I had never realized just how important the Whopper could be to people. This is a beautiful example of the importance of nostalgia within a brand. If you remove the Whopper, you immediately scan for any fond memories of how the Whopper made you feel. It’s as if a lost lover, who you’d developed a relationship with over a long time suddenly had decided to leave you without even a discussion.

The reality of this commercial is powerful. For me it’s disturbing how emotional people can get over a Whopper. The unfortunate truth is that people are probably more disturbed that they’ve had their time wasted in line to find out that they will have to order a less enormous and fattening burger instead.

If you want to see all of the pieces check out: Whopperfreakout.com

I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my family. We do not own a car. I haven’t owned a car in twelve years now. We also do not have air conditioning. Again, it’s been twelve years since I’ve had this. I take almost all my local trips by bike, and I recycle nearly everything. Why? because it’s so damn convenient to do all of this where I live. I live in San Francisco, of course, where public transportation and parking sucks, thus the bike, recycling here does not need to be separated, thus recycle nearly everything, and air conditioning is climatically built in, thus no A.C. If I didn’t have all of these things being incredibly convenient then I would be a gas guzzling landfill kind of guy.What am I getting at? What’s the point? It’s convenience, stupid. It’s not action, or even seeing Pat Robertson having to associate with Al Sharpton for 30 seconds that is going to make me change into someone who cares about climate change. So, what I’m saying is it breaks my heart a bit to see the “We” campaign spending so much money to be the marking arm of the Greening of America when in the end it’s going to begin to feel disingenuous to people after being bombarded so much with the ads.

Here is a much more powerful model for climate change that requires a much smaller advertising budget: ZipCar. Zipcar is a for profit company that provides cars that are shared by multiple people and can be rented by the hour at reasonable prices. For instance, I use a car 3 hours per week, so instead of owning a car I pay 18 dollars a week to run all of my errands. If I want to take a trip, then I may pay 80 dollars for the weekend. I never pay for gas, insurance, nor do I have to fix the car if it breaks down. I can drive stylish cars that I would normally not have access to, and I can rent the car within seconds. The point is that this service works conveniently and cheaply while keeping hundreds of cars off the road.

What is ZipCar’s most sucessful marketing strategy? Word of Mouth. Make an innovative, cheap, and convenient service that eliminates major headaches in people’s lives and you have an easy way to spread the word quickly on almost no budget.

So back to the question: Can we solve it (the climate crisis, that is)? Yes we can, but probably no with more television commercials.

Shell has created a very strong stable of print ads that has artfully expressed an area of value that the public has often overlooked. That is that shell does not only extract substances from the ground to make energy, but they also have a valuable culture of innovation.

One of their ads in this campaign is ” Say No to No”, a quite clever take on the main rule of innovation (the main rule being do not discount crazy ideas by saying no to those ideas immediately). The ad shows an industrious, determined, and smart college student going crazy expressing his ideas on the chalkboard. The ad is an inspiration in its imagery. The ad also portrays a tone of rebellion in that you should not listen to you doubters and pursue your wild schemes. This, I like.

Two things that I find troublesome, at least from Shell’s point of view, are this:

• The ad shows one industrious kid writing away with his crazy idea. How autocratic is that? There is no doubt that one person can come up with a good idea, but in a culture of innovation it takes a group of people to make an idea shine. One person evokes one mind. It evokes one point of view. One could even say the boy a the board, with his back turned to everyone could care less about anyone else.
• “Say No to No” is a great distiller of a broad and complex concept into a tiny chunk, but it could come back to burn Shell. Say No to No could be interpreted in so many different ways. Wouldn’t it be fun, for instance, if Shell broke major environmental regulations (which, most likely they have) and the headline in the newspaper reads: “Shell says No to No”? It always sucks to have your brand catchphrase bite you in the as like that.

Regardless of your feelings about Shell, they’re not going away, so I appreciate seeing some sort of commitment to promote an innovative culture. It makes me feel just a bit more warm and safe on a visceral level.

I’ve recently seen a fantastically produced advertisement for Louis Vuitton featuring Keith Richards playing guitar at 3a.m. in what I assume is his hotel room. This seems like a straightforward brand strategy to involve rock stars as a promoter of your goods. What I am impressed with, though, is the fine print on this ad. It says: “Keith Richards and Louis Vuitton are proud to support The Climate Project”.

The Climate Project is a Nashville, TN based non-profit organization presumably linked to Al Gore. I am sure this organization has great intentions, but how exactly does Louis Vuitton and Keith Richards support The Climate Project? To me, Louis Vuitton represents luxury, a high level of craftsmanship, excess, and extreme consumption.These are all things that seem to tie Keith Richards to Louis Vuitton making a near perfect associative brand pairing. Why muddle this down with a confusing and not particularly sincere statement about The Climate Project? Could someone shed light on this objective?

I would suggest to Louis Vuitton to make a stronger and more integrated statement, and then show us a bit how they are committed to this statement rather than throwing in what appears to be an arbitrary afterthought.

I read this in the Wall Street Journal

Because the green Starbucks logo is so pervasive, the switch to the retro version is an immediate attention-grabber. It’s just one part of a much broader effort underway at Starbucks, in which the company is stressing a return to its roots and working to reemphasize its brewed-coffee chops. (Click here to read more from today’s Journal.) To much fanfare, Starbucks today unveiled a new blend, Pike Place Roast, meant to have a smoother taste. The change isn’t permanent–the retro logo is being used temporarily. But in the annals of brand identity, switching away from a high-recognition logo–even for a promotion–is an unusual move.

Starbucks has jumped the shark twice recently. That is, they’ve created PR stunts to gain popularity, but in fact, lead to their demise. It seems to be a trend for Starbucks to use PR ploys more and more rather than sticking to their simple brand promise. I think changing the logo is less annoying, however, than closing all Starbucks in the U.S. for three hours recently making people ask the question: " Is life still good without Starbucks?". The answer for me is yes.

I’m not suggesting Starbucks simply should sit still in their business until something better comes along, but I think they should look for real paradigm shifting changes to their business that require much more difficult risks than changing their logo for a couple of weeks.

My advice to Starbucks would be to study cases of businesses where they seemed to have jumped the shark with their brand and succeeded. One that comes to mind is the show Twin Peaks. They jumped the shark in the very first episode  and got more and more boring afterwards, and yet they stretched the series for many season? How? By trying to reveal pieces of the mystery in each episode, they came up with a long puzzle to solve that requires the audience to watch every second. Kind of like Steve Jobs makes PR mysteries at Apple by giving hints at what they’re going to unveil.

Buzzwatch : Grande Logo Switch: Is Starbucks’ New Cup Grabby–or a Grind?