Being from out of town, I always look forward to heading home for the holidays. Of course once I’m there for a few days I look forward to getting back, because let’s be honest, you can only take so much family for so long.

This year was a little different from most in that when I got back, there was a truly stunning box of mail waiting for me at the neighbor’s house. Sure there were a few letters and bills in there, but the vast majority of it was direct mail, catalogs and especially coupons.

Which got me thinking: if couponing is a measure of how tough the economy still is, the recovery must still be some months off. If things were normal, would so many businesses be trying to get my attention in this way? Would they be offering me such deep discounts on their products?

And because my mind just naturally works this way, my next thought was: I hope the economy turns soon, for the sake of all these brands. Because while there’s no question that in tough economic times coupons keep revenues flowing and businesses afloat, they can only be kept up for so long before they begin to serious erode the viability of a brand.

Why? Because coupons teach consumers to view brands through just one very narrow lens: the lens of price. The more a brand relies on coupons, the more consumers come to see that brand as a price competitor and nothing more. And that’s a bad place to be — a place of narrow margins and fierce competition where customer loyalty can’t be earned, only bought…usually with more coupons.

Does that mean there’s no place for coupons during good economic times? Not at all. Product rollouts are a great example of a healthy use of coupons, when customers need to be incented to try something new. There are of course others. The main thing to remember about coupons is that they need to be used judiciously, lest they become an end in themselves, a survival tactic that a business can’t live without.

With the economy starting to turn, now is a great time to start thinking about brand building: focusing customer attention on the value-adding features of products, and on the one-of-a-kind experiences that will keep them coming back for more.

I’ve been thinking about that now-famous line from Michael Jordan this week, since I’ve spent quite a bit of time ruminating on the subject of celebrity endorsements. It was this article from The Independent that got me going. It’s a piece on the subject of “disgrace insurance”, a product created for advertisers for those times — and they seem to be increasingly frequent — when celebrity endorsers fail to live up to expectations.

With it, advertisers can recoup some of the losses they incur when they’re forced to scrap an expensive ad campaign. Of course there’s no amount of money that can make up for the lost brand equity, but that’s a subject for another day. For now I thought it might be fun to run down a list of some of the more memorable celebrity endorsement disasters.

Tiger Woods — of course — whose string of infidelities cost him the backing of AT&T, Accenture and Gatorade.

James Garner, who spoke on behalf of the Beef Council until he underwent a very well-publicized triple bypass.

Eric Clapton’s music and image were used in a string of Michelob ads, until he admitted in Rolling Stone that he was an alcoholic.

Michael Vick — can’t forget him — who was accused of organizing an interstate dog fighting ring, lost Nike, AirTran Airways, Coca-Cola, and Kraft.

Madonna had a multi-million dollar endorsement deal from Pepsi until the video for Like a Prayer came out and outraged Catholics the world over.

Sharon Stone pontificated that a deadly earthquake in China was caused by bad karma that resulted from the oppression of Tibet. Bye-bye Christian Dior.

Bill Maher called Americans cowards after the US launched a cruise missile attack in the aftermath of 9/11. Sears and Federal Express were not amused, and pulled their advertising from Politically Incorrect.

Kate Moss was dropped by Chanel and Burberry after she was caught on film snorting cocaine (Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci kept her).

Michael Phelps, on a similar note, lost the sponsorship of Kellogg’s after he was photographed smoking pot.

How come Snap, Crackle and Pop never seem to get into that kind of trouble? Oh, I remember: they’re imaginary. Anyway, based on all that, you might assume that celebrities — living in their fame cocoons — don’t consider the impact their day-to-day actions have on the companies who support their lavish lifestyles. You’d be largely correct in that assumption.

However there are always one or two celebrities who manage to grasp that their actions have an impact on their financial futures, and by extension the futures of the companies that underwrite them. Michael Jordan was/is such a person, which is why, when asked why he didn’t publicly endorse the Democratic candidate running against Jesse Helms in North Carolina, he said…

Domino’s “Oh Yes We Did” campaign, which consisted of admitting their old recipe pizzas weren’t any good and introducing new ones, has received both praise and criticism.

Only time will tell if the campaign was a success and destined for case-study greatness, but at nearly a year old, it’s still making quite a buzz.

Most companies believe they know what their customers are saying about their product.  But I ‘m afraid, more often than not, they only think they know.  In fact, I believe that until the unvarnished truth of the pre-campaign research was presented to the Domino’s top brass, they were still toeing the company line and espousing the tastiness of their old recipe.  Once confronted with the truth, they were faced with a choice: continue the same tactics and expect different results, or do something totally different and expect radically different results.

