Vince Lombardi (June 11, 1913 – September 3, 1970) was a legendary American football coach. Best known as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers during the 1960s, he led the team to three championships and five wins in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls following the 1966 and 1967 seasons. The National Football League’s Super Bowl trophy is named in his honor.

Vince Lombardi – loved by some, feared by others, respected by all – was first and foremost a winner. The greatest sports coach of his time, perhaps all time, Lombardi was also a thoughtful man with uncommon passion, a great motivator with uncompromising values, and a leader with unprecedented wisdom and authority.

Coaching a  football team and running a business have many things in common. Consider these for example:

1. You need to find the right personnel who can complete the task  assigned to them.
2. You need to have a strategy and plan of attack for your team as a whole.
3. You have to trust your team members to do the job well and consistently. How well you do that is measured by the bottom line – the score board in a game, and profit in business.

Here’s the great coach’s take on some of the essential elements for winning, be it a football game or in the market place: Commitment, Dedication, Leadership, Excellence, and Enthusiasm.

Commitment

Individual commitment to a group effort is what makes a team work. Once a man has made a commitment to a way of life, he puts the greatest strength in the world behind him.

Dedication

Winning in business or in personal life is all about inches; going small distances successfully, then gaining further still.

After the cheers have died down and the stadium is empty, after the headlines have been written and after you are back in the quiet of your room and the championship ring has been placed on the dresser and all the pomp and fanfare has faded, the enduring things that are left are: the dedication to excellence, the dedication to victory, and the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.

Leadership

Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that is the price you will have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. Leadership rests not only upon ability, not only upon capacity; having the capacity to lead is not enough. The leader must be willing to use it. His leadership is then based on truth and character.

Excellence

The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your life.

Enthusiasm

If you are not fired with enthusiasm, then you will be fired with enthusiasm. It’s time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever – the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Follow these principles and you will be on the road to uncommon success.

Image Source: The Grindstone

Rosser Reeves, one of the advertising legends, was the man who pioneered the concept of USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Later he explained the pre-requisites of the USP in detail in his 1961 classic book, Reality in Advertising.

His most typical ad and first application of the USP is probably for Anacin, a headache tablet. The ad was considered annoying by most of the viewers, but it was remarkably successful tripling the product’s sales. It is said that the 59-second commercial made more money in seven years than the movie, Gone With the Wind made in twenty-five years!

Transcript of the famous 1950s era Anacin Television Commercial:

From Doctors’ offices across the country comes survey replies of what doctors recommend for headaches, neuritis and neurology pain.

3 out of 4 doctors recommend the ingredients in Anacin.

Doctors know with most headaches pain mounts up. You feel dull, depressed. Tension puts nerves on edge.

Now, Aspirin has just one pain reliever. Add buffering, you still have just one pain reliever.

Only Anacin has four leading headache remedies. Has four special ingredients to:

Relieve pain fast

Help overcome depression fast

Relax tension fast.

I feel great. Headache’s gone and my stomach isn’t upset.

And no wonder Anacin is like a doctor’s prescription, that is a combination of ingredients – a particular combination of ingredients, that brings fast relief without upsetting stomach.

Remember Aspirin, even with buffering has only one pain reliever.

Take Anacin with ingredients 3 out of 4 doctors recommend.

Anacin for fast, fast, incredibly fast relief!

Study the copy of this most successful commercial carefully and you would observe how the USP of the product was conveyed powerfully and memorably. Now, think of ways and means of conveying your product’s unique position meaningfully.

Click here for viewing the famous 1950s television commercial of Anacin, that created history.

Ad Age Advertising Century: Top 10 Slogans

The top ten advertising slogans of the twentieth century have helped build lasting brands that enjoy immense customer loyalty and franchise even today.

1. De Beers: Diamonds are forever. Frances Gerety, a young copywriter from N.W. Ayer & Son, a prominent U.S. Advertising Agency created this most powerful slogan of the twentieth century in 1947. Today after sixty-six years, it is still going strong and 90 per cent of Americans recognize it.

2. Nike: Just do it. Created twenty-five years ago in 1988, this inspiring slogan while fundamentally simple, is distinct in its meaning. Just Do It means don’t think, don’t ask, don’t talk about it, don’t regret it, Just Do It. The slogan was coined at an ad agency (Wieden+Kennedy) meeting in 1988.

