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Brand Winners... And Losers: Wal-Mart and Madoff
Posted by The Marketing Doctor at 3/8/2009 10:25 PM 
Categories: Marketing
Tags: Marketing Dr. Madoff Marketing Doctor Wal-Mart ponzi scheme adpublitzing marketing Walmart Dr. Tantillo Doctor Tantillo value value for money branding John Tantillo ponzi Bernard Madoff
Categories: Marketing
Tags: Marketing Dr. Madoff Marketing Doctor Wal-Mart ponzi scheme adpublitzing marketing Walmart Dr. Tantillo Doctor Tantillo value value for money branding John Tantillo ponzi Bernard Madoff
Brand Winners… | And Losers |
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The Marketing Doctor says:
Winner: Wal-Mart
Loser: Madoff
Folks, a short post this week on true brand opposites. The winner is a brand that has been defining value-for-money for decades —and continues to do so even in this economy. The other is a brand that projected value but delivered loss instead.
The Winner:
Wal-Mart is the clear winner this week. In an economy in which retailers are suffering and retail brands are quickly losing value, Wal-Mart continues to amaze.
According to Forbes, “Wal-Mart scoffs at Recession” (see that article here). Analysts predicted a 2.4% same-store sales increase; the actual number was 5.1%, more than double this prediction.
How is Wal-Mart able to do this? In short, value-for-money.
Over the past few months, as the retail scene has gone kaput, I’ve been blogging about the importance of value-for-money (here and here).
Bottom line: the stronger a retailer’s brand is on the value-for-money side, the better it will do now.
Every retail brand must actively strengthen value-for-money if it wants to prosper or even just survive. (Target recognized this in their marketing campaign at the end of last year. I blogged about it here).
The brands at the biggest disadvantage are those that don’t have much room to offer value-for-money (i.e., so-called luxury brands) or those that refuse to acknowledge the value-oriented needs of today’s consumer (i.e., as Starbucks did until recently).
How does a company let the consumer know that it’s a value-for-money brand? Two basic ways: 1) promote through every channel possible, including adpublitizing and direct mail, but most important 2) be a real marketer and deliver on the promise of your promotion from the top down and the bottom up.
Wal-Mart beats other retailers on price, value and often on the experience of shopping in its stores. It also beats them on the consistency of its value-for-money message. Wal-Mart stands for this, plain and simple.
As a retail brand, or for that matter any kind of brand, once you have this kind of branding momentum —Fuggedaboutit, you are hard to stop.
In my opinion, this most recent sales result is just the beginning of Wal-Mart’s “hard times” success story. Stayed tuned. Politics aside, this is a brand that you really have to admire.
The Loser:
What can I say about Bernard Madoff?
Bernard Madoff is really at the exact opposite end of the branding spectrum from Wal-Mart.
Here is a man who represented quality, excellence, and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps achievement for decades. He was at the center of the financial world. A former chairman of NASDAQ and, until everything fell apart, considered a wise old man of Wall Street and one of the pillars of the financial community. (I’m also sad to say that he started life in my home borough of Queens.)
But as we all know, Madoff was apparently little more than a crook operating a giant Ponzi scheme (“one big lie” as he allegedly told his sons). His external image had little to do with his fundamental brand.
Now it looks like he is going to jail.
The Marketing Doctor hates to see a brand waste itself, and in the case of Madoff you can really ask. “Did it have to play out this way?”
After all, on the surface, the brand had so much going for it. That surface would have attracted investors, whether the returns were a steady (and unbelievable) ten percent, or something more modest.
In a way, Madoff is bringing all of Wall Street with him to jail, and the Wall Street brand is going to have to do a lot of repair before it regains anything like the credibility and power it once had.
Madoff had superficial marketing down. He knew how to promote. He knew how to sell. But what Madoff lacked was real marketing; he did not work to make the internal reality of his brand conform to the image that he was projecting. I have written about Madoff before in a contrarian vein, arguing that as a salesman he knew his Target Market (see that post here). But in reality, he has done damage to the idea of sales —a genuine shame, because sales is an essential part of any honest brand strategy.
The rest of us can learn a lot here. The only way a brand stays sustainable and successful is through real marketing. Anything else is just spinning your wheels. Always promote your whole brand, and use your promotion to keep your brand honest when you threaten to drift on the inside.
And remember, it’s always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.
TODAY'S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY -
Always promote your whole brand, and use your promotion to keep your brand honest when you threaten to drift on the inside.
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