Month: December 2009

brand values, branding

The Tiger brand is well and truly tanked

Not one to kick a man when he’s down but some of the numbers that surround Tiger Woods’ sponsorship deals are starting to reach the public domain. So lets look at a few of them and see which ones have a chance of surviving.

1. Gatorade

The Pepsi owned gatorade brand is one of the biggest at with a multi year $100m deal. Gatorade is a drink that aims to promote sports, concentration and clean success. The drink they have created is Gatorade Tiger, which you can see here.

Gatorade Tiger - Put a Tiger in your tank next time you need to perform!

I would imagine, if it’s selling they’ll keep it in their line up anyway and one thing he isn’t short of is coverage at the moment, despite his being in total hiding for over two weeks now.

They announced on Wednesday last that they would be withdrawing it, but that this was nothing to do with his personal problems. It’s a bit of a coincidence though isn’t it.

The long term damage for Gatorade’s brand is to be established but with Pepsi, they will distance themselves very fact if they need to.

2. Accenture

These are the people that just escaped from the corporate clutches of Arthur Andersen that was brought down by the Enron scandal. They have it in their interest to both act and appear to be as clean as clean in a brand sense. Any sniff of a scandal will see them running for the hills.

They have just removed the Woods image that has been on rotation on their front page of their website. Oops.

3. Gillette

Thierry Henry is allowed to cheat and put France through to the World cup finals and deprive Ireland from their chance to progress and yet he still seems to be acceptable to the brand.

But infidelity runs deeper and hits harder. We become a prudy bunch in the uK and the US even more so, so Gillette may well drop him altogether.

Or will they?

When Thierry had his affair with celebrity make-up artist, Sadie Hewlett, they didn’t drop him then, so maybe Tiger will survive.

Gillette's Roger, Thierry and Tiger - a really wholesome bunch of gents
Gillette's Roger, Thierry and Tiger - a really wholesome bunch of gents

I guess all eyes are on Roger Federer now to keep his end up (so to speak) and to see if they can make it a full house of cheats. Gillette hve aid they will be cutting back the role that Tiger plays in their promotional material.

4. Nike

Nike is obviously one of the names he’s most closely associated with and he appears to still be at least listed on their site.

It’s hard to say how high profile he was on this site before, but he’s now only listed under their athletes and even then he is last on the list. There are no other pictures of him on the front pages of the site at all.

That sounds expensive.

5. EA Sports

Tiger Woods golf for the Wii, is one of the only computer games I have ever played and I loved it. Its worth over $60m as a brand and I don’t believe this will take one tiny hint of damage. Maybe they’ll push him on the deal next time they renegotiate, but who else have they got in the game that is anywhere near as high profile?

6. Summary

There’s obviously others like Swiss watch maker TAG Heuer and AT&T who all help with his $100m a year sponsorship income, but for me, after this does down a little, most if not all will stick by him as a brand spokesperson if he continues to be good for their business.

He needs to realign his own brand a little. He can’t really claim the moral high ground anymore and he will struggle massively with some mainstream family brands, but if he adjusts his position to be a little more ‘laddy’ and works the media a little, he can possibly recover his status.

David Beckham did it by concentrating on being good at what he does and by being photographed everywhere with his kids, looking like he’s having fun.

Hot off the press

It’s just been announced that Accenture will be withdrawing from the deal with Tiger, stating that he is no longer the right representative for their brand. It looks like they are being as sensitive about any potential bad press as I thought they maybe. There will now be others following. Expect Gatorade to go more public pretty soon.

branding

Tony Lyle RIP 10.12.39 – 23.07.06

This is a very personal blogpost as my Dad would have been seventy years old today. This was him in 1983 when he blagged the Lowenbrau Porsche for the weekend and then let me drive it about a lot, even though I was only 17 years old. I overtook his boss and good friend Tony Hales on the Oxford ring road going far too fast and to his eternal credit, he kept quiet. Thanks Tony.

My Dad in the Lowenbrau Porsche

I’m off to a big meeting in London rather than moping about, so I want it to be a really positive day today and i’ll raise a glass to him tonight.

