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 | | Powerlines: Words That Sell Brands, Grip Fans, and Sometimes Change History by Steve Cone ISBN-10: 9781576603048 ISBN-10: 1-57660-304-0 ISBN-13: 9781576603048 ISBN-13: 978-1-57660-304-8 Hardcover 2008-04-24 Bloomberg Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Powerlines, the exceptional slogans that people remember long after the campaign ends, stand out from the barrage of marketing messages consumers face each day. A product, service, company, candidate, or an organization with a powerline outshines the competition every time. Steve Cone, author of 'Steal These Ideas!,' reveals the secrets to contemporary marketing's biggest mystery: how to conjure the phrase that will make a product irresistable and memorable. This book restores the lost art of creating killer slogans to its proper place: front and center in every campaign. Drawing on examples of great and not-so-great lines from marketing, politics, and popular culture, Cone provides an irreverant, intelligent, and insightful primer on a singularly important aspect of brand building. | ||
Reviews | ||
Playing around Powerlines This book is a study of the nature of marketing that emphasizes those "Powerlines" or taglines that manage to enthrall the consumer and even become part of the popular culture. This analysis is from the point of view of author Steve Cone's perspective as a marketing executive. As a reader with no background in marketing, I found this book to be a thorough and accessible survey. It begins with the history of Powerlines that traces back to the use of nursery rhymes and folk tales. In this sense the Powerlines of history have become unconsciously entrenched in our language. This is essentially etymology, but it is always fascinating and it useful to engage in this study from a marketing approach. The author then continues to analyze Powerlines that were coined as a result of politics. As technology progressed the nature of Powerlines evolved to take advantage of new types of media. Jingles evolved along with radio. I was particularly interested in the success and nature of an early radio jingle for the Pepsi product. I actually searched The Internet for an audio version of this and I haven't been able to find it yet. There is something about these jingles that does capture the spirit and nature of its time, and I find myself yearning to experience it first hand. There is some fascinating history that goes along with the marketing of some products. For example, I was not aware that "M&Ms" were based on an earlier British product developed for soldiers in the field called "Smarties". I am a Canadian and I grew up eating "Smarties", there were no "M&Ms". By the way, Smarties had their own very effective jingle...."When you eat your Smarties do you eat the red ones last...". Along the way the author points out the characteristics and strategies for creating effective advertising with Powerlines. He also critiques many existing advertising schemes in various media. I am sure that marketing professionals would find this analysis interesting. Some of this analysis was a little repetitive, there were several times in the text were the author was critical of the overuse of the idea of "life" in advertising strategies. The author also spends quite a bit of time on negative critiques, to be fair, there were positive ones but I came away with a feeling of emphasis on the negative rather than the positive. An idea that might of mitigated this would be to have done a hypothetical cases study in which the author could have shown how to approach the problem and devise some meaningful Powerlines. Overall, however, this book is an informative and enjoyable read. The author has an easy and engaging writing style and the book is well paced and extensively supplemented with illustrations. | ||
You absolutely, positively need to get this book overnight. Powerlines are what can prop up the troops and kick up consumer sales for decades. You know - like Snap, Crackle Pop, or You Deserve a Break Today. It comes down to some theory, art, and they way we humans have evolved to remember sounds or melodies (jingles) that quickly evoke (marketers hope) a thought about a product - and then hopefully buying it. There is a difference between "Say Pepsi Please" and "Can I please have a Pepsi". Backed with sufficient advertising support, one will grow to be a valuable asset and the other a bomb. Steve Cone puts some method to the madness - or what before was recognized but not described so ably. The next time you need a great line to support your product or brand, you will have the guidelines to produce it. Also interesting were some historical powerlines that have their origins hundreds of years ago. Cone leaves us with more than today's, well, corporately correct and boring, ineffective lines. | ||