The campaign they were about to launch caused Domino’s marketers plenty of nervousness and unease, not to mention a fair amount of oh-my-gosh-what-if-this-doesn’t-work moments.  Speaking at Ad Age’s 2010 IDEA Conference, Russell Weiner, Domino’s chief marketing officer, said “you can’t imagine the sleepless nights and Alka-Selzer consumed when Crispin showed us a storyboard. You’re a 50-year-old pizza company with 5,000 stores out there, these guys first tell you to go on air and say your pizza sucks, and then go out there and show how crappy it’s made,” he said.

It was a gamble that, so far, seems to be paying off — Domino’s same-store sales are up consistently this year, including a  third-quarter bump of 11.7%.   I’d bet Domino’s decision makers are resting a little easier these days as they gear up for the next big campaign.  But in the wake of Domino’s success with this marketing strategy, other companies will try to mimic their success.

The key to making a radical authenticity strategy work for your company is to tell a compelling, true story that resonates with your customers.  Easy, right?  Actually, no. Smart marketing isn’t created in a vacuum.  It has to be informed by, and infused with, truth from your customers.  These days, it’s easier than ever to hear what your customers are saying, if you take the time to really listen.  Knowing where, when and how to listen is the challenge for today’s marketers.  We’re up to that task….are you?

Last week was an exciting moment for the City of Beverly Hills, California: they released a line of perfumes. From what I understand, Beverly Hills is the first municipality to ever try to market a line of scents. Aside from jokes about what the perfume smells like (Rolls Royce exhaust?), the move is eliciting plenty of raised eyebrows from cosmetic marketers and real estate agents alike.

As well it should. Beverly Hills perfume has got to be one of the weirdest brand extensions since the Smith & Wesson mountain bike.. People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In reality it’s paved with Cheetos Lip Balm, Ben-Gay aspirin, Bic underwear and Hooters Master Cards. At least for brand managers.

What is it that motivates otherwise intelligent people to commit these sorts of crimes against their brands? The money, obviously. Products like Gerber Singles adult meals-in-a-jar arise from misguided brand managers’ attempts to make a fast buck off of a name that consumers know and trust.

What these folks invariably discover is that brands aren’t elastic. They can be grown, but they can’t be stretched. Colgate learned that when they tried to extend their name into bath soaps and frozen entrées. Not only did consumers not buy the new products, sales of their existing toothpaste products actually went down.

Why? Simply because of a basic rule of commerce: consumers like to buy products from specialists, not generalists. People who want sleek, sexy cars buy Porsches because Porsche is a sleek, sexy car specialist. Or at least they were until they came out with the Cayenne, a pudgy SUV. Here’s a question: does seeing a Cayenne parked in front of a dry cleaner’s or a day care center make you want to own a 911 more or less?

See what I mean?

This is not to say that the Cayenne isn’t making money, but its success is coming at great cost to the broader Porsche brand. For one of the iron laws of branding is that brand extensions, while they may be profitable in the short-term, always end up damaging the master brand in the long-term, causing an overall loss of market share. Companies from Colgate to Coke, IBM to Microsoft, BMW to GM have all learned that lesson — and learned it the hard way. The more you try to be all things to all people, the less those people want to have anything to do with you.

So why then are we constantly turning around to discover more new products like Dunkin’ Donuts deep dish pizza in stores? Because of short-term pressures to realize profits. That’s not an illegitimate reason, however every time it’s done another big piece of brand equity goes out the window. Is long-term loss of viability worth the brief uptick in profits? That’s the decision brand managers need to weigh before they bring another product like NASCAR romance novels to market.

The best brand stewards know that a great and enduring brand requires just three things: focus, focus, focus.

Consistency is great, not only for consistency’s sake – too few companies truly understand the benefits of being consistent and the power that it has. Consumers sub-consciously rely on consistency for everything from easy recognition of their desired products on the shelf to maintaining their loyalty to a product.  Newsweek released a slide show recently of some product lines that have made changes to their brands in one way or another over the last few years. Their observations help support my point.

Take Tropicana for example… they launched a new package design that lasted only 6 weeks on the store shelves. People didn’t recognize the brand anymore and sales subsequently plummeted. Now was that just because of a lack of recognition, or was there possibly more behind it? Did people also think the product itself had changed since the packaging had? Tropicana did a fair amount of testing of this change before launching it…all to revert back to the uber-recognizable orange with the straw in it. Guess you can’t argue with sales, right?

