Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Three top global ad groups announced so-so results and warned that the rotten economic climate would likely yield more bad news to come, according to the Financial Times on Wednesday.

Isn't this a textbook definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Advertising, and marketing in general, are the proven tools to generate sales.  They're how consumers find out about products, learn the costs and benefits, and get prompted to buy stuff.  When you cut it in some absolute sense, or by a percentage, your sales will suffer absolutely, won't it?  Then the cycle repeats; less sales means less effort to prompt sales, yielding even less sales and, well, you get the idea.

So either the leadership of big corporate spenders on brand are stupid, or there's just something wrong with the equation I outlined above.

I think the answer is sorta both.

Lots of marketing communication has nothing to do with sales, with corporate advertising instead leading the charge toward realizing abstractions of brand and awareness.  Clients are told that they must invest in the brand, which means running ads (or sponsorships, etc.) that make explicit and implicit promises to impact sales somehow, someway, sometime in the future. 

The problem is that the future never seems to turn into the now. 

Nobody is seeing payoffs for all those investments in brand equity: the accounts are not getting drained, or applied to patch up holes in today's outbound marketing.  Instead, price seems to be the most important brand attribute, followed by the realities of utility, reliability, and support.  I'm not sure if the brand equity was ever equity in any meaningful sense of the word (beyond the bank accounts of people paid to deliver it). 

So it doesn't seem like an unreasonable executive decision to avoid making the same mistake again, even if they can't articulate the budget cutting as such.

But what about the marketing that's directly tied to sales?  Does it make any sense to cut those budgets, especially in challenging times?

It does, only if you can't tell the difference between what works and what doesn't, or even define what "works" means.

Now’s not the time to advocate mindshare, awareness, likeability, presence, engagement, or any of the other mealy-mouthed excuses for marketing that doesn't deliver some casual prompt to sales (however distantly, even).  Conversely, it's a perfect opportunity to cast advertising, PR, and all the other tactics of marketing communication as tools to generate behaviors that can be mapped and measured...not just in some abstract future sense, but right now, and every now between today and whenever.

Maybe brands live moment-to-moment, and your brand equity is the context and result you see in the last snapshot you took of your activities in the market? 

It would mean the budgets that will survive (if not grow) would deliver that actuality.  And  the agencies that make it happen could have a lot less to worry about when it comes time to report ’09 profits.

Enough with this self-fulfilling, self-defeating routine, right?

Tell Me Why It's Better

 

Electronics retailers are cutting the prices of Blu-ray players, hoping that a lower cost will attract more consumers to the format.

That's one way to do it.  Not a good one, though.

Price is the bugaboo of any brand communication, and usually the tool of last resort (because it's implicitly the least profitable tactic to utilize).  Getting consumers to pay less for something is an inelegant way of making up for the fact that they don't see any more value in the purchase.  Marketing can talk about perceived value up until the moment cash has to exit somebody's purse or wallet, at which time it's either real...or not.

Blu-ray won the Format War against HD, and the world has been waiting to see what that would mean.  So far, marketers have been unsuccessful in communicating the value of that victory to anybody beyond early-adopters, those with money to burn, and the otherwise gullible.

It's a tough argument to make. 

• The picture is better, although not in a vinyl-to-CD sort of way
• You need a hoity-toity TV to notice the difference, which'll cost something
• Blu-ray dics are double (or more) the price of regular DVDs, and
• The new players still are 3x or more the price of standard entry-level devices

Is Blu-ray that much better?  I suspect the math just doesn't add up, even with the player discounts. 

So I'd offer that maybe the strategy shouldn't be to lower prices whatsoever, at least not yet. 

