Pavansut: The Monkey God

Nick Rice, over at Small Business Branding Blog has written a nice article on some of the things a small business could do to brand themselves. Most of the ideas are great, and most are easy to implement. The unfortunate fact is, many small business people are too busy to worry about branding. They are still chasing the next customer so that they can pay the bills.

What do you think? Is branding critical success factor? or is it a nice-to-have attribute?

Matthew Creamer has a nice piece in Ad Age about Rock Star Marketers. Truth be told, marketing is a difficult profession where successes are hard to come by. There are so many unknowns, not the least of which is your product and the competitive situation you are in. Many a careers are made by products that are so superior that they would sell by themselves. And eventhough product development needs hundreds of people in the organization, the credit often goes to one or two marketers at the top, who go on to gain rock start status to the chagrin of the rest of the organization that wonders, what about my contribution?

But more times than not its the other way around. Products that have good attributes languish because the results don't follow the marketing hype and the organization looses interest in it. I have known many a great communicators who tell a great story and persuade the organization into investing heavily in their hyped-up ideas. However the realities of life soon…

Here's a surprise...Deadenbacher is driving traffic to Orville Redenbacher's website. Well, duh!

I wrote earlier about why Ad Age's Ken Wheaton was wrong in his article about "Selling Popcorn 101". That it would surprise to an Ad Age write is whats a mystery to me.

The ConAgra campaign follows the theme that has become so widely popular these days in marketing, "Create controversy to stay top of mind". In todays fragmented media world where to keep your message top of mind is a herculean task, trying to differentiate oneself is no longer enough. Marketers have to constantly strive for ways in which the brand can stay top of mind. And we have found a nice tool in "controversies" to meet that goal.

Marketers of consumer goods are not the early adopters to utilize this approach...the pioneers in this business are our entertainers. Whether it is Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" or Brittney Spears "show it…

Nothing warms the coccles of a marketer than a controversy that will shine the spotlight on your product. As a marketer I have often struggled with this need to heighten the level of public awareness without going too much outside the boundary. So when some one comes along and criticizes yur work in a public forum, the marketer should thank his lucky stars that it was they who were picked for this public drumming, for the one big benefit of the public drumming is "raised awareness".

A recent case in point is the controversy stoked by Copyranter on Gawker. Copyranter decided that (s)he did not like the Cirspin Porter + Bogusky execution of the new Orville Redenbacher ad which ressurected the dead Mr. Redenbacher. That was enough to make Ken Wheaton of the venerable Ad Age to pickup on the story and put it its website. Sure enough, the ad is drawing attention from others such as Patrick, USA Today and James Lilek(including me).

Ken's article is sub titled, "How n…

Speaking of Marketing Gurus, Kerri Martin, the marketing guru whose claim to fame was launch of Bently's "Mini" and repositioning the BMW Motorcycles, was given the axe. Martin efforts to raise the sales of Volksvagen failed amid controversy around the ads developed by Crispin Bogus.

This was bound to happen; its tough to repeat the success of the past especially if the product sucks. Mini was just such a radical departure from the contemporary automobile designs that even a moron could have led the brand to success. Not so with Volkswagen; VW has some challenges infront of it. The brand designs sorely needs to be refreshed, and no matter of marketing pizzaz could have helped.

Nevermind this slide into failure territory - Kerri will surely land a even more plum assignment.

In case you have been living under the rock, Apple Computers has changed its name to just "Apple". Makes sense since Apple is no more a computer company than IBM is a computer company. Oops, wrong example!! IBM still keeps its name "International Business Machines" despite the fact that much of the business comes not from selling business machines, but from providing consulting services.

And in their esteemed wisdom, the marketing gurus at CitiGroup have decided to drop the umbrella logo. Not only that, they have changed their name from CitiGroup to, you guessed it, Citi!

Stop this silliness, already!

For those who doubt the power of branding, here is a story that shows how a brand name built over years can be a powerful tool in marketing.

All of us know about how Bell Labs was disbanded into ATT the long distance company, and smaller regional Bells doing local business. ATT did very well in the age when hard hard-wired long distance service was the king. However, newer internet technologies which make IP telephony possible resulted in ATT losing market share and eventually deciding that it couldn't survive on its own.

In 2004 ATT sells its wireless business to Cingular, a wireless entity formed by a partnership between SBC Commnications and BellSouth. Cingular decides to keep its name and converts customers over to Cingular brand name.

Fast forward, ATT continues to go down and decides that short of a merger survival would be difficult. So, ATT decides to merge with Bell South, one of the original Baby Bells (in a reverse merger), and new entity decides to take on the A…

Illig writes about Starbucks response to the U-tube posting of Oxfam Charities video about how Starbucks is mistreating the Ethiopian farmers. The response from Starbucks has been equally "grass-rootsy", and bold. Starbucks is now a large corporation, and large corporations tend to be hidebound to change. Internal policies and procedures tend to so skew the response to conservatism and procedure driven that its almost impossible to quickly mount a response to a challenge, lets it be seen as being too aggressive.

However in this instance, Starbucks seems to have done exactly opposite demonstrating that Starbucks hasn't forgotten where it got its start - as a scrappy young brand that did not hesitate to put its position in the market place.

Newer technologies like blogs and U-tube are marketing opportunities, and the companies that rapidly adopt these technologies are going to create a significant marketing opportunity for themselves.

This comes courtsey Clagnut, and Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman describes the problem, and clagnut has analyzed it further to show the differences, with some screen shots.

While this situation with font rendering in web-browsers is truly annoying, even more annoying is the fact that fonts you want to use in your website may not be available on the computer. Both the rendering problem, and lack of fonts makes it impossible to create a website that looks the same in all browsers. There will always be different font formats, different browsers, and different operating systems. Whats more, there is no way to control which fonts the reader/viewer will have installed on their computer.

What is needed is a simple way to code information so that the browser renders the font in the exact same way whether the viewer has that particular font or not. Until a simple answer can be found, we will always be scrounging for ways to make the common fonts, verdana, helvetica, arial, times new roman etc. …