Branding Mistakes Archives - Page 5 of 7

Dear Intel, you had me at “Intel Inside”. Now enough already!

An open break-up letter to the Intel brand.

Dearest Intel, cure

This is hard. We had such a good thing going once, and in a lot of ways, I still love you. But, well, things have changed. You’ve changed.

And I’m afraid you just don’t understand why… [sniff]

…I no longer want you inside. [sound of sobbing]

The early days

The early days. It all seemed so simple then...

I remember the first time I saw you in that cute little “Intel Inside” logo on the side of a new laptop at Office Depot. Wow. Knock-out.

I remember how you made me feel: safe, secure, like I could be better than ever. But mostly you helped me feel smart, just because you were there. Inside.

And that made everything else so easy. And really, that’s what I loved you for. You made my choices easier because you stamped them with an extra little promise that said “I’ll be there for you”.

And while I’m confessing everything, here’s something else I never told you: I never even knew what an “Intel” was, how it worked, or why it was important! And you know what? I never wanted to. I couldn’t care less about silicone chips or dual-core doodad clock times or whatever. I vaguely knew that those things were important, but because you were there, I didn’t have to worry about it. You cared, and that’s all I needed to know.

Where it started going tragically wrong

Trouble on the horizon

I think it was Pentium. That’s when I started wondering about us – when you convinced me that just having “Intel” inside wasn’t good enough. No, now it needed to be Intel and Pentium. “Just one other brand” you said. And sure I went along with it. Because I loved you, I put up with that little three-way thing. I even enjoyed it a bit.

At least, I thought, there were limits. Your friend Pentium had the decency to know its place, quiet, complementary, never intruding on your “Intel Inside” area.

But it didn’t stop there. No, then it had to be a Pentium 2, then a 3, then a 4. Always bigger, faster, with more complicated features and power.

And over the years, you found new names to stamp on all kinds of different parts of yourself: Celeron, Centrino, Core, Atom, Itanium, and on and on. Something called Xeon – honestly, was that one even from planet earth?

I couldn’t keep them all straight and I couldn’t tell the difference. But all along I thought: at least I still have my Intel Inside…

Not sure about smart being the new speed, but you sure kept me shifting...

But now, it’s gone too far

Well today I received a flyer from Dell telling me about some new laptop brand, and there, screaming from the upper left corner was one big massive graphic with your name on it. And if I was confused before, now I’m totally baffled. Now you’re “Intel Core i7 Inside”, with four different type-styles and a litte barf-coloured mosaic-ish thing. I don’t know you any more Intel!

And after all that, you have the gall to tell me: “Look for Intel Inside” and a bunch of randomly placed stars.

Well you know what? I did it: I looked for Intel Inside, and I found… wait for it… nothing.

Sorry Intel, you may still be inside my computer, but you’re just not inside me anymore.

And you know why I’m so angry and hurt? With Intel Inside, you seduced me into caring a little bit about something I’d never wanted to care about before. And it worked. You helped me feel like a smart, informed consumer by giving me a simple tool to feel better about my purchases.

But I never wanted to care more than that. And I will never, ever care about it as much as you do.

So enough already. Get rid of all those other brands, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll THINK about coming back.

No, scratch that. You see? Just for a second you made me want you again. But this time it’s over. [door slams]

Another blogger’s take on the evolution of Intel Inside:

Evolution of Intel inside: from www.lowendmac.com

The great brain freeze: the perils of too much ice cream… or choice

This happens to me a few times every week: I’m standing at a store or restaurant, this web getting customer service by phone, information pills or buying something online, and suddenly I’m faced with a dazzling, badly organized array of choices like this menu board at an Ottawa area Dairy Queen Brazier (no comment on that name for today). And how does it feel? Well, imagine shoving a whole Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard down your throat all at once…

The THARN Effect: for me, this DQ board was a Brain-Buster Parfait

Basic brain freeze

In the video below from the last Beg to Differ Brand Strategy Boot Camp, I describe what happened when I was faced with this menu board.

Basically, I had walked through the door having already made a number of choices: first I’d chosen between a dozen different food establishments in that neighbourhood; then I’d to choose to ignore my guilt about going with fast food at all; then I chose between ice cream – the product I normally associate with Dairy Queen – and hot food; and finally I had to choose whether to wait when I saw a significant lunch-rush line at the counter.

