Here’s what we learned this week.
Sometimes you gotta hide the brand to sell the brand
If this experiment was legit, it was probably smart that Dove kept its involvement a secret until the last minute. Its projects (Evolution, Onslaught, Beauty Sketches) have achieved a worldwide familiarity enjoyed by few other companies, and keeping the brand out of the picture would have preserved that moment of surprise the Ogilvy Brazil filmmakers were after. But surely the participants never saw this as a straight-forward drug test either – they got involved via a casting call, after all, as opposed to public notice for drug testing (which likely would have only yielded a bunch of poor college students).
[Read more in “Dove tries to patch-up beauty issues with new film”]
Quotable: How to win with sociology
“Stop looking at needs. Stop looking at the psychologically orient idea of what the consumer wants. That’s almost Freudian. Start developing a more sociologically oriented understanding of how cultures change and how new energies can be captured and turned into economic capital.”
Markus Giesler, associate professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto who who’s consulted for big international brands, specializes in the study of market system dynamics. Going against the traditional marketing grain, he uses a sociological rather than an economic approach to understand what drives product success.
[Read more about his theory of marketing in “How sociology trumps economics in marketing“]
Experts say Telus might not need to run an agency review
With three of our four Brand Doctors weighing in, the majority opinion is that Telus has strong equity with its current branding. And while there’s certainly more than the critters on the table for the current review, from that standpoint, the doctors’ advice can be summed up as “stay focused.”
“It would be madness to throw away the critters,” said Michael Murray, Blammo’s CCO. David Kincaid at Level5 says, “Let’s try some diagnostics first to ensure the patient has adequately tried to take its big idea to the next level. Until that’s settled, I wouldn’t prescribe an agency search.”
[Read more in “Brand Doctors: Does the Telus brand need new life?”]
