I am fascinated by the uproar about the transfer of the show Project Runway from the uber stylish Bravo to the more, um, subdued Lifetime (it premiered on the new channel last Thursday).  According to the blogs, viewers were sure that the show would not be nearly as good on Lifetime as it was on Bravo.  But while the channel has changed, the format, the hosts and the lingo will remain - so why was everyone so sure it would be bad?  Because the Bravo network has developed an incredible brand around “drama” TV that is so bad it’s great, for young-minded, style-oriented viewers – while Lifetime’s for…well, I don’t really know – women who stay home on Saturday nights?  (Even the name Lifetime sounds old!)  Fans trusted the show coming from Bravo as curator.  I’m inspired by Bravo’s ability to create this “in the know” persona for itself (even the logo suggests people are talking about it!). The most successful channels are brands – and while some are reaping the rewards of brilliantly managing this, those that don’t will be totally “out.”

This spot has been getting a lot of play on the advertising blogs lately. It’s an Australian beer ad for VB, which is immensely watchable, even for non-Australians. I’m not a VB drinker and nor will I go out of my way to find it, but the spot created a really positive impression of the brand for me…and really that’s what matters. VB is a massive mainstream beer…effectively the Bud of Australia, with huge appeal to a broad audience. I can imagine the planner sitting down to try to write the “target audience” section of his brief and struggling to find anything really insightful for his creative team. Then, maybe the lightbulb went off that the insight was not about a focused target audience, but more about the brand’s huge everyman appeal. The fact that VB is enjoyed by a huge array of Aussies means that it must have something special about it. The way the spot celebrates this appeal across a range of stereotypes is a great creative leap. It reminds me of the brilliant Bud radio spots years ago celebrating Real American Heroes (all 110 of them here) .

More importantly, it reminds me that while we often strive to focus down to a tight definition of our audience, maybe we should look much more broadly at a larger pool of users and concentrate more on what they need, rather than just who they are.

I’m currently on a research project set across three cities in India. Over dinner with my client Abhijit in Delhi, we got to talking about the interesting dynamics of cell phone adoption in this massive country. The biggest player here is Nokia, who just “got it right” according to Abhijit. I pushed for a reason why and he rattled off a number of smart moves… terrific advertising, a stellar product, and early entry into the market. But what caught my attention was an anecdotal story of how Nokia connected with the working class. Abhijit said a key move was when Nokia won the allegiance of truck drivers (who, believe me, are everywhere in this country!). As Nokia was looking for new and innovative ways to improve their hardware, they stumbled across a deceptively small insight: truck drivers get out of their trucks a dozen or more times in the course of a long night on the road… and it can be really, really dark (you know… that thing that happens when the sun goes down). The answer? Add a little flashlight to the phone. Bingo! Instead of looking for some earth-shaking, never-before-seen feature on the bleeding edge of technology, Nokia went old school and added a light bulb. And just yesterday on my flight from Delhi to Mumbai, the Economic Times of India published the results of its Brand Equity Most Trusted Brands survey. The top brand for 2009 and now two years running? The guys with the light bulbs sparking up — in more ways than one.

I am totally inspired by the groundbreaking force-to-be-reckoned-with of social media it what is proving to be pivotal in the historic events in Iran this week.

It has catapulted a technology that I was previously entirely cynical about into the realms of the truly revolutionary with average Iranian citizens able to get their personal experiences out to the world despite media blackouts and internet censorship with simple micro-blogging.

Hooray for a media coming of age and finding it’s worth. I am brimming with ideas to incorporate Twitter methodologies into our work!

As we talked about the other day with my United Airlines experience, brand consistency often comes down to an individual’s delivery. With all people-facing brands we are at the whim of the brand representative. Thinking about it from their point of view for a second, they have to be incentivized to deliver that brand experience consistently.  If we imagine the most successful service brands in the airline industry, Jet Blue and Southwest come to mind in the US and maybe Virgin and Singapore on an international scale.  What gives those people greater pride in delivering a unique and consistent experience that elevates their brands?

Ponder that for a while and then overlay yesterday’s news from London where British Airways announced they were asking their staff to work for free for a month to help get them out of the financial hole they’re in due to the economic crisis. In truth, their voluntary pay reduction would be amortized over a 6 month period, but which ever way you cut it, the airline is asking its staff to deliver the brand for a lower incentive.  The CEO, Willie Walsh, is clearly behind the initiative as he was first in line to volunteer to work for free for a month.  As he’s on £735K a year, critics say he can afford to lose £61K for a month.

In my mind, this could  galvanize a “circling of the wagons mentality” and a determination to survive, which could result in a push for even higher levels of customer service. This would happen if the staff felt an affinity for what BA stands for beyond just their pay packet. I’m not sure if this is true.

A more likely result is a disaffected and pissed off workforce who lack the incentive to deliver the BA brand consistently in the air. This has massive implications for the BA brand, which has been determined to differentiate based on a a “full service” promise vs. low cost, no frills competitors. What looks like a short term cost cutting policy could result in longer term detrimental damage to their brand.

What do you think? Would you be prepared to work for your company for less money to help it out of a financial hole?

Note to Egg Strategy employees reading this post - this is not a cheap attempt at testing the waters for a “BA style” wage cut. We just hired more people, remember!

In recent months we’ve seen a few mis-steps by major brands.  KFC’s free sandwich problems, aka the Oprah Tsunami, the Dr Pepper and Guns and Roses debacle and last year the Burger King employee taking a bath in the restaurant kitchen sink didn’t exactly endear people to that brand.

