Ramblings and Junk

The New Rules of Brand Competition : Brave New Marketing : Fast Company

By: Joel Rubinson

The old branding model is past its “sell by” date. It is a product-centered model that comes from packaged goods in the ’70s and ’80s; offer differentiated benefits that a particular consumer segment is thought to care about. “My peas are picked at the peak of sweetness”…that kind of thing. This model is breaking down as people try store brands and find they are “fit for purpose” at a better price. Now what?

Change the model.

People live life in four dimensions. We have functional needs, but we also are social creatures, have self-expressive needs, and crave content that we find to be entertaining and informative. Thinking this way reveals new ways of making your brand relevant:

Functional: go from “product feature” to “solution-based” thinking
Social: make your brand a celebrity that is fanned, friended, and followed. Or, create a thematic environment around a value shared by your brand and its customers (e.g. Dove and “the real meaning of beauty”)
Self-expressive: the brand must stand for something so clearly understood, it is cultural currency
Content: become the logical and top of mind source for content centered on what your brand is about

But here’s the catch; your competitive set will change as you offer new constructs…new ways to categorize. This takes us to the idea of a “mental marketplace” where your brand must vie for attention against other brands that are functionally unrelated. Product brands can even find they compete with celebrities and news publishers.

Noah Brier has created a freely available tool called brand tags. (You should also check out mattermeter.) Brandtags displays a logo and asks you to type the first thing that comes to mind when you see a particular brand’s logo. You can then see what that brand means to everyone else.

3M competes with Apple in the mental marketplace of innovation but they express their brands differently. Experience the Apple store in SOHO. Apple has leveraged innovation, cool, and edginess into self-expression, a sense of belonging and maybe a little bit of “theme park” thrown in. Oh by the way, Apple stores reached $1 billion in sales faster than any other chain in history (previous record-holder was the Gap).

Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of health/fresh with Dannon, Kashi, and Subway (and others, of course). Whole Foods “competes” via brand community across social media (e.g. 800,000+ Twitter followers), has a wonderful blog and iPhone app about a wellness lifestyle from organic/fresh foods. A Whole Foods shopping bag is almost a clubhouse handshake.

When a brand wins in its mental marketplace it leverages multi-layered connections with people into spontaneous credibility that converts into sales. The unfamiliar new product becomes instantly familiar.

If store brands are going to dominate the mental marketplace for “affordable;” where do you plan to play and win?

“Break In” Directed by David Fincher, First TV Commercial For New Apple iPhone 3G S (laughingsquid.com)
The 100 Most Mentioned Brands on Twitter (businesspundit.com)

Just “Say No” to Pirated Software

Not that I think Mac users, of which I am, are/were impervious to malware attacks, I just don’t think anyone has paid enough attention to them to matter. As the article states, link below, it probably has been more of a case of neglect and not the security of the OS that has kept Mac users from being attacked.

Read more, Macs hit with BitTorrent-embedded malware attack. Brought to you by Yahoo! Tech.

Johnny Appleseed and the Ducati

Image via Wikipedia

Nothing like lean meat protein after two hours of mowing the lawn, what kind of meat protein, that doesn’t matter as long as it is meat protein and not soy protein. Just remember when something strange happens, stranger things have happened, this is some good advice, especially if that strange thing that happened did so while mowing the lawn, I mean really how strange can it really be if you are mowing the lawn. This is where Johnny Appleseed comes into the picture, because I assume you know, the lawn mowing was happening in the apple orchard, where else would you find Johnny Appleseed? And that is a funny name for him, since all he really does is pick apples as a summer job and when he does eat them he doesn’t eat the apple seeds, just the meaty part of the apple, speaking of which he really enjoys meat protein as well, his particular favorite, maybe his ultimate favorite is a t-bone steak that is seared on each side for about three minutes, no shorter no longer, exactly three minutes or he just won’t eat it, he is that picky. How can he be that picky when his summer job is picking apples in the apple orchard, well it is because he is also a secret, now the secret will be out, multi-millionaire in his spare time, he does the apple picking in the summer to keep fit and enjoy the beautiful summer weather. The summer weather this summer was beautiful too, mostly in the mid eighties with no humidity and only showers in the evening hours, so it sounds like Mr. Appleseed has a pretty good gig going picking apples during the summer. How did me make his millions you may ask, and you can ask, but he won’t tell you, so I will tell you right now, he sold his antique John Deere tractor collection to one of the most famous jack rabbits of all time, Peter Cottontail, who now uses them to plow the fields of his cabbage and carrot farms. Why would Peter Cottontail buy antique tractors to plow his field, well he is a bit of an eccentric jack rabbit and thinks that the antique John Deere tractors are better than the new John Deere tractors. The mower used to mow the apple orchard is also an antique John Deere lawn mower, it would seem like they are everywhere these days, but they were very rare when Johnny Appleseed sold his collection to Peter Cottontail for millions of dollars. Now that Johnny Appleseed is done picking apples for the day it is time for him to jet away on his Ducati, a nice motorcycle that he is always getting comments on when he takes it out for a ride on a beautiful sunny day, he doesn’t get any comments when he takes it out for a ride on a rainy day though. Mr. Appleseed believes the best way to live life is to enjoy the passage of time, most often in the apple orchard or on the seat of his Ducati.

Ramblings and Junk

The New Rules of Brand Competition : Brave New Marketing : Fast Company

Just “Say No” to Pirated Software

Johnny Appleseed and the Ducati

Blogs I Follow