3. Coca-Cola: The pause that refreshes. Although created in 1929, you still hear this popular slogan sometimes today. As a manner of speaking, pause serves us in a number of ways. It not only refreshes, but also makes us look thoughtful, confident and credible. We can take a pause to refresh a presentation, refresh a meeting or a training session, refresh your problem solving process, refresh your plan and indeed refresh everything!

4. Miller Lite: Tastes great, less filling. McCann Erickson, a leading advertising agency created this campaign in 1974. Miller Lite beer is a classic example of repositioning a women’s product to become a man’s product. Before the launch of this product, light beer was considered a women’s drink. This powerful slogan engrained the image of Miller Lite so firmly and deeply that Lite has become a mainstream beer, that having women fight over it does not water down its image.

5. Avis: We Try Harder. In 1962, Paula Green, a copywriter at the famous ad agency, DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach) penned the famous tagline, which has become synonymous with superior quality service. Avis, however dropped this tagline in 2012, after 50 years of living and breathing superior customer service. It’s your space is the new tagline that has just rolled out a few months ago.

6. Maxwell House: Good to the last drop. It is said that Theodore Roosevelt once drank coffee at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson in Nashville, Tennessee, and said it was good to the last drop. The coffee served to him was from the Maxwell House (hotel) in Nashville – a regional brand of coffee, marketed by the Cheek family. The Cheek family sold the brand to General Foods in New York, which in the 1920s made wide use of the slogan. Maxwell Coffee became a national brand name in the 1920s. Maxwell Coffee was the largest selling coffee in the U.S. till 2007, when it was pushed to the second position by Folgers.

7. Wheaties: Breakfast of champions. Wheaties was invented accidentally when a health clinician in Minneapolis who was simmering bran gruel for intestinally distressed patients spilled it onto a hot stove and dried into flakes. Washburn Crosby Company (now General Mills) introduced Wheaties in 1924. The brand adopted the Breakfast of Champions  slogan in 1933 and in 1934 the Wheaties box featured its first athlete, Lou Gehrig.

8. Clairol: Does she…or doesn’t she? Clairol, the breakthrough one-step hair color in the beauty industry from Proctor & Gamble created one of the most influential taglines – Does she or doesn’t she with the help their advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding in 1956. Shirley Polykoff, the only female copywriter at the firm penned the slogan. The slogan countered the stigma of hair color and created a wholesome, sentimental image for Clairol. Within six years of the campaign 70 per cent of all adult women were coloring their hair catapulting Clairol’s sales fourfold. In 1967, Polykoff was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.

9. Morton Salt: When it rains, it pours.  A common expression that you are likely to hear from friends and family when everything seems to be going wrong in your life: When it rains, it pours. It’s that expression that allows us to say something when there’s really nothing to say. This expression, when it rains, it pours, which helps us make sense of a string of bad luck, comes from a very unusual source – from an advertising slogan created for a brand of table salt that is free-flowing. N. W. Ayer & Son, the oldest advertising agency in the United States created this irreplaceable slogan for Morton Salt, When it rains, it pours in 1914 – almost a hundred years ago.

10. Wendy’s: Where’s the beef? The slogan, rather the query first launched and heard in 1984 soon became an all-purpose national catchphrase questioning the substance of an idea, event, or product. The phrase became associated even with the 1984 presidential election. The former Vice President Walter Mondale successfully used the phrase where’s the beef to cast doubt on Senator Gary Hart’s new ideas and changing the debate to specific details, earning him the Democratic nomination during the primaries.

Can you draw inspiration from these winning and memorable tag lines and think strategically, work on developing some powerful and memorable tag lines for your own brands?

David Mackenzie Ogilvy (June 23, 1911 – July 21, 1999) was a legendary advertising executive. He has often been called The Father of Advertising. In 1963, TIME called him, The most sought after wizard in today’s advertising industry. The British government awarded him the CBE (Commander in the Order of British Empire).

