By Bonnie Feigenbaum, Guest Bloggers | LearningWithoutScars.com
Marketing is all about creating a connection between your company and your customer, a permanent place in their lives for your product and a permanent place in their heart for your brand. In 1971, as a very young child I remember belting “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep them company… “learning the iconic Coca-Cola Hillside singers’ ad by heart. The ad was so popular that Coca Cola had Hilltop Reunion in 1990 and brought back the singers to recreate the commercial.
There are many times I watch marketing campaigns roll out and wondered who was the marketing genius who came up with that! For example, McDonald’s does so many customer connection points right and really raised the bar on creativity in my mind when they launched their pizza line in 1989. The traditional golden arches were angled to make the Zs in pizza to communicate with one picture and one word that this is McDonald’s Pizza, a logo within a logo.
In 2018, I was intrigued by Nike’s decision to use Colin Kaepernick as their brand ambassador. I read the article by the Montreal Gazette columnist Scott Stinson, “Nike stands with a bet that outcry from Trump and his allies won’t cost them business.” Kaepernick choose to “take a knee” using the moment of the U.S. national anthem to protest racial injustice and lost his football career in the process. The US was sharply divided on whether Kaepernick protesting during the anthem was disrespecting the flag. Nike, it would seem, was placing a large bet on the support their target market has for the issue and on Kaepernick’s sacrifice connecting with them. Would the tagline, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” resonate?