1. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” (Dr. Seuss)

2. “Man’s feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.” (Jean Paul Richter)

3. “The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.” (Ivy Baker Priest)

4. “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.” (Irving Berlin)

5. “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” (Garrison Keillor)

Stolen with Pride from all over the place.

PS – I hope you’ll excuse the sentimentality…after 10 wonderful years at The Value Engineers, I am moving on to pastures new, making this my last Quotation Quotient. My esteemed colleague Jossie Clayton will be taking over from me as of next Friday. Hasta luego amigos!

A few weeks ago I incorrectly forecast that it would only take me a few days to post the answers to a trend quiz I set. It goes to show you can’t even trust the sceptics. The quiz challenged you to overcome the trend tricksters’ abuse of the nominalist fallacy by correctly identifying the real trends among the false ones simply by reading their names and a short description. Here’s a quick reminder (the answers are at the bottom):

• A) “Sleep is the new sex”: increasingly over-tired and over-stressed, people now think of sleep every 7 seconds and love a good quick one (a nap, that is)
• B) “Back-clash” : a growing surveillance culture, health & safety overload and crap X-Factor music leads to a return of punk values
• C) ”Tech fatales”: they’re out of the closet and driving marketing decisions, this is the emergence of sultry, nerdy chicks who dig gadgets
• D) “Geriatric-olescence”: the rise in third and fourth age rebels who forgot they were too old and start to revive some teenage habits
• E) “Screenagers”: the rise in kids who celebrate more over scoring a Pro-Evo goal than one they score on the school pitch

And the real ones are: A), C) and E). How did you do?

Warburtons have just announced that they are due to launch two separate sub-brands in an assault on the savoury snack category. It makes intutitive sense for Warburtons to extend the brand in this way and will no doubt build a strong base of incremental sales to its core bakery product portfolio.

The typical snacker profile tends to be much younger than the supermarket shopper profile and this is reflected in how Warburtons have crafted the snack propositions and their sub-brand expressions. Whilst the Warburtons parent brand remains as an umbrella endorsement, the two brands ‘ChippidyDooDaa’ and ‘Snackadoodle’ are both prominently used as the primary on pack branding and the tonality of the pack design combined with the flavours appear to have been created to appeal to a young adult (male) audience.

As part of the mix, they have also developed brand characters for each which are highly visible on pack and this looks to be an interesting move given that such characters are usually deployed in this way to appeal to young children (especially so within this category). Warburtons do not explicitly mention ‘kids’ as one of the core target audiences in the launch announcement although I would predict that the characters will indeed prompt interest with tweens and teens. Furthermore, their potential popularity will be strengthend with this ‘aspirational’ audience largely because of the absence of any other kids branding cues.

Despite this potential interest from tweens and teens however, the presence of the characters may work against the success of the snack products in that they may serve to limit interest amongst older adults (who may be existing brand loyalists) or else risk overall confusion as they sit alongside the core Warburtons brand…

1. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” (Dale Carnegie)

2. “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” (Peter T. Mcintyre)

3. “Whatever you say, say it with conviction.” (Mark Twain)

4. “Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.” (Anon)

5. “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” (Dr. Seuss)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

Over the last few years kids marketing has received increasing attention from lobby groups, politicians and the media and as we build towards the general election it is clear that it will become a big hot potato as witnessed by David Cameron’s latest comments. Whilst his statement today is laced with headline-grabbing sound bites, much of what he says is actually well grounded common sense given that his central demand is that kids should not be exposed to brand marketing that causes ‘….inappropriate commercialisation and sexualisation too young.’

This philosophy is implicit in the ‘Constructive Kids Marketing’ proposition of The Value Engineers Kids practice, highlighting the need to responsibly cater to the needs of children whilst recognizing the necessity to earn and keep parental trust.

With kids marketing universally being lambasted by politicians however, there is a distinct danger that brands over-compensate and revert their marketing focus too far towards mums at the exclusion of children (who, it must be remembered, are still the primary consumers of child / family products and services). We highlight this balancing act as a brand pendulum and with our needs convergence model we can demonstrate that the needs of kids and their mums are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

It is also interesting to note that the parental blog responses to such political initiatives largely reflect a growing frustration with ’top down’ directives from government. Parents are growing tired of being preached to about how they should bring up their children and largely take a more balanced view of the situation, willing to accept that ‘Kids should be Kids’ and that they should be allowed to have a bit of fun, albeit it in moderation and as part of a balanced lifestyle.