His two books: The confessions of an advertising man and Ogilvy on Advertisingare a must read for anyone who wants to know and understand about advertising. Here are some nuggets of his advertising wisdom:

1. If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall be a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people, who are bigger than we are, we shall be a company of giants.
2. I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgement; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunk uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.
3. If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.
4. A good advertisement is one, which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
5. I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you are trying to persuade people to do something or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use everyday, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
6. If you even have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.
7. On the average, five times as many people read the headline as they read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents of your dollar.
8. The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
9. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is Test. If you pretest your product with consumers and pretest your advertising you will do well in the marketplace.
10. The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can live happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.
11. Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.
12. Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
13. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
14. Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
15. There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. What really makes consumers decide whether to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
16. You now have to decide what image you want for your brand? Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace.
17. Be more ambitious. Don’t bunt. Aim out of the park. Compete with the immortals.
18. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating. You can’t bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them into buying it.

Click here to watch The Ad Week Video on Everything you need to know about David Ogilvy in four minutes.

Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple to resurrect the failing company in the mid-1990s, wanted to create a campaign that reflected the philosophy of the campaign to be reinforced and resonated across the company and ensure that the entire Apple team embraces it and owns it.

In many ways, Think Different campaign would mark the beginning of Apple’s resurgence as a technological giant that it is today. The company rose from the brink of bankruptcy to the world’s most valued company today.

The Television campaign first aired on September 28, 1997 followed by print ads, billboards, and posters. In 1998, the television spot won the second annual primetime Emmy Award for the best commercial from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS). The ad also won a Belding, A silver Lion at Cannes. The long-term campaign won an Effie award (American Marketing Association’s Award for Advertising and Marketing Effectiveness) for marketing effectiveness.

The Think Different campaign very effectively reinforced the counter-culture image that Apple had created in the earlier years. The one-minute television commercial featured a black and white footage of seventeen historical personalities including Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Maria Callas, Jim Henson, Joan Baez, Pablo Picasso, Mohammed Ali, and the like.

Here’s a complete transcript of the famous television commercial, which was narrated by actor Richard Dreyfus.

Think Different

Here’s to the crazy ones,

The misfits,

The rebels,

The troublemakers,

The round pegs in the square holes

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules

And they have no respect for the status quo

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,

disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them,

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.

They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?

Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?

Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can

change the world, are the ones who do.

Click here to see one of the greatest television commercials ever, Think Different.

Can you draw some inspiration from this great copy and television commercial and start thinking differently and give it your best shot at changing our world!

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005), the Austrian-born American management consultant contributed to the modern management thought significantly as an educator and author. He was a prolific writer and his writings influenced the way many organizations think and work even today.

Peter Drucker has been recognized as the father of the science of management. Starting with his first book in 1939, The End of Economic Man, Drucker wrote many ground breaking books such as Managing for Results, The Effective Executive, Managing for the Future, The Post-Capitalist Society, and Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management among others.

Peter Drucker had a distinguished career of teaching for over sixty-two years . For more than twenty years he taught at New York University as a Professor of Management and later at Claremont Graduate University in California from 1971 to 2002. He taught his last class in 2002.

Drucker developed one of the country’s first executive MBA programs for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University, which was later named the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in his honor in 1987.

At the beginning of the new millennium he wrote a book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, in which he described the shifting paradigms of management. These are as valid  and relevant today as they were when he wrote, which was about twelve years ago.

The top slogan turns twenty-five!

Ranked as the second most powerful advertising slogan of the twentieth century by the leading advertising magazine in the world, The Advertising Age, Nike Shoe Company’s JUST DO IT slogan is turning twenty-five this year.

One of the core components of Nike’s brand, JUST DO IT is a highly recognized trademark of the shoe company Nike. JUST DO IT slogan was coined in 1988 at an ad agency (Wieden+Kennedy) meeting. Dan Wieden, the cofounder of the agency credits the inspiration for his JUST DO IT Nike Slogan to Gary Gilmore’s last words, just before his execution. Gary Gilmore, the notorious spree-killer, uttered the words ’Let’s do it’, just before the firing squad executed him in Utah in 1977. Eleven years later, the phrase became the inspiration for Nike’s JUST DO IT campaign. Nike tweaked these last words and made it JUST DO IT.

Wieden said that he liked the Do part of the slogan and JUST DO IT might make a good slogan for athletic gear. It became one of the most successful slogans of the century and people started reading things into it much more than sport. The slogan propelled Nike to improve its domestic sport-shoe business from 18 to 43 per cent during the decade starting from 1988 to 1998.

The original JUST DO IT campaign was aimed at Nike’s traditional target, 18 to 40 year old males, as well as younger teens and females. The campaign reached consumers on a humorous level and tapped into the fitness craze, which began at the time. The ads worked to shame people into exercising, and when exercising to wear Nike’s.

