A Better Course

• Developing Your Leadership Brand | Business Week
  Firms with branded leadership… win with customers because customers have confidence that the leaders will respond to their needs in a consistent and appropriate way. They win with employees because employees know what to expect
  (tags: businessweek leadership branding brand)
• iPod cheap in Hong Kong, but a Brazil bank-breaker | Reuters
  One of Australia’s biggest banks, the Commonwealth Bank, has used the latest version of Apple’s music player — the slimline 4GB Nano — to compare global currencies and purchasing power in 55 countries.
  (tags: ipod reuters exchangerate)
• Brand Autopsy: How Tiffany Saved Michael’s Life
  When you make the company something to believe in, employees will talk about the quality of the company itself, the values the company endorses, and the ways in which their lives are enhanced because of it.
  (tags: branding business marketing starbucks brandautopsy leadership)
• Kolbrener | Elements of Branding | Table of Brand Element Terms
  Please rollover each branding element to discover each definition. Groups include: Advertising, Direct, Branding, Marketing Communications, M&A, Misc.
  (tags: kolbrener branding brand advertising entertaining marketing)
• Bob Sutton: New Study: Rudeness Reduces Task Performance and Helpfulness
  24% of the insulted students helped pick up the books – 73% of those who weren’t insulted volunteered to lend a hand. As always, more research is needed. This study… suggests that little bits of nastiness can have a big cumulative impact.
  (tags: bobsutton research management culture)

• Toyota Tries to Sell Priuses Where Tractors Are Sexy – WSJ.com
  “Gas is a huge worry, so I’m starting to think about hybrids,” said Mr. Recker, who owns a Ford Mustang, among other vehicles.
  (tags: wsj car toyota marketing branding)
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun » Blog Archive » RPS Team Fortress 2 Interview – Part 2
  we spent some time squirming under this art direction that we’d chosen too early. Later, when we started thinking about humour, we had a lot of fun with being free. We realised we could do that thing that we’d joked it would be fun to do.
  (tags: teamfortress2 interview computergames design rockpapershotgun)

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 one TV show. Although this almost certainly increases the salience of the named brand, it is hardly the kind of advertising a company would be willing to pay for.

One piece of research into the topic, from Penn State that it is likely that the viewer’s feelings towards the show in general are likely to directly affect the viewer’s feelings towards the products mentioned throughout the show. However, the nature of the placement in the experiment, in this case, is fairly neutral – the most negative emotion shown being frustration with a ketchup bottle.

Related to this is a similar question; does the reference to the placement itself have to be positive? An episode of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip recently spend 45 minutes complaining heavy-handedly about product placement in TV shows, in a TV show that is, itself, about a TV show. To go back to a previous post’s theme of flagging products to the viewer, this was an incredibly effective technique. Many brands could be mentioned many times – more times, possibly, than they could be in TV shows not written by Aaron Sorkin (“Are you saying our cast members should all listen to iPods on set?” “Are you saying you don’t like iPods? I like iPods” “I like iPods”, ad infinitum).

How much does any of this matter – is salience, or positive endorsement for the product, more important for those who would have their product featured within TV shows or movies? If the former, is it likely, or possible, that drug companies will pay to have characters form crippling addictions to their products rather than those of their competitors?

• HSBC Scuppers Bluetooth Ads Plan | Business Week
  But after fully evaluating the results of the Bluetooth ad trial, HSBC said it has no plans to deploy the technology. An HSBC spokesman told silicon.com: “We did look at the results and it is not being taken forward. It didn’t prove commercially viable.”
  (tags: advertising bluetooth technology hsbc mobile)
• Britain’s Labor Party Hires Agency That Aided Thatcher’s Rise – New York Times
  Labour appears to be moving toward a more buttoned-down, if not Thatcherite, image. A poster displayed on the Labor Web site to confirm the appointment of Saatchi & Saatchi shows Mr. Brown in a slightly rumpled suit. “Not flash, just Gordon,” it reads
  (tags: labour politics advertising nytimes saatchi&saatchi)
• Video – Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer: why we’d rather lie than be associated with failure – Times Online
  The Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business explains why people may remember or reconstruct lies in order to associate themselves with success.
  (tags: business leadership management psychology businesseducation thetimes)

