The Conversation Thing

The greatest bang for the buck in marketing

What's old is new again. And despite all the hoo-ha, frenzy, sizzle, hype, and ballyhoo about the app of the moment, the oldest tool in the marketing profession is the strongest -- we'll call it the slogan. S - L - O - G - A - N. (How do you spell relief?) You can call it other things: a tagline, a positioning line, a theme line, a strapline. Sometimes great campaigns don't even have one, consider how "Just Do It," morphed into nothing but the "swoosh." Consider how the immortalbe VW campaigns of the early 1960's did not have ANY slogan at all (in the popular memory, 'Think Small', is a slogan, but in fact, it was a headline for a partcular ad.) But the thought is the same. If a brand is, to quote someone, "the most effective information compression device ever invented," a slogan is its expression. As Wittgenstein (pretentiousness alert, I know, I know) said, "The world we live in is the words we use." So...

Why is this so powerful and so 'media-agnostic?' and what made us want to rant about it today? Besides having been working the pastures of sloganeering for the past few months for several of our clients, the lead article in this weeks DM (Direct Marketing) news struck us. Not only is Levi's relaunching its buttonfly 501's totally online, but the director of marketing is hinging it all, touting it all, on a SLOGAN! "Life Unbuttoned." Not bad. Not bad at all.

Another spur to this post: On the much-hyped premier of Mad Men, the best part of the show was the actual BMW commercial in the middle of the interview with actual Mad Man (ycchhh) Marty Puris, who came up with the actual "slogan" that drove the actual BMW business, "The Ultimate Driving Machine." This set of four words has been powering billions of dollars in sales -- across every media form from mobile phones to brochures to events -- for thirty five years. Talk about media agnostic!

More later on why that's not bad. Suffice it to say, that's a promise that fits the brand that you can hang an entire campaign around.

"We make money the old fashioned way -- we write great slogans."  (With apologies to John Houseman and the genius writer at Ogilvy whose name escapes me at the moment who wrote it!!!)

Getting a vital new conversation going -- aging and the boomers

This is a post related to a new client of ours at partners + jeary, but is relevant to marketing questions facing us all. The baby boomers, the immortal generation, is now, not only seeing their parents age, they are starting to age -- seriously age -- themselves. Jane Gross, of the New York Times, has jumped on this with her blog, "The New Old Age," http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/, and as it regards our new clients, Jewish Home Lifecare, it is showing us the entire world of marketing through a new lens. The Pepsi Generation is facing some harsh realities. While much of the commentary on Gross's blog is bleak, it is our task to find the positive aspects, to see that there are ways to take control, to the best of our abilities, the lack of control that aging poses. This has to be more than an ad campaign. Not only because ads, as we know them, are not reaching enough audience at the right price, but because we have a unique opportunity to understand and define a leadership position in a growing social trend. Not easy. Certainly not like doing an ad for Shake 'n Bake (and, truth be told, that's not easy either.) But dealing with a loaded, charged, emotional, and rapidly evolving topic like this -- well, owning that conversation, starting it, being responsible stewards of it, that will be a challenge we relish. Stay tuned.