The brandgym blog

Are you in your element?

I was lucky enough to see Sir Ken Robinson talk recently about his new book, The Element. A previous post covered the talk he did about creativity in children at the TED conference. He's a man with an important message who is also as funny as a stand-up comedian. Do see him if you get the chance.
 
Like all great management ideas, The Element is simple and yet very powerful. To be one of the minority of people who fulfill their potential you need to seek work that combines two things:
1. Something you are passionate about and love doing. Not like. Love. Your own "adventure playground", where you do something you enjoy so much it's more like play than real work.
2. Something you have a natural talent for, that you were born to do.

In my personal model, I add a third dimension:
3. Earning enough money to be happy.

When I look around me I see many examples where people are not in their Element. One friend was for many years a successful and well-paid trader in the City. But he hated his job. He was stressed, un-motivated and unfulfilled. His performance plateaued, and as the recession bit he was laid off, over-taken by younger, hungrier and more ambitious traders.

But how does The Element apply specifically to marketing?

1. Don't understand the consumer. Be the consumer.
I was trained at P&G that you could master any market if you had the data. But over time I'm not so sure. I think the best situation, when you can truly be in your Element, is when you work on a market where you ARE the consumer. This is why Nike only hire active sports people and Harley Davidson hire people who ride motorbikes. When you are the consumer you have a deep, visceral understanding of the market we call "consumer empathy".

2. Bring your whole self to work
Working in a company and on a brand you believe in makes a big difference and helps you be in your Element. When I see people like this they seem to bring their whole self to work, putting passion and enthusiasm into their work. I've seen this zeal in folk I have interviewed from Lush, Gu and Method Home. In contrast, other people hang up their real selves at the door of the office, along with their coat. They go into professional marketer mode, detached and rational. Often these people don't like their brand, don't use it and maybe don't even respect the people who do. How can they hope to create passionate users, if they don't have this passion themselves?

3. Have a plan-B
If you feel un-fulfilled in your job, and not in your Element, take control of your destiny by creating a "Plan B". Or perhaps it should be "Plan E". Take time to figure out what you really want to do to be in your Element, and start planning it now. Start right now because corporate life has become a risky business. Gone are the days of a smooth and safe ride up the company ladder, with a nicely managed career path. We now live in an age of mergers, acquisitions, cost-cutting and management re-shuffles. And this means jobs are much more vulnerable.

I recently posted about Peter de Kruif, an ex-Unilever marketer who had a Plan E. He was passionate about the Bertolli brand he worked on, and about living in Italy. Rather than take a job on the Knorr brand in the UK, he left and started his own Italian food business, Trattoria Guilia. A man in his Element.

Warner's response to 50% of its market disappearing

The last few years have seen a tumultuous transformation of the music industry. Sales of CDs have halved since their peak level in 2000 as music goes digital. And it gets worse, much worse. For every legal track downloaded another 20 are illegally downloaded. Think about that. You're missing out on 95% of the available market. Scary.

One company who seems to doing a pretty good job of coping with theses challenge is Warner Music, according to the FT. Revenues are steady since 2004. Their share price is up from $2 in February to $7 in late May (although still down sharply from the 2005 IPO price of $17). And their 21% share of the US market is its highest level for a decade.

Here is what we can learn from the Warner story.

1. Re-define your market
The clue that explains the plight of many record companies is in the name. "Record labels". This antiquated definition still refers to the good old days when people bought music on bits of plastic instead of bytes of data. Warner have re-defined their view of things to now compete in the "music market". Warner are doing "360 music management" for their artists. The actual digital music is only part of this. It also includes tours, merchandise and music licensing. They are not the first to do this. Concert company Live Nation is going the other way, by also releasing music (they poached Maddonna from Warner last year).

Other markets use a similar business model, where what seems to be the core business is actually a means to an end. You can buy a decent printer for only £50. The shock comes when you have to pay £30 a pop for the ink cartridges. That's where the money is. Same story with video game consoles/games and Gillette razors/blades.

2. Keep the cannibals in the family
Warner realized quicker than other companies that you're betting off having the cannibals inside the family. In other words, if the market is moving from CDs to digital, you may as well get more than your fair share of the new business. Warner's Atlantic label was the first in the US to get more than half its revenue from online and mobile sources.