There are at least two approaches that could focus on increasing the preception of value, while preserving the profit margins behind it:

First, give the players away for free.  I wrote about this idea almost a year ago, and I still think it makes sense.  The goal is to get the devices into regular use, especially before digital transmission obviates the need altogether.  That means getting consumers into/back into the habit of renting discs.  So why couldn't the device manufacturers cut deals with the content creators (in some, if not many instances, they’re parts of the same conglomerates), and implement a "razor & blades" strategy?  Focus the perception and experience of value on the content, and perhaps find new ways to get discs to people more often, more easily, etc.

Second, create exclusive content for the format.  Maybe skip enticement altogether, and simply start putting out stuff that's exclusively on Blu-ray.  Perhaps there's extra content that could only come in the format (don't the discs hold a ton more data than standard discs?).  How about special movie trailers that only get enjoyed on the format?  There could be creative ways to access this content, whether through subscriptions, pre-orders, or whatever so, again, consumers saw value in the content, not just in the cost of a device.

Ultimately, Blu-ray is going to have to figure out how to not only tell consumers why it's better, but why it's a necessity among a growing universe of playback options.  And the clock is ticking.  Digitally, of course. 

I'm Disloyal

I just quit the Holiday Inn loyalty program, and I've never had a bad stay at one of their hotels.

Instead, they decided to make another part of my life too difficult.

Like any other busy, traveling numbnut, I've lost some tidbit of my account sign-in information.  I don't know how it happened; I've taken to writing all of the names, codewords, hints, and related nonsense in a little book I keep in my desk.  It's a violation of Internet Security 101, but I didn't just tell you which drawer it's in.

Anyway, I visited the Holiday Inn site yesterday to make a reservation, and I couldn't sign-in as the Priority Club Member that I am.  I don't know if I've got my username or my PIN wrong, and I don't know how I could be mistaken, since I've written both down.  But it didn't work.

When I sent what I believe should be my sign-in and password info to club central, I got an email telling me that I needed to provide some information before they’d help me: 

• My telephone number
• My address as it appears on my account
• The email address on file, and
• The date and location of the last stay posted to my account

Are they serious?

I don't remember if I gave them my office or mobile phone number.  I have no idea if the address that "appears on my account" is my office, or the P.O. box I sometimes use.  I thought my email address was my sign-in, though I guess it isn't the address "on file," but they already know that I don't know the answer to that one. 

And the details of my last stay?  Jeez.  Forget it.  I can't remember what I had for breakfast an hour ago.

Surely, there are good reasons why they need to put me through such a wringer. 

• There are evil-doers out in cyberspace just waiting to abscond with my free hotel room nights, and
• I know that I should have kept my records accurately, and that lots of club members might not only not have this problem, but probably keep details of wind direction and speed in their diaries should they ever need such info 

But the cost/benefit of the loyalty equation just isn't there for me. 

Staying at a Holiday Inn is fine, but it's not meaningfully different than the experience of their similarly-priced competitors.  Its loyalty program rewards don't appear movingly valuable to me, as the thresholds and levels are generically incomprehensible.  I pretty much participate in the deal -- and in most loyalty programs -- because maybe someday, somehow, sometime, there will be some payoff, and I'll be able to congratulate myself for having been so foresighted. 

So I'm not really loyal. I'm lazy.  And if one of my pretty much unconscious routines gets even mildly interrupted, I discard it.  I think this says a lot about the nature of loyalty, as well the efficacy of branding communications.  If the hotels and policies were truly and beneficially unique and/or different, maybe I’d care more. 

Maybe Holiday Inn should take some of the money from its branding budget and commit to finding a way to help its customers stay in its incentive program?

It might be a better investment in the brand than a funny TV commercial, or coming up with ever-never iterations of its corporate logo.  The sign isn't my problem.

I don't know the answer...a biometric thumbprint reader, three yes/no questions that only I could fill in?  Maybe a funny game?  It doesn't really matter.  The creatives should get creative on it, maybe instead of trying to be funny.  Less sexy could equal more return reservations.

Don't worry about me, though.  I've already booked with a competitor whose secret sign-in codes I seem to remember.  For now.

