Five Hour Focus Supplemental- Packaging and Product Diffusion
The new five hour focus resonates with professionals with its simple and sophisticated packaging. Our key survey insight was that many of their target customers believe in the efficacy of the product, but feel the current 5 hour energy carries a social stigma.
5 hour Focus retains the ease of use and simplicity of 5 Hour Energy, but is available in grocery stores and health food stores rather than gas stations.
This new sub-brand is meant to resonate with consumers who have important tasks to complete, but retains the simple ingredients and no crash results that has made 5 hour focus effective.
Overall, the new Five hour focus reinvigorates the company and allows Five Hour to better reach their intended customer target.
Our "Ask a Panelist" segment concludes with "Ask a Host!" The one, the only Tony Reali's got stories: Backwards Show, Airport sushi, Airport Engagements, Err...
Probably one of my favorite things I worked on while at ESPN, the Ask Tony segment was the conclusion and unfortunately filmed after I had started school, but it really gives a great inside look into what makes him such an affable leader.
Personal Leadership Branding is a vague business school term for many people. It was for me too, until I reflected back on my experience with leaders in the workplace. For me, no one typifies a leader with a personal brand more than the electrifying, death-defying Tony Reali, the host of ESPN's Around the Horn.
When Tony arrives at work, he makes it a point to greet everyone there with more than a passing "Good Morning." His earnestness and humor defines the culture at the ESPN studio in Washington DC. Throughout my time as an MBA at Sloan whenever I need to give a speech or interview or find myself in a situation when I really need to grab someone's attention, I always ask myself what Tony would do. This reputation is probably what has kept 1 million viewers coming back to Around the Horn for the past 12 years. This is as good an excuse as any to have a Tony Reali retrospective.
The ESPN comments section will no longer exist in its current form after today. The cesspool that allowed sports fans to anonymously post their unpunctuated thoughts about sports while hiding behind the shield of anonymity is being replaced by a system that will force users to tether their comments to their Facebook accounts. So now is the perfect time to look back at the best thing the ESPN comments section ever produced: the Occupy Tebow meme.
And here is a follow up link to my last post recounting ESPN's social media crisis with bonus Sarah McLachlan tribute. It was a simpler time.
Wal-Mart, a $254 billion corporation, is so terrified of its employees sharing their true workplace stories with us that it's purchased ads on Google and Twitter expressly targeted at our readers. On its employee website, the company also asked workers to share positive stories. Here are the comments they got.
I never would have expected that Branding class would let me talk about two of my favorite internet stories of all time. Gawker vs Walmart, and The World vs ESPN.
But first McDonald's, whose social media campaign gloriously exploded into cynicism and persisted even as they attempted to quell it. The reading's cite this as a manifestation of the end of the consumer era of advertising and the dawn of an era where consumer's seek to avoid ads, and are always eager to subvert brand advertising with cynicism.
In Wal-Mart's case, Gawker's series on working at Wal-Mart incited them to send internal memos to their employees compelling them to AstroTurf the internet with positive stories. What transpired was a small rebellion on their internal website which spilled over into the internet at large.
For ESPN their constant saturation of Tebow stories compelled their user commenters (a typical cesspool that makes Yahoo! News and YouTube blush) to unite and reply to every article with "X>Tebow" where the variable X was equal to anything ever in history. This war between users and moderators lasted four days until ESPN gave up and ceded the comment section to the users, who continued to post a deluge of these comments until ESPN totally overhauled the comment system.
Like WalMart and McDonald's, The ESPN case was a small act of rebellion against an oversaturated brand. In each case, the company's took shortcuts with their product to bolster their bottom line and paid dearly and for outsiders, hilariously. The message to me is the end of the Consumer Era is not the end of Branding, but more of an event akin to extinction of the dinosaurs in that large lumbering brands who do not creatively and genuinely market their products suffer the consequences.
Even at the mention of the name Intel, I can hear their 5 note jingle in my head. It is the first thing I think of, even before their market leading products. This jingle was borne out of the Intel Inside campaign. This initiative was meant to compel IT leaders to upgrade existing Intel chips and steer them away from cheaper competitors. Intel's business is built on R&D and being the first to market with leading chips. In order to translate this into sales, Intel needed to educate customers about the premium benefits associated with their chips.
This success led to Intel remaining the leader of the pc chipset market to the point they were sued for anti trust in 2009 (which what the cartoon above references).
The prospect of extending this campaign to PDA and smartphone technologies is an excellent example risk verse reward when curating a successful brand. Intel hopes that their household name will sell more intel based phones. But there are concerns that since their market hold of this segment is not strong, that the campaign will be less effective in establishing them as a premium brand. I personally feel they should extend the campaign given that the Intel Inside slogan is more than a message, but succeeded in triggering an emotional response in customers who identify them with safety and innovation.
