Li Ning: Make the Change

Chinese sports brand Li Ning has unveiled a new logo and slogan as it continues to pursue its global expansion aspirations.

The new slogan Make the Change replaces the previous Anything Is Possible, though the latter phrase is being kept in storage by the company for potential tactical use in the future.

According to the company, the new logo ”displays a modern interpretation of the iconic attributes of the original logo in a modern design language that spells out a global perspective.”

New Li Ning logo

The company has long been criticized for having a logo with too much resemblance to the Nike Swoosh and for a slogan too similar to the Adidas tagline “Impossible Is Nothing.”

Well known in its home market of China for its strong distribution system and competitively priced products, Li Ning has started expanding into numerous overseas markets in Southeast Asia and the USA. It has also begun sponsorship of a handful of western athletes, including a couple of NBA basketball players and European track and field and tennis stars.

The company was founded 20 years ago by Olympian athlete Li Ning, who became an immediate Chinese sporting hero when he captured three Gold Medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

As we wrote in this blog back in November (see Li Ning: First Chinese Global Brand? under the categories Branding and Marketing), Li Ning wants to build the first truly global brand to emanate from China.

With this new logo and slogan, he may very well be on track to accomplishing this dream.

Brandkarma — the social network on brands

How do your views of brands stack up with those of others?

Now you can find out — through the Brandkarma web site.

Started by the chief creative officer of one of Australia’s largest ad agencies, Brandkarma is a social media platform “on a mission to help everyone make better brand choices and to influence brand behavior for good.”

The site was founded on two important truths:

1) that in today’s world, brands that span national, social and cultural divides can be a greater force for good than governments, and

2) that we all, as consumers with opinions, have much greater power to influence brand managers and their actions than possibly we currently imagine.

Brandkarma was started to help answer two basic (and important) questions:

1) what kind of world do you want to live in?

2) what kind of a world do you want to leave your kids?

Through this site, all ordinary consumers have a chance to make a difference, assuming Brandkarma grows strong enough to get brand managements to listen.

On the Brandkarma web site, you can comment and score hundreds of brands for any of five criteria: planet, customers, employees, suppliers, or investors.

As Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company magazine says in his testimonial on the site, “Let’s all come together around Brandkarma and use it as a platform to help businesses / brands become a force for positive change in the world!”

Enter your own evaluations of brands and join the brand conversations at Brandkarma network today, and let us know what you think. Will this network grow powerful enough to influence the future actions of brands?

World’s 30 Hottest Brands

Advertising Age has selected the World’s Hottest Brands, a list of 30 brands succeeding on a global, regional, and local level.

According to the advertising industry’s bible, their goal was “not to create a list of the largest global marketers or rank the brands that contribute the most to their company’s market value.”

Instead, the publication set out to “chronicle the brands percolating at the local and regional level.”

Broken into global, regional, and local categories, the 30 Hottest Brands as identified in this Ad Age Insights report are:

Global

BMW

Coca-Cola

Facebook

H&M

Ikea

McDonald’s

Nike

Nintendo Wii

Pampers

Tesco

Regional

ASOC – As Seen on Screen (Europe)

The Economist (UK, Western Europe, India)

Havaianas (Brazil, South America)

Lenovo (China, USA, Europe)

MercadoLibre (South America)

Nando’s (South Africa)

Natura (Brazil, South America)

Tim Hortons (Canada, USA, Western Europe)

Uniqlo (Japan, Asia)

Local

Azul (Brazil)

Banco Hipotecario (Argentina)

Fullerton Bank (India)

Li Ning (China)

Mama Lucchetti (Argentina)

Manchester United (UK)

Tata Nano (India)

Tencent Holdings (China)

Tsubaki (Japan)

Zipcar (USA)

More details on this report are available from the Advertising Age website.

Also, the report can be viewed online or purchased.

What other local or regional brands do you think Ad Age has missed? Share your thoughts and comments.

