We come to the end of another Shark Week — Discovery Channel’s summer-doldrums ode to blood and water. Yes, it’s more than that. It’s educational, it’s scientific, it’s a complicated love/hate affair with an aquatic species most of us will never, ever encounter.

I mean ever.

But forget about all of that. Let’s talk about something you might not know.

This year marks Shark Week’s 23rd season, making it cable’s longest-running event. And it’s garnered more than 20 million viewers every year since 1995. On cable.

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No one is in business in spite of the customer – we are all in business because of the customer. If other people didn’t have needs that we could fulfill, we would still all be hunters and gatherers, foraging for ourselves.

Big companies sometimes lose sight of this simple truth. Over time, they forget their roots, growing into complex organizations with lots of layers of management and administration, production and supply chain integration. Most of the people, whose livelihoods ultimately depend on the customers, are completely out of touch with them. If you surveyed the work force of a very large company I wonder how many of them would be able to tell you why the customer buys or what they most care about. (more…)

Yes, Gap is again searching for a new agency to generate creative ideas for their upcoming campaign. This is their strategy to reach their goal of increasing sales. I guess it is hard for a one-time market leader to actually do something different.

To save me from repeating myself, here’s last year’s blog: The Challenger Gap!

I still have my 1988 Gap jean jacket. It is increasingly becoming buried in the back of my closet. But as a loyalist, I’m still rooting for you, Gap. If this year’s campaign doesn’t work, maybe you’ll think about a brand spanking.

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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We’re starting a new file at Fitting Group. I’m going to call it the “turn down the heat and let it simmer” file. In this file, we will store all of the great and crazy ideas we have for clients and postdate them for 18 months to three years from now. We’re doing this to maintain our sanity.

In reviewing the work of our agency over the last three years, I began to see a pattern. In our desire to help clients get ahead of the curve, we have often promoted ideas that were viewed as too risky. So the conversation goes something like this:

FG to Banking client: (seeing the regulatory environment loosen up and allow more competition plus the trend in online banking) “We think you should change the name of your bank to UnBank. We’ll advertise that you’re a new kind of bank – completely transparent, with no hidden fees or evil practices. Unbank takes the pain out of the banking relationship for the customer. You’ll launch new products with no minimum balance requirements, no penalties for early withdrawal or loan payoffs, no ATM fees, etc.” (more…)

All eyes will be on Pittsburgh the week of the G-20 Summit in September, and local government officials, community leaders and the media are talking about what an opportunity this is to elevate the perception of Pittsburgh to something more than a dirty old steel town. Pittsburgh is not the market leader when we think of US cities. It’s definitely not the biggest. It’s not top-of-mind. And it certainly has never been thought of as the most prestigious. These characteristics make Pittsburgh a Challenger Brand city, and they’re why we must break the rules to take our rightful place in the market — as the most innovative and marketable city in the US. (Dream Big! Brand Spanking® Cardinal Rule #4*). (more…)

Ten years ago, Adam Morgan, believed by many (including me) to be the Challenger Brand guru, wrote the first edition of Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders. Morgan, who worked for one of the largest ad agencies in the world at the time, wrote from his experience with second, third and fourth-place brands. Nevertheless, the Challenger Brands he used as examples were still industry behemoths compared to the regional players or early-stage types that I am accustomed to working with. He outlined eight credos in his book to guide others to succeed, and I became one of his disciples — or as Seth Godin might say, a member of Morgan’s “tribe.”

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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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I’ve been thinking about how to make Fitting Group’s product better, which in turn, helps our Challenger Brand clients enhance their marketing efforts. Each client has his or her own business goals, but usually among them, is growth. And I can tell you, it’s really, really hard to think up better ways to do things when you’re in the thick of things. So I sought inspiration in the Rockies.

Andrea's cogs are turning at 10,000 feet

I might look like I’m not working. But believe me, the cogs are turning furiously. The lungs are working pretty hard too.

Here’s one of the things I’ve come up with so far. The old model of marketing was pretty simple and straightforward: make a product or deliver a service that is predictable, consistent and works as expected, control your costs and sell at a profit. If you attract more customers and sell more stuff, you’ll make more money. But there is something fundamentally flawed with this model given our world today. The basic assumption relies on the principle that stability is the norm – that the “customer” will have the same needs or desires tomorrow as he does today. If that were true, the status quo would indeed be something to protect. And many keep on trying to protect it. No wonder people need the weekends to recharge their batteries. Going to work every day and holding up the dike against a sea of change saps a lot of energy. There’s not much left over to think about a better way to do things.

So at least take the holiday weekend to think about how the world has changed for your customers. Maybe you’ll be able to come up with a better way to help them cope with it.

Andrea Sardone, Director of Marketing Communications and Public Relations for the Mason School of Business at The College of William & Mary, joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.

During the presidential campaign, I watched, actually marveled, at masterful messaging of candidate Obama. Despite my support of another candidate, I couldn’t help but be drawn into the brilliance of the campaign staff, who so deftly applied the Eight Credos of Successful Challenger Brands. I found myself scouring the web to read everything I possibly could to gain that one insight that I could apply to my own little niche — higher ed marketing, specifically business schools.

Now I watch/read the news and I wonder ‘what happened?’ I am now scouring the web for everything I can find so I don’t make the same mistake.

Specifically I am talking about all of the chatter about the President’s economic recovery plan and the “lack of a message.” Nearly every story on the recovery plan includes references to its “lack of message” or “muddled message” or “the president has failed to tell the story to make the recovery plan work in the minds of the American people.”

The unfortunate “tarring and feathering” (yes, I am in Williamsburg!) of Timothy Geithner, blaming him for the “lack of a plan” is not really his fault at all. I have a number of experts around me at the business school and many of them say that Geithner’s details make a lot of sense, that he may even be doing the right thing. But even they say that the problem isn’t the details, it’s that they haven’t come up with a way to communicate those details in a meaningful way!

Score another one for marketing or messaging or perception management. Whatever word or phrase you want to use, it’s obvious. The message DOES matter because it gets people in the right frame of mind to actually pay attention. The flood of details doesn’t give anyone any meaning, it just scares them. And it’s scaring them away and they’re tuning out. And they are left with a sense that this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. We hear, “Geithner doesn’t give us the feeling that he’s in charge… he doesn’t inspire confidence.”

I don’t intend to blame anyone here or second-guess the President’s handlers (although I guess I am). I am not sure who is to blame, but you would think that the President knows better. Sending in the details guy is not the way to win the hearts and minds. He needed to send someone in with a big idea, one so big that it could mean something to a lot of people or people could project their meaning onto it. Didn’t that work for him before? Our Challenger Brand stopped thinking like one!

You don’t feel details and you don’t inspire with them, especially when the details are kind of boring or don’t sound very appealing or include words like ’sacrifice’ or ‘catastrophe’. And you certainly won’t get people’s attention with them, either. You inspire with a big idea that stops them dead in their tracks. You get them to feel by telling a story that raises the hair on the backs of their necks. And that gets followed with “tell me more…”. Nobody is asking for more. They are asking for a way for them to make sense.

I’m not saying the details don’t matter. They certainly do. But they won’t matter to people not paying attention.