Aaron Hoos

Every mall has a food court and, it seems to me, basically the same options: Usually a couple of Asian food places, an Italian place, a burger-and-fries place, and a sub place. The brands are usually pretty similar from one mall to another (at least in the malls I’ve shopped in).

Turns out, someone has been dubbed “the food court king” for his growth and broad brand lines represented at many food courts across Canada.

Stanley Ma is the founder of MTY, a food services company whose specialty is branding. They have 26 brands (some acquired and some developed in-house) and over 1,700 stores across Canada.

Read the article here: The food court king. Don’t miss the key lessons from this article:

1. Good growth is thoughtful, strategic, and patient.
2. Effective branding is an asset.
3. Successful businesses find synergies among its products and brands.

Learn more about MTY and see what brands they own at MTYgroup.com.

It wasn’t that long ago that people wouldn’t pay more than about $50 for jeans. Now, $300 plus is a distinct possibility. You can’t just blame inflation. There’s been a transition in how we define luxury.

In this article, Dan and Chip Heath talk about how luxury has changed and why products that weren’t luxurious can become luxurious.

The Inevitability Of $300 Socks – Jeans – Luxury – Connoisseur | Fast Company.

If you sell products, read this article. Find out how your products can become high-end luxuries.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post called “5 beer spokesmen and what businesses can learn from them about marketing“. Right after I posted it, I read this excellent article on Stealing Share about beer markets and how they can increase market share.

Increasing Market Share | Beer Market Study

The article walks readers through the process of analyzing beer markets and finding a good opportunity in the market’s “whitespace” for beers to gain market share.

This article, posted in 2008, identifies some whitespace in the beer market in the imported-beer/special-occasion market. (I’ve embedded the image from their blog)

This is exactly the space that Dos Equis is playing in right now. You can tell by their slogan, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.”

As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re all looking to stand out a little from the crowd. One of the ways we can do that is by taking a page from the marketing playbook of beer companies whose marketing campaigns are one of the only ways they can differentiate themselves from all the other beers available.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t need to have a beer-company-sized marketing budget to benefit from the lessons these spokesmen can provide. Nor do you need to introduce a spokesperson in your marketing (although you can, and that’s a clever way to connect with buyers). In this blog post, I’ll look at 5 current (or recent) beer spokesmen and share some lessons that you can apply in your business. (Note: I’m using spokesmen here because the ones I’m referring to are men. And it could be argued that these are technically mascots, not spokesmen — whatever).

A SHIFT IN BEER MARKETING
You don’t see a lot of celebrities and athletes pitching beer on TV commercials anymore. The most famous celebrity beer endorsement is probably the Miller Light “great tasting/less filling” debate between football players Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith. Today, athletes might wear a beer logo on their clothes or equipment, but we don’t see them appearing in commercials.

Instead, beer commercials have generally gone in two directions: (1) Regular people drinking beer and having a good time in some kind of social setting (this is a popular and time-tested marketing method), or, (2) beer spokesmen who portray the face and style and attitude of the beer (but have replaced celebrities and athletes).

MOLSON CANADIAN SPOKESMAN: JOE

Molson is one of the biggest, oldest beer brands in Canada and they continue to rely on national pride as a way to sell their beer. It works. They’ve been using the “I Am Canadian” slogan off and on, and in 2000 they released a commercial in which “Joe”, a typical Canadian, goes on a bit of a rant about who Canadians are and aren’t. This ad worked. It was parodied frequently, it stirred up some national pride, it won a bunch of awards, and I still hear people quoting lines from it more than a decade later.

As a spokesman, Joe appeared just once (that I’m aware of) and reflected the common Canadian stereotype of being a nice guy, if not a bit understated. He wears plaid and portrayed the “everyman” approach.

The ad won numerous awards ad, as you can see from the following Google Trend comparison, Molson Canadian and “I Am Canadian” are still searched frequently even though “I Am Canadian” was no longer used as a slogan after 2005.
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Marketing lessons learned from Joe

• Appeal to pride. Joe appealed to national pride but there are a lot of ways you can use this: Pride of parenthood is a big one among “mompreneurs”, for example.
• The slogan expresses a feeling — not just a benefit or feature — and can outlive your marketing campaign.
• As a representative of your brand, you can be the “everyperson” that your customers will identify with.

BUD LIGHT SPOKESMAN: BUDD LIGHT

Bud Light’s spokesman, in my opinion, failed. It looks like Bud Light was trying to go for an awkward-cool counter-hero (heroic in a nerdy kind of way) but they fell short of success. It took me a long time to discover that his name is, apparently, “Budd Light”. They created someone who was doing things that their customers would want to aspire to do (be the life of the party, pick up women, etc.) but he was also creepy and ubiquitous… NOT someone you want to have around and not someone you want to be like.

A quick (and unscientific) comparison of searches for Bud Light and Budd Light reveal that few people, if any, searched for “Budd Light”. Those spikes in searches for Bud Light are Superbowl-related.

Marketing lessons learned from Budd Light

• Counter-heroes are compelling but they are risky. If you’re going to have some kind of mascot/spokesperson/persona as a counter-hero, they need to do heroic, aspirational things but your audience needs to aspire to be like them.
• If you want to leverage a marketing effort, you need to brand the effort itself, not just your product or service. Bud Light should have worked harder at branding Budd Light.