Brands & People Pt. 2

I can't stop thinking that the truest and most longest-lasting impact to financial brands won't be investor reputation or trust, but rather the psychological scars on employees.

Talk about the ground literally falling out from under their feet.

I mean, here we had a large group of well-educated, motivated people who played by the rules, and then the rules changed.  Dramatically.  One day, employees from the important to the inconsequential played their parts in running profitable businesses; the next (or after torturous weekends), the businesses were gone.  And so were the jobs.

It must be hard for them to watch all the media coverage of the greed on Wall Street.  It's accepted wisdom that those employees did something wrong, whatever that something might have been.  They deserved to lose their jobs because of, well, whatever they did. 

Were they guilty of trying to grow their companies?  Was it bad that they pursued profits for themselves, their investor, and shareholders?

No, of course not.  It was'’t even unethical.  At worst, if at some level the salepeople knew that what they were syndicating as fine food assets actually reeked of rotting fish, could'’t that be seen as no different than a brand marketer making the purposeful, conscious claim that, say, a cologne or beer drove women mad with desire?

These firms had standards, visions and mission statements.  Their businesses have been regulated and reported upon for many years.  Outbound marketing relied on implicit standards, if not explicit rules, about the risks and rewards of investing. 

They've spent many millions building name recognition.  But what does the branding say to the people who are still working those digs?  How do you repurpose it to recruit new staff once this current meltdown is history?

I'm not sure the traditional tools of brand communications are up to the challenge.

Hasn't everything changed?  One could imagine, say, Barclays Capital's 10,000 new Lehman traders and staff as a new business, not an extension of an old brand name.  A new company needs new definitions not only of principles, but the actual processes and systems that will make them real.  These are the fundamentals that won't shift if and when the context shifts again.

What a great opportunity for a management team to come together and co-invent the behaviors that will define the brands.  Otherwise, they risk creating great-looking communications that risk leaving the employees behind.

Brands & People

Chrysler announced last week that it would let go at least one out of every four white-collar employees. 

This comes after thousands more were dismissed prior to its acquisition by leveraged-buyout firm Cerberus little more than a year ago.  Back then, Daimler-Benz took a giant hit on the deal, and the new owners recruited a management team to rip through every budget and find more efficiences.  I think it subsequently asked every union worker in Michigan to retire. 

These actions were called "...a focus with greater intensity on the day-to-day business of producing better cars."  A new day at Chrysler was quickly declared via an expensive, sunny branding campaign that ran on the Super Bowl within months of the acquisition.

Only how can there be a Chrysler brand without anybody there to deliver it?

Truly, the most important brand communications about the company have come from finance, not marketing; no creative or new media shenanigans could obfuscate the fact that non-car investment types bought a car company because they thought they knew how to run a company better, not necessarily make better cars.

It's hard to believe that even a year ago we used to think that financiers and the otherwise uber-successful were supermen who could run any business, but the financial media gave them a pass.  So, as the price of gas shot up and new car sales went down along with the rest of the economy, who better to manage the transition and survival of the Chrysler brand?

Only what is the brand without people?

I don't think you can separate what a company says about its brand from what it does, and it's people who do the doing. 

Experts can talk about brand promises, attributes, associations, or transcental one-eyed-ness, but it all disappears in a poof of expensive smoke when behaviors don't add up.  I think those actions come first, and prompt the brand communications, and not as a follow-up to absolute declarations.

So it doesn't matter if you try to label your slash-and-burn behaviors organizational announcements, restructurings, or blame your circumstances on every externality including the orbit of the planets; it's impossible to re-brand the reality of the any business.  There was never really a new day at Chrysler, and all the money the experts spent on trying to declare otherwise (or simply obfuscate the truth) was ultimately doomed. 

