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The New York Times reported in June on the efforts of states to improve their brand images. Let’s look at the results:
Two states, Kentucky and Oregon, are seeking to cultivate positive images — among residents as well as visitors — with ambitious advertising campaigns meant to speak with one voice for governmental departments like agriculture, business development, commerce, education and tourism.
Oregon recently introduced its new campaign, from Wieden & Kennedy, which carries the theme “Oregon. We love dreamers.”
Debby Kennedy, director for the Brand Oregon Initiative…and no relation to the agency, [said] “the idea is making it all consistent because we just want the brand to look really bigger than it is….”
[Dan] Wieden, of Wieden & Kennedy, asked if other states ought to try their hands at branding, replied, laughing, “I fear other states have this great a story to tell as Oregon does.”
Indeed.
Perhaps inadvertently, Wieden and Kennedy point to the opportunity with every new image effort, that of identifying a single evocative point of difference creating a lasting competitive advantage. Accomplish this, and grow a balance sheet asset. Miss it, and saddle the client with a lasting advertising expense.
Ms. Kennedy wants “the brand to look really bigger than it is.” Really bigger? Well, for new image makeovers to propel into pop culture and turn the conversation to your benefit, they must be really based on authenticity.
Most state branding efforts consist of variations on the same theme, such as:
Wonderful [Alaska]
Simply Wonderful [Kansas]
Wild, Wonderful [West Virginia]
or
Great Potatoes Tasty Destinations [Idaho]
Great Lakes Great Times [Michigan]
Greatest Snow on Earth [Utah]
or
Smiling Faces Beautiful Places [South Carolina]
Great Faces Great Places [South Dakota]
or
Come Be Our Guest [Iowa]
Welcome [Maryland]
or
Linger Longer [Kansas]
Stay Just a Little Bit Longer [Wisconsin]
or
It Must Be Maine [you guessed it]
Positively Minnesota [same here]
These imaging efforts often fail as decision-makers are unable to see their brand from the perspective of the consumers they are trying to reach. Rather, they look from the inside out, where the view is both comfortable and safe with reassurance from other insiders. Frequently, this inability to see yourself as others see you is due to a breakdown of process discipline, often led by firms who explain they understand brand strategy, then demonstrate they know only advertising.
While other states engaged in recent image makeovers have yet to announce their results, Tennessee introduced their new campaign and positioning strategy with the tagline, The Stage Is Set For You!, and Pennsylvania launched The State Of Independence. Together with Oregon’s We Love Dreamers, each campaign over time will prove to have fallen short. Why? Without huge advertising budgets to break through the cultural white noise, these taglines do not point to a relevant and evocative difference creating new mental real estate. For example, any state could authentically claim We Love Dreamers. Borrowing Wieden’s phrase, other states do indeed have as great a story to tell.
But all is not lost. Positioning strategies that work include Virginia is for Lovers and Texas, where It’s Like A Whole Other Country. Both staked out new and evocative positions. Recent proof of a tagline becoming a pop culture icon and leading to move-the-sales-needle success is What Happens Here, Stays Here for Las Vegas.
One global strategy for Nokia, “1,001 reasons” for mankind: The Wall Street Journal reports on Nokia’s strategy to move to a single global message. But is the message the right one to achieve a global identity for the Nokia brand?
NOKIA CORP., the world’s largest cellphone maker, is going global with its advertising, a first for the company, as it tries to create a stronger, more-unified identity in the increasingly tough cellphone-branding war.
The corporate campaign, which carries the slogan “1,001 reasons to have a Nokia imaging phone,” is rolling out across Europe, Africa and Asia, showing up in television, print and online ads. Nokia also plans to bring it to the U.S., tentatively in several months. It aims to send one message in all countries where Nokia is sold, a strategy that departs from past approaches that used different images and messages in different countries….
Yet, a global strategy has some risks. A one-size-fits-all approach could translate into bad business if consumers misunderstand nuances or cross-cultural differences.
