Branding 101: Loblaws and Air Canada looking for love in all the wrong places
Advertising, PR Add commentsTwo recent “branding campaigns” (an expression I really don’t like) show what’s wrong with most people’s idea of what a brand is. Both Loblaws and Air Canada placed their faith in all the wrong elements. The result? Air Canada stays grounded and Loblaws tumbles further still.
The Loblaws campaign was an attempt to get us to buy underwear at the same time as we buy bread, milk and ground beef. If it wasn’t for the fact that these extra aisles of not-quite-what-I-came-for stuff add about a kilometer to my grocery shopping, I wouldn’t much care. What I do care about is a flyer advertising the new Loblaws line of underwear with page after page of soft porn masquerading as branding. The flyer raised many eyebrows, including those of an alert columnist with the Ottawa Citizen who questioned (not inappropriately) if the models were even of legal age. Yup, the flyer was that tasteless.
Here’s the crazy part, though: As Loblaws was hard at work building its underwear brand, they were quickly eroding a once proud grocery store brand. See, the folks who buy the most groceries are parents. Do the math, they tend to buy for two, three, four or more people at once. Parents, like me, sometimes read the morning newspaper with their kids. And parents who read the morning newspaper with their kids frankly resent soft porn with too-young models being slid into the newspaper. So good luck selling your underwear Mr. Weston. But beware the parents who frankly expect better from you and the agencies you hire. Better yet, get back to creating, stocking and selling really good grocery items. Seems to me, when your campaigns featured a pudgy, fully-clothed, middle-aged Dave Nichol, the company was profitable. Imagine that.
The folks at Air Canada, meanwhile, are focused on the right brand but still living with the delusion that brands are all about advertising campaigns and paint jobs. So, if the travelers are angry because they’re not getting fed on flights, if they’re stressed about having to weigh their suitcases, if they’re tired of late or overbooked flights, then it must be time for a new paint job on the planes and a new ad campaign. Which may explain why so many of the people I speak with these days are talking about Porter Airlines. This little airline somehow figured out that treating customers like guests, feeding them a little and giving them a nice lounge to wait in (all at no extra cost) might just be what branding is really all about. The experience is positive, people relax and they talk to others. That’s branding. There is no campaign - only people experiencing, remembering and talking.
Bottom line: The successful companies are those that focus first on ensuring a positive and memorable experience. Then they create ad campaigns that get people talking for the right reasons, not because the ads made them angry.
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May 4, 2010 at 11:14 pm
[...] is that the very idea is based on an incomplete notion of branding. As I mentioned in an earlier ...