This video of a McDonald’s in Australia does take the cake though.  How bad is this?

Reminds us of a few truths:

1. Every single touchpoint with your brand creates an impression.  Good, bad or ugly.

2. The internet has an awesome power to convey dramatic ideas to many people over a very short space of time.

3. Don’t go to McDonald’s in Adelaide after 3am on a Saturday

So, I have been totally hooked by the Chapsticks folks.

Today was one of those days that I needed to put on my headphones and jam in my own little piece of cyberspace to meet a deadline. So, I plugged into my headphones and flipped on Pandora. But today, my usual stream of music was secretly replaced by a very clever marketing ploy.

Chapstick, it seems, is sponsoring playlists, one for each of 4 products they are promoting. Each product has its own playlist with a different personality and point of view. When I turned on Pandora today, it put me straight into a Chapstick playlist, and since I was immediately grooving, the list has been playing all day.

The strangest part for me was when I started wondering why Chapstick True Shimmer had chosen classic disco tunes for their play list and what that said about Chapstick as a person…I happen to think it means she is cool, quirky and doesn’t really care what I think about her choices…interesting.

As a jaded professional who works at branding every day, it is worthy of mention that this strategy reached me and got me seriously thinking about my relationship to the Chapstick brand. It was the perfect match of communication, channel and timing, and I am impressed.

Thank you Chapstick True Shimmer for sponsoring such a groovin’ day!

Pretty much since the economic world went noticeably pear shaped back in the fall, there’s been much ado about this new climate of frugality that we’re living in. Grant McCracken had an excellent post about this back in October about finding Joy in a Joyless Economy.  Grant spoke about a growing desire to savor things in a down economy - essentially we try to find new joy in what we already own. Another way to look at this is to argue that in a recession, we engage in “consumption triage” - i.e. we are more selective in the purchases we really need and prioritize accordingly.  The perfect place to be in this climate would naturally be the spot where you are always viewed as a critical purchase that will rarely be sacrificed.  Which brands can still claim that?

While discussing this with Egg President Heather Dupre the other day, she came up with an interesting distinction - the difference between downtrading and downgrading. If we believe that these days there is a badge value in choosing practical brands over luxury brands, then the idea of “downtrading” seems to be an compelling trend.  It’s the opposite of the classic Trading Up model created by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske in the heady days of 2003.  Downtrading is actively choosing a brand that you believe delivers as well as a more expensive competitor and feeling good about that choice.  Downgrading is making a lower quality choice and perhaps feeling resentful about being forced into that compromise.

Which brands are downtrade brands and which are downgrade ones?  Is a McDonald’s latte a downtrade from Starbucks or a downgrade?  Is a VW a downtrade from an Audi or a downgrade? Is Olay’s Pro-X face cream at $40 a downtrade brand or a downgrade?  The last example isn’t one I’d be able to comment on personally, but hopefully this whole idea will spark a bit of debate.

Gladwell’s new book Outliers is getting a lot of press lately, mainly for the provocative stance it takes on how success is a factor of practice and effort, rather than simply innate talent.  The magic number is apparently 10,000 hours (a topic we linked to year ago, here).  The recent publicity about the book has got me thinking about this again and wondering if there is a magic number of years a brand has to be around before it is taken seriously and trusted by consumers.  It would be interesting to measure brand trust by category and find out which categories demand the greatest years of experience in order for a brand to succeed.  I wonder what the magic number is for Scotch brands vs. cell phones for example.

We blogged about the great We Feel Fine visualization back in June, but today found a great way of taking the pulse of how people are feeling about the election thanks to the New York Times.  This cool “tag train” is such a simple way of using tag cloud style visualization to demonstrate strength of feeling in real time and provides a fascinating snapshot of election day emotions.  You can check it out through 3 lenses - an “everyone” perspective, an “Obama supporter” perspective or a “McCain supporter” perspective.  Click it and run it for just a few minutes to see who is feeling more optimistic about the day.  This is most interesting right now, mainly through either the McCain/Obama lenses, but tomorrow it will be great to look at the mood of the nation through the “everyone” lens.  Hopefully the New York Times will keep it up.

An interesting article in BrandWeek this week discusses the Pharma industry’s unwillingness to touch social networking as a part of their interaction with consumers:

Why Pharma Fears Social Networking 

While I agree that your average Pharma Company probably has more legal worries than your average Carbonated Beverage Company when it comes to what people say about their product in the public domain, it does seem like a huge blind spot on the part of the Pharma industry.

Consumers view big Pharma with suspicion, and despite the need to entrust their life to these companies, they rarely actually give them their trust.  Perhaps failing to support the patient community is part of the problem here, and why Pharma continues to look stoic and cold in the face of a socially networked reality. 

I saw this ad in Rolling Stone last month - you'll have to click on it to read the copy.  It's for a Polish vodka called Sobieski, which is apparently cheap, authentic and good (3 things I like). Every now and then I love it when brands try to tell us that marketing is all smoke and mirrors.  It conveniently forgets that we love to be hoodwinked (at least subconsciously anyway) - which is why clubbers in New York will pay $13 for a Grey Goose and cranberry juice. We love the stories told by brands, the myth, the packaging etc…it's all part of it. While the Sobieski campaign is trying to debunk marketing hype, it is buying into the hype itself.  Nevertheless, nice copy, nice ad and apparently it's only $11 a bottle.  What a winner.