Chinese Brands and Brand China

Do the origins of a brand shape the perceptions of the brand?

Yes!  No!  A more accurate response might be, Maybe!  It all Depends!

This is a question that Chinese brands are facing every day now.  For more than a decade the rise of Chinese exports has captured the front pages and led to predictions that Chinese brand will soon breakthrough to become powerful global brands. Haier.  Lenovo.  Huwaei.

It hasn’t happened yet.  For some insights, here’s Columbia’s Professor Don Sexton discussing the state of Chinese brands:

Prof Don Sexton on Chinese Brands

Professor Don Sexton

Brand That Place – or – George Washington Slept Here

In today’s NY Post there is a swell piece about Brooklyn as a brand.  And, yes, that is me being quoted.

My first experience of branding a place was spending some of my cavity prone years in Morristown, NJ.  Everywhere you look there is a plaque about George Washington.  George Washington Slept Here (A Lot) is pretty much the town’s unofficial slogan.

Best of all in Morristown is Fort Nonsense.  Basically it is just a hill. The story is that George Washington had his men build fortifications, dig trenches and put up a guard house on the hill for the sole purpose of  keeping the soldiers busy during the winter months.  It was never used and soon reverted back to its natural state as a hill.   All that remains are plaques on the hill, telling its unique narrative.

Fort Nonsense is such a wonderful name and a wonderful example of how branding a place can create a legend.  The story carries so much value that today a plain hill is a historical landmark and a national park!

2012: The Year of Reinventing Marketing

A new year, a new way of marketing?

In the past 7 or 8 years the traditional methods of marketing have shown declining effectiveness.   At first the decline was slow overall, although more accelerated in some categories than others.  The decline in effectiveness of traditional methods was most visible in categories such as services, hospitality, beverages and entertainment at first.  Now it is quickly spreading to all  categories.

Miller Lite was a classic example of the traditional  method.  ”Taste Great. Less Filling” along with some brilliant advertising  and heavy media spending drove the brand to the number 2 market share.  But from 1994 to 2003 the brand went from a 23% market share to an 18% share.

Looking more narrowly at the light beer category, Miller Lite lost the number 1 position to Bud Light.  By the rules of brand positioning that shouldn’t have happened.  Miller Lite had a strong differentiating claim, while Bud Light had no product differentiation at all in its advertising.  By 2010 Miller Lite lost the number 2 position to Coors Light.

At the same time, marketers continue to use the old methods.  In part, I suspect that the continuing Great Recession is to blame.  I call it “The Tepid Trap”. The economy is bumping along too slowly to give marketers great confidence in the future.  Yet business is not in such a tailspin that people will take the leap of faith to a whole new approach.

Tepid economies result in tepid marketing strategies (okay, a gross generalization, I know).  From personal conversations with people on the corporate side, I sense a certain flight to safety and conservatism.  Not in the political sense but in the sense of  avoiding risk or substantial changes that will leave a person exposed if it fails.  It seems like an unconscious reflex, avoiding danger until business really picks up and there is more leeway for experimentation and risk taking.

Of course this is a broad generalization and many individual companies are bolding moving in new directions.  McDonald’s, Visa (whose stock is up over 40% year over year), Samsung.

So what will 2012 bring?  Will marketing stay in the Tepid Trap?  Or will we spring out of it?

I am an optimist.  I believe that 2012 is the year of reinventing marketing.

This Is Real Social Media – or – Come To The NYAMA Holiday Party on December 13th!

Yes, it’s that time of the year when marketing pulls out all of the stops but marketers occasionally stop to enjoy some of the holiday cheer.

We are kicking off a new tradition at the NYAMA — a festive holiday party on Tuesday, December 13th.  Everyone is invited and encouraged to come.  It’s a chance to meeting people from all areas of marketing including brand management, advertising, market research, design, pr and social media, mobile marketing and so on.

Sign up at the nyama.org website!

I am also requesting your help.  I’m going to be making some brief remarks about some of the milestones in marketing of the year behind us and 10 predictions for the year ahead.   This is where you come in.  It would be swell if everyone reading this sent in suggestions on either milestones of this year or predictions for next year.  I’ll compile them and use them on the 13th.

NYAMA Holiday Party Invitation

Marketing Without Context Is Not Marketing – or – Reading Curation Nation

Context is King!

You don’t have to take my word for it.  You can have breakfast this Wednesday morning (11/16) with the author Steven Rosenbaum and hear it from him directly.

Here’s what Daniel Pink (author of A Whole New Mind) has to say about Steven Rosenbaum’s new book, Curation Nation

“Curation Nation gives me hope for the future of the Information Age. Rosenbaum argues for the growing importance of people creative, smart, hip who can spot trends, find patterns, and make meaning out of the flood of data that threatens to overwhelm us.”

Rosenbaum is the next guest in the NYAMA’s “Meet The Author” series of informal breakfast conversations.  This Wednesday, November 16th, from 8 am until 9:30 am (8 am!  yes, I know, that’s quite early for all of us…).  116 East 27th Street.   Sign up at nyama.org

Come and get your copy signed by Steven.