3. Focus, focus, focus In the same way consumer good companies like Kellogg's and Pepsi are focusing their product portfolio, Warner are focusing their artist portfolio. As CEO Edgar Bronfman commented: "We've gained market share because we focused the A&R (artist and repertoire) budget on the artists we believed in."

4. Freedom from the corporate structure
Five years ago Warner was a low priority part of the sprawling corporate empire Time Warner. A $2.6billion buyout freed itself from the corporate structure, enabling management to be more radical and move faster.

5. Cut costs
According to the FT "deep cost cuts began within hours of the buyout's completion" and these have improved margins.

Doomsayers have predicted that record labels will die, as in our digital world artists can connect directly with consumers. And they may well be right. Record labels will probably die. However, by re-defining its market and business model, Warner should have a brighter future. The new music world, with expensive mega tours, complex merchandising deals and multi-channel content distribution means that Warner still has an important role to play.

A great example of how to pro-actively respond to dramatic market changes.

Does Twitter really matter?

To Tweet, or not to Tweet? I'm still trying to figure this out myself. I am experimenting with it, and you can check out my page here.

What the hell is it?
Its a form of "micro blogging", that you do from a phone or PC. "Micro" because you can only use 140 characters to reply to the question "What are you doing now?". You sign up to then have the "tweets" of people you follow sent to your own personal page.

In just over a month, 45 people have signed up to mine. Still a long way to go to reach the 1.46 million who follow Obama! The Top 100 Twitterers are here. Some are people. Others are brands.

Does anyone use it?

Oh yes. Twitter had 32 million users in April 2009. What is mind boggling is the growth rate, shown below (Twitter is the dark blue line). This was up from 19million in March! It has more users than the New York Times online and LinkedIn.

What I don't get is that some people follow literally thousands of Twitter sites. I was chuffed that Marketing Magazine were following me, until I found they do this with over 4,000 sites. This means they get probably 4,000+ Tweets a day coming in. So I guess they don't read them, unless they have a full-time person trawling the comments?

The risk of Twitter being a fad that people don't keep using is backed up by analysis showing that the retention of users is much lower than for Facebook.

Does it matter for brands?
I think the jury is out on this. But, I have found some good examples of brands using it well. Here are examples from Search Engine Journal. Click here to check out the sites themselves.

Use 1: To update customers of the company deals and coupon codes:

DellOutlet posts recent refurbished Dell computer offers. The company estimates they have made several million pounds out of it according to Sky News.

2. To offer an alternative customer support option:

ComCast offers a friendly Twitter customer support; what I personally like about their profile is the real person photo instead of the company logo.

3. To get closer to customers:

Via their Twitter profile Southwest Airlines run non-official, entertaining discussions with their customers.

3. To react to customers’ feedback:

Popeyes answers their clients’ feedback in an entertaining tone and also updates their Twitter listeners of the current deals and discounts.

4. To offer an alternative subscription option:

ATTNews updates their Twitter-followers of the news published at the site.

5. To post company news:

Samsung has created a Twitter account dedicated to mobile phones and posts both the company (US department) and product news there.

6.To promote the corporate blog:

Kodak Chief Blogger both posts the company blog updates and discusses them with the company customers.

Clarks win loyal customers for the price of a Poloroid

[Guest blog from David Nichols, brandgym's head of invention]

At the weekend we bought our young son’s first pair of shoes.  Instead of the usual drudge of buying kids' shoes it was a heart-warming moment of pride – thanks to Clarks.

During the week a piece of Clarks direct mail plopped on the mat. It managed to avoid the recycling bin (unlike 95% ofdirect mail in my house) and lingered on the kitchen table, as it perfectly hit us as parents of an ‘about to toddle’ child.

The flyer showed a new way of thinking about babies and walking.  Not just ‘not walking’ or ‘walking’, but three stages: with a new stage in between crawling and walking of ‘cruising’. This ‘about to toddle’ stage is where they begin to need grip so they can learn to use their feet. Intrigued, off we went to our local store on Saturday.

