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This Nike Thing: They Didn't Have A Choice

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No politics, no emotions. Let’s strip away all the dust-up over the Nike-Colin Kaepernick ad and look at what really happened – and why it had to happen to try to reboot the Nike brand. Nike isn’t on the verge of going out of business, far from it, but the brand is getting stale. As young people, the primary wearer of athletic shoes, get older and stop living in athletic shoes, brands have to reintroduce themselves to a new generation. It’s a cycle. Walk through a high school hallway right now and you’ll see brands like Adidas and Puma riding high like it’s the 70s again. Nike is the “old” brand. Nike needed an Old Spice moment. Old Spice was a dying brand until a few years ago when they delivered a shocking, bizarre ad campaign that made it cool for young men to wear Old Spice. The gamble was that those young men would continue to use Old Spice products for the next 20 years. It was a huge win. I wasn’t in the Nike meeting, but I’ve been in ple...
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What Happened To My Grocery Store?

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I’ll confess, I love going to the grocery store. The sights, the sounds, the samples. Most of all, I love the battle on the shelves. You can see what brands are doing with price and promotion to fight for your attention at the critical point of purchase. I’m a picky shopper, too. I usually shop at one of the better-known brand stores instead of somewhere like Wal-Mart because I like the experience better and that gives me a perception of higher quality. Let’s be honest, experience costs money and you pay for it at the register. What if “experience” was taken off the table? I recently shopped on-line at both Wal-Mart and a more expensive store. The online experience between the two was almost identical and pretty uninspiring. It was all a bit early 2000s, to be honest. For the most part, the two stores offered most of the same brands at similar prices; some things were a little more, others a little less. The pick up process was painless and pleasant....
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Why Doesn't Best Buy Get Any Respect?

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Best Buy should be dead and buried. It was predicted the end was nigh years ago. But Best Buy is still here and doing quite well, thank you. The stock price is rising and they’ve beat analysts’ financial estimates for 22 quarters. In a row. Christmas sales were up 9%. The biggest gain since 2003. Does this mean brick and mortar is back? Kinda. But it really means, human beings are back. No question, Best Buy has re-imagined their stores, updated their offerings and gotten competitive on price. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to know that could never be enough. So they did something very interesting, they moved into your house. Best Buy In-Home Advisors bring the store to you and Geek Squad makes it all work. So instead of ordering all these gadgets, having them show up and being frustrated because you can’t make them work, Best Buy does all that for you. They’ve stretched that from routers and sound systems to refrigerators and TVs. To be hones...
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John Schnatter Isn't Going Down Alone

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John Schnatter screwed up and now he’s gone. The stock price sank and as soon as he resigned it came back up. Good job everyone, whew, glad that’s over. Trouble is, it’s not even the beginning. Huge piles of bodies were left in the wake of the Papa John’s debacle and we may never know the full extent of the damage. In May, the agency Laundry Service was celebrating picking up the Papa John’s account. Later the same month they had the infamous conference call with John Schnatter and now in July they’ve laid off 10% of their workforce including the agency’s founder. Today they’re in a war of worlds with Schnatter and those words include racism, lynching, lawsuit and extortion. If the Laundry Service survives this, it will be a miracle. The body count goes even higher. The first ads from Laundry Service didn’t feature Schnatter like previous ads had. Suddenly, the Papa John’s Chief Marketing Officer who hired Laundry Service was gone, the agency was gone ...
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