CAP 1 Those definitions form only a small portion of what advertising is all

about. My definition is that advertising is everything. Yes, it’s those television

ads that are the darlings of the ad industry. And yes, it’s those radio
and print ads, too. Plus, it’s the way your product is packaged, the spokespeople
you use—or don’t use—to endorse it, the way you treat your
employees and the way they in turn treat your customers, your annual
reports, your promotional materials, the articles that get written about
you, the events you sponsor, and even the way you handle unexpected
business successes and failures. In short, everything you do communicates
something about your brand to your customers and prospective
customers.

If consumers don’t get a reminder every day, they’ll forget and become free
agents, available to be picked up by whatever advertisement they happened
to see last. No matter how much television people watch, they can’t possibly
see every commercial.
Simply put, the goal of advertising is to sell more stuff to more people
more often for more money. Get used to that sentence because you’re
going to see it a lot in this book
Ad agencies and ad execs lure companies in
with promises that they’ll come up with the best ad campaigns anyone’s
ever seen. They
Burger King, for example, has changed agencies so many times that
consumers have completely lost track of what the company’s value
proposition is in the first place.
Greseala pe care majoritatea o fac cand taie din bugete, este sa renunte la publicitate, ceea ce este o
mare greseala.
Part of the reason advertising as we know it today is dead is that the
rules of the marketplace and the rules of business have changed
Awareness is king and assume people get it” becomes “awareness
is irrelevant, so overcommunicate.” One of the biggest advertising
mistakes companies make is to assume that just because they understand
what they’re talking about or what their strategy is, the consumer
will, too.
Promote from within and grow organically” becomes “teach continuously
and get regular transfusions.

that there’s been a huge shift in the way people spend

money. People have a nearly unlimited number of products to choose from but
a very limited amount of money to spend. So, instead of whose tuna are they buying, the
question
is now more complex: “If they aren’t buying my tuna, what are they
spending their money on instead?”
Money was limited,
so a lot of people were faced with the choice of buying a Coke and
walking home, or not buying a Coke and having money for the bus

CAP 2
The big issue facing your business today is how to differentiate
yourself from your competition in a way that’s relevant and meaningful
to consumers
The message here is pretty simple: Constantly renew and redefine
your brand or die. Don’t take your brand for granted.
Look at it. Look at your target market. Look at how you’re selling. Redefine your positioning and
figure out how you can actually get done
everything you need to do. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that
remaking your brand is a one-time thing. It’s really an all-the-time thing

Consumers want to know that the product or service you’re offering

is at least as relevant to their lives today as it was yesterday. Our lives
change, our needs change, and our values change as consumers, but
more important, our values change as people. And any time those values
change, our brands have to reposition themselves in front of consumers
in slightly different ways, adding relevance to what the brand
means.
As much
as we hear and talk about branding, how confident are you that you
know what a brand really is? If you aren’t 100 percent sure, don’t be
embarrassed; you’re certainly not alone
A brand is the original way to scale an idea, to make it grow, to get
the word out about your product
Brands still give
buyers a way to tell one nearly generic product from another, and they
give buyers a reason to buy. Unless you
constantly tell people why your brand is better and why they should buy
it, you’ll end up with nothing more than a name.
The reason people buy Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi or the generic
supermarket label is because of what the brand tells them. Coke is it,
the real thing. Coke is always. Pepsi is the choice of a new generation.
The supermarket brand is cheap. The brand has to have meaning;
it has to signify something special in the mind of the consumer. The brand that does that best,
that resonates most with the cus
tomers
(in other words, the one that’s closest to what they’re looking for),
is the one they buy.
This lesson illustrates one of the major misconceptions about brand:
that name recognition translates into brand success. The theory is that
all you need to do is make sure that everyone (potential and current cus
tomers)
is aware of your brand, then you can go on vacation. I wish it were
that simple. The reality is that unless you redimensionalize your brand and
keep it relevant to consumers, awareness won’t get you anywhere
If you
don’t give customers a reason to buy—and keep hitting them over the
head with it—they won’t.
Here are the initial
components:
• Come up with a strategy through an understanding of your brand’s DNA.
An effective brand strategy starts with a thorough examination of your
brand’s DNA, the building block that determines how your customers
see you and how well your brand meshes with their needs.
Most companies tend to try to drive their business by having activi
ties
such as promotions and ad campaigns
The point here is that a brand may be managed by internal efforts,
but it’s also affected by things that may be completely out of your control.
So it’s essential that you have someone you can trust to analyze
everything that could possibly impact the brand and position the brand
properly.
• Position yourself.
Once you’ve got your strategy in place, your next task is to figure out
how to reach your customers. Like your brand, how you position yourself depends on every
aspect of your advertising and marketing mix: your employees, public
relations, sponsorships, packaging, and pricing
• Differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Connect to consumers’ wants and needs.
• Go back and do it again.
As you start thinking about how to position your brand, take a long look at your company’s
strengths and weaknesses. As important as strengths (I call them core competencies) are, they
have very little to do with whether a company is as relevant as it could be. Many companies, for
example, confuse core competence with brand
essence. Yeah, you think about the design and
how the shirt is going to look on you, but you also think about all of the
intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of the brand that will fill you with the feel
ing
that you’re doing something good for yourself and that you made the
right choice.

Differentiation
By definition, a brand is very different from a commodity, which is a
product or service that is perceived to be pretty much the same as the
other similar products or services in the same category

The driving philosophy behind dif

ferentiation
is the belief that customers don’t buy sameness (even with
commodities consumers will differentiate on the basis of who’s cheap
est).
Differentiation is what separates you from the pack. There are
three basic ways you can differentiate your brand