The strategy aimed at creating a belief that Nike was a pre-requisite to attain physical fitness. When you think of it, JUST DO IT acts as a very powerful and influential element in positive self-talk and affirmation. The super athletes and super sports-persons of world repute endorsed the Nike brand in the JUST DO IT commercials. The print ads contained some of the most inspiring copy in the advertising history. The campaign became so successful that by owning Nikes you were instantly a member of very desirable group. The ads struck a strong emotional chord in all the aspiring athletes-at-heart in addition to people who have a strong bent of mind to become athletics.

Neville Symington, a prominent British psychoanalyst in his work on therapeutic change in psychoanalysis suggests that a shift from the old routine to a new way of being requires an act of freedom, which means having a mind of one’s own, acting in faith in oneself and one’s good objects, and taking a chance. We must cut the ties to the old way to try something new. Nike’s slogan, JUST DO IT, represents this act of freedom. Jennifer Kunst, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst writes that psychological progress occurs in the face of anxiety and conflict. If we wait for the anxiety and conflict to subside first, we will never do anything. While thinking before acting is necessary and helpful, at some point, you have to JUST DO IT.

The tagline or the ad slogan of Nike, JUST DO IT is twenty-five years old and going strong. Although the tagline is fundamentally simple, it is distinct in its meaning. JUST DO IT means don’t think, don’t ask, don’t talk about it, don’t regret it, JUST DO IT. It appeals to the desire to be free, independent, overcoming all obstacles and social and physical inhibitions and limitations, both to the athlete and athlete at heart!

Click here to watch the first JUST DO IT television commercial.

What is focus?

Steve Jobs described focus the best in his own inimitable style soon after his return to Apple, the company he once CO-founded, at the Apple Developers’ Conference in 1997 during the Q&A session. He said: Focus is about saying No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products, where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

Focus is also about sacrifice. It is tempting for brand managers to leverage as much value as they can from the equities of their brand – something at the expense of why your brand matters in the first place. It is simply not possible to appeal to all customers in all segments however versatile your brand may be. A brand manager, like a good parent sometimes has to just say No. The more you say no, the more focused and valuable the brand becomes.

Saying no is not going to be easy. There will always be tempting, quantifiable opportunities to promote your brand in a number of indications that seems to make eminent sense, but you may intuitively feel and know that doing that will distract the brand from its reason for being. Focus, therefore is precise positioning of your product in the minds of the consumers.

Here is a brief case showing what clear focus can help you achieve.

The Case of Fefol and Livogen Capsules

The multi-hematinic market in India during the 1980s was highly fragmented with over a hundred-and-one brands. The market size was around ₹ 200 million with an annual growth  rate of 1.2 per cent. Most of the brands did not have a clearly defined positioning strategy. A typical list of indications for no-position hematinic looked like this: In anaemias due to diverse causes such as increased requirements of hematinics during pregnancy, lactation, convalescence, due to malnutrition, due to restricted diet in obesity, chronic infectious diseases, tuberculosis, anorexia nervosa,  achlorhydria, post-gastroctomy or gastro-jejunoctomy, chronic haemorrhoids, hookworm infestation , etc.

Only two brands, Fefol (Eskay Labs then and now part of GSK) and Livogen Capsules (Allenburys division of Glaxo) had a clear positioning strategy. Both were positioned as Pregnancy Hematinics. Why? Because, prescription research indicated that pregnancy accounted for about seventy per cent of the hematinic prescriptions and usage.

Fefol stayed with the theme Part of the routine during pregnancy and lactationconsistently for many years. They had put their might behind this position (the mother and baby contests as one unique promotional strategy they had adopted to reinforce their positioning) and reaped a rich harvest of prescriptions.

Close on their heels was Livogen Capsules, which stayed on with its very strong, persuasive and distinctive theme, the only hematinic that provides 11 Blood-building Factors for the Mother and 5 mg of folic acid for the Fetus. This is not to say that other hematinics were not promoted in pregnancy. Pregnancy was one of the several indications in which other hematinics were promoted. Whereas both Fefol, and Livogen Capsules were positioned only in pregnancy and stayed on with that position unwaveringly and unflinchingly!