For Nokia, Grey Worldwide agency SEK & Grey created the ads for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Another agency, Bates Advertising in Singapore, part of WPP Group, is handling the Asia Pacific region. The two worked together to come up with one campaign.
Effective messaging creates emotional connections with your audience. True-to-the-brand evocative messaging creates a want-to-know-more, lean forward reaction. A strategy that focuses the consumer on a single key product difference creates an industry conversation Nokia could own.
Instead of expressing one best difference in their products over those of the competition, Nokia decided an additional thousand reasons are better than one great one. Not only that, but as Pekka Rantala, senior vice president of marketing for Nokia’s multimedia business teases, Nokia does not tell you what the reasons are, just that there are 1,001 of them. Mr. Rantala envisions future ads for Nokia identifying at least some of these 1,001 reasons.
As Nokia will soon discover, consumers do not waste their time with obscure advertising messaging. If the consumer must spend more than a few seconds decoding an advertising message, the advertising is doomed. And besides, who has time to filter through 1,001 reasons in making a purchase decision?
According to The Journal, the ad uses bright, crisp photos, such as a close-up of a baby’s cherubic face, to denote using the phones to store cherished pictures.
How often have we seen this, the ineffective message glossed over by high-production-value creative and sold as effective brand strategy?
For Nokia, a global company based in Finland, staying with this strategy will create future ads lost in the white noise of global culture, falling short of developing human connections so necessary for market traction, in any language.
One global strategy? Kyllä.
1,001 reasons? Ei kiitos.
Two well-funded brands, numbers one and two in their category, fight it out for market share. This unique category consists of a single purchase decision date occurring once every four years, with the results creating a market share of 100% for one brand, and 0% for the other.
The United States is five weeks away from their next purchase decision date in the presidential contest between President George Bush and Senator John Kerry.
The New York Times points out that the race may yet turn on classic issues of branding strategy:
Senator John Kerry tried reintroducing himself last week with a new speech against the Iraq war, but he promptly ran into an old problem.
To Democrats, it was a fresh, tough speech that put him in good position to challenge President Bush in this week’s debate.
To Republicans, it was a familiar opportunity. They gleefully labeled it Mr. Kerry’s ninth different position on Iraq and put up a commercial showing him windsurfing to the strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz while a narrator dismissed his Iraq policies as going “whichever way the wind blows.”
By sticking to their theme of Mr. Kerry as flip-flopper, Republicans have put him in a bind: he could use a new message to move up in the polls, but any new message leaves him vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency. How do you reposition a candidate whose commonly perceived weakness, fairly or not, is his penchant for repositioning? And how do you do it so late in the campaign? [Emphasis ours.]
Both President Bush and Senator Kerry are brands representing a promise to voters. The key to any effective branding effort is to change and take ownership of the conversation. Owning the Conversation represents a process discipline of finding the single most important core truth, and transforming that truth into a compelling, evocative message that sticks, demonstrating why a candidate is different and why voters should care about him or her, as the case may be.
To stick in the mind of the electorate requires an effective and repetitive expression of the candidate’s one key difference. Supported by messaging simply describing emotional benefits experienced by voting for a given candidate, the campaign can build an inerasable and positive image, a mental hook, that if expertly guided leads to votes.
It sounds so simple, and it can be. But simple is difficult in human communications, as it is easier to describe a concept in fifty words than it is in five. Getting to five compelling, evocative words that engage your audience is the work of an expert brand strategist, who makes it possible to see the answer, when human inclination says the solution is otherwise difficult to find.
The Los Angeles Times reports a new tagline for Sony. The question is, why?
Sony Corp.’s new slogan for its consumer electronics line was intended as a simple anthem to individuality: “Like No Other.”
Turns out, though, that the company’s “marketing mantra” is like quite a few others.
