Playing to the Stereotype: Four Insurance Branding Lessons from the New Jersey Governor
April 10, 2012 by Charles Wasilewski · 5 Comments
Take These Four Insurance Branding Lessons Home With You
From modest beginnings in New Jersey, a larger-than-life politician has emerged onto the national stage: Governor Chris Christie. And he’s brought along branding experiences that apply to insurance.
Christie was criticized by opponents as an underqualified political appointee and a legal lightweight when he was nominated by President George W. Bush to the post of U.S. Attorney for the State of New Jersey. During Christie’s tenure from 2002 through 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office won convictions or pleas of guilty from 130 public officials (state, county and local), both Democratic and Republican — without losing a single case.
Tebow This: Does Your Brand’s Muscle Memory Need Changing?
January 10, 2012 by Charles Wasilewski · 2 Comments
Tim Tebow, Denver Broncos starting quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner -- and rebranding lesson
Tim Tebow was the biggest brand in college football just three years ago. During a career at the University of Florida from 2006-9, he set records in career passing efficiency and total rushing touchdowns in the Southeastern Conference (considered by many football fans to be the most competitive conference in the country).
Tebow’s teams sported a 48-7 record during his four-year career and won two national championships. He won the Heisman Trophy, emblematic of college football’s best player, in 2007, when he became the first college football player to both rush and pass for 20 or more touchdowns in a single season.
Now, Tebow is among the biggest brands in professional football, in just his second National Football League season. His number 15 Denver Broncos jersey is the largest-selling among all NFL players. Last weekend, he threw a game-winning touchdown pass in the first play of overtime to capture Denver’s first playoff victory in six years — spawning a record 9,420 tweets per second, according to Twitter.
But the two Tim Tebows are totally different brands, even though both have been successful.
So, what would one of the most-successful college quarterbacks of all time even need or want to change? Read more
It’s Christmas Eve. Let’s Go to Grandmother’s House (on Facebook)!
December 20, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
“Over the river and through the woods,
To Grandmother’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,
Through (the) white and drifted snow!”
– traditional children’s song
Those who don’t get to Grandmother’s house by horse and sleigh (or airplane, bus, car, or train) are now traveling there via Facebook. They’re going to all kinds of places on the social networking site.
Facebook.com was the most-visited web site on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009, and on New Year’s Day 2010, according to data reported by Experian Hitwise. “Facebook” was also Read more
Gift Card In the Big Store
October 11, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
“It’s like a gift card in a big store.”
Recently a client made that statement at the conclusion of a discussion about a new branding initiative for his insurance firm. The client was delighted about having a range of choices in the creative materials we had developed. But he also was a bit torn and forlorn about having to only choose one approach from more than one choice.
Ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare once said.
With a marketing budget, or any budget for that matter, insurance brands need to make choices. Read more
True Name Grit
May 31, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
With the summer kickoff of movie season this past Memorial Day weekend, I thought back to a recent movie I enjoyed. In the 2011 remake of Western film True Grit, 14-year-old heroine Mattie Ross hires rough-hewn U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt down and bring to justice Tom Chaney, her father’s killer. Cogburn is an “aging, one-eyed, overweight, trigger-happy, hard-drinking man.” But to Ross, he’s the right man to ride out onto dangerous ground and find the elusive Chaney, who has a head start fleeing across the river from Arkansas into Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma).
Rooster has “grit” (Ross’s word), even if he’s time-beaten, weather-worn and (in actor Jeff Bridges’s take) has a muffled, mouth-chewing way of speech.
The girl heroine insists on coming along, so Rooster and Ross ride out on the range, encountering dead bodies, outlaws, rattlesnakes and other hazards. [Plot spoiler: Rooster tracks and kills his quarry (with help from a Matt Damon-acted Texas Ranger who has his own reasons for hunting down the villianous Tom Chaney). Mattie Ross gets her justice.]
I’m not a movie buff nor a Western fan, but this well-done movie led me to reflect on naming and insurance brand tagline projects we’ve been working on here at Aartrijk: Read more
Mobile: “Unlike Anything … Ever Seen”
April 11, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 2 Comments
At Google Inc.’s Think Mobile event in New York, industry guru Mary Meeker said that the pace and force of mobile growth is unlike anything she has ever seen.” — Mobile Marketer, February 11, 2011
Mary Meeker, the leading trumpeter of the Internet in its early days and now a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, is now saying mobile is growing faster than the Web did.
She’s got her evidence … Read more
Call for Action
March 15, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
“Call for action! GReenwood 7-5-3-1-2!”
I still remember the radio ad jingle. Growing up in central New Jersey and raised on AM radio, I repeatedly heard this commercial for a Philadelphia newspaper, which featured a consumer hotline dubbed “Call For Action!” (Using a word like “GReenwood” in the phone number followed by the numbers was a trick for making telephone numbers memorable.)
In those days of the 1960s and 1970s, lemon laws were not yet on the books, malls were just being invented, and the “vigilante consumer” (more on that term later) was a slumbering giant. So the local newspaper had a consumer action helpline where people could call if they had a problem with a consumer product or service. The Star-Ledger, a newspaper in New Jersey, recently reintroduced a similar column. Read more
E-Mail “Grew A Facebook”
February 15, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
Facebook passed 500 million users in 2010.
E-mail added 500 million users in 2010.
An article in Econsultancy.com’s blog reported:
“According to Royal Pingdom, 107 trillion email messages were sent in total last year. That works out to 294bn per day. There were nearly 2bn email users and 3bn email accounts, and the ranks of the emailing grew by nearly 500m. In other words, last year, email grew a Facebook last year.”
Royal Pingdom, a monitoring company, recently posted numbers about e-mail, social media, Web sites, etc. Read more
Man Loves His Work
January 18, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · Leave a Comment
In the village of Liberty Corner, N.J. stands a car repair shop on the downtown corner. As I left my office on a recent cold winter evening, I drove past the shop and saw a car up on the lift and the mechanic (one of the owners, either Robert or Michael) underneath. Through the glass garage doors and under the bright florescent lights of the garage it was clear to see the man’s body language: Determined, intent, obviously wanting to solve whatever problem the car’s owner had brought to his attention.
The scene made me grateful for my own work, which usually involves sitting at a desk in front of a computer, writing about insurance in articles, news releases, ads, social networking posts, and the like.
Two days later I got an update e-mail from LinkedIn, the business networking site. It said: “Charles, 65 of your connections changed jobs in 2010.” The e-mail had thumbnail photos of all of them and an occasional question (“Where’s Scott now?). Read more
Behave Yourself
May 10, 2011 by Charles Wasilewski · 1 Comment
But this resilient sector of the insurance industry continues to sprout new buds, even fully blooming new meadows of information:
This whole reinvigoration of the insurance trade press has roots in editors such as Sam Friedman (now-former editor of National Underwriter Property & Casualty) reinventing the traditional editors’ column as a blog.
Read more
Filed under Branding, Insurance Industry · Tagged with Benefits Selling Magazine, BenefitsPro.com, Best's Review, Charles Wasilewski, comments, Denis Storey, Insurance Journal, insurance trade media, National Underwriter, Rough Notes, Sam Friedman