When the Women & Girls Foundation (WGF) needed an annual report to showcase their girl-empowering good deeds over the last five years, we didn’t hesitate – after all, we’ve built a brand around one powerful, whip-carrying female.

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Can the Gap brand be saved?

The all-American brand of the Gap has been under scrutiny over the last several years from Wall Street analysts, branding industry leaders and advertising publications all asking roughly the same question: Can the Gap brand be saved? The topic even came up earlier this year on Gap’s own Facebook discussion board, albeit without much action.

The most recent move by the Gap was to go outside of their agency of record relationship to hire Crispin for their holiday season campaign. A bold move? Yes. The correct move? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I am fairly certain Crispin will be very creative. However a clever holiday campaign may boost year-end sales, but will it truly save the Gap brand?
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So what do you think of when you hear the name, Bayer? If you didn’t say Aspirin, you either work for the company or you are a geeky chemist that knows way too much about Bayer’s subdivisions in Healthcare, Nutrition and Material Science.

OK, so Bayer is a huge company with roughly 75,000 employees and many, many important products that probably make our lives better. In fact, its tagline is “Science for a Better Life.” What could be clearer than that?

But, please Bayer marketing people, I beg you to have some consideration for the sensibilities of an innocent, unsuspecting TV watcher (me). I was watching one evening when I started paying attention to a particularly disturbing commercial that showed a vast lawn with a cross-section of the ground beneath teeming with squirmy grubs.

(View the commercial at http://www.bayeradvanced.com/advertising/ Click on ‘Season Long Grub Control’ under TV Commercials in the right-hand column) (more…)

It’s tax day. So I need something else to think about.

Since all cellular phone services are fundamentally the same, why would a group of people with similar demographic and psychographic profiles favor one over the others? Here’s another example of brand preference. Cellular companies, are you paying attention?

In a 2008 National Report, The Media Audit published a cellular phone study that reveals the demographic profile and media habits among customers of the major carriers are distinct and may warrant different media tactics to attract new customers (http://www.themediaaudit.com ). The study analyzes four of the major carriers – Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, as well as 15 additional national and regional cell carriers.

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As the Public Relations Coordinator at our agency, I find myself constantly discussing with clients the many benefits of social media: engaging, free, easy to maintain and most importantly – allows you to have direct conversations about your product or service with your customers. All really good things – right?

So as a young Republican, I should be enthused about the following:

Last week, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, candidates to become chairman of the RNC were asked at a debate, among other questions, whether they have any followers on Twitter. Almost all of them responded ‘yes’ and went on to quote the exact numbers of social media followers and friends they had accumulated on not only Twitter, but Facebook as well.

This somewhat unusual line of questioning is part of a larger movement by the Republican party to focus on the Internet and social media after the November drubbing by the more tech-savvy Democrats. In fact, a coalition of Republicans came up with a ten-point action plan outlining how to rebuild the Republican party, with “the Internet” as the number one priority. According to them, “Winning the technology war with the Democrats must be the RNC’s number one priority in the next four years.”

So am I, as the young, social media-pushing Republican, enthused about this? No. Here’s why.

If the Republican party really does plow ahead making the Internet its number one priority, it will be missing a vital step in the process of rejuvenating itself – REBUILDING THE BRAND (or, as we like to say, spanking).

Whether it is social media, online advertising or good old-fashioned print advertising, it doesn’t matter which outlet you’re using if the right message isn’t there. The majority of my peers (who supported Obama to McCain 2:1) were not supporting Obama because they received his tweets or were friends with him on Facebook. They supported him because they wanted change and his brand represented that. Consistently.

The Republican party has already realized it needs to revitalize itself, and that’s an important first step for Challenger Brands. But before it jumps the gun and tries to “get out there” and “connect,” there needs to be consensus about what it stands for and what message it’s trying to portray. Once everyone has a message and cause to rally around, then online support will develop naturally – that’s the beauty of social media.

Until then, tweet off.

As the inauguration of Barack Obama approaches, Gerry Griffith joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger to discuss how the “change” brand will fare in the next four years. Griffith spent nearly a decade as a press secretary to a member of Congress and is currently Director of Communications at the West Virginia University Research Corporation.

As the manager of a few congressional campaigns and a former communications director in the political world, I was familiar with the concept of creating a brand for my candidate and putting it out there to do battle with our opponent’s similar effort. My candidate’s record of service helping constituents with red tape problems, his work securing dollars for infrastructure improvements and his positioning on key social issues made the brand that we promoted. Slap a good logo on the web site, distribute materials that hit the key messages and stick to the script. That was my branding formula and I stuck to it – with the desired results.

But that was congressional level politics. The presidential campaign of 2008 made a mockery of that traditional formula. In 2008, the presidential candidates didn’t seem to be hawking their own brands to compare and contrast to the competition. Instead, they were all battling for control of and identification with one brand – the brand of “change.”

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Being of the Millennial generation persuasion, when I tune in to watch my favorite TV shows, I usually do so by means of my PC’s DVR capabilities. The primary benefit of this technology is the ability to skip commercials. Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this given the field I’m working in, but how many times can a guy my age sit through a Viva Viagra ad before it becomes unbearable? Answer: once.

Anyway, sometimes I find myself multitasking during a prerecorded episode of Mythbusters or 30 Rock and because my focus is elsewhere, the commercials just don’t get skipped. Ironically, this is where I am most susceptible to television advertising, because it’s the simple messages that I notice peripherally that snap me out of the zone.

Such was the case when a commercial for Big Red came on. You know Big Red, right? Of course you do. It’s the Cinnamon Gum that promises long-lasting fresh breath. You probably know that because if you were alive in the 1980’s, you also remember this:

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John Righetti, Vice President of Strategic Relationship Management for Butler Health System, joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.

When we talk brand in communications and marketing, we have a tendency to talk about it in the context of graphic identity and advertising — either long-term image development or the paid stuff.

But what about media relations? Do we consider the role media relations can have in bolstering and supporting — even helping to establish — brand?

Media relations, as we know, is a really powerful tool because the voice is an external one. It’s not us saying it about ourselves, but an objective third party talking about us. So how do we convince external media to cover us in a way that establishes or reinforces our brand?

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You don’t create a brand through advertising; you create a brand through behavior, reflected back at you through the eyes of others. I have been told I’m funny. In my manic moments, I have been known to be very funny – quick with a pithy one liner or a side-splitting story, poking fun at myself just as readily as at members of my family, friends or even strangers, mostly without harm or offense. In creative sessions at work, some of my ideas are shared just for the laugh because I know they will never, ever see the light of day.

But I’m not funny because I say I’m funny. You won’t see me describing myself as funny in any biographical sketch. It doesn’t mention ‘funny’ anywhere on my resume.

Over time, feedback from all kinds of people has reinforced this self-awareness of one of my dominant characteristics. If they were reflecting something I didn’t like and didn’t want to be known for, I would probably work hard to change it.

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This is no time for the faint of heart in business. So if you’ve been listening to our Challenger Brand messages about being bold, gutsy and sticking to your brand strategy, no matter what…I say it’s even more important now while the whole world goes through what’s going to amount to an economic restructuring.

Our Challenger Brand philosophy has always promoted thought leadership, leveraging the tools of marketing and advertising without sacrificing profitability and focusing on creative ideas and integrity. In this economic climate, customers will be looking even more for trustworthy business brands that have their act together, so it’s important to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do – and that you’re here to stay. Customers want, no NEED, to trust your brand and be assured that your company is focused on their business problems, not on your own.

How can you demonstrate this? In every single way:

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