There were a few good reasons why Chevrolet and General Motors’ other surviving brands admittedly came late to the social-media table. There was that bankruptcy thing last year, and the worst sales environment in decades. And when GM first began sniffing around online networks a few years ago, it began at the corporate level.

But now Chevrolet is leading GM into a determined new surge in social media, and the brand’s coming-out party is going to be its heavy participation in South by Southwest, one of the nation’s largest and most influential interactive conferences. Chevy will be asking SXSW attendees in Austin, Texas, to help it evaluate three emerging applications.Continue reading...

If one of the biggest obstacles for your brand was that people mistakenly associated your product with banned narcotic substances, wouldn’t you try to distance yourself in any way possible from that relationship?

Hemp milk is increasingly popular with Americans as a nutrition-packed, allergen-free, non-dairy alternative to milk, with total sales that industry executives put at more than $10 million a year, split mostly among the four biggest brands. And they consistently say their biggest challenge is to make consumers understand that the hemp seeds used in the beverages are in no way connected with “rope” or “dope.” The seeds don’t contain THC, the active ingredient in marijuana (it’s in the leaves – of course), and the plant’s stalk is used to make rope.Continue reading...

To put it bluntly, prune juice is a great laxative. Everyone knows it, and that reputation has always posed some branding challenges for Sunsweet Growers – one of the largest bottlers of prune juice. Now the California-based brand wants to capture the growing ranks of boomers who may be increasingly in need of the the product's digestive properties.

Nevertheless, Sunsweet has been working hard on ways to draw younger American consumers to its plum and prune products. A few years ago it launched PlumSmart, a juice made from the plums that become prunes when dried; it is lighter than prune juice and possesses much “lighter” regulative properties. It’s selling at about a $20-million annual clip, according to Sunsweet.Continue reading...

Ever since BMW scored a big hit with its online series of short films a few years ago, automakers have been trying to figure out how to reprise BMW’s success. Now, at the Geneva Auto Show this week, Volvo has unveiled an online-only campaign called “The Naughty Volvo” to promote its new S60 sedan coming to the US this year.

Volvo’s online episodes aren’t that kind of naughty. But for a brand whose DNA has always been about safety and staidness, even after a radical styling overhaul several years ago, these three web films are naughty indeed.Continue reading...

Toyota executives are trying to stop the brand bleeding as they deal with safety recalls and attempt to jump-start sales with a new incentive program and a fresh TV-advertising campaign aimed at shoring up consumers’ overall confidence in the company.

But at the same time, Toyota also has been launching an important new product, a completely made-over, 2011 version of the Sienna minivan. The long-derided minivan segment has been showing some signs of life lately, and Toyota still sees it as an important category for the long term, as its Generation X customers move through parenthood.

The trouble is that, as great as the new vehicle is and as clever as the TV spots are, Sienna has been in danger of getting lost in Toyota’s scrambling attempt to stabilize its brand overall.Continue reading...

Toyota is employing a marketing campaign to mitigate the horrific damage it has sustained over the past several weeks – including an estimated 18,000 “lost” sales in February, billions of dollars in repair costs, and an untold deterioration of its once-sterling reputation.

Even as Toyota executives testified on Capitol Hill this week, the brand was unveiling a whole new approach in its TV advertising and launching the company’s most ambitious incentive program ever.

“We’re back in the sales business,” Bob Carter, general manager of the Toyota division of Toyota Motor Sales USA, declared to reporters on a conference call yesterday.Continue reading...

Over the last decade, Aflac has done an incredible job of gaining recognition for its brand. The supplemental-insurance company now has 93 percent brand awareness compared with only 13 percent when it launched its white “Aflac!”-quacking duck into TV advertisements in early 2000.

But that’s where the company’s branding success stops: All most Americans know bout the brand is that Aflac is represented by the partly annoying, partly endearing wing-flapping Aflac Duck, who’s always seeking attention in its television advertisements.

“We have to take the duck, and we’re beginning to take the Aflac name, in consumers’ minds and explain what we do,” Paul Amos, chief operating officer of Columbus, Ga.-based Aflac, told brandchannel. “We’re going from brand awareness to brand definition."Continue reading...

Amid all the woes of the American newspaper business, it’s heartening to see a venerable newspaper and its associated brand on the rise. That is, unless you’re the New York Times.

That’s because one of the few newspaper brands with any palpable momentum these days is the Times' long-time, Gotham-based rival, The Wall Street Journal. Not only has its circulation actually been rising while the Times’ has been falling, but the Journal’s ownership by Rupert Murdoch has resulted in all sorts of successful brand-extending activities over the last couple of years.

There’s the Journal’s engaging, if relatively minor, foray into sports coverage, for instance. And its burgeoning co-branding efforts with corporate sibling Fox News.Continue reading...

