MARKETING COMMUNICATION DIGEST

A great deal needs to happen for an established brand to die. Brands can have immense power and the fortunes of a brand do not necessarily reflect the company's fortunes. For example, car manufacturers have many brands -- some successful and some less. And brand management is an integral part of a company's marketing strategy. Each year, some established brands will disappear - either due to bankruptcies, mergers, discontinuation, or re-branding. Majority of these cases represent some failure, in company or brand, and often in both. Some of the brands on this list are already certain to disappear, with just the last remnants left to dissolve. Others are on a trajectory to vanish, but their final fates will depend on what happens this year. The best brands have staying power and can weather major changes in the company that owns it. People will continue to follow a sports team through generations, even if the players, management, and even home city change. When companie...

It’s not about products; it’s about experiences and how things make us feel. Gone are the days when you could create a really beautiful ad and serve it in front of your consumers’ face like a carrot dangling on a stick. Even if it’s the perfect ad — being served up to the perfectly targeted person — marketers need to do more: they need to create the perfect experience  for their consumers. And who does a fantastic job of this? Lifestyle brands! Reference books say a   lifestyle brand   is a company that markets its products or services to embody the interests, attitudes, and opinions of a group or a culture.   Lifestyle brands   seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of their products contributing to the definition of the consumer's way of life. By definition therefore, lifestyle brands have a deep understanding of their target consumer’s way of life. They understand the type of experiences that they crave, as well as the people,...

Since last week’s article on Conversational Marketing was published, I’ve had requests from people wanting to know how they could best use this marketing communication tool. Today, we discuss more on one app that is making waves facilitating engagement with consumers. More than 1.4 billion people used a chat app in 2015, according to eMarketer . By 2020, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, there'll be 6 billion smartphone users in the world. These are huge numbers, and the smart brands, marketers and advertisers don’t want to be left out of the party. The Internet is changing, and chat is at the centre of it. Chat apps like Kik offer brands and developers the opportunity to reach consumers in a more intimate and direct environment, where consumers choose who they want to engage with. Kik has more than 300 million registered users. On top of a chat experience that has seen young consumers spending average 35 minutes every session in the app. Kik now hosts bots...

A brand new world, the rise of Millennials There’s one recurring obsession that keeps haunting almost every marketing and ad agency executive. It’s in nearly every Powerpoint deck and on every marketer’s mind… Millennials: that so documented and ubiquitous M Word! For many years, most marketers (and their agencies) relied on the same old recipe. Write a tagline. Make a TV spot. And plaster it everywhere you can, all in the name of “Integrated Marketing”. Brand awareness and reach were the only metrics that mattered. Problem is, the recipe started to turn sour. It wouldn’t stick anymore, especially with new demographics: The Young People (which we decided to call “Millennials” to make them even more mysterious and fascinating). Combined with the digital revolution, the rise of Millennials has become hell of a puzzle that many CEOs are still struggling to solve. As a result, Chief Marketing Officers are losing their jobs as sacrificial lambs for this corporate gap and thei...