Astonish Your Customer(s)

So, you're the brand manager for Christmas

What would you do? 

The holiday still happens on the same date as it has for millennia - December 25th.

All the commercial activity is based on the date because a very big event happened on that date.  

Yet people are changing your brand, including the name/description, the symbols and the language.

In fact, they are keeping all the commercial activity but deleting your brand name from it. Kinda like renaming Independence Day, "BBQ & Firework Day". Seems that in this day and age if your brand offends someone, anyone in fact, it needs to be muted in some way.

What should you do, Mr. Christmas Brand Manager? 

There are countless examples of brands that have won and continue to have tons of success by polarizing the market - brands that take a hard stand for something they believe in and willing to fight for. 

So, Brand Manager, it's your brand and your call --- fight or flight?

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.

America's Team

I hate the Dallas Cowboys, always have, always will. I was born and raised in Philadelphia - I will not budge, ever, and I even lived in Dallas for one year when I worked for J&J. 

Did you know that The Dallas Cowboys are known as America's Team?

Not everybody loves or even likes the team but millions do - for one or more reasons. Maybe it's the winning heritage, the great players, the bold personalities who coached and managed the team, their uniforms. 

The Cowboys' logo, helmet and uniform are classic, basic, uncomplicated and incorporate a Star - one of the more prevalent symbols of American's national identity. 

What could a brand learn from the symbols, color palette and design used by America's Team?

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.  

Can a Milligram be big ?

How big is a milligram? 

How many milligrams would it take to impress you?

There are so many pain relievers and cold relief products that use descriptors like ... regular strength, extra strength, maximum strength, un-calculable strength (ok, I made that one up), and so on. 

All of these products have FDA approved quantities of medicine(s) that are often measured in milligrams.

But hardly any brand, and maybe no brand, prominently touts the amount of milligrams of medicine its product contains.

Numbers can be pretty persuasive, especially when every other brand is using words to describe their product - the same words as ever other brand, mind you.

If you were in search for a pain reliver and you were trying to decide which one had the most power to relieve pain, would you choose maximum, extra or the one with 1,000 miligrams of pain relieving power?

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.  

Symbols - who decides

Would you agree that symbols related to Nazis are some of the most repugnant symbols in our culture? 

Symbols like Hitler, all of his barbarous henchmen, the Hitler salute, the Swastika. 

Tough to imagine anyone, other than a skinhead, proudly and publicly wearing any of these symbols. You'd also imagine that any business sporting one or more of them would reap tremendous, withering scorn.   

The other day I noticed a bunch of Harley Davidson bikers. Several of them were publicly and proudly wearing another symbol associated with Nazis - a motorcycle helmet designed to replicate the helmet worn by the German soldier in WWII. This is not a new development, it has been going on for decades. 

Ask 1,000 people over the age of 40 what that helmet design represents and I bet over 90% would say ... WWII German soldiers or Nazi or Nazi soldier.

Who decided that the helmet is okay but the other (non-human) symbols of Nazi-ism are out of bounds and what criteria was it based on? 

The answer: We decided and the criteria was subjective, following no protocol or logic.

Humans - weird, interesting, confounding, illogical, unpredictable, an ongoing mystery. 

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.