September 17, 2006
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Does it make sense that Heineken has launched a Premium Light beer brand that directly competes with its own Amstel Light beer brand? No, says Al Ries in his latest column.
August 06, 2006
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Despite the fact that their's is the largest-selling European vehicle brand in the U.S. market, the top brass at BMW appear to be moving away from the slogan that has defined their winning product for 31 years: "The Ultimate Driving Machine." Have they learned nothing from the past marketing mistakes of others?
July 16, 2006
One of the most difficult problems in marketing is balancing the needs of today with the needs of tomorrow. While Diet Coke was obviously successful in the short term, its long-term success is currently in doubt. Furthermore, Diet Coke is a brand whose obvious target is regular Coca-Cola. "The taste of Coke without the calories."
June 11, 2006
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- If you think of your business as a small business and look for ideas and concepts that will help a small business, you'll always remain a small and relatively unprofitable one. Look at lessons we can learn from some small companies that had a very different attitude about themselves.
May 28, 2006
For a number of years now, I've been collecting advertisements that are over the top. In other words, ads that seem to have been created for creativity's sake only. Guess what? Ninety percent of my over-the-top ads are automobile ads. If BMW is the ultimate driving machine, then the auto world is the ultimate creativity machine.
April 17, 2006
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Although a hard sell in the corporate boardroom, the strategy of concentrating the lion's share of the ad budget on a single iconic brand can have a dramatic "halo effect" on a marketer's entire line of products. Look no further than the iPod or Razr to see this phenomenon in action.
March 13, 2006
Commentary by Al Ries
Given that General Motors has spent $32 billion on advertising in the past 10 years but has nevertheless wound up reporting record losses, you have to wonder if the company should continue its advertising.
February 20, 2006
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Columnist Al Ries disagrees with the consulting firm that devised Guatemala's new tourist marketing strategy and slogan. His audacious counter idea is to change the name of the Central American country.
January 23, 2006
Commentary by Rance Crain
General Motors is considering an ad campaign to dispel the widespread notion it might go bankrupt. “As much as I hate to do this, we’re probably going to have to do something proactively on the marketing side just to address that issue,” GM’s marketing boss, Mark LaNeve, told The Wall Street Journal. “How you do that, I don’t know. It’s a tough thing because you really don’t want to go there.”
January 03, 2006
Al Ries Column
Thousands of marketing people literally let opportunities slip through their fingers because they don’t recognize the nuances of the law of leadership. They could learn a lot from Google.
December 05, 2005
Commentary by Al Ries
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- Volkswagen just announced that it was withdrawing its luxury Phaeton model from the U.S. market. No surprise there. In the two years since its introduction in November 2003, VW has sold just 3,715 Phaetons.
November 14, 2005
ATLANTA (AdAge.com) -- After eight months of gestation, a new promotional theme has been unveiled for Atlanta. The city now joins a long list of companies and localities that can boast meaningless and unmemorable slogans.
October 10, 2005
Divergence is the least understood, most powerful force in the universe. In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. It is a force that turns out to be as important to biology as it is to marketing.
September 12, 2005
The Al Ries Column
In 1994, the S series Saturn outsold Honda's Civic by 7%. But by 2004, the Civic outsold the comparable Saturn model by 197%. What happened? Al Ries dissects Saturn's marketing.
