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Posts tagged ‘Intel’

Oct 2

The Legacy of ‘Just Do It’? Imperative Rebrands on the Rise

It’s been 25 years since Nike launched the renowned ‘Just Do It’ brand line, and their place as a global brand leader was reconfirmed this week as they came 24th in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands survey, showing a brand value increase of 13%.  Earlier in the year, Fast Company crowned it the most innovative company of 2013.  However, despite their 25 year dominance, other leading brands have only recently begun to emulate the imperative expressed in ‘Just Do It’.

‘Just Do It’ uses the imperative tense – ordering, commanding or instructing us to do something.   It captures the spirit of Nike’s athletes, yet also speaks directly to Nike’s mission statement and the idea that there is an athlete in all of us.  It challenges us, orders us, to ‘just do it’.

Of the 182 most valuable brands in the world, only 6% use the imperative tense in their encapsulation of what their brand stands for.  But this is on the rise.

Close to half of the world’s most valuable brands who rebranded in 2012 and 2013 use the imperative to encapsulate what they stand for.  Consider,

Gap – Be Bright
Pepsi – Live for Now
Ford – Go Further
Pizza Hut – Make it Great
Intel – Look Inside
HP – Make It Matter

The rise of ‘imperative rebrands’ is likely down to three things.

1. An increasing focus on the importance of employees as drivers of the brand and the customer experience.

Many of the brandlines above speak as powerfully to employees as they do to the end consumer.  It’s clear that HP’s ‘Make It Matter’ is as much a rallying cry internally to drive much-needed innovation, as it is a mandate to their customers.  As Ford indicated in their launch of Go Further,

The company is exhorting its 166,000 worldwide employees to “Go Further,” too, because executives believe that making Ford’s “internal brand” consistent with its new external messaging can create profound synergies that benefit the company in significant ways. “What we aim to do is inspire behavior,” Matt VanDyke, Ford’s director of global communications, told me. “Go Further” is “more than an advertising tagline. We want to institutionalize it as part of our culture.”

2. The understanding that successful marketing today needs to encourage deep consumer engagement with the brand.

The imperative tense asks you actively do something – to get involved.

3. The need for brevity.

In the increasingly cluttered and splintered media world we live in, brands struggle to get their brand ideas across.  Ford’s long form of their brand idea is “we go further so you can”: more polite but less directly engaging and memorable. The imperative tense uses the verb’s short infinitive form (make, look, go) – and that may make the brand idea more memorable.

The downside of this approach is that we may not like brands to command or instruct us to do something.   When Smirnoff told us to ‘Be There,’ some may have responded with an equally direct two word response…  This may have been partly why, after 3 years of using the phrase, they walked away from ‘Be There’ when they broke a new global campaign last year, to adopt a new line, ‘Yours for the Making’.

Brands need some credibility as an arbiter of cool, or to have garnered a great deal of respect, to talk to us in the imperative – so perhaps it is only the brand leaders who can get away with it, since we already feel like we know them and value their opinion.   Friends can talk to us this way; but not strangers.  New brands should beware of this approach – it may backfire.

Jun 25

What the most valuable brands in Cannes have in common

IBM, Intel and Coca-Cola.  Three brands that won Grand Prix and Special Awards at Cannes Lions last week, that also appear in all of the world’s most valuable brand rankings.  What can we learn from this juxtaposition of creativity and value?

Stay simple and stay the course.

You can associate all of these brands with one word that defines what they stand for.
Coke: Happiness.  IBM: Smarter.  Intel: Inside.

While all three expand on these notions when they articulate the core of what they stand for (Coke’s purpose is ‘to inspire moments of optimism and happiness’, IBM are ‘driven by the idea of building a smarter planet’, Intel invite us to ‘Look Inside’), they consistently, relentlessly, creatively, use the ideas and literal words of ‘happiness’, ‘smarter’ and ‘inside’ in their marketing efforts, as exemplified in IBM’s Grand Prix-winning ‘Ads with a purpose’.

(Even their advertising is smarter, and asks for smarter ideas to help to build smarter cities).

What they also do is stay the course.  They have built brands from these simple core ideas for years.  IBM established the Smarter Planet initiative in 2008.  Coke have talked about happiness for decades, and explicitly unveiled their ‘Open Happiness’ global campaign in 2009.  The ‘Intel Inside’ cooperative marketing program (and associated branding) launched in 1991.  Their multiple Grand Prix Cannes Lions wins for ‘The Beauty Inside’ last week celebrated the ideal that – with humans and computers alike – it’s what’s inside that counts.

Although Intel wavered in 2009 (they rebranded around the idea of Sponsors of Tomorrow (which was geared to last for three to five years and serve as an overarching theme for all of the company’s branding efforts)), they (re)launched a new brand ‘theme’ of ‘Look Inside’ this year.  As Deborah Conrad, vice president and chief marketing officer at Intel stated,“ ‘Sponsors of tomorrow’ didn’t leverage our heritage as much as ‘Look inside’ does. ‘Look inside’ is a call to action, and ‘Intel inside’ says, ‘Hey, here I am.’ ”.

Whilst it’s very difficult to ‘own’ a simple idea, there’s money (and possible glory) in trying to do so.  A spate of one word rebrands in 2012 suggests that other brands aspire to a similar goal.  Pepsi: Now; Jaguar: Alive; BMW: Joy: Mahindra Group: Rise; Commbank: Can…It will be interesting to see whether they can stay the course, and climb the value rankings.