Because here's the countervailing, ugly narrative the firm’s actions suggest, and which easily supersedes the branding it tried to buy: 

• Smart financial-types buy troubled company with no intention of making cars, but rather slashing the structure of the business so they can get it into some semblance of shape to be sold again
• These guys are big picture geniuses, and they see the likely contraction in the auto business.  Their goal is to swap a slimmed-down Chrysler for some other asset that they are more comfortable managing (and which will make them ever-more money)
• It isnt like they know how to sell cars any better than the folks they replaced, so a surprise crash in the marketplace forces their hand at a bit
• A possible deal is pursued with GM that would saddle it with the surviving hard assets of Chrysler's manufacturing base, along with the trailing expense of healthcare for all those workers it worked through over the years
• Cerberus would get GM's finance arm in the trade.

Then everyone is happy with the brand...except anyone who worked at or with Chrysler.  Or anyone who owns one of its vehicles.

Imagine going to work today at HQ in Detroit, at a factory, a supplier firm, or a Chrysler dealership?  How about every owner who puts a key into the ignition of one of its vehicles?  What do they know when they look around?  What do they fear is true, based on what they've seen? 

What's the value of the Chrysler brand apart from what people do with or for it?

Whether due to ineptitude or conscious deceit, its brand communications have been a lie.  There was never a new day there. 

Or maybe the new day is just about to end?

Mad Men For the Masses

Limited Brands has announced plans to expand its Henri Bendel little, two-store boutique retail brand as a purveyor of "luxury" gifts and accessories.

I think there's a much bigger opportunity than chasing the chotchke biz.

(Caveat: I worked in the corporate offices of Limited, Inc. back in the early 90s, and I have a particular affection for the brands and many of the people with whom I worked.  Any of them would gladly, and with some relish, confirm that I have the fashion sense of a gnat.) 

But I can't help but see a clothing opportunity for a store that epitomizes New York "high society" fashion and exclusivity.  Think a dressy Abercrombie & Fitch (another storied brand Limited bought and built into a retail legend).

A&F had a tradition of sporty clothing for East Coasters, and Limited expanded and deepened that concept with mainstream consumer ideas of recreation, youth, and the unbridled sexuality that emerges from merging the two.  It hit on an economic moment in American history that allowed for large kid allowances, and a abject worship of glitter and waste in society at large.  The combination delivered zillions in sales and profits.

But those days are waning.

What's emerging for the foreseeable future is a more austere, controlled economic climate.  For all of the openness of mortgage-based CDOs and Internet ubiquity represented by A&F's devil-may-care short-shorts and nearly naked models, we may be entering a time of more guarded appearances, grater appreciation of quality (as in durability), and, gasp, conservatism in fashion?

So maybe the opportunity isn't to try and pick off shoppers still living in the 90s, but identify a future trend that looks a lot more like the 1960s?

Imagine if Henri Bendel became the store that sold all those cool knit shirts, slacks, poofy dresses, wild patterned, thin-tied, sharkskin suits and porkpie hats like they wear on Mad Men?

Talk about taking an unique position in the otherwise numbingly similar fashion landscape (A&F's biggest problem is that all the big box retailers have knocked it off, though it still has the exclusive edge due to its in-store experience).  A fashion POV backed by merchandising and control of the store experience is still a defensible business strategy. 

Henri Bendel was always the hip, slightly off-kilter brand, often featuring unique designers who were unavailable at other New York stores.  Why not take a position on fashion and build it out to packaging, store experience, etc.?  It would be far more complicated than relying on the Bendel "stripe," which seems to be the visual cue that the company plans to feature on lots of chotchkes.  

But the potential return could be enormous.

The retail wags don't talk about it much, but there really seems to be a need for a new design paradigm in men's and women's fashion.  J. Crew, Ann Taylor, Kohl's, Limited, Gap, Target...they all look the same, are priced the same, and pretty much retail the same way.

