As usual with Johan, it took me a moment to figure out what he was saying, and then another to realize he was right. Like a lot of Gen X folks, I loved TV advertising as a child. Sometimes more than the shows. I had my favorite ads and shouted, “Where’
We love creative ads and beautiful brands. We admire a well-designed website or logo. But we know it’s just marketing.
Actually I did, for a minute, believe the hype. There was this parachute board game I saw on TV that I was sure was the Golden Ticket to Happiness. I had never wanted anything for Christmas so badly before and actually gotten it. I opened the box immed
And I’ve taught my son the same: It’s just the ad. It’s not real. Read the reviews. Think for yourself. What does common sense tell you?
This isn’t news. Today marketing isn’t fooling anybody. You can’t sell a crappy product, no matter how good
So what’s a marketer to do? Well, you could tell the truth. You could work with your CEO and your HR department to help shape corporate culture. You can be honest with your audiences, internal and external, and spend your time communicating instead of
There are plenty of whole brands out there. You see them a lot in small businesses where hiring likeminded folks isn’t a corporate initiative so much as the founder’s intuition. Like a trustworthy mechanic or your local mom-and-pop grocer.
But big companies can do it too. It just takes more work plus conscious structure and effort. I’ve seen it work. (Full disclosure: I’ve also seen it fail.) Once we were rebranding a company that was trying to change how they built their products. It wa
In the end, whole brands simply work better because they are real. They permeate every level of the business, not just the marketing, and can create meaningful jobs for employees and make meaningful connections with consu
So here’s the thing: There are only a handful of truly unanswerable questions out there. Like, “What’s the meaning of life?” or “What’s at the end of the Universe?” For the rest of life’s questions, finding the answer is usually as simple as asking somebody.
We were sitting around a conference table in Bellevue, a few weeks ago, presenting our research results and proposed brand strategy for an enterprise software company.