Burberry Brit, today the name means young luxury, but this was not always the case. In the early 2000s, after a CEO change, Burberry set out to fill the gaps in the luxury market and become a respected player. Burberry elevated their check logo to the forefront of the fashion consciousness.
While Burberry's price point play is likely matched by competitors, their status as a name brand now gives them some insulation against pure price competition. I am interested in discussing the launch of their Brit line as it appears to overlap with products and customers they have already built success with. It will also be interesting to see which portion of the class is in favor of the garish check logo splashed on everything, and who would be in favor of a more subtle look.
Regardless Rose Bravo succeeded in reducing the risk posed by the out of control licensing and Burberry is now a company whose alums leave to work for visionary brands like Apple.
A key channel the used to engage their younger audience was performances by well known artists like Kaiser Chiefs, pictured above, at their flagship stores under the name 'Live for Burberry'.
Google "Brand Manifold" and the top two replies are Honda customer forums asking for help identifying car parts. But in business, the concept of the Brand Manifold is a powerful tool for new age brand managers to accomplish their increasingly challenging job.
Just as Honda was powerless to prevent their family sedans being transformed into street racing machines (most prominently popularized in the motion picture classic The Fast and the Furious). Brand Managers today face a kind of Jean Baudrillard nightmare of their own where products and symbols are indistinguishable from the greater brand. Brand Managers today are not the owners of the brand, but at best are stewards who guide the brand's perception and adoption by subgroups of consumers as best they can.
The Manifold analyzes brands across four categories, internal and external meanings, as well as past and future. This gives managers a framework through which to think about the impact that their products may have on the consumer environment. as they guide their brand's evolution.
In low margin industries, competitive advantage is paramount. Singapore's ability to enter a crowded market with limited funds and support along to become a leading airline in the world is a perfect example of this of the effects of differentiation.
For me this case brought to mind Alamo Drafthouse, a small chain of movie theaters in Texas which has now spread to 9 states. They have generated big buzz by virtue of their commitment to customer experience.
At Alamo, people on cell phones are routinely escorted out and minors under the age of 17 are not allowed unless accompanied by an adult. They serve premium alcoholic beverages and excellent dinner entrees. Another popular aspect of the brand are their nights dedicated to "Alamo Films" where they screen theme movies like Rocky Horror Picture Show or zombie movies where patrons dress up.
This highly interactive model has spurred other competitors to install better seats and serve real food in their cinemas. Whether you are a couple opening your first movie theater in an abandon parking garage, or a small airline looking to establish a name for itself, providing the best customer experience in the industry creates a brand that money can't buy.
It's hard to say what Yahoo! is, exactly: your grandma's favorite search engine (!)? a convenient place to set up your fantasy baseball league (!)? just a sneaky means of getting us to look at more ads (!)? The company we don't understand now wants to add one more item to the list of things it may or may not be: a Netflix competitor (!).
Another firm devoted to cultivating a primary named brand at the cost of its business is the much maligned Yahoo! This Gawker article is the perfect example of the effects of poor brand diffusion. Rather than having the reputation of a giant conglomerate, Yahoo! is portrayed as a rudderless entity overpaying and acquiring random start-ups with no rhyme or reason. For more source material on the evaporation of the Yahoo! brand read more here: http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet
What do these pictures have in common? They represent different approaches to Concha y Toro's question of top down or bottom up branding. Companies strive for a strong reaction when customers ask "What is in a brand?" For companies like HP, it is very challenging. HP makes printers, scanners, laptops, cameras, among other tech products all with varying degrees of success. Much of their recent struggles can be attributed to an inability for consumers to know what their core specialty is.
IBM has long been known for their staunch reluctance to use any of their sub brands in their advertisements. During my time in their sales force, nothing was more frustrating than having to peddle an obscurely named product with no brand recognition behind it in an increasingly specialized IT world.
These approaches are contrasted with the final image demonstrating the litany of household names under the control of the major consumer product companies. These companies have developed an instant consumer association with their product but crafting dozens of marketing campaigns to ensure that each product has its own unique message. Given Concha y Toro's status as a player in a market where only a few countries are able to denote their wines as worthy aspirational, they would be better off creating unique sub brands.
Did you Microsoft had a Smart Watch in 2004 with a joint venture with Fossil? Probably not. It was apart of their foray into creating the fabled "Internet of Things" (a concept which itself started right here at MIT). Predicting what products succeed is the difference between a company that IPOs and a thrift store treasure for decade theme parties.
Adoption rates are dictated by word of mouth, market size, and several other factors such as complexity, trialibility, and comparative advantage which encourage adoption.
In our readings, bringing smell into computing and slicing peanut butter were too foreign of an experience to catch on. But satellite radio offered the potential of removing a pain point that many customers felt. Understanding the market is key to product launch
Find Your Beach. When it comes to controlling your brand, few do it better than Corona. Since their debut in the US in 1979, few companies have cultivated a stronger image with their core audience. Sun. Fun and Sand.
