Superbrands 2004 - Brand Autopsy

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Superbrands Jerry Gramaglia: The Sportsman While Bousquette managed to resist the lure of “look at me” dot-com advertising, Jerry Gramaglia built his career on advertising that was hard to ignore, especially with E*Trade. Gramaglia came to E*Trade in June 1998 after spending much of the decade as head of marketing for Hardee’s, Taco Bell and Sprint. At Taco Bell, Gramaglia once set up a one-on-one basketball match between Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon in Las Vegas. He showed a similar flair for big-bang events with E*Trade. In particular, Gramaglia targeted the Super Bowl. E*Trade sponsored the halftime show (pre-Janet Jackson) three years in a row and ran ads during the game featuring a chimp, the E*Trade mascot. The strategy worked in one respect: E*Trade became one of the top online brokers. But after the dot-com bust, the brand’s Super Bowl monkeyshines linked it in some minds to the frothy likes of Pets.com. As online stock trading cratered, E*Trade moved into boring-yet-stable businesses like home mortgages and insurance. In 2003, Pamela Kramer, who succeeded Gramaglia as top marketer at the broker, called for a more button-down approach. “When online was hot, the message was the right message,” she said of Gramaglia’s approach. “We’re trying to match the message to where we are at the time.” Jaime Punishill, principal analyst with Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass., said E*Trade’s big mission now is to appeal to an older investor. “They had wide appeal to emerging investors, but they’re having trouble getting entrenched investors to hand over their money.” Gramaglia, now at ArrowPath Venture Capital, Menlo Park, Calif., said he delivered results, something on which CMOs should be judged. “In my experience there are two types of CMOs: those who know how to make money and those who know how to spend it,” he said. Indeed, Punishill CMOs Gone Wild: Some More Switchers Super CMOs aren’t the only marketers to have made a big splash. The following have held top marketing slots at two big brands. NAME MADE THEIR MARK AT . . . WENT TO . . . Bill McDonald Cammie Dunaway Randy Gier Brad Ball John Cywinski Jody Bilney Becky Saeger Geoffrey Frost Jerri DeVard Michael Sievert S14 JUNE 21, 2004 Boston Market, with a Calvin Klein parody ad for Extreme Carver line telling the waifs to “eat something!” Frito-Lay, where she targeted ads via the Internet instead of TV, which proved better at reaching teens. Pizza Hut, where he introduced Twisted Crust pizza with a $70M TV campaign. McDonald’s, thanks to 1980s’ ads with a moon singing “Mac Tonight,” to the tune of “Mac the Knife.” Burger King, where he beat out McD’s for rights to Disney’s The Lion King. Verizon, at which she oversaw the telco’s early days after it was rechristened. Visa, where she targeted “real NFL fans,” and drew closer ties with the league. Nike, where he shifted the ad focus to products after a backlash over the company’s brash tactics. Citigroup, at which she oversaw the company’s e-Consumer line of business. E*Trade, where he teamed with Kellogg to get its name out to bleary-eyed traders at breakfast. Bank One Yahoo! Cadbury Schweppes Warner Bros. Applebee’s Charles Schwab Charles Schwab Motorola Verizon AT&T Wireless noted that although E*Trade was “certainly sassy” in Gramaglia’s time, the firm was no more profligate than rivals like Charles Schwab and Ameritrade. E*Trade’s ads were more memorable than those rivals, though, complicating efforts to redefine the brand. One ad, which ran in 2000, was voted the No. 4 most memorable Super Bowl ad of all time in a 2001 USA Today/CBS poll. Jim Garrity: The Explainer As Gramaglia knows, marketers from industries like technology and financial services have to simplify their messaging for the layman, and some do it better than others. Jim Garrity is one such standout. Garrity came from the tech side, putting in 24 years at pre-Lou Gerstner IBM before landing at Compaq in 1992. At the time Compaq did little consumer advertising and had a reputation for well-designed, high-priced PCs. But Dell and Gateway were flooding the market with cheaper units, putting price pressure on everyone. Garrity ran advertising for the firm as it cut prices and went full bore for the mass market. The first of many such efforts lampooned the techno-babble that often confronted new PC purchasers. The ad was set in a classroom where