Skills, Drills, and Teamwork – More Musings from the Basketball Court

As the NBA championship game approaches, we find ourselves musing, once again, on the relationship between branding and roundball.

Like we said last week, teamwork is essential to victory. But so are the fundamentals. So let’s take a brief time-out to draw a few parallels between the basketball fundamentals and building a winning brand: Read more

Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan: Branding Guru

Great brands, like great basketball teams, are built on cooperation and a commitment to mutual success. And both can be shattered by the actions of just one player. In basketball, five individuals work as one unit to drive a 9-inch ball down a 94-foot court and place it through an 18-inch hoop ten feet in the air. Each player has a chance to excel – to be the best at his game – but in the end, what sets winning teams apart is their ability to work together, carefully executing plays that orchestrate fluid exchanges between players to create an opening for one player to make the shot.
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Burgers to Benefits

From Burgers to Benefits

By using features, advantages, and benefits, marketers focus the buyer’s attention on very different things. Features focus on the product by pointing out facts, but facts alone are seldom compelling. Advantages focus the buyer’s attention on the competition, but such comparisons are only useful if the buyer is familiar with the competitor. (And who wants to focus the buyer’s attention on the competition, anyway?) Benefits explain the value of a product or service in terms of its ability to meet the buyer’s needs. They focus the buyer on himself, and self is what matters most, to most people. Yet despite the obvious differences between features, advantages, and benefits, many people still have difficulty sorting them out. One helpful mnemonic is to associate them with three classic television ads…
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Beyond USP - 3 Simple Rules

Beyond USP – 3 Simple Rules for Positioning Products, Services and Even Organizations

On April 17, 1961, New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf released the first full edition of Rosser Reeves’ seminal book Reality in Advertising, in which Reeves detailed the theory of USP. Based on more than two decades of research at his world-renown advertising agency Ted Bates & Company (Reeves had been Bates’ creative partner), Reeves argued that advertising campaigns were far more likely to be successful if they offered the buyer a “Unique Selling Proposition.” Each advertising campaign should center around a specific buyer benefit – one that is unique to that particular brand.
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