Brand Mix

Six of the Best goes all cranky this week:

1) Susan Boyle Goes Bad? MTV UK
How quickly the story changes. Earlier in the week, I was dissecting the Susan Boyle phenomenon to try and figure out how come she had done so much better than the similarly attractively-challenged Paul Potts. Then, bam, it's: "The 48 year old, named the ‘hairy angel’ wasn't so holy after losing her temper at two people who had started to ‘wind-up her up’ in the hotel lobby. Boyle is thought to have shouted: “How f**king dare you! You can’t f**king talk to me like that!" And that was followed, the next day, by another 'f'-laced interlude. She's now apparently holed up in some hotel so she can't lose it again. Will Su-Bo still make it? Or has her moment passed?

2) Enlightened Stupid Marketer Nalts (via Church of the Customer)
The times are right for Kevin Nalty and his brand of humor. Here he is asking marketers whether they are stupid or enlightened stupid? He claims enlightenment reporting that: "I like to stick with proven offline strategies to drive awareness. It's not that digital marketing isn't proven, it's that I can't conduct a thorough ROI. No. I don't do ROI on the rest of my media mix but that's because they're proven."



3) The Vendor Client relationship - in real world situations: zeorge497 on YouTube (via Fresh Peel)
Frustration coming through loud and clear in this video. Unseemly tactics from the world of vendor/client negotations translated into real life: "You got to work with me," "Show us how you made it," "We didn't budget for this" and others



4) Brand Management From The Field: Branding Strategy Insider
The English football coach, Brian Clough was the ultimate crank. But he was incredibly successful in his early years and took teams with very average players to astonishing levels of performance and success. Mark Ritson uses the opening of "Damned United," a movie that covers his tumultuous 44-day reign at Leeds United FC to reflect on what the Clough School of Management can still teach all marketers about marketing. Lessons that include his views about working with the cards you've been dealt: "I used to look at what a team had got. I was a great believer in getting out of them what they had got. I never harped on about what they hadn't got."

5) Ads for discount retailer call big spenders ‘disgusting’: JWT Anxiety Index
Marian Berelowitz reports on "luxury shame" and new ads from sister companies Marshalls and T.J. Maxx in which: "women literally shame a friend who 'always pays too much for designer labels.' In one of these “interventions,” a woman chides the over-spender: 'Everyone thinks it’s disgusting!'" Perhaps a little O.T.T? Marian suggests that a better approach would be to focus on the opportunity cost — what to do with the money saved not paying full-price. She points to a new study in The Journal of Consumer Research that found that most shoppers will consider opportunity cost if it's made explicit and it can then be a strong influence on purchase decisions.

6) No Payments and No Interest Until...Uh-oh: Harvard Business Review
The "scariest thing you'll see this week" and something that should make you feel cranky. A graph that shows that: "If an average family spent all of its income paying its debts starting right now, not leaving a penny for anything else — not food, clothes, birthday parties, grass seed, pedicures, nothing — it would take that family 1.3 years, about 16 months, to pay off its debt. In short, the American lifestyle is largely borrowed." What this will likely mean is a record number of consumer bankruptcies and most companies are highly over-exposed to this risk.

And so it goes! See you here on the blog or on Twitter (@martinjbishop) for more stories from the world of brand strategy.