Tourism Marketing Gets Refreshed.

The recent joint work between Coca-Cola and the State of Michigan is great on many levels. It extends both brands into new territory that is beneficial to both. Michigan can use the brand push at limited financial cost, and Coke gets unofficial sponsorship of Michigan summers.

The attached article also shows that Scotland has done this joint branding effort as well. So the question is why don't other cash strapped tourism brands investigate this. Government budgets are tight and I think consumers are over the previous feeling that "our government is selling out to commercialism". Hey if you want to attract customers to your parks, etc., you may need to make them relevant to wider targets.

Anyway, good work by Coke and Michigan State, and Scotland and Highland Springs.

brandrepublic michigan-is-it-coca-cola-create-tourism-brand-partnership

Coke's Dynamic Ribbon Becomes More Dynamic

I started to work on the Coca-Cola account in 1995 from my McCann Erickson office in Bangkok. I spent about 8 years working directly and indirectly on the famous brand all over Asia Pacific.  For 5 of these years I was McCann's Regional Director of the Coca-Cola business in South East-West Asia, and I know it's not easy getting Coca-Cola to play with their icons, be it the contour bottle, the red disc icon, the Spencerian script, or the dynamic ribbon.  So, when I see a classic Coca-Cola icon like the "dynamic ribbon" executed in a manner that turns my head, I want to give recognition to those behind it.

Great work O&M China, and in particular Jonathan Mak Long, a graphic design student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who gained acclaim in October last year for his Steve Jobs tribute. The work below is outstanding. It is so refreshing to see subtly at work, and I know it will break through in streets filled with visual clutter.

Coca-Cola China Out-of-Home poster

Click on the link below to the Campaign article that highlights this great work, and goes into a bit more detail on this great young talent, Jonathan Mak Long.


Campaign China Coca-Cola Outdoor Article

Play It Again Samsung

Recently IDC's Worldwide Phone Tracker research found that "Samsung closed 2011 as the year's top smartphone manufacturer with 94 million units shipped and a market share of 19.1 per cent". This fact took me back to 1986-87 when I was part of a team that launched Samsung into Canada. Samsung was just a new brand from Korea that was trying to get in the face of Japanese power house brands Sony and Panasonic. Their native domestic competitor Lucky Goldstar (now LG) was also starting out in the Canadian market making TV sets, VCR players and other low cost consumer electronics for Canadian consumers who felt they were paying too much for Japanese and, still at that time, US product.

Samsung's success is a great story and tribute to the power of branding perseverance. Samsung went through a few CMOs and logos (as you can see from one of the Canadian launch ads I was part of back in the mid 1980s), however they never lost faith that they would build a brand of quality and eventual world leading relevance.

Samsung Canada launch ad in 1987 by Toronto based Enterprise Advertising.

I look at what Hyundai and KIA have been doing in the car market in the last 10 years, and I see the same strategy unfolding for them. I hope they have walked down the street in Seoul and thanked their friend at Samsung for showing them they way.

Rock 'n Roll and Beer Advertising

In the 1990's I was lucky enough to be part of a great creative team at Scali, McCabe, Sloves in Toronto. I was an account guy on Labatt's Blue (it was Labatt's back then) and we were facing a surging Molson Canadian brand in most provinces in Canada. Molson had smashed the ad world with their "What beer's all about." campaign, and classic rock music was integral to their success. However, we believed that Blue could find an opening in Molson Canadian's music flank because they never tapped into the Canadian music scene, which was shocking given their name was "Canadian". So we developed a series of radio spots based great Canadian music that won a pile of national and international awards.


Now beer advertising and rock have had a great relationship for years but in Canada, the late 1980's and early 1990's were the heyday of this relationship in Canada.


Click on the link for a sample of Labatt's Blue award winning radio in 1990.

More Juice Around The Future of The Ad Agency

I was reading today in Campaign Asia about the intense pressure marketers are feeling to continue to come up with the next big idea. They are trying to stay relevant to a consumer base that is rapidly getting smarter and more savvy every minute. This means they are looking to anyone, including their customers for ideas. No longer are their AOR agency partners the holy grail of ideas, and this is sending shock waves through New York, London, Chicago, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Los Angeles.

As past blogs I have written have eluded to, the game has changed because the consumer has changed. They carry the influence to persuade their community to act, and the traditional ad campaign is treated with the proverbial grain of salt. Advertising air cover is critical in the war to win the hearts and minds of consumers, but it is boots on the ground, the reality of the brand experience, that wins the war today. What is the brand doing as it actually engages and delivers to people. Is it a positive experience they will twitter about to their community, or will it be so counter to the big ad air cover that they will hold the brand hostage with negative WOM to their friends.

Never has the game been so exciting and played with so much at stake for those that used to dominate the brand building and idea generating world...the traditional big ad agency.

Click on the link below to read the Campaign Asia article.
http://www.campaignasia.com/Article/259364,pressure-mounts-as-agencies-search-for-the-next-big-idea.aspx

If At First You Don't Succeed

Image via WikipediaEvery so often Nait (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) asks me to instruct a continuing education course for them dealing with marketing and business. This past weekend while I teaching a course on delegation and teamwork, I was reminded just how important allowing people to fail is to building trust, respect and innovation. Some companies thrive in allowing their people to fail and then learn from there failures. 3M makes it mandatory for people to fail. In their mind if they are not failing, then they are not learning and inventing new category defining products.

So back to what struck me this past weekend. I was watching with the class a DVD on the design consultancy IDEO, and a quote from one of their great talent jumped out and smacked me in the face. The quote was "enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius." Now I am not sure if this was his original thought or he borrowed it from some other great mind, but it quickly reminded me that people need to be encouraged to try things that scare them, things that just might not work. Too often business cultures breed stagnation and like mindedness in product design, business models and marketing communications.

In my mind the reason so little marketing activity jumps out at people and very little is differentiated and relevant, is because no learning was done it the development process. No one was encouraged to try new things and know it was ok if it didn't work because they knew they would learn from it and be even better next time. Maybe that is why I love the idea of beta sites in the webbed world. Beta sites and their thinking says we'll figure this out as we go along, some things may not work and we're fine with that because it will make the things that we do well for you become even better.

So make a mistake today and celebrate it. Then get back up and fix it so your next idea is even better.

Related articles

• Are you ready to accept failure? (ericbrown.com)