Blog

Blog and articles

Brands with Lipstick

After having committed to worthy causes like advancing DEI in their workplace and supporting responsible actions for controlling climate change, now some brands are running in the opposite direction. Are Brands with Purpose now simply Brands with Lipstick?

Why Great CMOs Make Great Mistakes – and How Not To

The best marketers sometimes make awful mistakes with their brand campaigns. Instead of selling more stuff and building brand equity, they end up inadvertently upsetting their customers. To avoid these missteps, marketers need to go beyond their classical training and leverage behavioral sciences to understand how their consumer will perceive their campaigns. But most don't do those audits. They should. And there is lots to learn from the experience of those that have failed before them.

A New Playbook for Building Brands - Part 3: Brands with Purpose

Aligning brands with a bigger purpose, well beyond its product attributes, is a great way to build phenomenal brands. Modern brands like TOMS, Allbirds, and Warby Parker have done exactly that. But is this something that is more than a fad? Should traditional brands follow the lead of these young upstarts? As with most things in life, the answer is "it depends." But there is a right way and a wrong way to build brands with purpose. Even Unilever, the undisputed leader in purpose based marketing, has stumbled as often as it has succeeded.

A New Branding Playbook - Part 2: Brands with Resolve

"Brands with Resolve" can get hesitant consumer over the hump and buy. The "trick" lies in leveraging one of the most significant advances in the field of psychology - SDT. It gets your brand in peoples' motivational DNA. How about that! Amgen, Diageo and US Navy show us how in this blog.

AI Existentialism: TheFuture of Being

Will AI affect life as we know it? This is a very different question from the current run-of-the-mill concerns amongst managers around “will AI take my job away?” This question is about whether life itself will change – with it what it means to have consciousness and morals as we know these terms to mean. The answer is “Yes. And probably in our lifetime.”

A New Playbook for Building Brands - Part 1: Brands with Wisdom

Possibly the best strategy for building successful brands is to align them with the learnings and rules that consumers already have deeply etched into their brain. This strategy of tapping into the path of least resistance turned around the fortunes of a faltering McDonalds on one hand, and brilliantly turned KIND bar into a multi-billion dollar nutrition snack star on the other. Could this be a path for your brand?

Is Unilever on The Right Track with its “Brands with Purpose” Strategy?

Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever, has pushed each of its 400 brands to have a social or environmental purpose. As its stock price growth has trailed other consumer product companies like P&G and Nestle, Wall Street analysts have questioned Unilever’s focus on “purpose” versus things like innovation and cost management. I warn marketers against taking advice on how to manage their brands from Wall Street analysts. And, yet, we do have to question if all brands can have a purpose and what is the right way to architect a brand with purpose.

SCORECARD: C+ for Facebook’s Metaverse Ad

Facebook’s new Superbowl ad for the Metaverse misses the mark on my cognitive branding scorecard. The 60-sec spot opens with a with an animatronic band rocking the audience to “Don’t You Forget About Me” in a fictional pizza-and-games restaurant called Questy’s. Then suddenly the lights go out, the audience disappears, the restaurant closes forever, and the band members are toast.

Cognitive Brand Scorecard: A+ for Hyundai's EV CAR Ad

Watch System 1 and System 2 in Action. Hyundai’s new Superbowl ad for its all-electric IONIQ 5 gets a two thumbs up from me. The 60-sec spot features Jason Bateman as a prehistoric caveman, pensively and amusingly musing how humans have come a long way over the last several millenniums to finally the modern age.

Subscribe to Sandeep’s mailing list to get a free chapter!