Advertising Age - Al Ries

What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign

Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing. With its reliance on consistency and simplicity in messaging, the Obama campaign has a lot to teach the advertising community.

Take a Holistic Approach to Your Messaging

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.

Boost Your PR by Doing Something, Not Just Saying Something

Every country, every state, every city, every company should consider the long-term potential of sponsoring events that generate PR. They need not be particularly expensive, either. Since 1933, Rockefeller Center in New York has sponsored its annual Christmas tree lighting, which always generates a raft of favorable stories. In 1964, the tree-lighting ceremony became an annual TV special.

The Pitfalls of Megabranding

The rampant proliferation of flavor variations has a downside. Consumers are getting confused. A number of research studies have shown that the more choices a consumer has, the more likely that consumer will be unhappy with the choice he or she does make. (The only people who are getting excited about the proliferation of product flavors and variations are the vice presidents in charge of slotting fees.)

The Visual Hammer and the Verbal Nail

What's more important, the visual or the verbal? Neither. It's like asking what's more important in building a house, a hammer or a nail? Both have to work together. The best hammer in the world is useless if the hammer misses the nail. And the best nail in the world is useless unless there's a hammer to hammer the nail in.

Ries' Pieces of Slogan Savvy

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.

Mobilenet Promises to Be the Next Big Medium

If mobile devices integrate three technologies in an attractive and convenient package -- GPS, scanning and voice recognition -- the result will be the birth of a new medium as revolutionary as television or radio.

Sometimes Saying 'No' Is Your Strongest Asset

In Al Ries' opinion, too many advertising agencies are concerned with fixing the advertising when their first concern should be fixing the problem. All the advertising in the world wouldn't have saved Isuzu, he says. Why? First and foremost, Isuzu is a terrible name. And its agency should have said something.

Innovation Should Be Seen as a Tactic, Not a Business Strategy

Innovation is not a strategy, and companies that depend on a constant flow of new, innovative products will someday find themselves in deep trouble, as Sharper Image has. 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.

Why You Can (and Can't) Learn From Obama

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.

The Power of Flanking

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.

Category Creators vs. Category Killers

It can cost a fortune for a company to pioneer a new category of product or service. Digital cameras, for example. Or satellite radio. Or internet grocery service. Since it's so costly to establish a new category, why would any company deliberately want to kill an emerging new category? Actually there are good reasons for putting the kibosh on a new category. In the marketing jungle, there are two kinds of companies: category builders and category killers.

The Long Tail vs. the Re-tail

There's no question the packaged goods industry has fallen in love with the Long Tail. It's "shelf warfare" in the strip malls of America. Each additional SKU of a leading brand has the potential of pushing a competitive brand off the shelf. In many companies, the battle has become one of increasing shelf space, not increasing sales. Two facings are always better than one.

Think Category First, Brand Second

A brand is the tip of an iceberg. How big and how deep the iceberg is will determine how powerful the brand is. The iceberg is the category. If it melts, the brand will melt too.

Companies Must Lift the Velvet Curtain

From the General Electric Co. in New York to the Walt Disney Co. in Los Angeles, a velvet curtain has descended across the country separating marketing from management. Very few companies get in trouble because of marketing mistakes. They get in trouble because of management mistakes that management usually blames on marketing.

'Multi' Is the Most Dangerous Word in the Dictionary

Every time a new medium arrives, older media players think, "What an opportunity to extend our franchise." So magazines and newspapers and radio and TV outlets are jumping all over themselves to digitize their brands.

Why the iPhone Will Fail

Prediction No. 1: The iPhone will be a major disappointment. The hype has been enormous. Apple says its iPhone is "literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone." A stock-market analyst says, "The iPhone has the potential to be even bigger than the iPod." I think not. An iPod is a divergence device; an iPhone is a convergence device. There's a big difference between the two.

The Dubious Practice of Double Branding

Branding is so popular in boardrooms today that some companies are overdoing it. "If one brand is good," goes the thinking, "then two must be better." Take the example of Taster's Choice, which made its name longer in 2003.

Out of Focus: The Rise and Fall of Robert Nardelli

"The most-overpaid CEO in America" is the epitaph often applied to Robert Nardelli, the former CEO of The Home Depot. After six years, he left the home-improvement chain with an exit package valued at about $210 million and a legacy that continues to engender much debate.

How Radio Is Becoming RadiADo

For every ad that radio stations used to run, it now seems like they run two. Radio, in my opinion, has become RadiADo, an extra "ad" inserted at every possible point in the programming. Radio is a powerful medium with great selectivity at relatively low costs, but advertising clutter threatens the very existence of the medium. Too much is too much.

Nintendo Will Win Game Wars by Thinking 'Different,' Not 'Better'

Too many companies focus on trying to make better products when the real advantage is making different products. The video-game dogfight between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo illustrates this point. The Nintendo Wii is perhaps one-tenth as powerful as its two rivals, yet its motion-sensitive wireless controller allows you to produce action on the screen by tilting and waving your hand. It's a dramatically different product.

How Motorola Squandered a Brandbuilding Opportunity

Retailers Make Same Marketing Mistake as Airlines

Where is the retail chain discount derby headed? If history is any guide, it's headed in the same direction as the airline industry. It was the airline industry that perfected the high-low approach to marketing. High prices for consumers who have no other choice. Low prices for consumers who could find cheap fares on other airlines.

The Red Giants and White Dwarfs of Electronics Marketing

Corporations are like stars. Toward the end of its life a star the size of the sun swells up into a red giant and becomes some 100 times as large. As a red giant exhausts its internal energy supplies, it loses its outer layers and finally shrinks to become a white dwarf, perhaps 1% of the diameter of a sun. Sony appears to be well along in this process.

From Famous Advertising Name to Meaningless Initials

J. Walter Thompson has changed its name to JWT and another famous advertising name gets replaced by meaningless initials. The agency now goes into the history books with Doyle Dane Bernbach (changed to DDB) and Foote, Cone & Belding (changed to FCB.) Is nothing sacred?

How Heineken Dropped the Ball With Amstel

ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Does it make sense that Heineken has launched a Premium Light beer brand that directly competes with its own Amstel Light beer brand? No, says Al Ries in his latest column.

BMW Broadens Marketing Message

ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Despite the fact that their's is the largest-selling European vehicle brand in the U.S. market, the top brass at BMW appear to be moving away from the slogan that has defined their winning product for 31 years: "The Ultimate Driving Machine." Have they learned nothing from the past marketing mistakes of others?

Watch for Tomorrow's New Brand Potential

One of the most difficult problems in marketing is balancing the needs of today with the needs of tomorrow. While Diet Coke was obviously successful in the short term, its long-term success is currently in doubt. Furthermore, Diet Coke is a brand whose obvious target is regular Coca-Cola. "The taste of Coke without the calories."

Why Small Marketers Need to Reach for the Stars

ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- If you think of your business as a small business and look for ideas and concepts that will help a small business, you'll always remain a small and relatively unprofitable one. Look at lessons we can learn from some small companies that had a very different attitude about themselves.

Pushing the Boundaries of Creativity to Absurd Levels

For a number of years now, I've been collecting advertisements that are over the top. In other words, ads that seem to have been created for creativity's sake only. Guess what? Ninety percent of my over-the-top ads are automobile ads. If BMW is the ultimate driving machine, then the auto world is the ultimate creativity machine.