Assuming that a couple of eleventh-hour bids fail to amount to much, General Motors is finally going to shut down the great Hummer experiment in brand rocket-riding.

GM took Hummer to unparalleled heights – but when the zeitgeist turned against the brand a couple of years ago, there was little that an enfeebled and distracted GM could do about it except watch the steaming hulk of its Hummer investment crash to the ground. Turns out that GM couldn’t even figure out how to sell Hummer to the right bidder.

In the latest and probably final chapter of this brand tragedy, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery earlier this week couldn’t get Chinese regulatory approval for its bid to take over the brand carcass of Hummer. There’s lots of talk about how the failure reflects China’s insanely arcane bureaucracy, and about how the Chinese government has been trying to throttle back on auto-industry investments by Chinese companies.

But maybe the Tengzhong folks just got smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much juice left in the old Hummer brand, even in places like the Middle East where it was wildly popular for a time.Continue reading...

Mainstream food brands must be careful when taking their products into the natural foods category – a space occupied by foodies, environmentalists, and brands that live by and defend stringent eco-conscious standards, particularly when it comes to the term “organic.”

Sara Lee is learning that lesson the hard way. The brand recently introduced its new line of bread, EarthGrains, which Sara Lee claims uses flour from wheat that is cultivated using ecologically advantageous means. And this drew the attention of the natural foods watchdogs.

A group called the Cornucopia Institute alleges that Sara Lee is misleading consumers into believing that its EarthGrains Eco-Grain products include flour from organically grown grain – and that, in doing so, Sara Lee is undermining the “organic” categorization that is crucial to the success of truly organic products and organic farmers. It’s an important distinction on many levels, including that the term is a crucial branding asset in that “organic” brands charge higher prices.Continue reading...

Fully free from that old-media dinosaur Time Inc. since December, America Online has been taking a number of steps aimed at re-establishing itself on the cutting edge of online media. Remember 15 years ago when AOL was the online media?

One of AOL’s latest moves has been to hire a number of brand-name journalists, ranging from Jay Marioti, the well known Chicago sports commentator and sometime guest on ESPN, to Gene Marcial, a sage of business journalism who is best known for his long stint at BusinessWeek.

AOL also hired Marty Steinberg, the former supervising editor of the Associated Press, and has named him its executive news editor at AOL News.Continue reading...

Desperate times, bank closings around the world, entire nations teetering on the brink of insolvency, and just general global financial meltdowns leave consumers feeling a bit edgy. That isn’t good for the brands that are helping to make them feel that way – including bailed-out banks like Citigroup.

And so it’s little surprise that Citigroup has stirred up a hornet’s nest of anxiety with a new communiqué to customers that is foreboding, at worst, and confusingly arcane, at best. It’s just not the kind of thing that a major bank brand should be doing as it tries to redeem itself in the eyes of American consumers.

For its part, Citigroup blames the feds.Continue reading...

Tiger Woods arguably took a huge step forward today for brand Tiger with his televised 15-minute apology from a room at the TPC Sawgrass country club in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

But by leaving unclear the timing of his planned return to golf, and in staying away from the topic of his commercial endorsements, the world’s greatest golfer only took baby steps in the interests of the many brand partners that have relied on him, especially the PGA Tour.

“It was one of the most remarkable public apologies ever by a public figure,” gushed George Stephanopoulos on ABC News shortly after Woods read his comments and, for the most part, stared directly into a camera while about 40 family members, friends, associates and journalists sat in front of him. And as one of former President Bill Clinton’s handlers, Stephanopoulous knows something about public apologies.Continue reading...

Over the last couple of years, major energy-drink brands have launched their own smaller, shot-style drinks to try to exploit the growing niche created by the success of 5-Hour Energy.

Now, however, the category is cluttered as Full Throttle, Amp, and other energy-drink stars have leapt into the shots business. While shot sales continue to climb strongly overall, standard energy-drink sales have dramatically leveled off – especially for some of the bigger brands that are trying to work both ends of the market.

Take Full Throttle, for example. Sales of its shot version rose more than 250 percent in supermarkets, drug stores, and mass merchants (except Wal-Mart stores) surveyed by Information Resources Inc. But sales of the mainstay Full Throttle energy drink declined by nearly 3 percent during the same period.Continue reading...

Domino’s has been raising the stakes with a major rebranding effort lately, starting with the reformulation of its pizza ingredients and its counterintuitive marketing campaign based on criticism of the chain’s old recipe.

But maybe just as important in the long run is that Domino’s has moved to the forefront of the future of pizza ordering: online. Last year, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based chain launched an app called Pizza Tracker that allows customers to monitor the progress of their online orders and delivery ETA.Continue reading...