Trust Is An Issue For Brands

I don’t put much stock in the annual 100 Best Global Brands report from BusinessWeek for two reasons: the valuations by Interbrand never seem to have any relevance and the list is too U.S. centric to truly be called a global brand ranking.

Nevertheless, there is one interesting and pertinent point made in the BusinessWeek article accompanying this annual listing. This concerns the element of trust, or what the article’s two writers refer to as “the most perishable of assets.”

According to the article, recent polling (in the USA) shows that distrust amongst consumers for business as a whole is growing. Citing a phone survey by public relations firm Edelman, only 44% of Americans say they trusted business, a significant decline from the 58% level recorded two years ago.

This point got me to dust off a posting from The Reputation Garage Blog from October 2008 that I had filed.

In that post, a reprint from an article that appeared in HR Leaders magazine, trust is called “one of the defining issues of the emerging century.”

Public trust in big business, governments, and even non-profit organizations has been declining throughout the 21st century. Here are some “fun” statistics that I gleaned from The Reputation Garage Blog:

* As few as 13% of all Americans place their trust in big business (and it’s not much higher for other mature consumer societies!).
* Only 39% of employees in a Watson Wyatt survey said they trusted senior leadership.
* Some three-quarters of US consumers feel that companies don’t tell the truth in advertising.
* Three-quarters of employees in big companies observed violations of the law or company standards in a 12-month period.

As economies start to rebound, marketers and organizational leaders have an important task in front of them: re-establishing their torn and tattered brands and re-building trust with all constituencies.

Failure to do so is not an option. Unless you want the tombstone for your organization’s brand to read “died of trust-related causes.”

Li Ning: First Global Chinese Brand?

According to Fast Company, Chinese Olympian Li Ning wants to build the first truly global brand to emanate from China.

In an in-depth article, the magazine touts how Li Ning (the company) is China’s largest domestic manufacturer of athletic footwear and sports apparel, with revenues over $1 billion from 6300 outlets.

While Fast Company focuses on the design of the Li Ning product line, the article fails to convince how this company is likely to take on Nike, adidas, Puma and others in the international arena.

I can think of only one athlete who has ever successfully launched a brand with their own name (Michael Jordan’s Air Jordans footwear line in partnership with Nike).

Can Li Ning build an entire global brand spectrum around his own name? Time will tell, but I have my doubts.

What do you think?

Eliminate Stupid Rules and Fees

Dark clouds on the economic horizon. Executives naturally concerned about how to attain revenue growth during a slowing economy.

Ah! The light bulb goes on. Let’s create new fees we can charge customers!

Wrong!

The wrong way to go about creating new revenue streams is to start adding fees to your existing services or service delivery. Doing so will only agitate your existing customers and have them start questioning why are they doing business with you in the first place.The last thing you want to be doing at the start of an economic downturn is to have your customers asking themselves why are they buying your products, services, or brands.Ben McConnell, author of Creating Customer Evangelists, suggests all marketers should vow to eliminate a stupid rule as part of their marketing strategies. “More rules are proportional to less convenience,” writes McConnell. “More rules = fewer customers. You either let the tyranny of one customer influence your organization, or not. When someone wants to add a new rule, how about eliminating an existing one instead?”

I would add to this: vow to eliminate stupid fees as well, and make a vow not to add any new stupid fees during the remainder of the calendar year.

Your customers will appreciate this. And so will your bottom line, though you probably won’t be able to prove so to any bean counters.

Questions to ask yourself:

What fees or surcharges drive your customers crazy? How can these be eliminated, or incorporated into your overall price structure?

What rules do you have that drive your customers crazy? How can these be eliminated or modified?

As we said above, the last thing you want to be doing at the start of an economic downturn is to have your customers asking themselves why are they buying your products, services, or brands. At least if you want to reduce customer attrition and improve your customer loyalty.

Apple Combines Powerful Brand With Great Marketing to Create iPhone Success

How powerful is the Apple brand?

Damn powerful.

I read last week that the Apple iPhone share of the U.S. smart phone market for the fourth quarter was an amazing 28%. This was up from the 19% level in the third quarter.