Now how about the recent Gap debacle? Gap changed their logo from the probably 20 year old all cap, serif GAP to a sanserif  typeface. I don’t see the logo change as enacting any alteration to the quality of their brand…however, if I was not already familiar with the brand, I may assume, based on this new logo, that they are a cheap brand with little sophistication and a lack of quality. The “new” logo (which has already been done away with) just screamed outdated and out of touch, in my opinion.

Let’s also consider the famous Coke switch. Loyal users were up in arms when Coke changed its formula all those years ago… and it’s still talked about to this day. It was a huge mistake for them. They didn’t seem to put any merit in the consistency of their product being their primary money maker. What did they think it was people loved about Coke? The color of the can?

I love consistency when it is done purposely and with conviction. I love when businesses understand that their look is just as much a mark of their brand as the quality of their product. Consistency isn’t just a mark of being lazy and not wanting to move your brand forward, it is a carefully considered direction that I think more brands need to embrace and understand.

Certainly in a parallel universe where the highest quality and/or best tasting products always win out, the findings would be worth worrying about. In that universe, our perfectly rational duplicates drive Tuckers, watch movies on Betamax and eat McDonald’s Arch Deluxe Meals. Here in our own universe, however, people are irrational. Brands rule and leading brand managers know that there are far worse things for your business than losing to a private label peanut butter in a blind taste test.

Not that product quality is totally irrelevant, mind you. It’s that reasonable quality and a strong brand will beat a top-quality product with a weak brand any day of the week. Products that make it into the public’s imagination first, which have the best story to tell and can generate and sustain the most consumer excitement will always win in the end.

That’s a truth that’s well understood among savvy marketers. Which makes me wonder why it is that this article should appear, of all places, in Adweek. Articles touting the would-you-believe-it findings churned out by Consumer Reports are everyday fare in major daily newspapers and on the evening news. But Adweek?

I suppose the reason has to do with that old tried-and-truism, that it’s the simplest lessons that are the hardest to learn. Consumers rarely make rational choices. The assumption that they usually do is a big reason why Harvard and Yale MBA’s are forever focus-grouping their way to products like New Coke.

The bitter truth is that in the world of commerce, reality is not reality. Perception is reality. Marketers who truly understand that, who “get” that brand development is every bit as important as product development, are the ones who will be the best positioned to compete in the 21^st Century economy.

America’s Choice, Food Lion and Publix Premium may make great products, but it’s going to take a lot more than a taste test or two if they want to catch up with Oscar Meyer, Campbell’s and Tropicana. The owners of those Cadillac names understand that, and unless they make some sort of catastrophic mistake with their brands, none of them ever will.

Among the rest of the survey population, that number is still relatively high at 88%.  Yet seventy percent of survey respondents believe companies aren’t doing a good job of speaking to them. That translates to huge missed opportunities for companies to grow their customer base or deepen their connection with existing customers.

Right now, McDonald’s is giving a portion of each Happy Meal sale to support its Ronald McDonald House Charities®.  The Pepsi Refresh Project continues to receive 1,000 new ideas each month for it’s “vote for your favorite charity” campaign.  But these are short-term strategies and, frankly, they’re starting to feel a little gimmicky to me. Will these campaigns convert participants into long-term McDonald’s customers or Pepsi drinkers? I don’t think so.

What the consumer really want is for companies to make long-term commitments to causes she supports. A full 83% of consumers indicated they want more of what they buy to benefit a cause.  When a woman can continue her normal buying habits and know that a portion of her spending will go to support a cause she cares about, companies have the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with that consumer.

Consumers want the companies they buy from to be good corporate citizens.  If there’s an alternative product or service available — one that’s aligned with their values and giving — a whopping 80% will switch without any remorse.

Consumers want to be heard, included, and to believe that their buying power makes a difference.  Companies must do more to communicate with their customers about the causes they support.  Failure to do so may mean driving them to your competitors.

In particular, I found these statistics to be particularly interesting:

• 95% of Moms and 94% of Millennials approve of cause marketing.
• 73% of Moms and Millennials are willing to try a brand, even one they’ve never heard of before, because it supports a cause important to them.
• 88% of Moms and 84% of Millennials say cause branding influences what they buy and where they shop.
• 74% of Moms and 79% of Millennials reported that cause marketing is important when deciding which stocks or mutual funds to invest in.