adults tried to master the jargon, repeating, “Megabytes, Gigabytes,” and finally, “Wysiwyg.” The wave of Compaq ads during Garrity’s tenure there prominently featured women. Garrity also got Compaq to drastically up its ad budget. The spend more than doubled in his first year at the firm (1993) and continued to climb. Compaq would eventually be bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Though First Union was a smaller company in a different industry, there were some parallels to Compaq where Garrity landed in 1997. First Union was committed to boosting its ad spending and was looking for a simple, coherent message. Early on, Garrity found a way to make the somewhat arcane world of financial services palatable to the masses: by evoking the common denominator, money. His first ads with the firm featured historic and modern currencies to explain First Union’s various services. In 2002, First Union merged with Wachovia and Garrity emerged as the lead marketer at the new company. Ensuing Wachovia ads again sought to simplify, this time using metaphors. One of the first spots showed a couple in formal www.brandweek.com
Superbrands attire rowing a mahogany canoe to shore. “What can a canoe teach us about investment banking?” asks a voiceover. “Whether you get soaked depends on proper balance.” Russ Klein: The Animator Russ Klein, now CMO for Burger King, has a similar talent for reducing messages to a palatable, entertaining form. In the soda world, Klein had found a winning formula: animating cans. In a 1990 spot targeting teens for Diet 7 Up, Klein, then the company’s top marketer, masterminded an ad showing a thermometer surging on a hot day. The viewer next heard the sound of a can opening and the mercury falls. The camera zoomed in to a tighter shot of the thermometer as the mercury transformed into a silver can of Diet 7 Up. Klein tapped a strikingly similar idea seven years later when he was working on the Gatorade account at Foote, Cone & Belding. A 1997 ad introducing Gatorade’s Frost featured sweat-dripping athletes joined by an animated character representing heat who claims he “will defeat” them. At the end of the ad, the character changes to a frosty cool animated icon representing Frost, saying, “I chill to please.” Klein joined 7-Eleven in September 2002, but had left by May 2003. At BK, Klein has taken the bold step of hiring Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a Miami firm known for zany ads for Ikea and BMW’s Mini Cooper. The relationship has so far netted “Submissive Chicken,” an online effort where a man in a chicken suit follows orders, and offbeat TV ads mimicking the British black comedy, The Office. Also airing: spots with “Ugoff,” a faux designer touting pouches for beef—with a kangaroo. Steve Wilhite: The Remodeler In the early ’90s, when Steve Wilhite was the sales manager for Volkswagen of S16 JUNE 21, 2004 “If a company places great emphasis on the short-term, [a marketer] is going to think the same way. It depends on the individual.” Steve Wilhite America, the company was doing so badly that many speculated VW would drop out of the U.S. market. The sea change occurred after William Young resigned as president/CEO in 1993. By the next year, thanks to an aggressive 100,000-mile limited powertrain warranty, new products and price cuts, sales jumped 96%. Taking the reins for VW’s ads, Wilhite picked Arnold, Boston, in 1995, for a youthfocused campaign with the tag, “Drivers wanted” and a minimalist look that would be emulated by, among others, Apple. Wilhite’s brand philosophy was to cultivate “attitudinal vehicles.” At Volkswagen, that was the New Beetle, an update to the iconic model introduced in 1943. The ability of one model to lift up a whole brand was also evident at Apple, which, in a situation uncannily like VW’s, rebounded with the first major update of the Macintosh, the iMac, in 1998. Apple, no doubt impressed by Wilhite’s star treatment of the new VW bug, hired him to fill its top marketing post, which he held until 2001. Wilhite then took the attitudinal vehicle idea to Nissan, which he noted had done a good job launching individual vehicles like the Xterra and the Maxima, but had yet to create much distinction for its overall brand. Wilhite joined Nissan as vp-marketing in 2002. At the time, Nissan was rebounding from a sales slide that almost prompted bankruptcy. One of Wilhite’s most visible changes was to unify global advertising from TBWA\Chiat\Day under the broader theme, “Shift,” which