Nintendo blaming price promotions (http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/nintendo-blames-price-promotions-for-profit-slump/4001363.article) for a profit slump is nonsensical; discounting is only ever a symptom of an underlying business problem rather than a cause. Strong brands and product manufacturers do not need to reduce their prices to shift volumes. Judging by Thursday’s announcement Nintendo’s recent focus has been to desperately cling onto market share, even at the cost of profitability.

The underlying reason for such ailing fortunes is the expansion of their competitive set. The digital revolution that is underway in gaming (as well as most other industries) is fundamentally altering consumer behaviour in a way that is squeezing Nintendo’s devices out of the market – who wants to buy a hand-held console if they can download the games onto their iPhone for a lower price? Portability and convenience used to be Nintendo DS’ great selling point, but carrying one device is infinitely more convenient than carrying two.

This is part of a wider trend in technology that is leading the consolidation of devices into a fewer number of formats, each of which acts as a multi-purpose platform. The result is that Nintendo’s strategic focus going forward should be on software rather than hardware, both from the point of view of the market trends and the core strengths of their brand in the eyes of the consumer.

Many marketers know the phrase, “stolen with pride”. It refers to a ‘tool’ for innovation when you ‘borrow’ an idea from another category or country and transfer it to your market. One of the cases most often quoted is that of Unilever’s Magnum ice cream, which i said to be based on US ice cream brand Dove.

Reading Johan Lehrer’s excellent new book, ‘Imagine : How Creativity works’,  I came across another early example: the birth of Barbie.

The story starts with Ruth Handler watching her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls in the 1950s and noticing that she gave them ‘adult’ roles. At the time, most children’s dolls were representations of babies or young children. Ruth suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, who just happened to be a senior executive at  the Mattel toy company. However, he was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel’s directors.

The seismic change took place during the Handlers’ summer vacation to Switzerland in 1956, when the family began ‘stealing with pride’. Lehrer states that Elliot Handler’s wife: “noticed a strange looking doll in the window of a cigarette shop. The doll was eleven and a half inches tall, had platinum-blond hair, long legs and an ample bosom. Her name was Bild Lilli. Although Ruth didn’t know it at the time – she didn’t speak German – the doll was actually a sex symbol, sold mainly to middle-aged men (- That’s why the doll was only stocked in bars and tobacco stores.) But Handler didn’t get the joke – she took one look at the blond Bild Lili and saw a perfect toy for young girls.”

Ruth bought three of the dolls, giving one to her daughter and taking the other two back to Mattel in the US.  The design of the doll was slightly reworked (with help from engineer Jack Ryan) and given a new name – Barbie – after the Handlers’ daughter, Barbara.

The doll made its début at the American International Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959; now Barbie’s official birthday.

Lehrer goes on to describe how the toy was by no means an overnight success. Early market research showed that some parents were unhappy about the doll’s chest, which had distinct breasts, while Sears initially refused to carry a toy with “feminine curves”. Despite that, some 350,000 Barbie dolls were sold during the first year of production.

Since then the toy has – again according to Lehrer – “ become a cultural icon, beloved by girls, burned by feminists and immortalized by Warhol. Mattel has sold more than a billion Barbies: a salacious German figurine is now one of the most popular toys in the world”

For me, the above isn’t merely a lovely story that demonstrates the power of stealing with pride, but also a timely reminder that not all innovations are immediate successes.

Footnote:

And finally, just in case you’re interested, the Bild Lilli doll was based on a character who appeared in a comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for the newspaper Die Bild-Zeitung. Lilli was a blonde bombshell; a working girl who knew what she wanted and was not above using men to get it. The Lilli doll was first sold in Germany in 1955, and sales continued until Mattel acquired the rights in 1964 and ceased production.

As someone who used to do their main shopping in Tesco and used other supermarkets for top-ups, but who has now switched to another brand for my main shop and relegated Tesco to one of my other top-up options, I feel well placed to give both a professional and personal view on why they have gone off the boil in the UK.