He was a good man and he is very much missed by all of us.

augmented reality, branding

Gaming takes on a new dimension

This is a tough one to call. Is it a fake, is it a spoiler or is it the face of things to come in the future?

It’s almost like a usable version of augmented reality.

My belief is that it is a demo to see the public reaction to a new gaming format. This takes what the Eye Toy first delivered on the PS2, which was then picked up by the Nintendo Wii and delivers it in a far more seamless and intuitve fashion.

Whilst I’m not a gamer and can’t be bothered with any of the formats really (although I do like a bit of Tiger Woods golf on the Wii) what this does deliver (if you have an enormous house with no furniture to kick over as in this demo) is a gaming format that forces you to expend some calories whilst you play. Anything that gets kid playing properly and physically has to be a good thing, so i’ll watch with interest.

Brand Experience, brand values, branding

The coolest brand in britain?

I was at Bicester outlet village yesterday for a bit of pre-Christmas shopping.We actually let the kids have a budget and choose what they wanted. This seemed to work.

With a Jack Wills store there, offering much of their clothing for over 40% off list price, we knew we were onto a winner.

It was quite busy, which you’d expect, but there was only one store that had resorted to getting people to queue up to even get into it, and this was Superdry. It only opened on Wednesday last week and it has been rammed solid ever since. By making people queue they give the people inside a better shopping experience and create a scarcity marketing rumour that what is inside is soooo cool that you have to queue to even get to see it.

Finally getting to the front of the queue at the Bicester Outlet Village Superdry shop

Again it was 40% off list price throughout the store but starting from a lower price than the likes of Jack Wills, they started to look like immense value.

It seems that everything in Japan is cool for kids these days and Superdry is one of those brands that seems to inherently understand both scarcity marketing and offering great design with great value. It’s not surprising they are so popular.

So what did the kids buy?

It was no shock to me that the perception of Superdry being cooler than Jack Wills hit home (as it had a queue), so they spent all of their budget in there and are now giving us a hard time over not having the chosen presents until Christmas.

So does this mean that Superdry is the coolest brand in Britain?

It does for me, sitting here writing this in my new Superdry shirt! (yours for a bargain £20.99)

brand values, branding

10 brands that will disappear in 2010

Ten brands that will fail – starting with the dodo

In an article written by 24/7 Wall Street, there is a great article about the ten brands that will disappear in 2010.

Now for UK based businesses, they will not be as familiar with all of the ten brands but the lessons are pretty much the same for any dying brand you can think of the world over.

Adapt or die.

None of these have adapted fast enough, so they’re all dying.

Lets deal with each in turn

1. Newsweek

It’s printed news. The end.

The fact that you are reading this on a blog and I read the original article on another blog just goes to show that we are gathering most of our information online these days. It used to be that the credibility was offline in print, but that just isn’t the case anymore. There’s good stuff in both and crap in both too. The man problem is that advertising has followed the readership and not many of the old media barons have worked out how to monetize the new media platforms, because Google seems to own the space at present.

2. Motorola

I’m surprised it’s lasted this long really. Back in the mid 90’s I had an original Nokia Orange phone (that was in the days when they didn’t even have model numbers) and we needed two more mobiles, so we bought Motorola MR1’s (luggable rather than mobile) as they were half the price.

Big mistake.

Non functioning menus and useless interface. It was so hateful, I smashed it against the wall to give myself an excuse to buy another Nokia.

Any Motorolas I have seen since, seem just as bad.

3. Palm

Not since the Palm pilot and the shortlived ‘Pre’ have they had anything the market wants. When did they last produce anything innovative?

4. Borders

All a bit pointless. They stood for nothing and offered worse pricing than Amazon and less loveliness than Waterstones. They reminded me of how WH Smiths have been for the last ten years and I could never really think of any single occasion when I would need to go and buy from them. So I didn’t. It appears that few others did either.

5. Blockbuster

How have they survived this long against the marching digital army? If I want to watch a film, do I pay the same amount and watch it now on Virgin or Sky or drive down into the town and hire one, only to be bollocked for returning it late?