Much to our surprise the in-store experience was a seamless extension of the Direct Mail promise:
•    Clear in-store section, mirroring the DM
•    Same full range of shoes as shown in the ad
•    Smiling, helpful service from knowledgeable staff

We explained what we needed. Little feet were duly measured and ‘cruising’ shoes fitted.  Then they asked us to stand him up and then, the clincher, they took a Polaroid snap of our little Tom in his first shoes. Hearts were melted and a loyal customer was born – all for the cost of a Polaroid.  Simple.

What did I learn from this?

1.    Make it easy to deliver ‘golden’ service moments
-    Getting staff to embody the brand in a service business is notoriously hard - lengthy training, glossy posters and incentive schemes all do their part. Clarks have gone one better and found a way to make is easy for their staff to over-deliver.  The simple addition of a Polaroid camera gives their people the chance to create golden brand moments for parents time and again.

2.    Targeting, targeting, targeting
-    Making sure your offer is relevant to your core target and then ensuring your messages reaches the right people is obviously paramount for any business, yet so much of what I see in print, on TV or on my doormats is not just wide of the mark but downright irrelevant.  Getting this offer delivered to people with babies at the right age is critical – a month or two too young or old and the opportunity is missed.
-    Clarks have managed to hit us just at the right moment.  I hope that this is due to careful list management, not blind luck!

3.    Use insight to be insightful
-    The new segmentation of toddlers’ walking that has driven Clarks’ new range is very insightful.  It clearly shows that they have actually spent real time watching babies learn to walk and then applied it not only to their product development but also to their marketing and communications.  Too often insight is just data with a fancy name, rather than something that actually helps a business act more insightfully.

4.    Be consistent across media
-    In a busy marketing department with multiple initiatives, re-lauches and communications campaigns going on simultaneously, it is actually very hard to get a piece of Direct Mail to look the same as an in-store display.  They are produced by different teams, using different agencies, and have markedly different development & deployment timescales.  Clarks’ marketing team have coordinated all this to deliver a seamless consistency that seems obvious to the most important people in any marketing department – consumers.

In Summary
Doing the simple things well is easy to say and hard to do, so hat’s off to Clarks for achieving it.  I challenge any marketing director to look at disparate parts of their communications (website, direct mail, in-store etc.) and see if they can pass the Clarks consistency test.  Not that easy.

Boo hoo for Fruitabu

The second of your "miss" predictions from our Hit 'n Miss survey has come true with the news that Kellogg's have withdrawn their Fruitabu brand of fruit snacks.

I first raised doubts about the added value of this brand back in January 2008. I proposed an radical alternative that was "1/3 of the price of Fruitabu...only 25p per pack...just as convenient to transport..even more natural...100% natural in fact.... even more tasty..... nicer texture... even healthier." My radical innovation? An apple!

The comments comments of Kellogg's UK sales director Mike Taylor about Fruitabu bring to life our recommendations about Recession-Proof branding:

1. Follow the money: long-overdue need for a more practical, bottom-line focused approach. Mike Taylor "claimed the decision to ditch the range was indicative of the company's new, get-tough approach."

2.Kill the dwarves: "The metrics didn't stack up for us so we decided to pull out of FruitaBü"

3. Grow the core: Taylor said there were "much bigger opportunities" in Kellogg's core cereal business

Also, its a good example of the need to focus on business-model issues, not just brand issues. A key one is how strong your presence is in the area of the store you need to launch in. For Fruitabu, Taylor recongizes "The footfall and the visibility of the fruit snack category from a shopper perspective is difficult to bring scale to."

Better to ask for forgiveness, not permission

There is so much process and so many systems in business today that teams can get strangled into doing nothing. Well, sometimes you just need to take the initiative, get on and do things, rather than being a slave to this corporate approval process. I have often found that its better to "ask for forgiveness, not permission."

And, to illustrate the idea of taking initiative, I couldn't resist sharing this story from Claire, the wife of brandgym partner David Nichols:

"Outside Bristol Zoo is the car park, with spaces for 150 cars and 8 coaches.
It's been manned 6 days a week, for 23 years, by the same charming and very polite car park attendant.
The charges are £1.00 per car and £5.00 per coach.
On Monday 1 June this year, he didn't turn up for work.
Bristol Zoo phoned Bristol City Council to ask for a replacement parking attendant.
The Council said, "That car park is your responsibility."
The Zoo complained, "But the attendant was employed by the City Council... wasn't he?"
The Council replied ..... "What attendant?"
Gone missing from his home is a man who has taken the car park fees each day, for the last 23 years.
Total fees: £400 per day.
Over 23 years, it adds up to £3 million in total, tax free!"