 

 

It Is A New NYAMA

Every once in a while I interrupt this blog with invitations to events or to drop names.  This is one of those times.  So I’ll temporarily drop my role as CEO of Verse Group and switch into my role as the President of the NYAMA.  I’m doing that here because, well….I don’t have a blog yet at the nyama.org…

But when I DO, I’ll write the following:

The old way of marketing doesn’t make sense in a changed world.  And at the New York American Marketing Association we realized that our old way of communicating with our members and the greater marketing community doesn’t make sense in a changed world.  We’ve taken the several important steps forward.

In addition to our Linked-in and Twitter presence, we’ve (finally) upgraded the website, making it easier to see the NYAMA events that our programming committee has developed for the coming weeks, next month, next few months.  In fact, we have events planned from now through June of 2012, thanks to Sarah Linden, Lee Hornick and everyone else on the programming team.

In addition to the NYAMA events, you can also find an aggregation of marketing events across the New York City area.  This is something rather special.

In a world of silos, where each organization becomes more and more specialized, the NYAMA is going in the opposite direction.  We are opening up the world of marketing, opening up the opportunities to learn from more people in more areas.

Marketing extends across design, social media, consumer research, public relations, mobile media, media research, advertising, reputation management, organizational design, employee culture, product innovation, managing outside agencies, measuring ROI.  That is why the NYAMA is opening up all of these areas for everyone to discover, to explore, to understand and to see if they make sense for you.

That is why the NYAMA is organizing events across more areas than anyone else.

That is why we having a monthly “meet the author series” with people as varied as Tony Hseih, Jack Trout, David Rogers and, at the pre-dawn hour of 8 am on November 16th you can have an intimate breakfast with Steven Rosenbaum to discuss his new book “Curation Nation”

Have breakfast with the author Steven Rosenbaum at the nyama

That is why we are bringing to you a window into the full richness of marketing in the marketing capital of the world.  Sign-up at the new site to learn about the events, to meet people, to expand your horizons.  And, yes, you can have fun, too!  nyama.org

Questions, improvements, ideas are always welcome.  You can reach me at randall.ringer@nyama.org

Think Police?

For years people have been saying “content is king”.  In branding, context is king.

There are times when the context tells a different story than what was intended.

IBM Think Police?

Irony aside, it was wonderful to see these screens lit up at night while walking past Lincoln Center or early in the morning.  That wouldn’t have been possible without the NYPD.

Cloudy Outlook For Word Clouds?

Finally, an authoritative source on the un-usefulness of word clouds.  This from the NY Times’ expert software architect, Jacob Harris:

For starters, word clouds support only the crudest sorts of textual analysis, much like figuring out a protein by getting a count only of its amino acids. This can be wildly misleading; I created a word cloud of Tea Party feelings about Obama, and the two largest words were implausibly “like” and “policy,” mainly because the importuned word “don’t” was automatically excluded. (Fair enough: Such stopwords would otherwise dominate the word clouds.) A phrase or thematic analysis would reach more accurate conclusions.

How do I compare the relative frequency of lesser-used words? Also, doesn’t focusing on the occurrence of specific words instead of concepts or themes miss the facts….

And what about the readers? Word clouds leave them to figure out the context of the data by themselves…Most interesting data requires some form of translation or explanation to bring the reader quickly up to speed, word clouds provide nothing in that regard.

At least I now know that I’m not the only one who gets gloomy under threatening word clouds.  They remind of George Trow’s phrase, “Within The Context Of No Context”.

 

Recession Marketing and E-ink

We don’t have to wait around for the official NBER ruling to sense that a new recession is already here.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the last one never really ended — it just got less worse.

The new recession won’t hit marketing like the last one.  There will probably be two major differences.

First — marketing spending will not take a big hit.  In fact, it may increase.  Based on my informal conversations with people around the industry (one advantage of being the president of the NYAMA is that I get to speak to a lot of people) is that this downturn will accelerate changes already underway.  In general budgets will not be frozen like 2008/2009.  Rather, there rate of shifting spending will increase.

Second – Mobile is finally taking off, thanks to the iPad, the Galaxy and, perhaps, the Kindle Fire.  And what is interesting is that they are all taking very different routes to their success (assuming Fire doesn’t miss).

The promise of these technologies has been tantalizing for years.  I worked with E-Ink when it was an MIT start-up that used pager technology to create changing in-store displays.  Our project was to help increase visibility of their company and technology.  One of our ideas was for a dress to be made out of E-Ink.  Another was for the cover of the New Yorker to be in E-ink. The ideas were right but the timing was wrong.  Then came the Kindle and changed all of that.

The possibilities of mobile marketing are only beginning to be explored.  Digital is mobile is social is digital.  I suspect that the turmoil this will create in the marketing world will be tremendous.

L’shana Tova

L’shana Tova to all who are celebrating the Jewish New Year’s.  Here’s a video for us

Okay, and now the marketing twist.  Branding + Religion = Branded Nation by James Twitchell.  About half an hour after watching the video and sharing it with friends, Twitchell’s book just popped into my brain.  The book’s subtitle:  Marketing Megachurch, College Inc and Museumworld

Branded Nation by James Twitchell