Retailers may find Halloween to be a bit scarier this year in terms of profit potential, according to a survey released today (Tuesday) by the National Retail Federation. The study, conducted by BIGresearch, found that the number of consumers (62.1 percent) planning to celebrate Halloween this year dipped by more than 2 percent, down from [...]
‘Today, Tomorrow Together’ is Absa’s pay-off line and to most South Africans reflects a professional, approachable, friendly and accessible financial services institution. It’s a brand that has a spontaneous recall of 97 percent1 and has achieved this remarkable feat in just ten years. However cast your minds back a decade or two, think of Volkskas, [...]
Coke Zero and L’Oréal are getting ready for their close-ups by sponsoring the Yoostar Casting Agency Tour, a nine-city crosscountry jaunt with 25 stops at college campuses and malls to spread the acting bug and the concept of “movie-oke.” NMA Entertainment & Marketing brokered the sponsorship deal between the brands and Yoostar, which is also [...]
Shelter cats and dogs have a branding problem. Can loathing for financial arch-villain Bernard Madoff help fix it? While animal welfare organizations and pet products manufacturers promote shelter adoption, sad images of animals in cages depict shelters as holding areas for undesirable pets. Not exactly the best branding strategy. To dispel this depressing public image, [...]
There is sufficient evidence of the business case for building customer trust, making our focus not one of whether to commit resources to building trust, but rather, how to most effectively commit resources to build customer trust. While trust is a complex subject and there is no simple formula to building trust, here is a [...]
Companies are using their financial muscle to bring about change. LEVI’S uses the sex appeal of its products to sell safe sex and SABMiller SA uses taverns to teach men about responsible drinking in philanthropic programmes that benefit South Africans. The irony of this is not lost on the leaders of corporate social responsibility programmes. [...]
The difference between a commodity and a brand of value is not more than a few degrees. The small gap between blurred vision, disengagement, fear of change and plunging profit margins. Take gas for example. I was coming back from a meeting in an area I wasn’t familiar with. Because my gauge was plummeting past empty I pulled into the first [...]
With increasing frequency business owners or managers who realise that copyright is an important asset in their business, are confronted by this question. For certain works, the copyright will belong to the person or business for which the work was created, in terms of the Copyright Act, No 98 of 1978 (as amended) (-“the Act”). [...]
What’s more important, the visual or the verbal? You Need Both to Build a Powerful Brand. Advertising today is a visually oriented discipline. And we have Confucius to thank (or blame) for this state of affairs. Confucius’ famous saying, “A picture is worth 1,000 words,” has been quoted endlessly in advertising circles in America. Furthermore, [...]
In the early 1980s I was managing director of a long established, but fast growing advertising agency. I owned a small stake in it, but the majority shareholder was the chairman who had established the business thirty years before. One evening, the deputy chairman and I met a team from FCB to discuss their offer [...]
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