Tampa Bay Rays Get a P&G-Style Makeover†

Arsenal of Marketing Concepts Includes 'Brand Pillars' and Consumer Touchpoints

Advertising Age, October 6, 2008 — Under the guidance of a former Procter & Gamble brand manager, the Tampa Bay Rays have gone through the sort of transformation typical of deodorant sticks and shaving razors.

First off, the team got a new name — Devil is gone — and a fresh logo and color scheme, swapping green for blue. A list of "consumer touchpoints" was found via focus-group research and monitored to make sure the ballpark experience is fun for fans

At JetBlue, Growing Up Is Hard to Do

New York Times, October 5, 2008 — JETBLUE AIRWAYS was the darling of the airline industry until Valentine’s Day, 2007. And life for the carrier hasn’t been the same since.

On what is now known within the company as “2/14,” a winter storm paralyzed flights at New York City’s airports. Hit hardest was John F. Kennedy International, where JetBlue, which got its start in 2000, has its busiest hub. Its planes were snowbound at gates or stuck on runways, trapping some passengers.

The 2/14 fiasco set off a crisis — emotional, cultural and financial — that few start-ups might have survived.

OfficeMax Magic

Bob Thacker says his plans to make us love OfficeMax are right on target. An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners.

Hub, September 1, 2008 — Twenty years ago, when he was a marketing chief at Target Stores, Bob Thacker says he used to hear the same thing all the time: “Target? Are you kidding me? It’s a discount store in Minnesota. It’s kinda dumpy.”

Well, it took 20 years to turn around Target, and Bob was right in the thick of that transformation from “kinda dumpy” to “pretty darn cool.” Today, as chief marketing officer of OfficeMax, Bob is once again relishing a Target-sized challenge. “We’re the third-place brand in a category that has no differentiation whatsoever,” says Bob. “Office supply stores have long been dubbed as dull and uninspiring. But if you do things that are totally unexpected and surprising, it suddenly begins to breathe humanity into a category... continue reading

The Second Coming of Khaki

New York Times, August 20, 2008 — ON Monday afternoon, as the ballyhooed new designs of Gap’s fall collection by Patrick Robinson began appearing at its store on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, a line of customers stretched well around the corner — at Abercrombie & Fitch, that is, two blocks away.Fashion magazines have heralded the recent arrival of Mr. Robinson at Gap in reverential tones (he is actually called a “megabrand messiah” in the September issue of Elle), and the windows announce in big block letters that a “New Shape” is in store.

InBev, the Only Way to Bring Back Bud Is By Being Fearless†

Budweiser Soared When Its Owners and Agency Took Chances. It Can Happen Again

Advertising Age, August 11, 2008 — As un-American as this is going to sound, maybe the best thing that could have happened to the would-be King of Beers' parent company is to be acquired by a Belgian-Brazilian multi-/mega-brewer that, despite honeymoon promises to the contrary, should indeed turn its marketing upside down.

Sharper Image Lives -- as a Brand†

Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2008 — Retailer Sharper Image was left for dead in February. Now, four months later, the bankrupt purveyor of air purifiers and nose-hair clippers is coming back to life.

This time, though, it won't have stores with $5,000 massage chairs where customers can relax. Instead, Sharper Image will live on as a virtual brand name, its moniker rented to other retailers that want to spruce up the appeal of a vacuum cleaner, pet robot or pair of sunglasses.

The Issue: How P&G Brought Back Herbal Essences

It updated a stale mass-market shampoo to appeal to younger Gen Y and Millennial women

BusinessWeek, June 17, 2008 — When Procter & Gamble acquired hair-care company Clairol in 2001, it inherited a floundering shampoo brand. By 2004, Herbal Essences, at the time nearly 35 years old and a mass-market hair-care brand for women, was in a "long-term decline," reports Chairman and CEO A.G. Lafley. Marketed to all women (or at least those who wash their hair), the line had gone stale, with little distinction from the many competitors it shared on the drugstore shelf.

Hydrox Redux: Cookie Duels Oreo, Again†

Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2008 — Hydrox, the defunct chocolate-sandwich wafer, is returning for one more rematch with its nemesis, the Oreo.

Bowing to more than 1,300 phone inquiries, an online petition with more than 1,000 signatures and Internet chat sites lamenting the demise of the snack, Kellogg Co. has decided to temporarily relaunch Hydrox, the left-for-dead cookie

Schultz's Second Act Jolts Starbucks†

Already Intense, He Faces New Pressure: Peltz Owns a Stake

Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2008 — For two decades, Howard Schultz enjoyed uninterrupted success building Starbucks Corp. into a hip chain of coffee shops that richly rewarded shareholders.

But with profits off and the stock sinking, Mr. Schultz is cast in an unfamiliar new role: the person who must re-energize a company that has lost its edge. That has unleashed an intensity in him that is rattling the feel-good Starbucks culture.

Can a Dead Brand Live Again?

Do you remember Brim?

New York Times, May 18, 2008 — The coffee brand? Perhaps you recall its advertising slogan: “Fill it to the rim — with Brim!” Those ads haven’t been shown in years, and Brim itself has been off retail shelves since the 1990s. Yet depending on how old you are, there’s a fair chance that there’s some echo of the Brim brand in your brain. That’s no surprise, given that from 1961 to around 1995, General Foods spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to get it there. But General Foods disappeared into the conglomerate now known as Altria, which also acquired Kraft, maker of Maxwell House. With much smaller sales than that megabrand, Brim soon disappeared — except, perhaps, for a vague idea of Brim that lingered, and lingers even now, in the minds of millions of... continue reading