So by the time I got to the counter, after passing up several opportunities to walk away, you’d think DQ would try to make my life easier. But no, once I got inside the store, I faced a wall of giant posters with exclamation marks and starbursts all over them, and the menu board above that utterly failed to line up my choices in a clear way, filled with cleverly-named products that were all yelling, dancing, and fighting for my attention like a room-full of sugar-buzzed preschoolers whose Ritalin had run out.

Choice: the hidden “THARN”

Richard Adams, in his classic novel Watership Down, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice:

THARN: (adj) the helpless, catatonic state a rabbit enters when it is caught in the headlights of a car.

Humans react the same way when you throw too many choices at them: they go “tharn”. Sounds a lot like the headache most people get when they swallow too much ice cream doesn’t it? Like ice cream, small, measured bites are a heavenly experience; too much too fast is physically painful.

But bright headlights & ice cream sundaes are good aren’t they?

Now, you may say, “but that’s just effective consumer marketing”, and perhaps the marketing sages at DQ know something I don’t about what sells sandwiches. Plus, as a 40-year old male, I suspect I’m not at the heart of their target demographic.

I also don’t want to imply that choice is bad, nor is it a bad thing to get your customers to slow down a bit and pay more attention to you while you have their attention.
But remember all the other choices they had to make to get to your “counter”: it’s a delicate balance between deepening their understanding by showing them more and overwhelming them with too much choice.

So ask yourself:

1) Are you helping customers quickly scan their options by organizing clear “decision trees” of plainly labelled and named options?
2) Are you making them feel confident about your brand – that is, their their end-to-end experience of it , and not just the individual sandwich they buy?
3) Are your marketing tactics really deepening their understanding, or just adding to the wall of noise they already face and defeating the point of marketing (to help people decide to buy your products)?
4) Are you managing your whole brand including your product portfolio, your decision-making interfaces, and your customer service to remove THARN moments or are you just turning on the high beams and shoving the ice cream down their throats?

The choice is yours. Well, actually, it’s theirs. And that’s the real point isn’t it?

“The card fer yer Doh!” Italian bank chooses unlikely spokesperson.

On the topic of choosing spokespersons for your brand wisely, pill here’s a photo of a poster in the window of a bank in Italy – sent today by our own Lauren Hughes. It made me laugh hard.

Spotted in a bank window in Italy by intrepid Beg to Differ reporter Lauren Hughes

Apparently Homer isn’t alone: all the Simpsons get their own card.

Of course, in North America, Homer has shilled for Mastercard as well – as in the You Tube video of a 2004 Super Bowl commercial below (with one of the weaker voice-overs ever in a Super Bowl ad). But to me, there’s a difference between the ad, in which Homer is able to be his bumbling, irresponsible self and still get the point across, and having his portly face on my credit card.

I’m trying to imagine pulling MC Homer out at the desk of a five-star hotel. “Uh gosh sir, do you have anything else?” Doh!

Aquisto: 2 Euros;
Mini rate: 25 Euros;
Homer’s brand equity on your credit rating: Priceless

Any wonder Flanders uses the other card?

Homer Simpson shows his credentials as a reponsible credit consumer.

New Coke 25 years later: was it all just a brilliant conspiracy?

Yesterday, in five more brand strategy lessons from the Princess Bride I used New Coke as an example of how customer research can occasionally lead branders astray. But thinking about it, two things struck me: First, that April 23, 2010 will be 25 years since the launch of New Coke. Second, I turn forty tomorrow, so that spring day in 1985 was when my fifteen-year-old self realized for the first time:

Brand strategy isn’t a cold, abstract business decision made by far-away executives. It’s personal! THEY WERE MESSING WITH MY COKE!!

Ah the good old days – when a company could just change its brand without fear of consumer backlash…

A brief history of New Coke

For those of you who were too young in 1985 to remember – or maybe you were bricked up into the walls of a desert hermitage during the 1980’s – and who can blame you really? – here’s a brief blow-by-blow of events around this seminal consumer branding event.

- Pre-history to present – Coca-Cola launches, and retains market leadership, in the soft drink market. Fortunes are built on dark, bubbly sugar water.
- 1975 – Pepsi launches the Pepsi Challenge – a campaign of blind taste tests in which consumers really did choose Pepsi over Coke for the most part.
- 1975-1985 – Coke market dominance gradually slips – mostly under pressure from Pepsi. Coca-Cola executives realize that the threat is serious, and it seems to them that taste is a key battlefield.
- Early 1985 – rumours circulate that Coca-Cola is testing a new formula. And indeed they are. Thousands of consumers choose the new sweeter flavour in blind taste tests like those used in the Pepsi Challenge. No one tests whether the taste actually influences the purchase decision when users are aware of the brand.
- April 23 1985 – To great fanfare (followed by an enormous “thud”), chairman and chief executive officer Roberto Goizueta announces New Coke to the world as a better tasting alternative to the old Coke that was still dominating the world’s brandscape.
- Supporting “the Cos”: In an act of selfless, heart-warming altruism, Bill Cosby brings his considerable charm to bear on the issue telling the world that he personally prefers the new taste.