I'm really not convinced The second half of "Powerlines" is a decent marketing primer on taglines -- how to recognize good ones and how to create them yourself. It's useful information for advertisers and marketers to know. But Steve Cone is trying to make the tagline into something much more: a "powerline" that achieves the great things described in his subtitle. I don't think his analysis and his examples support his claims. Cone writes "Most companies that have been marketing leaders over long periods of time employed taglines that built their brand promise into a powerful motivator for consumers to react to and purchase their product" (p. 198). But have they? In the many examples the author gives of powerful branding taglines, he never proves the tagline was an essential element in making the sale. As the number-crunchers say, he doesn't isolate the variable. Is the "ultimate driving machine" tagline really "a major contributor to BMW's success" (p. 188)? Or is it a crystallization of a host of things -- engineering, luxury, reputation -- that have made BMW a powerful brand? After all, Toyota is the world's leader in car sales and number two in the United States, but do they have a decades-old "powerline" driving their sales? It may be a chicken-or-egg question, but that's just my point. Perhaps the clearest example of the author's failure to link "powerline" with sales is his mention, several times, of Ed McMahon's "Heeeere's Johnny!" call at the start of Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show." Yes, it was memorable and distinctive, but was it "influential"? Only if Cone is suggesting people tuned into the program, not for the guests or the music or the comedy or Johnny himself, but to hear Ed's invocation. I guess what my hesitation comes down to is whether "being memorable" is enough. Certainly it's nice. But as a marketer, I'm not being paid to create memories. I'm being paid to drive sales. I said above that the second half of this book is a good marketing primer. The first half is mostly the author's discussion of memorable "powerlines" from politics and the media. Unfortunately, his explanation or analysis of these were surprisingly often flawed. (Some of these examples may be nitpicky -- but enough nits gathered in one place suggest a serious health issue.) For example, Cone starts (pp. 8-11) by telling the stories behind some famous nursery rhymes. But much of what he tells as straightforward fact is actually theory and can't be proven. Others, like "Three Blind Mice" being about Queen Mary I or "Ring Around the Rosy" being about the plague, are urban myths debunked on well-known reference sites like snopes-dot-com. In the section on political slogans, he cites "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" as a Hoover campaign slogan in 1928 (p. 57). In fact, as political-writer and word-maven William Safire notes in his essential Safire's New Political Dictionary, the phrase (usually given as "two cars in every garage" or "a car in every back yard") was most closely associated with Democrat Al Smith, who used it as an attack on the incumbent GOP. Finally, a trifecta in his discussion of Theodore Roosevelt (pp. 49-50), who did not order the navy to paint its ships white (USN battleship hulls were white well before the Spanish-American War, as contemporary photographs show); he did not coin the "powerline" "White Water Navy" (the "popular way to describe naval power" is *blue*-water navy); and he did not coin the phrase "The Square Deal" "during his second term" to describe a program including "the establishment of the National Park System" (again Safire, who shows TR first used the phrase in 1901 -- that is, in his first term -- and that "the Square Deal" always referred to trust-busting and other regulation of Big Business, not to things like the park system). In a way, all this reinforces the question I asked above: is it enough to be memorable? As Cone writes about some great movie taglines, "These lines have struck a chord with our social conscience and live on and on -- the true test of any powerline" (p. 104). But is that marketing? | ||
Sales techniques from the pros. This book has several outstanding ideas that really work. They come from one of the best in the business who has put these techniques to work and they are tried and true. You can't mess with success. The delivery was prompt as well, so the vendor did a great job and it was in nice condition. Thank you, Claudine Trainor | ||
Persuasion History Anyone interested in persuasion needs to have some historical context and Cone gives it to us. Recall Nixon's ill fated tagline for his 1960 campaign? "For the Future" Talk about uninspiring. As Cone says the only thing worse would be 'For the Past." Revisit the pain of companies that gave up great taglines just to change. Look at GE who abandoned the meanigful and memorable, "We Bring Good Things to Life" with the anemic and pointless "Imagination at Work." Great section on states that spend good money for poor taglines for travel. Illinois:'Right here. Right now." That's a howler. Good(but short) end section on how to create a powerline and some advice on developing the powerline and building your marketing and company around it. That's true: give people a great story to believe in (and a story can be a one liner) and their conduct follows. A book persuasion pros need in their library. | ||