We’ll see in a moment where this was done very well…

KEYSTONE LIGHT SPOKESMAN: KEITH STONE

Keith Stone is the Budd Light guy done right. There are a lot of similarities (He is a counter-hero who does heroic things but takes himself too seriously). But the differences are what makes the Keystone campaign successful: First, they have made the spokesperson someone that people can relate to — a dumpy, regular guy but with a cool confidence that an audience can aspire to. Second, they have branded the effort, not just their beer. In fact, check out how searches for “Keith Stone” have accelerated past searches for “Keystone beer”

Marketing lessons learned from Keith Stone

• Counter-heroes work when your audience can relate to them AND aspire to be like them.
• The marketing effort is a brand unto itself and it should tie into the primary brand.
• Your marketing needs to match the tone and attitude and style of your audience. Clearly, you can pick out the target audience by watching this marketing.

KOKANEE SPOKESMAN: THE RANGER

Kokanee is another Canadian beer, brewed on the west coast. They ran a series of ads for a while in which the Kokanee Ranger was always faced with a beer-stealing Sasquatch. I confess that I don’t like the beer and I didn’t like the ad. And if you want to know what the Kokanee Ranger was like, just watch the Budd Light commercial again. He was a creepy counter-hero… this time with a mustache. But just when I thought Kokanee’s commercials were started to wear me out, they introduced an audience-participation element that I was happy to see: After running a series of commercials, they had a “LiveOrDie” campaign where viewers voted on whether they should kill off the Kokanee Ranger.

Not surprisingly, viewers voted to kill him off. I don’t imagine that people would vote for him to live, simply because why would you vote for maintaining the status quo when the status quo is boring and tired? And I think people wanted to see if Kokanee would actually kill him off. Apparently they did, although I never saw the commercial.

You can see the spike in “Kokanee Ranger” during the LiveOrDie campaign… but Kokanee hasn’t done much else since.

Marketing lessons learned from The Ranger

• Don’t run the life out of a marketing campaign. Kill it off when it’s at its height.
• Involve your audience in your marketing.
• Once again, we see an example of the marketing effort itself branded (beyond the brand of the company).

DOS EQUIS SPOKESMAN: THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

My favorite spokesman! This is a fantastic marketing campaign because Dos Equis appropriately captures the mystique of a character who is, refreshingly, not an counter-hero but an actual hero. He is not an “everyman” but he is the kind of spokesman that viewers can aspire to be like, even if the whole idea of “the Most Interesting Man In The World” is unattainable. People like being interesting and having a character who lives an interesting life helps viewers to vicariously live his interesting life by drinking his beer.

Dos Equis introduced this campaign way back in 2006, and you’ll note a small spike of searches for the beer at that time but they really got aggressive in 2009 and you’ll see how searches for both Dos Equis and the most interesting man in the world have taken off.

Marketing lessons learned from The Most Interesting Man In The World

• This is another great example of a marketing effort that is, itself, branded above and beyond the brand actually being advertised.
• The spokesman has a cool factor — something none of the other spokesman have — that people are drawn to.
• We see another tagline (“Stay thirsty my friends”) — like the “I Am Canadian” tagline, that can moves beyond the realm of beer. People can apply it elsewhere in their lives, which will remind them of the beer.

Lots of businesses use the flavor-of-the-week approach to marketing. They read about great success that a business has had with articles so they have a bunch of articles written one week. Then they read about press releases another week and they have some press releases written. Then they learn about successful marketers using Twitter so they tweet like mad for a week.

At the end of the three weeks, what do they have? Very little.

A strategic approach is needed to market a business. Before your business blasts out marketing, make sure these market strategy tips are informing your marketing efforts:

MARKETING STRATEGY TIPS

1. Know what you sell and why people buy it. You’ve probably heard the classic reference about businesses selling drills but people buying the ability to make holes. What you are selling might be your product or service but people never buy your product or service. They buy the benefit your product or service provides. If you’re not making sales, it’s often because your product or service doesn’t provide any benefits.
2. Identify your position in the marketplace. What makes you unique? Create a USP that can only be applied to you. (If you can apply your USP to anyone else, it’s not a “U”SP). Get unique. Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy is a great tool for this.
3. Focus on a niche market. If you’re too broad, your message won’t get through. Narrow by industry or by demographic. Sell to fewer people to make more sales. Yeah, it blows your mind.
4. Market your business with a specific number of content types (i.e., 2 articles/week; 5 proposals/week; 1 press releases/week; etc.). Try it for a quarter. Measure the results and adjust. If you want more business, ratchet it up.
5. Develop your message and stick with it. It’s okay to test and modify your message but once you’ve found it, stick to it like a fat kid on fudge.
6. Create short-term and long-term tactics. Stop looking for immediate payback because it doesn’t happen.
7. Just add friggin’ value already. Everything else falls into place after that.
8. Make it really easy for people to understand what you do and to connect with you. Offer a pile of contact methods, intuitive buying processes, and fast response times.
9. Do all of the above at the business level but do it all at the offering level, too, for each product or service you sell.
10. Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Find your own groove.
11. Create a simple marketing system – just 3-5 steps – and hammer it out every single day. Every. Single. Day.
12. Measure your success by the actions you take compared with the sales you make. Stop worrying about the number of followers or subscribers.
13. Once you have a foundation of successful marketing methods underway, test those flavors of the month as you hear about them. Test them consistently for a month and see what the impact is.