The guy was stuck for a job. So, he made one up. Provided a service. And got rich in the process.

Thanks Claire!

Sainsbury CSR: "Consumer's Store Responsibility"

Saw what I think is a smart move by Sainsbury's in my local store this week. The only frustrating thing is that its an idea we proposed to Tesco a year ago! As part of their 140th birthday celebrations, Sainsbury's are inviting customers to nominate a local charity to support. The one with the most votes becomes the store's charity of the year.

I like this:

1. It makes CSR (corporate social responsibility) much more personal. Rather than a big national charity, you can support something local you really care about. CSR becomes "Consumer's Store Responsibility".

2. It gets customers involved and gives them a role in selecting the charities to support

3. It has the potential to create real buzz and word-of-mouth locally when the charity gets the money. There is a good chance you may hear a story from someone working for, or benefitting from, the charity.

4. It builds on an insight that shoppers main relationship is with their local store, not with the "corporate brand".

John Lewis': 69,000 Partners share £125million

Three bits of news on the John Lewis retail group reminded me of what an amazing business this is, thanks to its ownership structure. The company is owned by the 69,000 people who work there. Not the board directors. All 69,000 people, from check-out people to shelf-stackers to fork-lift drivers. You can watch a video about the Partnership here.

The first bit of news was the company's latest set of annual results. This is a company with the upmarket grocery chain, Waitrose, and the John Lewis department stores. And recession-hit 2008/09 was a blood-bath for many retailers, esp. upscale ones Well, John Lewis weathered the storm, with sales up £204.7m, 3%, to £6.97bn.

And those 69,000 partners shared a £125million bonus, equal to 13% of salary, or 7 weeks extra pay. Not some token gesture here. This is a serious bonus. And one worth working for when times are hard, and putting in a bit of extra effort.

The second bit of a new was an interview with Patrick Lewis, great-nephew of the Founder, and son of former Chairman Peter Lewis, and a tip for the top job at some stage. This guy's new job is Partners' Counsellor. He is the voice of the 69,000 partners at board level. What a symbol of how important the company take the partnership model. Its also great to see that Patrick has worked his way up the business from the bottom, starting on the till in the china and glass department and doing eight different jobs and locations in as many years. No parachute into a comfy executive chair for him.

The final bit of news was the "We'll call you" feature in Marketing Magazine, where they phone a call centre to see how good the service is. The week is was on Waitrose, and the "mystery caller" was enquiring about Waitrose's sustainable fishing policy. No easy one to answer. Well, Waitrose got the first ever 9/10 score I have seen. The call-centre person answered with passion and real knowledge, even referring to the fish buyer by name (Jeremy) and telling stories of how the tuna is caught (with a fishing rod in the Maldives).

And there you have it. Three pieces of news that are three parts of the jigsaw that is John Lewis:

Engaged and aligned employees => great service => good results

Why aren't all service businesses run this way?

iPhone 3GS: renovation waves in action

iPhone sales have now hit 17 million since the launch in June 2007, well ahead of Apple's target of 10 million. But Apple are not sitting on this success by any means. (I still can't help sniggering at how far off the mark iPhone-hater Laura Riess was back in 2007: "The iPhone is a distraction not an opportunity for Apple. A novelty product built on the technology whims of Jobs and another in a long line of convergence chasers." Whereas you, dear readers, were spot on when your vote was that it would be a big hit, selling at least 10million units.)

The iPhone 3GS and new 3.0 software, out later this month, are the latest examples of Apple's excellence in brand rejuvenation. Let's look at how they do this.

1. Renovation Waves
Apple are repeating on the iPhone what they did with the iPod. They launch, and then follow up with wave after wave of new news. On iPhone it has been:
Wave 1 - May 2007: launch

Wave 2 - Jan 2008: 2.0 software with new features

Wave 3 - April 2008: 16GB version launchd

Wave 4 - July 2008: 3G iPhone

Wave 5 - June 2009: 3GS iPhone and 3.0 software

2. Better and better sausage
Don't let anyone tell you Apple and iPhone is about lifestyle and image. Its all about the product design, or sausage. The 3GS phone has several cool new features including:

- double the memory

- longer battery life

- better camera

- video calling and recording

- "tethering" (you can use it to access the internet on your laptop)

And the new software has a series of upgrades, admittedly to offer features that have been a long time coming, like cut-and-pasting of text, and landscape email writing.

