A Better Course

I recently went to see a talk by Radha Chadha on the rise of luxury brands in Asia, about which she has recently written a book. She had moved from India to Hong Kong a decade ago to work for an ad agency and, fascinated by the attitude to luxury brands that she noticed both […]

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If there is a single thing I thoroughly dislike about alcohol advertising, it is the ideas of authenticity and purity as criteria for choosing a bottle of spirits. They are, essentially, bogus criteria; your whiskey might have been made by a company that’s been around for 200 years, but it’s not been aged for 200 […]

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This CNN article on product placement for pharmaceuticals raises another interesting question about how we, as audiences, react to product placement – does the reference to the product necessarily have to be positive? Frequently, references to named drugs in popular culture are negative – the addictive properties of Vicodin have formed plots in more than […]

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Working for a business school means that my opportunities to explore product placement as part of my job are extremely limited. However, it’s something that I notice, consciously, in the movies and TV that I watch. This year, I’ve been noticing a lot of clustering in the product placement – it’s not evenly distributed throughout […]

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Sometimes, adverts succeed in saying the exact opposite of what they meant. One of Sky’s “Believe in Better” adverts – generally quite a good campaign – achieves this: It wants to be about Sky’s multicultural credentials – that it shows a lot of non-English-language programming. However, the advert is entirely in English, but some of […]

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Despite my respect for it as an excellent piece of business development, I’ve remained slightly unconvinced by the Starbucks / iTunes crossover. There’s no clear reason, other than one entirely motivated by marketing (“We appeal to yuppies. Maybe we should talk.”) why the two brands should work together; and whilst I’ve no doubt it will […]

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Last week, I talked about looking at what your audience want from your product, and how to supply that. Fueled By Ramen, a record label who seem to be adapting extremely well to the new music industry, have traded heavily on something that might have been seen to be peripheral to the main product – […]

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I thought I was really going to like the new Gordon’s campaign when I saw this: I love this – it’s so simple, but so effective. Whilst it features a celebrity very prominently, there’s almost no reference to that celebrity; it’s hardly even an endorsement. The message is no more complex than “Gordon[‘]s don’t like […]

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I’ve been thinking recently about confidence as a brand value; what it means to have a confident brand, whether that’s always desirable, whether cute always has to rule out confident. Innocent, in particular, always walk the line between being unconventional and thoroughly affected, but it’s their confidence in their brand and product (“our drinks: It’s […]

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