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Masters of Marketing Kick Off -- Marketer of the Year

The ANA's Masters of Marketing conference kicked off naming Jim Farley of Toyota Grand Marketer of the year. Well deserved and a good choice, but I was pulling for Yellow Tail wines.

The Scion brand has been extremely successful and was a tough marketing challenge to make Toyota appealing to young car buyers.

But, IMHO, Yellow Tail pulled off a bigger coup. First they found a niche of affordable, unpretentious beverage that wine had been unable to penetrate. Leveraging the somewhat rebellious image of Australia to make wine acceptable in that niche and coupling that with packaging that made the brand fun, cool, and understandable. And lest I forget, delivering a product that is quite good quality for the price. That's a really strong marketing package.

Other nominees were:

Comcast -- The Comcastic campaign is OK, but it is just that: a campaign, a tagline. Not the breadth of marketing thinking of Scion and Yellow Tail.

Lunesta -- Ditto above. The glow-in-the-dark butterfly image is certainly a strong mnemonic device in the ad, and the category faced a lot of challenges. But is it more than just an ad?

City of London -- I just didn't get this one....

Walt Disney -- Certainly a good come-back story.

Vans -- probably the next strongest contender, successfully balancing the demands of expanding distribution and demand for their footwear while retaining the image of being hip, niche and cool.

Wal-Mart -- A modest repositioning which for a company of Wal-Mart's size has lots of challenges. A case of some good work that doesn't seemed to have helped their financials.

You Tube -- Was marketing really involved here? A very cool product that clearly struck a chord with a large segment of the population. I don't want to downplay the importance of being in tune with the market, but this seems to me more a case of being first to stumble into a market no one else had found yet, and being as surprised as anyone by its success.

Rachael Ray -- Great line extensions that stay true to her core values and personality. But going from one show to two to four and then rolling out a magazine and some books seems like a pretty well-trod path with little truly innovative in the approach.

Posted by Jim Nail on October 5, 2006 at 11:59 PM | Email this post Permalink

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