3. The amazing apps store
As the iPhone gets better, so the app store continues to have more and more to offer users. This makes the device even "stickier", and more and more like a mini PC in your hand. In only 9 months there have been a mind-boggling 1billion downloads from the store!

iPhone sales were up 245% in 2008, giving Apple an 8% share of global smartphone sales. This still lags well behind leader Nokia with 43%. But the incumbent's growth rate a paltry 0.8%, look at Nokia.

P&G' multi-brand makeover ad 'quadruples purchase intent'

P&G are launching an innovative new approach to TV advertising this June. The ‘Max Factor MakeoverBreak’ will  three 90 second advertisements shown over consecutive commercial breaks, which see a consumer made over by experts using a range of P&G Beauty & Grooming products. Throughout the series of adverts, experts share tipsfrom how to select the right hair colour to applying moisturiser properly.

In US trials the format was found to quadruple “intent to purchase” versus traditional advertising spots. Pretty impressive. Interesting points on this approach:

- Impact and engagement: the Max Factor Makeover is really clever use of media, in a world where our attention spans are getting shorter. The long time-length and the use of 3 consecutive ads in 3 breaks should keep viewers watching, and create stand-out

- Accessible aspiration: each break features an ‘everyday heroine’, who entered a competition to star in the campaign earlier this year. Roisin Donnelly, P&G’s UK Director of Marketing, comments: 'The star is agenuine consumer, which engages women of all ages. It’s almost like an intimate documentary'.

- Tapping into cultural codes: the campaign cleverly taps into the current obsession with make-overs, both in magazines like Hello! and on TV programmes.

- Portfolio leverage: the thing I like most about this approach is the way it makes the most of the brand portfolio P&G have built up, using products from Max Factor, Olay, Aussie and Clairol.

Hat's off to Roisin, who was my first ever boss back at P&G in the Victorian age, when I was brand assistant on Vidal Sassoon!

Are Ryanair taking the piss? (no, they're charging you for it)

We've posted before about Ryanair, the budget airline, and their maverick CEO Michael O'Leary. We can't claim that Ryanair is our favourite airline, but we do admire the crystal clarity of their proposition as THE lowest cost airline, and the unique business model that supports it. In particular, they are the grand masters as cutting out every last bit of cost they can. In our paper on Recession-proof branding we featured examples of this: taking out back-seat pockets to make the plane quicker to clean, and having non-reclining seats that break less often. O'Leary is also a PR genius, as his latest proposal shows.

This proposal involves, wait for it, charging you £1 to 'spend a penny' (go for a pee pee). There you go. 99p profit straight away! Yup, the idea is to charge you to use the toilet. This idea was first floated in March this year, but laughed off as one of O'Leary's many wind-ups; these have earned him the nick-name "Michael O'Really". Well, it seems he really is serious. This week he was reported as saying that he was already in talks with Boeing about designing a plane with one toilet instead of the current three.

Now, this is not quite as mad as it seems.

- First, taking out the toilets means O'Leary can add six more seats, and that means more revenue.

- Second, O'Leary points out that most Ryanair flights are less than an hour long, and most people on plan won't need to use the facilities during this short time. He suggests that people will remember to use the airport toilets before getting on the plane.

- Third, as he also points out, this will mean less hassle for people getting out of their seats to let people past to go to the toilet

- Fourth, this move generates lots of PR. A Google search for "Ryanair and toilet" yielded 94,000 results. And all this PR makes people think "My god, they really, really are cheap". Cheap and nasty perhaps, but then O'Leary has never promised flying Ryanair would be nice.

- And finally, two less toilets means less mess to clean up, so faster turnarounds. And also less maintenance, so lower cost.

The question is of course do we reach a tipping point where the cost cutting also cuts too deep into the service experience, and is so bad that people say enough is enough. I must admit that given a choice I prefer easyJet. The planes are nicer and the on-board staff are nicer. Will be interesting to see how the 2 low-cost airline brands fare in the coming 12-18 months and who comes out on top.