Like A&F prompted a lot of knock-offs, maybe it's time for a new concept to herald a new approach to fashion for the masses.  Bendel could establish a risky fashion POV, much the same way Limited and then Express did many years ago, and then own the position as the follower brands followed.  It would be a hoot to merchandise and market, wouldn't it?  I think it sure looks like an opportunity for something far beyond a gifts and accessories store (playing off a print pattern) that seems to sum up the current strategy. 

But like I said, I'm definitely a dim bulb when it comes to fashion.

Wild Gyration

No, I'm not talking about Bill and Ted's reunion band, nor the techniques of pole dancing.

The world's stock markets are gyrating wildly, daring investors to interpret what it means.  I say it's the most compelling branding message in the financial services industry, it's not a good one, and there's no good strategy to deal with it.  Yet.

The "Volatility Index," or "VIX," is a measure of prices paid for certain options contracts traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, or "CBOE."  It’s founders claim that it tracks mood, with a higher rating revealing fear about the future -- and hence the likelihood of wild gyrations in market prices -- and a lower number suggests confidence, and thus more stable trading.

The VIX is at the highest point it has ever reached in its 15 year history.

Tough you don't need an index to tell you that the market is flip-flopping from good to bad depending on the day.  And the fact that traders are betting on it continuing (as evidenced by the VIX) isn't necessarily evidence of some internal emotional states.  I say skip the extrapolation; it just is.

The challenge is what can financial firms and governments do about it?

It's a particularly dicey challenge because markets are semi-feedback loops; expectations of wild moves tends to affect trading decisions which, in turn, tend to move markets in the very ways and directions people expected.  On a macro level, market pricing is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the CBOE index could be as much a cause the behavior it purports to track.

That's why the marketing communications strategies haven’t worked: the President has broken his silence and appeared on TV a few times to calm our nerves; financial institutions have spent oodles to lecture us on being patient and trusting of their benevolent experience/guiding hand.  Only such disingenuous reassurances tend to scare everyone.

Like I said, there's no good strategy to deal with it.

I think this is the problem: declarations from authority figures that carry no authority of action -- no reality -- aren't particularly authoritative.  Patience isn't an action verb, and no amount of educating investors on their choices can take the place of simple, declarative directions.

In other words, somebody has to put their neck out and go on the record telling us what to do.  Actions speak louder than words.  More truthfully, too.

Like Jim Cramer did a few weeks ago on the Today Show, when he advised anybody who might need their money in the next few years to get out of the market and wait it out.  I think that one comment earned him more credibility, and assuaged the wildly gyrating fears of investors who watched him say it, than any official declaration from financial firms or our government.

The bailout announcement didn't reassure anyone because it came across like a Band-Aid fix...another drop in the bucket (a big drop, for sure).  There was no clear direction about what it meant for investors, and enough legislators wrangled over it long enough to dispel even the suspicion that it was anything more than a flawed, half-hearted gesture.  So the emotional value of the investment was reduced to zero a nanosecond after it was announced. 

I know that no entity, government or otherwise, can claim responsibility over what the markets will do.  Perhaps wild gyrations are with us forever.  Or maybe they'll pass next week. 

The point is this externality is an irrevocable aspect of the branding of any financial firm (or government) in operation today.  Brand communications need to not only acknowledge this fact, but dare to give investors clear, unequivocal direction on what to do about it.  It's not somehow outside or beyond the brands; it's a part of them.

How about saying something like this:

• If you need your money within the next few years, take it out of the market and good luck
• If not, don't touch it, because we're all in it for the long-haul and we have a shared interest in growing it

Full stop.

I'm sure there are some obvious legal reason(s) why no firms are saying that in a direct, authoritative way to their investors. 

But it might be the only way that financial services brands get past all this wild gyration.

Irrational Effervescence?

Last week, Pepsi announced almost a 10% decrease in its third-quarter income, and warned that the year wouldn't be as bubbly as once thought.  Coke delivered better results, crediting its sales overseas (and favorable currency exchange rates).  Both firms aren't convincingly happy about the outlook for 2009.