Tesco at their best for me epitomised what a good brand should have – a central core but a multiplicity of initiatives, innovations, ideas and actions; their recognition  that for many people the supermarket is a necessary chore and that anything and everything, however small, you can do to make it better for me, the shopper, is welcome.

For years they did this – improving their stores, improving the car-parks and introducing family and toddler spaces, improving the quality of their products, allowing me to give something back to my local community with “computers for schools”, helping with queueing whenever they could by opening other tills, giving me premium and value options, introducing a loyalty card which gave me back something I could actually spend on what matters to me – every little helped and all those “littles” added up to a lot. It made Tesco leader of the pack and the constant innovation help keep them there

In recent times, however, while they have seemed to have one central core, it is a new core and they appear to have focused on it to the exclusion of just about everything else – to paraphrase Tony Blair it appears the three most important things for Tesco are value, value and value.

Now times are tough are and budgets are tight (even for those of us working in marketing) but Tesco seemed to have forgotten that whilst really important, price isn’t the only factor that affects where we choose to shop; otherwise why hadn’t we been shopping in Aldi or Lidl?

Other supermarket brands had been following Tesco where they led, but now in many ways it is the other supermarket brands that have been taking the lead in initiatives and innovations… whilst still being concerned with price too. For example, Waitrose may have introduced their Essentials range but have also focused on local producers, and have re-gained the lead in recipe suggestions and inspirations using Delia and Heston to good effect.

Tesco has announced its £1 billion plan to re-establish growth, and I wish them well, but from what they have said it sounds a little too much like they are planning to play catch up -not planning to re-establish themselves as leaders.

Many years ago John Stuart, then chairman of Quaker said “If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks and goodwill and you could have all the bricks and mortar – and I would fare better than you.”

The sad news that Aquascutum has called the administrators is perhaps a great example of this in practice. In all the analyses of this great old British brand, whose name combines the Latin words for water and shield,  two factors stand. Firstly that the company still has a factory in Corby, Northamptionshire and secondly that its biggest business problems are often cited as stemming from the decision to sell the rights to the Aquascutum brand in Asia to Hong Kong based YGM trading.

The administrators are looking to sell Aquascutum on, and perhaps the photos from last year of the Duchess of Cambridge wearing one of their scarves will help the cause – with YGM as a possible bidder who could then re-unite the brand globally once again

….but what others say matters too.

If you’re going to create a buzz around new product or service, then it’s obvious that you need to get the message right, otherwise, although you may well “never be alone with a Strand,” the chances are that you might turn out to be the only chap smoking one.  However, you can find yourself at the mercy of what the crowd thinks – and that can be just as damaging.

April 15 marks one hundred years since the Titanic slipped below the waves of the icy north Atlantic, laying the foundations for several generations’ worth of myths and conspiracy theories, to say nothing of a slew of book and films of varying quality and historical veracity.

One of the most persistant of the facts everyone thinks they know about the disaster is that the ship was claimed to be unsinkable, and yet the vessel’s owners, the White Star Line, never said this.  As far as any one can tell, the idea that the ship was some sort of invincible titan of the seas, came from newspaper hubris about her revolutionary construction, meaning that she could survive a holing in any four of five watertight compartments.  Once the disaster happened, the “ship that couldn’t sink” was simply too good a story, chiming as it did with narratives as old as Icarus and Prometheus.

Hubris, which admittedly the White Star Line did little to discourage in the run up to April 1912, soon turned, as it often does, to Nemesis.  A combination of the Titanic’s sinking, and the onset of the Great War, meant that White Star never recovered, and was swallowed up by its great rival Cunard.  Failure to control its ship started the rot, but it wasn’t helped by a failure to control the message.  So, even if what other people are saying about you is better than you could have hoped, does that mean that you should let them?  Or is it more important to be sure that your brand/product message is more realistic?