was augmented from market to market. In Europe, for instance, the tagline is “Shift Expectations,” while in the U.S., the theme varies from “Shift Passion” to “Shift Joy.” In all three companies, Wilhite worked for a charismatic leader who had a longterm vision for the brand. At VW, it was Ferdinand Piech; at Apple it was Steve Jobs; and now at Nissan, it’s Carlos Ghosn. Those who have worked with Wilhite say he has the keen ability to translate those visions into strategies for various global units and sales forces. In an interview in April before he left to work in Nissan’s Tokyo office, Wilhite said CMOs are in effect hired guns that reflect the culture of a company. “If a company places great emphasis on the shortterm, [a marketer] is probably going to think the same way,” he said. “But it depends on the individual.” Not surprisingly, super CMOs like Wilhite have a counter-argument to qualms about the free-agent system: “There’s a higher premium placed on performance. In my experience, people don’t move unless they’re unhappy or they get a better offer . . . People may have felt trapped in the past.” Wilhite compared the current situation to a marriage where both partners are aware that they can divorce. Knowing that they’re staying because they choose to stay makes all the difference, he said. Joe Tripodi: The General Joe Tripodi, svp/CMO of Allstate, uses a different metaphor to describe what he does at his current position and at previous marketing jobs at Bank of New York, Seagram and MasterCard. Tripodi likes to draw a distinction between the “supply station” at headquarters and the “front line” where customer reps meet the public. While a cursory glance over Tripodi’s resume might bring up a highlight reel featuring his signing of soccer legend Pele at MasterCard, his ushering of Captain Morgan to TV at Seagram and a $75-100 million increase in marketing spending at Allstate, Tripodi said the real hallmarks of his career have been less noticeable. At MasterCard, he helped roll out the firm’s first global customer service center, which assured that customers who lost their cards on vacation could quickly get an advance. At Allstate, he has introduced new advertising, but he’d rather be known for creating an integrated marketing communications unit. “One Godzilla footprint is better than millions of small ones,” he said. Such a 360-degree approach is not uncommon these days, but Tripodi said he’s always put the brand experience first before advertising. “A general philosophy I’ve carried has been that it needs to be about a lot more than just advertising . . . the best work is going on in the boiler room,” he said. Though the marketers previously mentioned are hardly one-dimensional, like brands, they tend to get pigeonholed. Mention Costello to other marketers, and they’re likely to bring up “The Softer Side of Sears.” Evoke Gramaglia’s name and most think of E*Trade’s wacky Super Bowl ads. Often, marketers are victims of their best successes: Brands hire them to repeat their www.brandweek.com
Page 1 and 2: A SPECIAL REPORT nD Bra s r su u pE
Page 3 and 4: Superbrands EDITOR’S NOTE Heeding
Page 5 and 6: www.brandweek.com JUNE 21, 2004 S7
Page 7: Superbrands decline of the departme
Page 11 and 12: Superbrands BRAND Sales Struggle as
Page 13 and 14: Superbrands BRAND In Tight Market,
Page 15 and 16: Superbrands BRAND ascension to Merc
Page 17 and 18: BEER, WINE and LIQUOR the wall. Mil
Page 19 and 20: Superbrands BRAND Colas Stuck in th
Page 21 and 22: Superbrands BRAND Microsoft Tries t
Page 23 and 24: Superbrands BRAND Amid Changing Dem
Page 25 and 26: Superbrands BRAND A Latte with That
Page 27 and 28: ENTERTAINMENT of the class,” said
Page 29 and 30: Superbrands BRAND Say Goodbye to
Page 31 and 32: Superbrands BRAND Crowded Low-Carb
Page 33 and 34: FOOD The Atkins backlash, meanwhile
Page 35 and 36: Superbrands BRAND Crest Gaining on
Page 37 and 38: Superbrands BRAND In a Rather Dirty
Page 39 and 40: Superbrands BRAND Gas Companies Ble
Page 41 and 42: PHARMACEUTICAL/PRESCRIPTION DRUGS D
Page 43 and 44: RETAIL to open as many as 100 store
Page 45 and 46: TOBACCO Consumption Down Slightly A
Page 47 and 48: TRAVEL Low-Fare Airlines Rule Skies
Page 49 and 50: WORLD WIDE WEB Web Players: Let’s
Page 51 and 52: RANK/ BRAND America’sTop 2000 Bra
Page 53 and 54: BRAND INDEX America’sTop 2000 Bra
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BRAND INDEX America’sTop 2000 Bra
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