• Big Pharma companies turn to TV product placement – Sep. 28, 2007
  Public attitude could turn around if drug companies take advantage of the increasing popularity of product placements… Americans have changed their general opinion on products inserted into movies and TV shows.
  (tags: pharmaceutical advertising productplacement cnn)
• Citi mails unrequested credit cards – Sep. 28, 2007
  A federal Law dictates that banks can issue credit cards only when customers request them or they replace existing cards. Citi considers the cards replacements to the Macy’s cards already accepted by the customers.
  (tags: citigroup marketing creditcard macy’s cnn)
• More Hollywood Studios Say ‘No Smoking’ – New York Times
  No company has said that it would bar smoking in the many films that are produced independently and later acquired for distribution by a studio. Thus, Cheryl Hines in the PG-13 rated “Waitress” can still wield a cigarette near the pregnant character p
  (tags: nytimes smoking cinema)
• At Starbucks, Songs of Instant Gratification – New York Times
  “The more people think about a purchase decision, the more likely uncertainty creeps in… One frame of mind is you’re helping create in consumers’ mind a source of pleasure, and enabling them to fulfill that pleasure”.
  (tags: starbucks music nytimes marketing)
• Selling Ads on Facebook Is a Tempting but Risky Business | Wired
  While Facebook earned respect for ringing the come-and-get-it dinner bell to developers, that level of benevolence seems incompatible with its $10 billion ambitions and a possible march to IPO
  (tags: facebook wired business web2.0 online advertising)
• Financial Times Will Allow Some Free Access to Web Site – New York Times
  Newspapers are rethinking their efforts to charge users for online content. A surge in online ad spending over the last 3 years has persuaded many publishers that it is better to increase their Internet audience in an effort to appeal to advertisers.
  (tags: ft media publishing wsj nytimes online advertising)

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 the movie, or even amongst the characters in the movie.

Sometimes, this makes sense. In The Bourne Ultimatum, it makes more sense to load the scene in Waterloo Station with adverts and prominent shop logos, because that’s what Waterloo Station actually looks like. It’s not worth pretending that the film takes place in an alternate reality Britain in which there is no advertising at train stations, so finding out who wants their station advertising to last a bit longer than usual (the 3 music store and the Carphone Warehouse, as far as I remember) is probably a logical step.

In Transformers – which is, in effect, one long piece of product placement anyway – only certain characters got to use the big name products. The first time we see Tyrese Gibson’s character, he alone of all the other characters in the scene is listening to an iPod and wearing Oakleys. This kind of distribution continues into the high school plot strand :

The girl in this picture, throughout the film, never wears branded clothing. You’ll notice that the guy on the right is wearing a Strokes t-shirt; later in the movie, he’ll get cold, and put on a G-Star Raw hoodie. While he is in handcuffs. That’s an unusual level of commitment to getting the advertiser’s product out there.

Very little research has been done about what is and is not effective in product placement; however, I’m interested in the effects this kind of clustering has. Does it dilute recognition for each of the brands, or do we key in more closely when they are all in the same place – when they are constantly flagged for our attention?

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 the letters that have been made to look at bit “foreign” – from which it might be fair to assume that the non-English-language programming is going to be dubbed into English. It also bears a remarkable resemblance to Martin Lukes’ attempt to make a-b global appear more global by rebranging as a-b glöbâl, which is surely not an association any brand would strive for.

• RussellBeattie.com – Lego Rocks (Redux)
  More superb advertising from Lego, who seem to have been on a roll recently.
  (tags: advertising branding lego russellbeattie)

• SEO & Search Engine Marketing Mindmap
  A mindmap about internet marketing. Extremely detailed.
  (tags: mindmap marketing seo online seobook)
• Neuromarketing » Halo 3: Brain Games
  Games like Halo 3 are really nothing more than direct interaction between machine and brain, and it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more neuromarketing-style analysis of player behavior.
  (tags: neuromarketing computergames halo3)

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 be a successful service, it would have been good to have seen a bit more reasoning behind it on the part of both companies.

Whilst operating in a completely different market (from Apple, Starbucks and each other) Lego and Paul Frank do very well at showing their working in their recent t-shirt lines:

Lego Julius Monkey:

Lego Man Choosing T-Shirts

There are more than these two, but together these do the best job of demonstrating an interaction – in the first, one company’s product builds the other’s main brand symbol, and in the second, one company’s brand symbol chooses the other’s products. It’s a nice visual solution, and consistent with the Paul Frank and the Lego brands, both of which espouse playfulness and, to an extent, childishness, for adults.

Likewise, the Marshall / Pure radio, which is just a brilliant product:

Here, there’s a more obvious reason why the two companies should work together – the obvious association of both radio in general and Marshall with music as well as the similarity of their products (both, essentially, boxes that make sound) mean that it makes sense that there could be a radio to appeal to a single segment of the radio-listening population.

Of course, both the t-shirts and the radios are purely aesthetic products – they’re not providing a useful service, in the way the the Apple and Starbucks’ deal does – but the ideas and reasoning behind both of them feel worked through in a way that deal doesn’t but, I think, could have done.