It had always been a neck-to-neck race to brand leadership for Fefol and Livogen Capsules, with a negligible difference of less than one per cent of market share points. Fefol had a market share of 11.6 per cent and Livogen Capsules about 10.9 per cent in 1992. Later, Merck had acquired Livogen Capsules brand.

What is the secret behind the success of these two brand leaders: Fefol and Livogen Capsules?

Focus, Focus, Focus!

This was the ad that created history. This 60-second commercial ran only once on the Super Bowl in 1984 and achieved the distinction of earning an unprecedented US $150 million in media in value being replayed as the subject of commentary on leading international television channels such as ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC and CBC. It is considered as one of the greatest television commercials ever.

The brief by Steve Jobs for the 1984 ad was simple: He said, I want to stop the world in its tracks. When Jobs introduced this spot at Apple’s annual sales meeting at Hawaii in October 1983, he cast IBM in the role of Big Brother.

The Big Brother was not IBM, but the collective fear of technology, not a corporation either real or imagined.  The Big Brother was  any government dedicated to keeping its populace in the dark.

Apple wanted to democratize technology telling people that the power was now literally in their hands. They knew that computers and communications could change all that.

Here’s the complete script of the commercial:

(In walk the drones)

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information of Purification Directives.

(Apple’s Hammer-thrower enters, pursued by Storm Troopers)

We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where every worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.

Our unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth.

We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.

Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.

(Hammer is thrown on Screen)

We shall Prevail!

(Boom!)

On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.

This 1984 Apple spot introducing the Macintosh computer forever raised the bar for Super Bowl advertising.

The 60-second commercial – created by Chiat/Day and directed by Oscar-nominated director Ridley Scott had cost almost $ 400,000 in production costs. Scott’s vision of George Orwell’s 1984 on which the commercial is based, is strongly reminiscent of his own 1982 film, Blade Runner, from the dark, fog-filled buildings to the beautiful heroine.

The ad also is one of the first that didn’t show the actual product, playing instead on public fears about corporate control through the mysterious Big Brother. Media outlets even posited at the time that the ad’s blue hues were meant to evoke IBM as the villain.

Gary Gusick penned the headline: Why 1984 won’t be like 1984. Lee Clow suggested that the heroine who runs in and smashes the screen with Big Brother haranguing the masses should carry a baseball, but Ridley Scott, the director of the commercial insisted that a hammer would be far better symbol.

The advertising spot actually foreshadowed the fall of the iron curtain proving Ridley Scot’s decision in retrospect.

Can we draw inspiration from this ad and identify the Big Brother, who is stopping us from doing things differently and break free from common practices and start doing something new, different and relevant?

Click here to watch the famous and revolutionary  1984 Ad of Apple!

If a man truly deserves a high destiny, he will attain it. Time spent to thwart him is worse than waste time because it corrodes the spirit of the one who makes the attack. Effect against another rarely succeeds unless that other has already failed. If your adversary is vulnerable, it is permissible perhaps to press home your own superiority. But again, if he deserves and is deserving of his high destiny – you wound yourself when you seek to injure him. There are those men, and those artistries and those business institutions, which never relax their integrity and never lose their title as leaders. They do not lose their leadership because they strive with mind, heart, and soul to continue to deserve it. Wise men do not waste time tilting at such high peaks as these. More especially, wise men do not seek to alienate the millions who have bestowed the leadership. When men in the mass have conferred fame and glory upon a name, it becomes in sense their name, and they guard it jealously. They are, as we say in the colloquialism of commerce ‘sold’ on that name; which means that they believe in it implicitly. And, of all the follies of selling, there is no greater folly than that of seeking to unsell that which is well and truly sold in the minds of men. Unselling fails a thousand times where it once wins a hollow victory. It delays, and distracts, and stirs up the muddiest depths of anger and envy. It poisons the sources of mental and creative activity and diverts them from their honest and healthful purposes. The excitement and enthusiasm it engenders in the salesman who has undertaken the thankless task is a false and artificial emotion, born of unworthy motives. It punishes him whose one desire is to inflict punishment. Meanwhile, the man, or the thing, or the business house, of high destiny goes on unperturbed. If that destiny is deserved it will be attained and maintained.

CADILLAC

Division of General Motors Corporation

This is the copy of a print ad in the mid-1920′s. It is indeed inspiring and educative at once.  It speaks about values and ethics and what is needed to become and what is expected of a leader.

SOURCE:

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