YOU ASKED FOR IT

I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.

—Mitch Hedberg

June 30, 2014BEEF, STATS, TOP BRANDS OF SUMMER

BRAND OBSERVATIONS OF THE DAYFrom my random collection of info sources, here are some highlights related to the brands of our times...

• Texas ranchers aren’t too happy with Chipotle. The company announced that they would be buying beef from

Australia, saying “naturally raised” beef in the U.S. is in short supply. While the Texas Agriculture commission disagreed, Chipotle officials stood their ground. As they say in

Texas, “You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits!”

• LOVE this site - StatisticBrain.com. Here are some highlights:- # of Americans using Craiglist annually...50 million- # of theaters Fandango sells tickets for...1,450- # of BIC lighters sold each year...1.825 billion- # of Chic-Fil-A sandwiches sold annually...282 million- # of different Coca-Cola products...3,500- % of Wal-Mart cashiers that are women...72%- % of all cheese produced purchased by Pizza Hut...3%

• If you’ve been considering a cruise, it sounds like you’d better take it sooner than later. Bloomberg Businessweek says Carnival Cruise Lines “foresees an end to the era of cheap caribbean cruises.” Executives predicted that by the summer of 2015, there would be a decrease in the number of ships in the Caribbean as they hold to pricing levels.

• Here are the top ten most appealing brands of summer, as recently surveyed and reported by E-Score...

1-Coleman 6-Disney World2-Pixar 7-Disneyland3-Good Humor 8-Wham-O4-Oreo 9-Toys R Us5-Orville Redenbacher 10-Oscar Meyer

JIM HUEBNERj i m h @ h u e b n e r p e t e r s e n . c o m

C E L L U L A RT E L E P H O N E970-420-3382

Hmmm.

Brought to you by popular demand of a client, my mom, and some folks I met at a church potluck

From the remaining gray matter of Jim Huebner

Information that will make you smile, groan or think...

Considering the notoriety of the food

at summer camp,was anyone really

surprised?

© 2014 Hmmm by Jim Huebner

GoPro: The brand that consumers built

...and on its way to the HuebnerPetersen blog...! PAGE2

The IPO du jour caught my attention last Thursday as GoPro offered shares on the NASDAQ for the first time. With a closing price of $31.33, this equated to a nearly $4 billion company valuation (on less than a billion in sales) and put approximately one-third of that into the wallet of founder, Nicholas Woodman.

For a valuation that high (about four times sales), brand equity was obviously playing a significant role. I did a quick search and found dozens of wearable video camera manufacturers. They literally came in all sorts of sizes and shapes—including ones that looked similar to the GoPro products. In a quest to discover how this brand became so revered in such short order (12 years), I decided to dig a little deeper.

Bloomberg Television interviewed Woodman Thursday morning, and the GoPro CEO was pretty quick to separate their brand from their competitors in textbook fashion. He referred to his brand as one in the “content enabling business”, and not just a maker of wearable cameras.

It’s a classic move—stop competing with your competitors by creating a new category. While I personally think this particular category concept is a little weak—heck, a pencil could be considered a content enabling device—Woodman did clearly articulate what so quickly established the brand.

“We recognize that when our customers capture and share compelling content of exciting and interesting life experiences—

and they tag-title to describe their content as GoPro—our customers are virally driving awareness and enthusiasm for our company, our brand and our products,” Woodman stated.

And drive enthusiasm for the brand they certainly have. Take the perspective our resident brand fanatic— my son, Jake. He is a GoPro owner...and crazy about the product.

I asked him what he liked about his GoPro, and he said, “Well, you can wear it on your chest or head or even put it on the end of a pole to shoot from some really cool angles.” Fair enough. But I then mentioned that lots of other cameras offer the same functionality. Mildly exasperated, he explained, “Dad, you know that if a pair of shorts has a Nike logo on it and another pair has a Russell logo on it, most guys are going to buy the Nike pair, right? Well, this is the same thing—GoPro is the cool camera to have...the others aren’t.”

Aha!...out of the mouths of babes (er, a twenty-year-old)...brand matters! Especially one built by your peers.

Brand matters enough, in fact, that when I asked Jake how much more he’d pay for a GoPro than the same type of no-name product, he decided he’d pay about 25% more for GoPro. And that’s

really close to what Nicholas Woodman took to the bank.

So how can you get customers to help build YOUR brand the way GoPro has? You could start by answering these questions...

• How can we foster and encourage user generated content?

• What experiences have customers had with our brand that might make for good stories, videos or case studies?

• Are there any tools we could provide that would better enable our customers to talk about their experiences with our brand?

Jim Huebner is President of HuebnerPetersen Integrated Marketing.The firm was established in 1989 and specializes in making companies heroes to their distribution channels through strategic brand positioning, integrated marketing, and front lines marketing services. You can reach Jim at jimh@HuebnerPetersen.com or on LinkedIn. For “Hmmm” archives, CLICK HERE

WORDS TO

LIVE BY

O taste and see that

the Lord is good;

How blessed is the

man who takes

refuge in Him!

–Psalm 34:8 (NASB)