For a brilliant exchange of letters and emails between David Thorne and Blockbuster, have a read of this. It’s brilliant!

I’m sure we’ve all tried the monthly subscription thing where we can pick films and they send them to us, but it’s not actually that spontaneous is it? On a Monday, you can’t really say whether you’ll feel like a ‘romcom’ or a thriller on Friday night can you? Its a model that suits them and not us, so will never take off really big.

6. Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac

It’s named after a front bottom and a burger. Enough said.

7. Ambac

Never heard of it, sorry to see you go, It’s been a blast.

8. Eastman Kodak

To me, this is going to go down as the biggest brand ever to fail. They let the market swamp them by not seeing the digital revolution. They used to be innovators and now are in danger of being totally unknown by a new generation.

They have tried to move to digital products and even to printer paper, but the market just isn’t convinced.

I will be sad to see this go. But I will make a prediction. It will go bang and then someone will buy the name and after a few years, when they have shaken off the years of debt and structure problems, it will come back with some small innovative products that will take the market by storm. It is just too good a name to allow it to die forever. Give it ten years and it will be a force again.

9. Sun Microsystems

This isn’t one I can talk about with any authority, but for any brand to have the name of a type of computer that was superceded ten years ago seems to be a problem to me. Microsystems were the babies to replace mainframes in the 80’s weren’t they? So what relevance do they have now?

10. E*Trade

Again, I don’t know much about these other than they are some of the eejits who lent money to people who shouldn’t be getting it. Surely if they had no income and no way of repaying a loan, you shouldn’t lend them money?

Maybe this is a bit simplistic of me, but just because it has the word ‘E’ on the front of it, doesn’t make it a good business. They deserver all the failure they’re getting. Bye.

Summary

There’s no really surprises to me here. Bad businesses that haven’t evolved are failing.

I run a small design business and have done for over 18 years. It’s called Purple Circle. What we do know is very different to what we did then, because the market has changed massively. If I was still trying to sell pasted up artwork on bromide and magic marker visuals all round, do you think they’d still be buying?

No me neither.

So why have all these businesses assumed they could do the same?

brand values, branding

Why does it cost more to repair things than to replace them?

I am open about the fact that I am a bit of a geeky bloke. I like to repair things. Actually I Like to take things apart and see how they work and as I have got older I have become (slightly) better at getting them back together and working again.

So if something breaks, I always start from the position of seeing if I can repair it. We all know this is a more environmental route don’t we?

But when my almost new Morphy Richards slow cooker crockpot broke (because you can’t use it on the hob to get it going – doh!!), I thought it would be a simple case of buying a new crockpot and that would be that.

So I stumbled around the Morphy Richards site and spares are listed as accessories there. It’s a ceramic pot. They break. Surely they should describe it as a replacement? I did eventually find one at £15.86 with the benefit of free delivery.

Buying spares and accessories from Morphy Richards

Spares 2 Go had one at the bargain price of £42.63

Buying one from Spares 2 Go will cost you twice as much as a new unit

And Buy Spares had one at the rather more attractive price of £15.99, but by the time you added £4.98 shipping, this came to a less attractive £21.97

Getting closer. This part only costs a bit more than a whole new unit

And then we come to Amazon. A new one, from stock with free delivery for £19.99.

Amazon come in with a bargain price of £19.99

How do they do it?

For an extra £4.13 over the cost of the cheapest delivered replacement spare part, I get the whole of the rest of the unit in a shiny box with a new warranty all delivered to home within 3 days. So where is my incentive to repair?

I don’t want to turn this into a rant, but for any brand owner, it has to be a better long term proposition to make us stay with them by incentivising a repair.

I could just have easily gone away and bought another brand and all of the retailers have some stupidly priced products in the run up to the winter months.

If the price of the biggest and most breakable part was around half of the lowest price you could by the whole unit from scratch, there would be no debate, you’d get on and stick with it. But when it is virtually the same price, however well intentioned your repair/environmental principles, you’d be silly not to take a new one.