Brand Fatale

many execs say it's impossible to draw direct correlations between stunts and sales. Most clients seem satisfied with generating high levels of social sharing, with online views providing substantial savings compared to paid media. "From our perspective ... it will more than pay for itself in earned media and 'share of conversation.' That, in turn, translates into brand worth, which in turn drives sales," says Thomas Moradpour, vp, global marketing at Carlsberg. "We won’t be able to track a direct bump—too many variables—but we’ll measure the impact on brand health and equity through our brand trackers in all of our key international markets."

many execs say it's impossible to draw direct correlations between stunts and sales. Most clients seem satisfied with generating high levels of social sharing, with online views providing substantial savings compared to paid media. "From our perspective ... it will more than pay for itself in earned media and 'share of conversation.' That, in turn, translates into brand worth, which in turn drives sales," says Thomas Moradpour, vp, global marketing at Carlsberg. "We won’t be able to track a direct bump—too many variables—but we’ll measure the impact on brand health and equity through our brand trackers in all of our key international markets."

marketers are staging "pranks on steroids," upping the ante in almost every imaginable way and probing darker territory—with the sponsor's name attached. Scenarios that trade on fear, death and danger test the limits of personal privacy and social acceptability. The genre, he says, represents "the dark side of the constant drumbeat to enhance consumer engagement."

I can't tell you how many people asked me in the last couple weeks about Japanese teenage girls renting their thighs as advertising space for everything from Green Day albums to local bookstores. Yes, there is a PR agency offering this service, and yes, some girls seem to have participated. But headlines like "Japanese Women Use Their Thighs as Advertising Space" create fake trend hype. "A Handful of Japanese Teenagers Got Paid to Wear Ads on Their Thighs" isn't so exciting, is it?

While I am a fan of supple thighs, I've not seen this fascinating new advertising medium in use. My vision is perfect, but I would have difficulty making out the ads in the real world, no matter how hard I stare. Despite being technically analog, these ads are 100% digital! The whole point of them is to get media outlets desperate for clicks (I'm looking at you Daily Mail) to write about them. There's a word for this: Gimmick.

the Smart Body, Smart World paradigm — how sensor-laden devices like wearables give us access to new domains of information and what we can do with that information

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm requires a different approach to marketing, an approach focused on delivering services and utility rather than just advertising

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm accelerates transformations that are already occurring in marketing. In particular, sensor devices require marketers to: Shift their priorities from acquisition to engagement. Today, marketers spend the majority of their budgets on the early stages of the customer journey, especially reaching new customers through channels like TV advertising and in-store displays. Smart Body, Smart World technologies lend themselves more toward engaging customers you already have, building on trust you’ve already earned. This shift from acquisition to engagement requires marketers to rethink their priorities and redistribute their spending accordingly.

Despite lip service paid to emotions, businesses routinely make multimillion-dollar marketing decisions on the false premise that respondents in survey research can consciously explain the unconscious origins of their actions. They fail to recognize that most of the business of life happens through our emotions, below the threshold of awareness.

neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor puts it, “We live in a world where we are taught from the start that we are thinking creatures that feel. The truth is, we are feeling creatures that think.”

When we ask respondents in traditional copy, tracking, and concept tests to report their emotional motivation to buy brands, we are asking their chatty, limited, linear mind to interpret the responses of their immensely more powerful, holistic, creative mind. Cognitive science experiments have shown that our left brain rationalizes stories in attempt to organize and categorize the sensory experiences of the right brain.

American Airlines has just rebranded for the first time in over 40 years. The AA logo of yore is gone, replaced by the Flight Symbol, a red and blue eagle crossed with a wing. And every plane will be tagged with a high-velocity abstraction of the American flag on its tail. There’s logic behind the decision: AA recently ordered 550 new planes. Many will have composite bodies that can’t be polished with the mirror shine of American’s existing fleet.

In approaching the redesign, American polled both their own employees about what defines the American brand (the answers were predominantly the planes’ silver fuselage and the eagle logo) and the larger globe about the American country (which is where tech, entertainment, and progress come in). What they were looking for was, not just what is American Airlines, but what is America in the age of globalization?

Futurebrand’s research also found that the American flag, of course, was another defining trait of America itself. The challenge was, how does American portray America without becoming blindly patriotic in the global market? The solution was a striped abstraction of our flag, augmented into a high-velocity graphic printed on each plane’s tail to make aircraft seem like they’re flying, even when they’re sitting still. In other words, they ditched the stars in favor of the stripes.

Analyst Bob Herbst, who tracks the industry at AirlineFinancials.com, pointed out that "all American Airlines labor groups have taken pay and benefits concessions, including thousands of furloughs and layoffs, so management can—somehow—justify spending tens of millions of dollars to take aircraft out of service and paint them."

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Brand fans might remember how The Gap learned this lesson a little over two years ago when it scrapped a logo that customers had embraced for two decades in favor of a more modern badge that won widespread disapproval—not just because of its appearance, but because consumers couldn’t see the need for it.

"Here was absolutely no reason to change AA’s well-recognized and respected logo," he said. Plus, he added, passengers care more about on-time flights than what color the paint is.