Focusing Consultants
Ad Age
|
Click here to view articles from: 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003
Variable pricing: The ultimate brand-destruction machine.
By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 6/2009 A former New York Times editor recently wrote a full-page article for Forbes magazine advocating “variable pricing” for art museums. “Art institution directors should start thinking like airline yield managers,” was the subhead of the article. That’s strange. You might think the yield-management gurus would have the airlines rolling in dough. But that hasn’t happened. Read More Metric Madness: The Answer to Mathematical Failure Seems to Be More Math By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 5/2009 If You Run a Company by Numbers Alone, You'll Run It Into the Ground. March Madness lasts only three weeks, but Metric Madness goes on all year long. What is Metric Madness? It's the notion you can run anything by the numbers, and it's become the hottest concept in business today. Read More Don't Damage Your Brand for Short-Term Gains in a Recession By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 4/2009 Cadillac Should Remember What Happened to Its Long-Ago Rival Packard Read More What's Love Got to Do With It? By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 3/2009 "Love" has become a key ingredient in many marketing programs. Does "love" work in marketing? Sure. As a matter of fact, falling in love is a good analogy for the branding process. A young person falls in love and gets married. Now suppose the next year that same person meets someone who is better looking, wealthier and more fun to be with. Bingo, he or she changes spousal brands. Read More Are You a Left Brainer or a Right Brainer? By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 2/2009 Marketing Success Comes From the Right. Your brain is divided into two completely separate hemispheres. Each hemisphere processes information differently. Your left hemisphere processes information in series. It thinks in language. It works linearly and methodically. Your right hemisphere processes information in parallel. It thinks in mental images. It "sees" the big picture. Read More The Difference Between Building a Business and Building a Brand By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 1/2009 Are you building a business? Or are you building a brand? Silly questions, you might be thinking. Naturally, you are trying to do both. But that might be a mistake. What's good for the business is not necessarily good for the brand. And vice versa. Read More General Misery By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 12/2008 "How Detroit drove into a ditch," is the headline of an article in the October 25th issue of The Wall Street Journal. When the most-respected business publication in the world writes a 2,000-word article on the problems of the U.S. automobile industry, you have to assume they know what they're writing about. But nowhere in this entire article is a mention of Detroit's failure to build powerful brands. Rather the blame is placed almost totally on problems in the factories. Read More What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 11/2008 Change -- and Positioning -- You Can Believe in. Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing. Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator. Read More Take a Holistic Approach to Your Messaging By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 10/2008 Holism is the concept that the whole has a reality independent and greater than the sum of its parts. Marketing people should pay more attention to this concept. Take Tiger Woods' endorsement of Buick. On the surface, this might seem like a good idea. A young, charismatic, world-class athlete drives a Buick. How could this not improve the perception of the brand? Read More The Pitfalls of Megabranding By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 8/2008 Last week I went to my local supermarket for Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour, a brand I have been buying for years. No luck. The store had Pillsbury's Best bread flour, whole wheat flour, self-rising flour and unbleached all-purpose flour. They just didn't have the original Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour. So I bought Gold Medal all-purpose flour instead. The week before I went to the same supermarket for Minute Maid lemonade, not exactly an exotic drink. No luck. Read More Do something. Key to successful PR. By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 9/2008 Remember when a political party used to hold a convention to select its candidates for national office? Of course, you don?t. Today, the candidates are already selected long before the convention starts. Then what is the role and function of a national convention? PR. Read More The Visual Hammer and the Verbal Nail By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 7/2008 You Need Both to Build a Powerful Brand. Advertising today is a visually oriented discipline. And we have Confucius to thank (or blame) for this state of affairs. Confucius' famous saying, "A picture is worth 1,000 words," has been quoted endlessly in advertising circles in America. Furthermore, most creative directors started out as art directors. First and foremost, they see their job as creating a unique and distinctive visual. The words can come later. What's more important, the visual or the verbal? Read More |
This site is best viewed with Adobe Flash Player 9.0 or higher.
