Focusing Consultants
Ad Age
|
Click here to view articles from: 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003
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 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 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 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 Ries' Pieces of Slogan Savvy By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 6/2008 Have you seen the advertising campaign for "the new Chrysler"? Slogan: "If you can dream it, we can build it." Sounds like an ad for a California custom shop. But more important, is the slogan memorable? In this day and age, it doesn't matter how well-crafted the words are; if the slogan isn't memorable, it's just a waste of space. Read More Birth of a medium. By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 5/2008 We are on the verge of witnessing the birth of a new mass-communications medium. It?s the second new mass medium to appear in the last two decades. Fasten your seat belts. On the horizon, there?s another profound shift in media, consumer behavior and technology coming. In the near future we are likely to welcome the arrival of a sixth mass-communications medium. And what is this earth-shaking new medium? It?s the Mobilenet. The what? Surely you are joking, Al.... Read More Sayonara Isuzu By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 4/2008 Another famous advertising icon is just about to fade from the American scene. Isuzu recently announced that next January the auto maker is going to withdraw from the U.S. market. Sales have been dismal. Last year, just 7,098 Isuzu were sold. ?Lying Joe? once was as famous as Britney, Lindsay or Paris. Advertising Age selected the Joe Isuzu program as the 83rd best advertising campaign of the 20th century, one notch ahead of ?The ultimate driving machine.? What went wrong with Isuzu? Read More Politics and Marketing. By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 2/2008 The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination once again demonstrates the power of one of the most fundamental concepts in marketing: Owning a word in the mind. Hillary Clinton launched her campaign by focusing on ?experience.? Not a bad idea, because it is a word that differentiated her from her chief rival, Barack Obama. Read More Innovation is not a strategy. By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 2/2008 Innovation is not a strategy and companies which depend on a constant flow of new, innovative products will someday find themselves in deep trouble. As Sharper Image did. Every successful company needs a branding strategy which may or may not include innovation. Yet many marketing gurus have elevated ?innovation? to a point where it is widely perceived as the single, most-important function of a corporation. Witness the raft of recent articles on the subject, including an editorial in my favorite publication with the theme, ?Forget the recession and innovate.? Read More The Power of Flanking. By Al Ries for Ad Age.com: 1/2008 The language of marketing has been borrowed from the military. We talk about defensive marketing, offensive marketing, guerrilla marketing. Often overlooked, however, is ?flanking,? one of the most powerful military strategies. Read More |
This site is best viewed with Adobe Flash Player 9.0 or higher.
