“Make it bigger,” the executive screamed from the corner of the room as I desperately sought a sign-off for an ad featuring a major fashion brand. This wasn’t the first time such a situation came up. In fact, every meeting I had always ended up in discussions about the placement and size of the logo – it was as if that one by one inch space, over time, had become the holy grail of branding...
I guess you’ll have heard about the Versace hotel, the Ferrari laptop, and the Apple cell phone. Yet, had I suggested any one of these products to you fifteen years ago, you might have been forgiven for thinking that a few extravagant typos had made it past the editor. Yet today, we’ve become perfectly used to extreme brand extensions like these.
Some time ago, I was flicking through a copy of ‘People’ magazine, when I beheld something on its pages that caused me to just about fall off my chair. An ad promoting a TV series about Elvis, which was to run on CBS, was the source of my surprise.
What do guns, burglar alarms and condoms have in common? Their sales all boomed in 2009, with condom sales jumping 22 per cent over the same period in 2008. But why?