[Images from travelcritic.info]

Mothercare's re-birth

When Ben Gordon joined mother and baby product retailer Mothercare in December 2002 as CEO, the share price was languishing at 83p, it was "haemoriging market share to to the supermarkets and bogged down in supply chain problems",  according to The Times.

Fast forward 6 years, and Mothercare are reporting sales up 6.9%, profits up 12.4% and the share price is 423p, having well out-performed the FTSE 100 index. Here we look at some of the key factors in the re-birth of this problem baby.
 

1. Embracing online retailing

Mothercare have done a good job of embracing online as a reatail channel, rather than seeing it as a threat. You can browse in store and get advice, and then order from a wider range via the website. Online sales now account for 20% of all Mothercare's business

2. Added value acquisition

Buying other companies can often end up back-firing. Mothercare have done this well, by buying Early Learning Centre and integrating this. This works well by extending the brand offer both in terms of product offer, to be more educational, and in terms of age group by extending beyond babies into toddlers and older kids.

 

3. Overseas expansion

Over half the company's 1014 stores are now outside the UK, and like-for-like sales are growing more than four times quickly overseas as they are in the UK

4. Core product development

Mothercare have invested in rejuvenating their core ranges. A good example is the Baby K range, designed in conjunction with TV presenter Myleene Klass. This is a clever bit of brand association, with a well designed product offering (sausage) complemented by the emotional appeal of endorsement and input from a celebrity mum (sizzle).

Polish your visual equities, don't change them: Ask.com

The JKR blog is well worth a look, as it has lots of really good mini case studies on design. One that caught my eye was one about the online search engine, Ask.com. Another interesting example of the care you need to take with visual equities, hot on my earlier post about the Tropicana re-design disaster.

Creation of the Jeeves character

Ask.com launched back in 1996 as askjeeves.com. They cleverly used as a brand character a butler called Jeeves, inspired by the works of British author P.G.Wodehouse. This was clever, as it helped the site stand out from the crowd, and was a lovely visual metaphor for a site that was "at your service", to go and get you stuff; in this case information.

Chucking out the butler with the bathwater

However, following a company buyout in 2005 the character was axed. The rationale was to shorten the domain name to ask.com to make it easier for people to type. Fair enough. But what a waste of brand equity to chuck out the butler character

Remember what made you famous

4 years later and the butler is back. According to the JKR blog, ‘Ask Jeeves’ still has a brand awareness of 83%, compared to Ask.com’s 72%. Took them 4 years of brand amnesia to remember what made them famous. But they got there in the end.

Polish your equities, don't change 'em

Shame the new Jeeves is not quite right though, as the JKR blog explains: "The visual re-tooling of the character fails to capture the spirit of the idea in the same way as his predecessor. With his new grey suit and 3D rendering, Jeeves now appears far more like a banker than a butler. So the mascot has been brought back, but the character has been lost." And, here is the best bit: "One would have imagined that Ask might have had a bit more respect for the original’s value."

Love that. Respect the value of your visual equities, and polish them with care, rather than changing them for the sake of novelty.

Starbucks Via: have they lost their beans?

I was full of hope for Starbucks when I posted about founder Howard Shultz returning as CEO, back in Jan 2008. At the time he said:

"We will be re-focusing our entire organisation on the Starbucks experience by going back to our heritage and what made us successful in the first place.

Let's get back to the core. Push for innovation and do the things necessary to once again differentiate Starbucks from all others."

Now, what in the bloody hell has launching Via instant coffee in supermarkets got to do with improving the Starbucks core experience?

This seems like a bonkers bit of brand stretching. Remember, the question to ask is not could Starbucks stretch into instant coffee. I'm sure it tested OK in focus groups, and maybe even quant testing. No, the question is should they do it.

My view is no, no, no. I just can't see a sustainable, profitable business model:

1. Where's the sausage?

There are loads of great instant coffees. Nescafe Gold Blend is a big, established brand that is strong. You can get Fair Trade coffee from Kenco. And own label has a formidable offer. Does Starbucks really bring anything new to the party in product terms?

