Do most successful brands share a common thread in their A&P practices?
Definitely not. There are many successful brands that, in our opinion, have very poor advertising & promotional practices. Many successful brands have been first in a new category. This is such a powerful position that the brands can have mediocre advertising and still be very successful. Toyota, for example, is widely perceived to be the “most reliable” automobile on the market. This perception has built the Toyota brand (at least in the U.S. market) to be a very powerful brand. Yet Toyota’s advertising never mentions reliability. Toyota’s advertising theme is “Moving Forward”, which is just a meaningless advertising slogan. The same is true of many leader brands that tend to ignore the powerful perceptions they own in consumers’ minds. Instead, they launch “creative” advertising campaigns that consumers tend to ignore. Coca-Cola is widely known as “the real thing”, a position that reflects the fact that the brand was the original cola. Yet their advertising talks about “The Coke side