- April 23 1985 – Meanwhile in Ottawa Canada, a pencil-necked grade nine kid in a Hewey Lewis and the News concert t-shirt hears… the news. And although prior to this, he has only been an indifferent cola consumer, the news wallops him with an odd mixture of horror and deep personal indignation. At lunch, he and his friends talk in whispers and look to the sky for other signs of impending apocalypse.
- The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts this scathing critique of the move. Check out the footage of the press conference “tasting”, the video message to retailers, and the response from Pepsi in which they declare victory in the Cola wars and give employees a celebratory holiday.

May, June 1985 – Stories circulate in the press of wide-spread hoarding of Coca-cola. Anecdotes like this one (of many) from the Coca-Cola Heritage site give a sense of the real urgency and panic that many consumers felt.

When the new Coke came out, I borrowed my friend’s pick-up and went to a club store and bought three pallets of regular Coke. It took two trips to get the Coke home. I had enough Coke to last me through the crisis, but I had to repair the floor in my spare bedroom – because of all the weight, the floor had sunk. It was well worth it.

Petitions are circulated, rallies are held, activist groups like the “Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing” and “Old Cola Drinkers of America” are formed, and Coca-Cola is swamped with angry response:

By June 1985, The Coca-Cola Company was getting 1,500 calls a day on its consumer hotline, compared with 400 a day before the taste change. People seemed to hold any Coca-Cola employee – from security officers at our headquarters building to their neighbors who worked for Coke – personally responsible for the change.

July 11, 1985 – Coca-Cola announces that they will be offering the old formula in parallel with the New Coke – which they call “Coca-Cola Classic”. There is widespread rejoicing.
In the decades that followed of course, New Coke became Coke II and then quietly disappeared as “Coca-Cola Classic” became the name for standard Coke again.
2007 – In Canada, the “Classic” was quietly dropped, but it remains on American packaging – albeit in smaller and smaller letters.

Brilliant conspiracy or colossal blunder?

But along the way home from their corporate Waterloo, a strange thing happened: Coca-Cola actually accomplished what they had set out to do in the first place: “to re-energize its Coca-Cola brand and the cola category in its largest market, the United States.” Coke sales surged, consumers breathed a collective sigh of relief, and Pepsi resigned itself to a seemingly permanent runner-up position in cola sales.

So of course, many conspiracy theorists have emerged claiming that Coca-Cola had planned this all along. But as they publically say on their Web site: “The company didn’t set out to create the firestorm of consumer protest that ensued”. Of course, they do try to put a positive spin on this bottle (with a little kiss of revisionism at the end):

The return of original formula Coca-Cola on July 11, 1985, put the cap on 79 days that revolutionized the soft-drink industry, transformed The Coca-Cola Company and stands today as testimony to the power of taking intelligent risks, even when they don’t quite work as intended.
(emphasis mine)

So here’s the real thing

That phrase “taking intelligent risks” doesn’t capture the enormous arrogance, ignorance, and shocking naïveté that went into the decision in the first place – and doesn’t capture the huge embarrassment and sense of crisis within the Coca-Cola company, or the tsunami of indignation that swept consumer society at large.

To sum up: New Coke made the corporation look really, really dumb. (But we forgave the brand).

Their big mistake (and it was a mistake): they treated the launch of a new formula as a problem that could be solved with product research, business logic, and a big ad campaign. In other words, they acted as if they had the right as a company to make such decisions, and we the customers would obviously be grateful.

The huge branding truth that became clear to this pencil-necked Hewey Lewis Fan:

Coca-Cola didn’t own their brand; I did.

Lessons for branders:

1) Respect the owners of your brand – your customers.

Yes, you own your “formula”, but they own the expectations and experiences built up over time – which are ultimately far more important than your brilliant launch plan.

2) Freedom’s just another word for everything to lose.

Coca Cola didn’t win because of New Coke, they won in spite of it – and because they were smart about getting out of it. For 99.9% of brands, a misadventure like this would be fatal.