Posts from: January 2003
Marketing maven Seth Godin has birthed a brand new animal, an excerpt of which–In Praise of the Purple Cow–is the cover story of the latest issue of Fast Company.
The article makes some salient points that are just as relevant for the names of products and companies as they are for the products and companies themselves. Here are a couple excerpts:
The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That’s broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.
Most companies play it safe with names that sound just like everybody else’s, and then spend millions on advertising to convince consumers “no really, we’re different.”
Playing it safe. Following the rules. They seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. The current marketing “rules” will ultimately lead to failure. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
As in, what was the cool car you saw on TV last night? Was it a Savana, Sedona, Sephia, Sienna, Solara, Sonata, or a Spectra?
BMW has a new print ad out this week that boldly reads: “If it were at all possible to prove that a BMW was not The Ultimate Driving Machine, we wouldn’t be able to say it.” Intrigued by their choice of the phrase “was not” instead of the more powerful “is not,” our forensic brand scientists dived in.
Never ones to shrink from a challenge, especially one that doesn’t require getting out of a comfy chair, we have indeed found the proof. The “ultimate driving machine” appears to have been first coined and used by Pontiac to promote the 1967 GTO. Download and view the TV spot for the original ultimate driving machine (click the second thumbnail down on the left), in which the spokesman (actor Paul Richards) intones with great seriousness:
This is the Great One, the Ultimate Driving Machine. And if you don’t know what that means, you’re excused. But if when you see this car you’re seized with an uncontrollable urge to plant yourself behind the wheel and head for the wide-open spaces, then we’re talking to you.
In truth, the “was not” language in the BMW ad dictates that legally you would have to prove that BMW never was the ultimate driving machine, NEVER, not even for a second. A daunting task. Further, “Ultimate” is purely subjective, making any attempt to disprove something–something that may have occurred for only a fraction of a moment–impossible. Which ultimately means that the statement is intrinsically un-disprovable. For instance, this works just as well; “If it were at all possible to prove that a Twinkie was not The Ultimate Diet Food, we wouldn’t be able to say it.” Legally, not a problem!
What appears at first glance to be a confident statement of legally supported bravado from BMW is nothing more than a meek, meatless piece of obfuscation. But great branding. Hard to believe? If it were at all possible to prove that this was not true, we wouldn’t be able say it.
Pharmaceutical companies were first allowed to advertise on television in 1987, and by 2001 they spent $2.7 billion on TV ads. Such ads often present pretty pills (“the purple pill,” “the blue pill,” “the polka-dot pill”) and many never tell you just what these wonders of science are for. To find out, say the commercials, you must “ask your doctor about” the particular drug.
Why show a drug without telling you what it’s for? Explains a Canadian online pharmacy in an article about prescription drug advertising: “Known as ‘reminder’ ads, drug makers ran these more often than ones that explained what the product treated because the latter type of ads required a summary of risks included in the drug’s label.” This way, commercials can feature only shiny, happy people and not mention their drawbacks, like the drug’s horrible side-effects and major health risks.
The result is often a surreal juxtaposition: images of smiling people frolicking in bucolic surroundings while a soothing voice lists sometimes frightening potential side effects. Plus, the ads generally must direct consumers to ways to get more information – all in one 30-second commercial.
Hence the rise in short-cut advertising that directs viewers to just “ask your doctor.”
Drug companies wouldn’t be pumping so much money into these ad campaigns if the strategy didn’t work. Two studies released in November, 2001 by the Kaiser Family Foundation,
…found that 30 percent of Americans have asked their doctor about a drug they saw advertised. Of those, 44 percent received a prescription. That translates into 1 in 8 Americans who saw a drug on TV and ended up with it in a medicine cabinet.
This is phenomenal, and we’re not talking about easy to remember brand names like Coke, Pepsi, Nike or Sony. No, we’re talking about products with such evocative names as Vioxx, Prilosec, Paxil, Zocor, Celebrex, Flonase, Allegra, Nexium, Meridia, Bontril, Tenuate, Lipitor, Zyban, Ionamin, Zyprexa, Remeron, Pravachol, Norvasc, and Didrex.
