Marketing Archives — Kevin Rothermel

The Definitive Guide To Modern Branding

There’s no question that the business of brands is changing. People have been going on and on about it since well before I ever got involved. Though it seems like there are some agencies out there that are actually getting on with it rather than ringing their hands about it.

Communication Design: Insights from the Creative Industries is a new book that features agencies like Zeus Jones who are inventing the state of the art in modern branding.

Adrian Ho, writing on the Zeus Jones blog:

The original impetus for the book was a recognition that there is a growing gap between the education designers and other creatives are getting at school and the emerging practice being developed in the real world. This isn’t simply true for students, it’s also true for practitioners. Modern marketing has become so complex and so specialized that even if you are on the forefront in one area, you may not know what’s happening in other areas.

Very excited about this one. I ordered it while collecting links for this post.

Advertising’s Kodak Moment

Gareth on the future of advertising and the ad agency’s big dumb slow march into irrelevance:

Remembering the Apple Newton’s Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact

In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure — albeit for different reasons. Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad. The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men. And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Ur tablet. The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop.

This reminded me of an idea that Gareth had years ago (I think it was Gareth…?) about doing a presentation on everything that Apple has done wrong.

You know, since any deck about how to do anything right generally has an Apple logo in it. Probably next to a swoosh. Adjacent to Coca-Cola.

Maybe, if you’re lucky and IF you’re dealing with an innovator/rulebreaker in the field of slide-based storytelling, you’ll find yourself with a Red Bull logo.

From: Daring Fireball

Yo Comprendo Seis Palabras de Español.

Welcome to a wonderous future where data makes hypertargeting possible.

Also: Taco Bell is the only restaurant, the police predict murders before they happen, and punk teenagers are hoverboarding around blairing Wyld Stallyns.

Luckily for all of us, Skynet is only being used to calculate Klout scores.

Good luck.

How To Sell Coke To People Who Have Never Had A Sip

Myanmar has been under sanctions for really long time. Long enough that the people who live there don’t really get what an ATM is, haven’t been subjected to television singing competitions, and don’t know anything about Coke.

But once sanctions were lifted, Coke naturally started working on making sure the Myanmarmots needed to start exercising and going to the dentist more often. The only problem is that after trading almost solely on brand for the past century, they had to figure out how to sell Coke to people who hadn’t heard of it before.

Moin says he started to go back in the Coca-Cola archives. He was looking at how the company marketed its product before the internet, before TV, even before radio. Eventually he found his perfect model for Myanmar, place where nobody knew anything about Coke — Atlanta, 1886.

Back then the hot advertising trend was wall posters. Moin noticed that in the beginning, Coke didn’t use the posters to talk about friends or happiness or style. It talked about what the product tasted like. It simply described it. Moin pulled out two words in particular that would form the core of his Myanmar campaign — “delicious, refreshing.”