Are these facts better understood in the context of brand image and awareness, or via the real-life mechanics of drinking soda pop?

A brand analysis perspective yields strategies of line extensions and tinkering with the look-and-feel of logos and advertising.  This seems to be what both companies will continue to rely upon: 

• Coke has been winning the war so far with its ownership of non-bubbly brands, so it can sell things other than cola and make its numbers
• Pepsi is expected to reveal a "hipper look" for its tri-colored globe, new packaging, and new ingredients

Industry wags think the brand approach makes complete sense, as one media expert said "...as we go into 2009 and Pepsi begins to roll stuff out, it’s going to have the upper hand."  

So both businesses have put their faith in the prospect of adding iterations of its core products -- coming soon...pineapple flavored zero-fat/calorie/carb de-caffeinated nanomolecular sweetener cola, with vitamins added -- while adding other products to store shelves, with the hope of extending them, too.

What about selling soda pop?

• Is it a foregone conclusion that soda pop is a dying category? 
• Is the best (or only) strategy to create various iterations of those products, in hopes that they can capture the taste buds of ever-smaller subsets of consumers?
• Are the brand names so compelling powerful (and lasting) that people will someday see them applied to other products altogether?  Coca-Cola brand mouthwash?  Pepsi cough syrup?

I don't think human beings are born with a predisposition to drinking soda pop; we have to learn it, or get inspired to add it to various experiences in our lives.  Like any consumption product, we eventually become somewhat reliant upon it, and drink more out of routine or habit than from conscious choice.

Stock analysts and industry wags should be worried that neither company has announced any awareness of the need -- let alone intention or concrete plan -- to find new, more meaningful and compelling ways to make drinking soda pop relevant to consumers' lives again.

Use or need cases are used in technology development to identify the places and times  people might require a software product or widget.  That approach to the mechanics of consumption is based on actual experience, not imagined desires or emotional associations, so the strategy doesn't start with brand...but certainly impacts it. 

Applied to the cola business, it would mean brainstorming the moments people could actually want (or benefit from) one or more of the attributes that Pepsi or Coke colas offer, then working backwards from those moments to create the brand marketing to promote them. 

Cola in the morning as an alternative to coffee and tea (I know Coke ran a single ad with this premise, and I think it was very smart)?  As an afternoon pick-me-up?  Something in the evening, when youngsters are out on the town? 

Again, maybe I’m a dim bulb on this one, but I find it stunning that nobody is asking these businesses why they aren’t focusing on making cola relevant again.  It’s certainly harder work than adding nonsense product extensions and redesigning logos, but it would yield business strategy that’s more real, more measurable, and more sustainable.

Maybe they've already tried, and come up with nothing?

But talking about brands without the cola soda pop attached just verges on irrational effervescence. 

 

Music From the Titanic

It seems that the resolve of the top marketers collected at last weekend's 98th meeting of the Association of National Advertisers was simple: defend brand budgets at all costs, and keep spending.

In other words, iceberg be damned.

The idea that big names can (let alone should) afford to keep spending on branding nonsense in a down market is as utterly wrong as it's intoxicatingly simple.  Yet head-honcho after expert guru got up before an audience of all those first-class passengers and declared that the challenges of the market demanded that they not "shy away" or “walk to the ledge."  It seems that recommitting to spending on branding could actually shorten the recession.

Yet the ship has already hit the iceberg.

Trust in companies is at an all-time low, as are most measures of customer satisfaction.  Consumer loyalty is a fleeting commodity defined more by price-cuts than any added-value patronage.  Brand marketers have been in a tizzy for a while now, madly struggling to find ways to re-establish the links to consumers that used to be called "brand equity."  Every imaginary or convoluted measure of brand ROI has enabled us to do little more than narrate a process that has ever-less to do with actual behaviors or reliable predictions of future sales.