2. Lack of expertise in consumer goods

Starbucks knows nothing about how to distribute, merchandise and promote products in supermarkets. I assume they will need a 3rd party to do this for them, reducing their profit margins. And it will be up against a "wall" of Nescafe, and risk being invisible.

3. No economies of scale

Nescafe churn out millions of tonnes of coffee and have a cost advantage. Starbucks have no chance of competing on the cost side.

4. The image building mirage

So, this must mean that the launch of Via is running off in search of the "mirage" of brand image building. The theory is that by launching an extension you get a positive "halo" effect on your brand as a whole. In this case, Shultz hope Via will improve his brand's value image.

This is one of the biggest load of bollocks in marketing. Every now and then you get this, when you have an amazing product like the iPod that is a huge hit. But Apple launched the iPod to make money, and selling more PCs was a bonus.

Few people are going to buy Starbucks Via. And even fewer are going to think "Oh, look. Starbucks are entering the instant coffee market. That must mean that they're not expensive like I thought. In fact, their coffee stores are great value."

To fix a value for money problem Starbucks should have focused on the core:

1) Improved and communicated about a better customer experience: They could make the coffee in store even better. And fixed the tatty chairs. And cleared all the empty cups away faster.

2) Used smart promotions to weather the storm

3) Used sizing: promote the smaller sizes as a cheaper option.

Bringing brands back from the dead: Phileas Fogg

I was intrigued to see that the Phileas Fogg snacks brand has been brought back from the dead. One of an increasing number of examples of looking back to the past for brand inspiration. Here we look at how this brand was created, how it was killed following a corporate take-over and the recent attempts to revive it.

Brand birth: pure genius (1982)
Phileas Fogg was created back in 1982 by 4 mates who had the idea for the brand down the pub. They started it with £67,000 of their own money. The idea was a range of adult snacks, such as tortilla chips, with a brand character and spokesperson called Phileas Fogg, inspired by the explorer in the film "Around the world in 80 days".

At the time (before Doritos), there was some real product "sausage": unique and exotic products, exciting flavours and disntinctive pakcaging. The whole world of Phileas Fogg added some lovely emotional "sizzle".

The ad campaign created by BBH in 1988 was pure genius. The entertaining mini-movies told amusing, tongue-in-cheek stories behind each product, contrasting the exotic roots with the place they were made: "Medomsley Road, Consett" (the factory in the North East of England). If you know Monty Python, the films were a bit like that. You can see one of the ads by clicking here. (Its the 2nd one on this compilation of 1980's adverts, so you have to skip past the first Swatch ad).

Brand death (1993-2003)
The brand grew during the 1980's and early 90's to achieve £30million in turnover. By this time it attracted the attention of multinational snack company United Biscuits (UB), who bought it for £27million. And this was the beginning of the end. The same old sad story of beautiful little brand bought by big business:
- The 4 owner/founders left, with a bg of money each, and the creative genius behind the brand
- The new owners cut investment, as Phileas Fogg was not part of a portfolio of brands
- They chopped and changed the packaging, diluting the identity
- They failed to invest enough in new products
- The brand got lost in the corporate machine, lacking love and care

The result? Fast forward to the present day, and brand turnover had declined to .... £101,000. In other words, invisible.

Brand re-birth (2009)
In a conference a couple of years ago I learnt that Phileas Fogg still had a startling 83% prompted brand awareness. At the time it seemed that this was a brand begging to be rejuvenated. So, it was a nice surprise to indeed see that the brand is being brought back from the dead by

On the good side, the packaging Andy Knowles and the team at JKR has brough back to life Phileas Fogg in his balloon. This helps communicate the idea of "exotic tastes from around the world".

I'm less impressed by the advertising. It uses soft focus, travel-ogue style imagery. You know what I would have done? Re-show the brilliant BBH ads from the 1980's. They have an edge and a wit to them. And I'm sure all the oldies like me who remember them would have had a nostalgia trip and bought back into the brand!

The one thing I do like in the advertising is the link from the comms to the on-pack device of the balloon. Nice way of getting across the idea of exotic ingredients transported back for you to taste.

But perhaps the biggest question is the dramatically more competitive brandscape today, 26 years on from the brand's birth. We now have Doritos, Kettle Chips, Walkers Sensations and many others. I fear that there is just not enough differentiation to help create a viable business model.