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1. Pepsi and Coke have to co-exist on the shelf for the long term because if they pull each other down, no one’s going to drink carbonated soft drinks anymore.
2. It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.
3. Every time there is a recession, consumers will typically be more cautious, more conservative, take more time, and make more serious price-performance trade-offs.
4. Younger people obviously are more likely to openly express their political affiliations in terms of gear.
5. You certainly don’t want to market the president as if he or she were a box of breakfast cereal.
6. You have lines of people outside Apple stores waiting for the latest iPhone, which adds to the hype around new product launch. So scarcity has value not just in its own right, but as a basis for free PR — it can become a story on the nightly news.
7. The Starbucks brand has shifted over time from being a specialty brand to being more of a mass brand. There is a gap at the top of the market.
8. When we’re talking about brand, we’re talking about what does the brand stand for. And when we’re talking about approval, we’re talking about whether or not I approve of what the brand stands for.
9. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Consumer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.
10. China is a very brand-intensive society. The reason that brands are so very important is that they are a way to signal social status.
11. I think part of the problem that the Republicans have is that the base has, in many cases, certain litmus test issues on which they are black and white on their thinking.
12. Instant, soluble coffee has long been the unspeakable wasteland of the coffee business. Conventional wisdom would be that no premium brand should go near it. But Howard Schultz’s vision from day one has been to bring quality coffee to the mass market.
13. You have to be willing to totally immerse yourself in China in order to have in-depth exposure to China.
14. Ease of navigation is important in both physical and virtual space.
15. View health as an investment, not an expense.
16. The closer a brand can cozy up to a consumer with a message along the lines of, ‘We’re all in this together,’ the better off a brand will be.
17. If you have market power like Nike, you can set terms that are much tougher because athletes value the endorsement of Nike — it means as much to them as it does to the company.
18. The Trump brand is complicated because it conflates a personal brand with a corporate brand. That means that the Trump persona affects the corporate reputation in a more direct way than, say, Richard Branson’s actions affect Virgin.
19. Understanding place is critical to achieving corporate growth.
20. The president can’t succeed without Congress, and Congress can’t succeed without the president. The image of one depends on the image of another. It is not a zero-sum game.