Ask your doctor if asking your doctor whether you need an anonymous treatment for an anonymous ailment means that you can lower your dosage of idiot pills for awhile, or if wasting their valuable time and driving up health care costs is something you should be asking yourself about.
“All of the good ones are taken.” That’s the explanation most often served up by those in charge of naming consumer goods and corporations. A recent Reuters article brings us these thoughts from the front lines of the auto industry:
One of the oddest named vehicles at the Detroit show was Volkswagen AG’s Touareg SUV, which takes its name from a Nomadic tribe of the Saharan desert.
“The name may sound strange but we wanted to differentiate the vehicle from everything else,” said Jens Neumann, a VW board member who is responsible for the U.S. operations of Europe’s largest car company.
Kubang, which luxury Italian automaker Maserati says is the name of a wind over Java, was another bizarre sounding vehicle in Detroit this week. Maserati is using it for a prototype or “concept” version of a new tall wagon….
For automotive journalists the worst names are scarcely names at all, however.
If you were shopping for one of the latest cars from the luxury Infiniti division of Nissan, for example, you may be asked to choose between an FX35, a Q45 or an M45. And at the end of media preview days at the Detroit show, even the most seasoned automotive journalists might have difficulty recalling all the differences between vehicles labeled SLK320, SL600 and C240 from Mercedes Benz.
Bad names, or the reliance on a seemingly random selection of letters and numbers to brand new cars, highlights a larger problem with the global auto industry. It is overcrowded, and too many vehicles are competing for buyers as well as names.
“Because all the great names are taken…some of the names are made up now,” said Jason Vines, an auto industry veteran and former chief spokesman for Ford Motor Co. .
“What we’re doing is taking foreign languages and half-way translating them to English in the market and getting a new name. In this market that’s almost what you have to do because all the other names are taken,” he said.
The truth, however, is that there is an endless supply of great names out there; they have just lost the ability to know one when they see it.
Ironically, the hundreds of millions of dollars that Detroit has spent on focus groups and market research has led them to adopt names that they and everyone else despise. How could this happen? Here is a telling clue from the article:
Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. may score a big hit with the mighty Titan, its tag for the all-new, full-sized pickup truck that it launched at the show on Tuesday.
But the name could backfire on Japan’s third-largest automaker. Environmental activists could change it ever so slightly to Titanic, as part of their campaign against America’s love affair with gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles.
If the car is environmentally offensive, then the name is the least of their problems. The real point here is that any name with meaning will be ripped apart by the misguided, usually during the naming process, because it’s easier to destroy than to understand, and those who destroy are driven by fear.
Take the venerable Corvette Stingray for example, a great name that could never survive a focused grope dissection in today’s chicken-little marketing world of forced negativity. The autopsy results? “A ‘Stingray’ is a slow, ugly, dangerous fish, and ’slow,’ ‘ugly’ and ‘dangerous’ are the last qualities we want to associate with our new sports car.”
They are equally well-versed at killing a great idea as they are at validating a terrible one, a la “Acheiva.” The real question everyone should be asking is: “Why does Stingray work, given all the reasons market research can come up with for it to fail?”
Anybody who would like to know the answer just ask and we’ll be glad to tell you.
In the first big branding news of the year, Chrysler has announced the bold change of its recently new tagline, “Drive = Love,” to a drastically rejiggered and even newer version: “Drive & Love.”
Who is the mysterious brand guru behind this little slice of genius? As was done with the unmasking of “anonymous” Primary Colors author Joe Klein a few years back, we have begun analyzing certain style elements of the new Chrysler tag via a massive proprietary linguistic database, cross-checking known users of “and” against known antagonists to the “=” sign, for instance. We’ll track down this branding marksman, and celebrate his or her identity right here on this page.
Send us your tips, leads and hunches and help us unmask The Phantom. Brand & Love.
Posted: January 30th, 2003 |
Category: Uncategorized