Interesting because the attitudes expressed in the results might prove beneficial to non-profit organizations.  If 88% of survey respondents approve of cause marketing, and 81% want more opportunities to buy products and services to benefit a cause, then it seems that non-profits by their very nature would have an edge in the minds of consumers, especially Moms and Millennials.

Here are some points for non-profits to remember about Moms and Millennials:

Moms are da bombs.  I’m not just saying that because I am one. No, I’m saying that because Marketing to Moms Coalition reports that Moms control 85% of household spending. No big surprise there, let’s not allow that to fall off our radar.
According to a study by BabyCenter, LLC, the number of moms who use social media regularly has jumped 462% since 2006.  More and more moms are going online to find out information about products and services they’re interested in.
While Millennials may not have much disposable income, they dominate all other social media user groups.  Their influence shouldn’t be underestimated. They go online for practically everything.

Non-profits shouldn’t overlook Moms and Millennials but instead enlist them.  Do you know how to engage consumers using social media? We do.

Nope, not a thing. And that’s exactly the way Steve Jobs wants it. Not a lot of people are talking about the the iPhone 4 antenna problem these days. You can chalk that up either to the fickle 24-hour news cycle or to some effective PR. I’m inclined to credit the latter, though Apple’s crisis strategy wasn’t what I’d either hoped or expected. But then I guess they “think different”, as their ads once said.

By now everyone knows the story. The iPhone 4 was launched in June, and within a week YouTube videos were popping up, demonstrating the phone antenna’s tendency to drop signal when held at a specific angle. The company’s response was twofold. First, it convened a press conference with Steve Jobs himself, a move that showed the world that Apple took the problem seriously.

But that wasn’t the unexpected part. That came when Jobs took the podium and offered his defense. It was, in a nutshell: everybody does it. He then demonstrated how comparable phones from other tech firms also drop signal when held at the same angle. The industry howled in outrage, then issued a series of non-denial denials which indicated that Jobs was exactly right.

Yet here’s the problem with the everybody-does-it line of defense: it isn’t the stand-up guy thing to do. Had Jobs been operating under more thoughtful crisis strategy, he would have taken the podium, issued an apology, then told the world the issue would be resolved immediately at no cost to Apple’s customers. I have no doubt that smirking Nokia executives expected that very thing when they tuned in to watch (hence the howling).

All of which begs the question, at least for those of us who consider themselves members of the ‘high road’ school of media strategy, as to whether the high road is always the right road. I believe it is, and that when it comes to managing a brand, honesty and honor always serve a brand better than dishonesty and/or dishonor.

Jobs told the truth, more than that a global truth about the industry, so he’s not guilty of dishonesty. However he is guilty of acting dishonorably. Quaint as those words may sound these days, the truth is that while honor may be out of vogue on a cultural level, consumers nevertheless expect their favorite brands not only to provide top-quality products, but to conduct themselves in a way that is honorable. Apple consumers expect, in a word, more.

The result is that while Apple is taking its iPhone 4 profits to the bank, it is also making a substantial withdrawal from its brand equity account, a reserve that in the long run will prove a whole lot harder to re-fill, now that Jobs has demoted Apple to the level of everybody other competitor in the category.

This particular controversy is now over. But there will always be others.  And the sharks are even now circling.

There’s nothing particularly compelling or unique about the Ford Explorer. What’s really impressive is the way Ford chose to launch the redesign of one of their most popular vehicles…on Facebook.

From the well-scheduled events of the launch (videos and a photo gallery timed to go live throughout the day) to the well-designed topographical map background (shout out to the designers and artists who worked on the page) to the well-executed Facebook, Twitter, and online ad campaigns, Ford’s decision to part with tradition by not unveiling the new Explorer at an auto show and instead launch it on Facebook is surely a resounding acknowledgement that there has been a paradigm shift.

Required driving shots, expected beauty shots…yeah, yeah, yeah. And then…a monkey. Of course! Why wouldn’t there be a monkey?

Perhaps I’ve missed some trend toward monkeys in advertising, or maybe there’s a huge subtext I can’t fathom. Granted, it’s slightly entertaining, even funny, to use a monkey in general.

What I am having trouble with is how that additional bit in the commercial will lead to incremental sales. Does it really engage people and get them out to the event? Perhaps if the spot committed to a visit with the monkey at the event, it would make more sense. Seems like this might be a case of creatives being shocking for the sake of awards rather than building sales for their client.