Vitaly Demin Senior Strategy Consultant Read about Vitaly

SHARE

(this article on Business Insider) January 2012

Al Ries, one of the world's top marketing strategists today, wrote in his best-selling book "Positioning" back in 1981 that the purpose of advertising is to support the position of your brand. It's not about throwing around fancy words that people will never believe in and remember, it's simply about reinforcing your brand position in your prospects' minds.

If you listen to most ads today, they all scream how great the subjects of their advertising are. And this might be ok, as long as it falls into your brand strategy and connects with the recipients of the information. Unfortunately, most companies fail at this.

Let's compare a couple of examples.

Apple in their ads consistently tells how easy and intuitive it is to use their products. They showcase their devices and describe them with down to earth words and phrases. This allows Apple to keep reinforcing their brand promise of making easy to use technology products and this simple message does connect with the consumer.

Now let's look at Verizon Wireless and Droid smartphone manufacturers. This whole intergalactic star wars space monster robot show started about two years ago with the release of the very first Droid smartphone and it doesn't seem like the world will see the end of it any time soon. Let's take the most recent example, Droid Razr, which according to Verizon and Motorola, is too powerful to fall into the wrong hands. Now, that's a thinker. Many viewers of the ad might easily ask what is meant by that. It would be interesting to watch the executive who approved this ad try to answer this question. Would he say that the smartphone can be used as a weapon and that some bad guys might use it against the US government? Or may be this phone is so powerful and fast that it can help robbers blow up a bank vault and fly away with the money? For those who love stories like that the amount of potential Droid Razr applications can be endless. But the most important question remains. Does it make any sense in the mind of the consumer and does it connect them to the brand?

The biggest challenge for advertisers today is to make their message stick but it's not about making people remember how funny or full of special effects an ad was. It's about making them remember the story about your brand and the qualities of your products when they go shopping. Every year we see many ads take top spots in Super Bowl funniest commercial lists but the reality is that most of them neither sell much nor connect with people the way they should.

Decision makers in companies that spend hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars on ads should sit down and think through every single word in a commercial they are about to approve. Will the word "awesome" register with my prospects? Will the phrase "blazing fast" mean anything at all to them? And so on. The reality is that people don't react to fancy words anymore. They need a distinct message about your brand or product to be able to process it and hopefully remember. Almost every single company on earth claims to be the greatest, the coolest and with the hottest products and that's why they fail. Picking the right and unique words for your message and communicating it clearly to your existing and potential customers will go a long way. You will enable the consumer to understand the language of your brand which will help you get the most out of your ad. All your message really needs to convey is your brand position and your simplicity.

Nevertheless, every year companies around the world keep spending millions and billions of dollars producing flashy and confusing advertisements. The reality is that all it takes to start doing it the right way is to believe it. Sounds so easy yet so difficult to do.

Read also:

• Three strategies that can give Nokia and Microsoft a chance

SHARE

Free on iBooks

This eBook is a brief insight into the core of the executive management of Sony Corporation, the core that is unfortunately filled with one of the most perilous human qualities – arrogance.

For a very long time now Sony has been known as an organization permeated by arrogant attitude toward their suppliers, their distributors and now their customers. This culture is felt everywhere in the world. I remember having meetings with Sony people in Moscow Russia when I consulted the largest electronics retailer in the country. These meetings were very adversarial and not a most pleasant experience. Also, as I worked with electronics retailers in Kuwait, Emirates, India, England, US and other countries, the opinions I received about Sony were the same. Nobody liked them and nobody wanted to do business with them because it was just too painful. Obviously, they could not stop carrying Sony products in their stores but some of them did try to reduce the assortment. Sony rarely partners. They dictate.

This work is an attempt to show how corporate arrogance affected the decisions Sony made along the way, the decisions that led to mistakes, mistakes that got them dethroned from the position of being the best and the most admired consumer electronics company in the world.

I hope this eBook helps other companies see a bigger picture of how decisions that are made inside their organizations affect their brand, their customer loyalty and profitable business growth. Very often top managers do not realize that many of wrong decisions are made not due to the lack of knowledge about the problem but due to the mentioned above human flaw – arrogance.

The 2nd edition includes financial updates from 2010 as well as other recent events associated with the Sony organization.

It might be interesting to know what Ballmer and Elop are sitting and thinking right now. Two arrogant people, who do not believe in the laws of branding and who thought... Read more...

Every day we read many articles that analyze strategic business mistakes made by large corporations worldwide. Some of these articles make sense, some don’t but the bottom... Read more...

This article is not a cheap criticism of a company that is ranked among the best ones in its field. The purpose of this article is to present a constructive analysis of mistakes that... Read more...

Al Ries, one of the world's top marketing strategists today, wrote in his best-selling book "Positioning" back in 1981 that the purpose of advertising is to support the position of... Read more...

In October 2010 Microsoft released its new generation mobile operating system called Windows Phone. They were just another player in the game after Apple iPhone with iOS... Read more...

I knew that the Kirkland Signature brand was being stretched beyond possible but I never really thought how bad it was till recently. I was at a Costco store the other day and I... Read more...

Earlier this month I wrote an article about how brand mismanagement is killing a very strong smartphone brand - Droid. Stretched among three smartphone makers (Motorola, HTC... Read more...

This brief take on the Nokia situation is not about the numbers. The latest numbers are here. The point of this article is below... Read more...

Earlier this year I published an article that talked about how phone manufacturers were losing their brand power by producing too many different phone models. Looks like... Read more...

Earlier this year I consulted a large national company. I worked directly with several Vice Presidents. One day I ran into one of the executives in the hallway (let’s call this... Read more...

If you look back about a year and a half and watch some of the TV ads that Verizon Wireless has had during this period of time, it’s impossible not to see that their brand has been... Read more...

What started happening 2-3 years ago in the mobile phone industry absolutely redefined the entire game. iPhone and Android were the ones who changed it. The two questions... Read more...

Microsoft has for a long time now been labeled as a company that lacks innovation for not making many attempts to move into the future, specifically mobile. After being on top of the... Read more...

For a very long time blackberry has been a world leader in smart phone sales until iPhone and Android devices dethroned R.I.M. in the last couple of years. You would figure that the... Read more...

As a lot of companies today are outsourcing their websites to other organizations around the world, the time has come to rethink the strategy and the plan for the future... Read more...

Apple has never allowed sex and porn content apps into their AppStore. Many people have criticized them for that but there is a deep strategy logic in the world’s best marketing... Read more...

Recently AT&T launched a marketing campaign involving a change of their slogan to "Rethink Possible." The question right there is "How do you expect to connect to your audience with... Read more...