'Breathtaking' Is One Word for Purported Arnell Pepsi Doc

Over the past 24 hours, adland has been abuzz about "Breathtaking," a 27-page document purported to be the thinking behind Arnell Group's recent revamping of Pepsi-Cola's logo. Littered as it is with marketing jargon, images of yin-yangs, mobius strips and Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, you'll maybe wonder whether Michael Phelps wasn't the only one hitting that bong.

Ad Age

Pepsi Gravitational Field

Disney Focuses on Boys

Walt Disney Co. is making a push to crack a market that few media companies have been able to conquer -- boys aged 6-14.

Next month, the company will launch a boy-focused entertainment brand called Disney XD, consisting of a new cable television channel, a comprehensive Web site with games, music, videos and social networking.

Wall Street Journal

Gatorade Quietly Aims to Revive Brand

The ads are part of a big rebranding effort for the Gatorade brand that includes a redesigned package and, according to a person familiar with the matter, a Super Bowl commercial. PepsiCo is trying to reach consumers beyond sports nuts to help reverse the brand's weak sales performance. The company is expected to spend roughly $150 million on the ad push, according to the person.



Wall Street Journal

FedEx Whites-Out the Kinko's Name

Some longtime customers are lamenting the imminent demise of the Kinko's sign, which FedEx will start removing from stores next year. Andy Sernovitz, an author and marketing consultant in Chicago, says he got more frustrated reader responses to a blog item he wrote about the name change than to any other. "It's not just a place you shop," he explains. "A Kinko's moment culminated in something big. It's the night before the term paper, and you've got to get to the frat party. It's your wedding invitation, your résumé, a big presentation."

Business Week

Rebuilding the Brand

The sun-drenched waterfront hotel in Miami is glitzy, with swaying palms out front and a glittering fountain in the lobby. But the mood inside Wednesday was dark, as the Republican governors Association gathered to try to rebuild a brand badly tarnished at the polls.

Newsweek

The Brand Bubble

Through extensive research using brand and financial data on thousands of brands, I and my colleagues at Young & Rubicam have found that the multiples that markets place on brand valuations far overstate actual consumer sentiment. This means that the value creation most brands are bringing to their companies, and ultimately to their shareholders, is greatly exaggerated. Put simply, most businesses and the financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them.

changethis

What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign

"Better" never works in marketing. The only thing that works in marketing is "different." When you're different, you can pre-empt the concept in consumers' minds so your competitors can never take it away from you.

Ad Age

Thinking by Design

While marketers have appreciated the value of distinctive design for some time now—at least since Apple and Target started making it a key differentiator about a decade ago—design thinking is something else. The premise is that if you tap a designer, or a designer's problem-solving approach, to tackle standard business problems, you will get game-changing results.

That's why Procter & Gamble credits DT for the company's successful turnaround of its Herbal Essences shampoo line. It's also why Bank of America points to DT as the catalyst for its "Keep the Change" program, which automatically entered "rounded up" figures on checks and payments into savings accounts. Ninety-nine percent of customers who opted for Keep the Change stayed with the program, according to BofA.

BrandWeek

Pepsi, New Bottles

Brand New

50 Stunning Examples of a great redesign

wefunction.com

PepsiCo Launches Massive Overhaul

PepsiCo today said it will pour some $1.2 billion over three years into a push that will include sweeping changes to its brands, including what Chairman-CEO Indra Nooyi characterized as a revamp of "every aspect of the brand proposition for our key [carbonated soft drink] brands. How they look, how they're packaged, how they will be merchandised on the shelves, and how they connect with consumers."

Ad Age

Stand by Your Brand: How Cohesive Design Turned Obama Into America’s Leading Man

But the “O” logo is only one element of the two-part Obama campaign. Utilizing the san serif Gotham font, his typeface creates a look that is both formal and friendly, the perfect hallmark of an ideal Presidential candidate. Paired together with its “O” partner, and the Obama brand created a dynamic duo. The symbol occupies the recognizable “hero” role, while the font literally reinforces the brand name. No piece of marketing collateral ever escapes a healthy dosing of logo treatment in a political campaign, but Team Obama has transitioned his sleek modernist look into an iconic symbol so seamlessly it borders on graceful.

dvisible magazine
h/t Steve L.

Transmoflection

Vancouver 2010 Graphic Identity

Subconscious Warm-Up

The upshot of the original study, and numerous replications, was that the subjects subliminally exposed to Apple branding came up with more uses, and their uses were deemed more creative, than those exposed to the I.B.M. logo or to no logo at all. In other words, exposure to the Apple logo appeared to make people more creative.

New York Times Magazine

White Castle Equity Video

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Best Global Brands

Then there are the other guys—companies that refuse to let tough times distract them from their long-term brand-building efforts. Sometimes they see a recession as the perfect moment to get a leg up on a weakened rival. Others strengthen their brands to ward off discount competitors. Still others feel they have a knockout new product that requires support. In BusinessWeek 's annual ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands, several are keeping their U.S. marketing budgets steady, as a percentage of revenue.

BusinessWeek

Branding in a New Dimension

First, brands cannot be created and managed in a top-down approach. Gone are the days when branding companies could create a brand identity accompanied by a dense, rarely read instruction manual on how to apply it across media. Brands are no longer static. Today they're fluid, flexible and nonlinear.

Ad Week

The Pitfalls of Megabranding

But then again, the whole idea of a megabrand is to strip the brand name of any actual meaning and turn it into a Paris Hilton. Famous for being famous.

Will it work? Maybe. Marketing is never one-sided. Winners are usually those companies whose strategies are better than the strategies of their competitors.

Ad Age

Font of Youth: How is Obama Like Target?

Like Aeron chairs or Eames furniture, Helvetica and its ilk have enjoyed a revival in the 21st century, and—like so much in campaigns—the use of the font sends multiple messages. First, given how small-c conservative most campaign design is (something like this could have been a campaign design for any candidate in the last four decades), the font and the all-around look communicates modernity—it reinforces the "change" branding. If you think of a Presidential candidate as a brand—and their campaigns do—it's young... but not too young. It also communicates a level of familiarity and safety, because you've seen if pretty much everywhere in commercial culture. (John McCain's website, befitting a conservative and old-school candidate, has a more traditional design and mix of serif and sans-serif fonts.)

Tuned In

Wolff Olins' Intuitive Branding

So it seemed like a good moment to see if Wolff Olins (part of the Omnicom media conglomerate) has found the secret of being taken seriously by top-flight clients and yet still managing to produce work that is successful, news-worthy and distinctive. On a cold day in January, I went to their spacious offices near King's Cross to find out.

Business Week