Haagen-Dazs ice cream is advertised as “Made Like No Other,” Bloomingdale’s is “Like No Other Store In the World” and a Riverside clothing manufacturer emblazons “Like No Other” on the front of a bikini thong.
“We are in the middle of an increasingly commoditized economy, with companies striving to differentiate themselves,” said Noah Manduke, managing director of branding firm Siegel & Gale in Los Angeles. “Sony is trying to tell the world there is a difference. A DVD player is not just another DVD player if it’s a Sony.”
Sony’s “Like No Other” is further diluted by General Motors’ three-year-old tagline, “Like nothing else”. The USPTO also turns up these federally registered taglines:
A Day Like No Other
A Drop Like No Other
A Feeling Like No Other
A Taste Like No Other
Built Like No Other
Cream Liqueur Like No Other
Delivers Like No Other Theophylline
It’s Like No Other!
Like No Other Bagel In The World
Like No Other Catalog In The World
Like No Other Market
Like No Other Music
Like No Other Onion On Earth
Like No Other Tire Store
Moves You Like No Other Chair
Protection. Like No Other.
Water Like No Other
At issue here is the fact that Sony is saying the same thing to retail consumers in the same way as other consumer retailers. It’s not so much that they failed to take hold of the conversation, it’s that they proactively walked away from a conversation they already owned! The irony is spelled out in the last three words of the above-quoted branding consultant. Here is the passage again:
“We are in the middle of an increasingly commoditized economy, with companies striving to differentiate themselves,” said Noah Manduke, managing director of branding firm Siegel & Gale in Los Angeles. “Sony is trying to tell the world there is a difference. A DVD player is not just another DVD player if it’s a Sony.” [Our emphasis.]
“It’s a Sony” is the tagline that has been displaced by “Like no other.” “It’s a Sony” is the tagline that effectively communicated the thought, “A DVD player is not just another DVD player if it’s a Sony.”
Clearly, it is essential to assay the brand territory that you own before beginning renovations. Oh, and do a competitive analysis so you don’t end up miming the messages of others.
The New York Times announced that ten years after the last brand refreshment, Xerox has unveiled a new logo and tagline. Gone is the large ‘X’ with the pixilated left arm that told the world they had gone digital, and gone is the old “Document Company” tagline:
“All of our research shows that we already own the document space, and that everyone knows we are digital,” said Diane E. McGarry, chief marketing officer of Xerox. “Now it is time to define for our customers what our capabilities really are.”
So Xerox has turned to “a new, cleaner-looking logo, featuring the Xerox name over the signature ‘Technology/Document Management/Consulting Services.’” In other words, Xerox is quite literally telling the world exactly what their capabilities are with this new, descriptive tagline.
Sometimes it makes sense for a company to adopt a purely descriptive, or functional, tagline, especially if they are new, or are launching a new business, or, as in this case, are redefining themselves for their current audience. The limitation, however, is that such taglines don’t allow for any emotional engagement with the brand, because by their very nature they cannot rise above the mere goods and services offered. Apple’s “Think Different”, Nike’s “Just Do It”, and Fannie Mae’s “We’re in the American Dream Business” are all great examples of taglines that allow people a way to emotionally engage with the brand.
“‘The Document Company’ is an intellectual idea, but the brand is an emotional promise that you can get people to rally around,” said Barry Hoffman, executive creative director at Young & Rubicam, Xerox’s longtime ad agency. “Now, it’s time to just let the brand speak for itself.”
All well and good, and it would argue even more strongly for Xerox to move soon from the purely descriptive, which brings their brand down to the level of a mere commodity, into the kind of audience engagement to be gained from emotional branding.
The problem with “Technology/Document Management/Consulting Services” for Xerox is that, while appearing to be a descriptive tagline, it actually describes very little about what they do, especially the “technology” and “consulting services” parts, which are so vague as to have little meaning. One hopes this is a short-term, transitional strategy to get people to thing beyond photocopies when they think of Xerox, after which they can take the brand to a higher level.
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