Category: Marketing, branding, advertising & design
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Horsing around with our food.
I wonder what people thought that they were getting for their £1.60 (Tesco website) frozen Findus Lasagne? Meat, cheese, milk, pasta, tomatoes and additives – all grown, sourced, transported, prepared, cooked, frozen, packaged, distributed, warehoused, shelved and finally sold. Unsustainable for everyone in the food chain bearing in mind that everyone involved has to make…
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Duped by brands?
Would you feel miffed if your favourite quirky, good for you, smoothie brand was owned by a sugar-swilling, fizzy pop uber brand? Or the independent coffee shop whose wifi you were nicking for the price of a small espresso turned out to be backed by a multinational giant like Tesco? The BBC reports that many…
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Christmas is coming
The usual slew of Christmas adverts is coming thick and fast. Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsburys, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, Waitrose et al have begun force-feeding us their usual heart-warming Christmas fayre. This normally prompts much debate in the office with two camps usually emerging. Those who favour the heart-warming (cue John Lewis’ lovelorn snowman traipsing…
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Reputation
What a few weeks for reputations being savaged. A senior government whip swears at the cops, denies it, then resigns and finally confirms the story as true. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer was caught trying to blag first class travel with a cattle-class ticket (why on earth doesn’t he travel first class anyway – is this…
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Telling Tales
One of the most ancient of human activities, after you know what, is probably telling stories. And it’s a skill that shouldn’t be lost to the marketer. Sat ‘round the fire in chez cave after a day’s hunting, captain cavemen would have spun epic yarns about narrowly avoiding sabre-toothed tigers and the size of the mammoth that got…
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Olympic Parallels
Even the most hard-hearted cynic must have been moved at the vision of dozens of athletes blubbing and wailing as they mumbled through various national anthems clutching their medals. I guess the tears and emotion come from the huge relief at having completed a goal. Years of work and expectation leading to a final recognition…
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Banks, belief & branding
I always thought that my teenage self was an incoherent bag of self-righteous liberal naivety. A trait not uncommon with media types you know. As a young gun whose teenage years occurred through the lefty liberalism of the 1980s I was pretty sure that big business was bad. Evil empires trading their branded goods were…
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We Need Something New!
Surely Doing it Better is the Answer. I was asked the other day, by a potential client, what his business could do differently with its communication programme as he was looking for a unique way to advertise – ideally something that had never done before. Why? Because he didn’t think the current campaigns were working…
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Why do clients change agencies?
I’m always interested when a new agency launches (although new is usually a metaphor for the phoenix-like resurrections from the ashes of a failed venture). Of special interest is how these new agencies position themselves to potential clients. What new services will they provided? How will they deliver a better creative product? What makes them…
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Principles of competitive communication
Communication is about individuals not mass markets Keep the individual at the centre of your thinking. By doing this, no matter how well researched, segmented and ABC’d your target markets are, you’ll always communicate with them in the way they want – as individuals. This thinking will make your brand communications much more powerful. The…
Making brands more distinctive 