And the best the experts can do is tell one another do keep doing more of the same?

It's partially the fault of the English language; the top marketers can all talk about substance, focus, and urgency, but the definitions of how those terms are applied are anything but commonly defined.  When they, or anybody, talk about brands, it's highly unlikely that any two people share a clear sense of what it means. 

So when Interbrand sings the praises of brands being "strong," is it a reference to an ability to prompt purchases more often, for more money, and to do so more reliably than, say, another brand name?  Pillsbury's reported new branding campaign, entitled "Home is calling," might be about getting consumers to think or feel good things about eating at home, or, maybe promote cooking that includes its products? 

Everybody knows that branding is cosmically important, which means nobody really knows how or why.

It's all a bunch of gloriously intelligent and useless nonsense, coming from a collection of experts who should be daring themselves -- and the entire industry -- to think radically and dangerously differently about brands and branding.

Because the ship is already sinking.

What a perfect time to announce to the world that today's economic crisis is a call-to-action for marketers to challenge their very assumptions. 

The conference could have focused not on pleas to preserve budgets (and, thus, jobs and perks), but rather explored specific ways to make advertising more relevant, compelling, and necessary to business strategy...which would involve redefining not just what gets put into it and why, but also where and when it's placed, and who within the organization needs to be involved in the process.

But alas, no. 

Instead, the leaders redoubled their commitment to defending themselves against the heightened push-back that they normally get on their budgets.  If reasonable people could question the wisdom of spending money on something abstract like "the brand" in a good economy, they're going to complain more so now that things are bad. 

So lock 'em up in the hold below deck, and fire up the orchestra!

Good News From Wendy's

Triarc's purchase of Wendy's, America’s 3rd largest fast-food hamburger chain, was completed two weeks ago, and blather about the brand was noticeably absent from the new owner's comments about future plans.

That was good news.

It would have been far easier to talk about branding, as most of its competitors do, as if it's a given that hamburger chains are all but identical save their outbound marketing nonsense:

• Burger King has spent unconscionably vast amounts of money on promoting awareness of its creepy mascot, and has had the audacity to lecture the otherwise discerning experts at the Harvard Business Review about it "participating in the conversation" and "giving up the brand"
• McDonald's has forsaken a focus on its eponymous clown to instead give consumers a litany of forgettable phrases -- the latest being "I'm Lovin' It," unless I'm forgetting one -- and waste millions on trying to overcome the legitimate perceptual gap between its food and its suitability for the diets of Olympic athletes
• Jack-in-the-Box gave us the talking car antenna ornament years ago, while Taco Bell (OK, not literally a burger joint) presumed that the best thing it could do with its branding dollars was to make its name synonymous with a nervous chichuahua

Even Wendy's was, until recently, guilty of the same addiction, giving the world those incomprehensible spots with the guy in red pigtails wig.

While consumers were certainly aware of this noise -- it is often hard to avoid, considering how much money is spent on it -- I'm not sure it had anything to do with driving brand preference...as measured by the only real measure that's, well, measurable (or meaningful): sales.

Instead, what drivers preference are all the less-sexy things that never get heralded in stock analyst reports or trade magazine stories: menu, pricing, food taste, quality of restaurant, employee service, hours of operation, availability of a clean bathroom, whatever.  It is from these qualities that consumers brand the chains.

The good news is that Wendy's isn't taking the easy way out, which would have been to hire some brand strategy firm to come up with a new look-and-feel image campaign.  Since that approach is irrelevant, at best, and doomed, more likely, it's particularly good news for its shareholders and employees.

Wendy's says that it will target 24-49 year-olds, and develop an offering and experience to meet the needs of that demographic.  The branding campaign can and should follow that development, less as the strategy itself and more of a tactic to deliver it...along with the operations standards, shipping requirements, staff training, etc.

I'm curious to see what they come up with, as I just barely squeeze into their target market.  May their good news taste as good as it sounds.