Saint Arnold Fermenter – Naming Rights on eBay is Great Public Relations

Some brands enjoy a disproportionate amount of warm fuzzies.  It helps if you sell beer and your product literally makes people happy.  So no surprise that St. Arnold Brewery is one of those brands that enjoys love from their customers. 

Saint Arnold is well known in the Houston area for their brewery tours where everyone gets a free "half cup" of beer.  But if it is a St. Arnolds mug it doesn’t matter how BIG your beer stein, you still get a "half cup."  So basically what you have is repeat offenders showing up with giant mugs (portable barrels with handles?).  Very odd for a first time attendee who of course wonders what the heck is with these people!

Saint Arnolds is now auctioning off the naming rights to their new fermentation tank.  Great public relations and with the bid at $1501 as I write this that is real money.  Here is the eBay listing.

Naming rights to new Saint Arnold fermenter

Become a saint! Win the naming rights to our newest fermenter. It is our first 120 bbl fermenter (that’s 3,720 gallons), twice the volume of our existing tanks. To put that into terms you can understand, that’s 1,653 cases of beer. The tank to be named is prominent to the tasting area. This means people will be thinking of you while enjoying a good beer. Then you can join the previous winner, St. Gonzo, along with our other saints Adrian, Brigid, Columbanus, Dorothy, Edmund, Florian, Gall, Hildegard, Idesbald, Jacobus, Lawrence, Matthew and Nicholas (all are actual saints of brewing). The proceeds will assist us in purchasing even more fermenters so we won’t run you out of beer.

In the disclosure category, Dan Keeney (a client of ours) sent me the link to St. Arnold as I believe they are a client of his.  But hey, if I could afford it, I’d be all over that fermenter.  Of course I’d probably have it signed with someone else’s name for fun, but what the heck?!?

update: And the winning bid was US $4,002.00 by elsambomeister

City Slogans Redux

I posted previously on my objections to several Houston branding campaigns.  And as a member of the Houston Advertising Federation and the American Marketing Association I have the right to be wrong but also to complain comment.

There is also amusement to be taken by the "Atlanta: Every day is an opening day" decision in Atlanta, particularly when you have a power house combination like the Ries’ offering Atlanta alternatives (although Hotlanta does sound silly to me).

Now, not to be outdone (via adjab) the New York Daily News brings us this:

1 boro tag? Fuhgeddaboudit!

<snip> "Brooklyn is too broad and diverse for one slogan," said Markowitz spokeswoman Jocelyn Aframe.

"It became apparent that one slogan wouldn’t be able to express all that Brooklyn has to offer."

Instead, the Brooklyn Tourism Partnership will use several slogans – which range from the classy ("Brooklyn: Bridge to the World") to the wacky ("Brooklyn: The Tenth Planet") and possibly risque ("Do It In Brooklyn") – for specific advertising campaigns.

At least they have a sense of humility acknowledging that sex in Brooklyn is so different we can officially declare it a new planet. Wow.  I mean, just wow.  HotBrooklyn maybe? 

Blue Ocean Strategy: Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus Responding to Cirque du Soleil

Brands are tricky things.  And Blue Ocean Strategy is about not going head to head with your competitors but rather about finding a blue ocean that creates NEW demand.  New territory.  It would be like dragging Edward Bernays along on the Lewis & Clark expedition and watching the fireworks fly.

My first point is the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is a great book for those of us navigating the branding oceans with a new and different product.  It IS tempting to go with the “me to” concept particularly when you consider search engine marketing and keyword counts which by definition ONLY highlight existing market categories.  So if it takes another brand manager X amount of self control to position his product in a new category, I truly believe it takes someone familiar with SEO X + 9999999 to achieve the same position, education and facts not withstanding.

In the book Blue Ocean Strategy they cover numerous relevant business examples (it is a Harvard Press book after all).  One of the examples that may be difficult to apply to our business (don’t worry – they cover other awesome examples that ARE easy to relate) is the case of Cirque de Soleil.  Blue Ocean Strategy advocates creating strategy maps as seen at right.