This means that Apple sold more iPhones in the fourth quarter than the number of smart phones sold by Palm or Motorola. Even more amazing – Apple outsold all of the various Windows mobile devices combined in the fourth quarter!

Chalk up another victory for Steve Jobs over the boys and girls at Microsoft!

The only mobile phone vendor to outsell Apple in the fourth quarter was RIM makers of the Crackberry…..oops, I mean Blackberry smart phone. They had 41% market share.

Now when is the iPhone being released in Australia???

The iPhone is going to make a great case study in how to launch a new product in what was previously considered a saturation market.

A powerful brand. An innovative product. A great launch strategy. Sort of sounds like Marketing 101 to me.

Super Bowl Ads

One of the most anticipated advertising events each year is the showing of new television commercials during the American Super Bowl football championship game.

The game which was played this past Sunday night, attracted an audience of approximately 97.5 million people in American, and countless millions more across the world. A tight contest,this was the most watched Super Bowl in history.

Thirty-second TV commercials during the game reportedly cost as much as US$3 million per spot.

Anheuser-Busch aired the best-liked Super Bowl ad for a record 10th-consecutive year, according to results of the Super Bowl Ad Meter real-time consumer focus group testing. Unlike many previous winners, the Anheuser-Busch ad did not rely on humor. Instead, it featured a Dalmatian who becomes personal trainer to a dejected draft horse eager to make the team pulling the famous Budweiser beer wagon.

The other Top 10 ads:

FedEx (FedEx beats giant carrier pigeons)

Bridgestone (critters scream with squirrel missed by car)

Doritos (gian rat goes for guy’s bag of chips)

Bud Light (fire-breather heats up romantic dinner)

Bud Light (men sneak beer into wine-and-cheese party)

Coca-Cola (cartoon-character parade balloons go after Coke Classic)

Diet Pepsi Max (star-studded cast stops dozing)

Planters (scent of nuts makes homely woman alluring)

Tide to Go (shirt stain is louder than a job candidate) tied with SoBe Life Water (Lizards dance with model Naomi Campbell)

You can watch all the Super Bowl ads as often as you like courtesy of Advertising Age at http://adage.com/superbowl08/article?article_id=124815.

10 New Rules of Branding

I came across the following list of so-called new rules of branding in a recent issue of Marketing magazine here in Australia. The list was developed by the folks at www.BrandingStrategyInsider.com.

Personally, I’d say the list is more valuable as a set of new considerations to be taken into account for marketing strategy, not just branding. But that’s just my opinion!

Anyway, here’s the list:

1. Brands that influence culture sell more; culture is the new catalyst for growth.

2. A brand with no point of view has no point; full-flavor branding is in, vanilla is out.

3. Today’s consumer is leading from the front; this is the most well-informed generation to have ever walked the planet.

4. Customize wherever and whenever you can.

5. Forget the transaction, just give me an experience.

6. Deliver clarity at point of purchase; be obsessive about presentation.

7. You are only as good as your weakest link; do you know where you’re vulnerable?

8. Social responsibility is no longer an option; what’s your cause, what’s your contribution?

9. Pulse, pace and passion really make a difference; has your heartbeat been checked recently?

10. Innovation is the new boardroom favorite.

Can’t say I agree with all of these….but it’s a good way to start a dialogue. Any comments?

Marketing Wisdom 2008 now available from MarketingSherpa

The sixth annual edition of the eclectic and interesting Marketing Wisdom report from MarketingSherpa is now available as a free PDF download at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30298. 

The report features dozens of real-life test campaign lessons and tips, and has been collated from 101 stories and submissions submitted by MarketingSherpa’s readers. The topics cover just about every aspect of marketing – advertising, B2B, B2C, customer service, direct mail, email, lead generation, search – and such hot topics as landing page and website design, mobile marketing and Web 2.0.

I have all six of these annual reports and refer to them frequently. And while you are at their site, I also highly recommend signing up for the free MarketingSherpa weekly newsletter. It’s one of the best in the business.