The idea is to determine what you can eliminate, raise, reduce or create.  So circuses fight over star performers (did you even realize there was such a thing as a star clown?  I find that laughable. (too easy, sorry….)).  So Cirque de Soleil eliminated star performers.  Animals are expensive to care for, travel poorly, require trainers and Peta is stripping in protest anyway – so why not ELIMINATE the animals (high cost / low return = capitalism??)

Finally we see a response from PT Barnum.  OK, not that “See the Egress” crap again, rather a “secret” new show eliminating the three rings and introducing a theme. But I’ll bet buckets of chicken (sorry Pam) to doughnuts (sorry HFPD) that they are not eliminating animals or celebrity performers.  So they have higher choreographical costs, perhaps more creativity, but no significant cost reduction in performers or animals care.  Will they at least return to performing in tents?

All kidding aside (image of goat here), the point of blue sky strategy the four actions framework:

1. Reduce - which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
2. Eliminate – which factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminiated?
3. Raise – which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
4. Create – which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

I am glad to see Barnum and Bailey thinking.  I think they need to explore their strategy a bit more and not rush to create a win/lose battle with cirque, rather they need to find some blue ocean.

Maglite goes LED and I am OK with that Branding Shift

Yes, I confess, I am a huge fan of the Al Ries, Jack Trout, Laura Ries thoughts on marketing, branding, and brand extensions (egad!).  But somehow Maglite introducing LED lights works for me, I am excited about it and I LIKE the Maglite brand as part of the LED world.  I buy it and WILL buy it no problemo.

So first here is the Ries position on Kodak and film versus digital cameras (as a counter point – just being fair and all….)

What about Kodak, they don’t focus on any one product or market?

Kodak bought Sterling drug, including Bayer drugs and pharmaceuticals and in essence became an unfocused company. In the last few years they have gotten out those businesses and focused on imaging products. But there are two types of imaging products, photographic and digital. At the moment, most of their business is photographic. But the future is going to be digital. Kodak is making a serious error by putting their photographic name on their digital products. What they need is a separate name for their digital products.

And here is the Maglite post on MAG-LED Technology.  For some reason I buy the putting the same brand on both.  I don’t view LED lights as a completely new category.  Just a better way to make a darn flash light that doesn’t go dead when you drop it.

We are pleased to report that Mag will soon be adding MAG-LED™ flashlights to its product line.

If these products have been a long time coming, it’s because the MAG-LED™ Technology has taken a long time to develop to the point where it is feasible to make an LED flashlight that meets Mag Instrument’s high standards of quality, durability, style and function.

Now, after years of research & development, testing and refinement, Mag Instrument is committed to introducing, in early 2006, a line of MAG-LED™ flashlights. Like Mag’s incandescent-lamp flashlights, these newest members of the Maglite® flashlight family will have the style, performance, benefits and features that both professionals and consumers have come to expect from a Maglite® flashlight, including the fact that they are built for a lifetime of service. The Maglite® design tradition will be instantly recognizable in them, and they will offer the beam-focusing capability that has always been a feature of Mag® flashlights, AND MORE!

Again, thank you for your interest in Mag Instrument and its products. We look forward to the rollout of the MAG-LED™ flashlights in the near future.

Sincerely,
The Maglite Team

So this is all do-able marketing and branding news.  I don’t view it as a brand extension; we will all ignore the Mag-LED moniker and just call the darn thing a Maglite anyway.  What I *really* want is the green laser LED version for snipe hunting.

U2 as a multimillion-dollar, multinational media company

Great write up on U2 and their marketing operation in the NYT today.  Somehow U2 manages to be a corporation, advertise with Apple which is completely proprietary, and yet have a glow of being open, honest, young and progressive.  That is a challenging brand position to reside in, and hats are off to their management and to the band/brand itself.

Quote from the NYT article on U2.

"We always said it would be pathetic to be good at the music and bad at the business," said Paul McGuinness, the band’s manager since the beginning. And while U2 hasn’t become a Harvard Business School case study (at least not yet) it offers an object lesson in how media can connect with their customers.

Speaking on advertising on the web I frequently get questions like "that is not what Nike does" and I have to keep reminding folks that YOU ARE NOT NIKE!  So while I am in awe of U2 and what they have accomplished in music, in business, and in philanthropy, I would caution new artists to remind themselves YOU ARE NOT U2.  New bands have to be a new brand and build on the latest in advertising evolution.