theeasybrandfight

Easy.com is a well known British group having under its umbrella an endless number of brands combined with the word Easy, their most famous one is the low-cost airline EasyJet, the founder of Easy Group is Stelios. Not long ago, Easy Group also launched EasyFoodStore with a very simple business line “No expensive brands, just food honestly priced”.

Yesterday, Carrefour Belgium opened its 1st store called Easy Market along with their Carrefour icon and previously they opened also in Belgium 2 stores called Easy Caddy without any link to the Carrefour brand. The main idea behind these 2 concepts is to test a low-cost stores which are too big for the Carrefour Express concept and too small for the Carrefour Market concept. Both Easy Market and Easy Caddy use the famous orange color used by EasyGroup for all its brands and products.

EasyGroup is very keen about its branding and colors, they have a dedicated page on their website for this matter entitled Brand Thieves, we need to see where this going to get on the brand trademarking side, the word easy and the orange color, unless there is a deal about it.

If you have any information concerning this, please feel free to share it.

Before Jeffrey Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield even launched Harry’s, an online service for men’s grooming products, they had their eyes set on a first acquisition. The pair wanted to buy an old German razor factory for $100 million.

That isn’t how most new startups operate, but then again this wasn’t Raider’s first time around. Raider was one of the cofounders behind Warby Parker, the popular e-commerce service for eyeglasses founded in 2010 and currently said to be valued at around $500 million.

In 2011, Raider received a call from Katz-Mayfield, a friend, who complained about his experience buying razors and shaving cream at a store. “Could you do it better?” Katz-Mayfield asked. That conversation sparked the idea for a company that would sell high-quality shaving products for a reasonable price to compete with more established businesses like Gillette and The Art of Shaving and upstarts like Dollar Shave Club. But it turned out to be harder than they thought to find high-quality razors.

Read full story on Mashable

harry's

McCaféRonald McDonald decided to enter the supermarket retail game and be present on the shelves.

So starting 2014 you don’t need to visit your McDonald’s store but instead visit your neighborhood supermarket to grab your coffee and drink it at the comfort on your office or home.

Tony Vernon, CEO of Kraft Foods, partner of the coffee venture, announced “McDonald’s is arriving in your favorite big grocery store”.

But the world’s largest fast food chain is eventually extending its successful McCafé , sold for years in its restaurants across the United States.

According to the National Coffee Association, 83% of Americans are coffee drinkers, regardless of its form.

Europe is the next stop for the McCafé.

I just finished reading Brandwashed, an amazing book by Martin Lindstrom, a worldwide renowned marketeer.

Martin takes you in very deep places on how brands we use are brainwashing us, the consumers, everyday.

On a personal experience, Martin tried hard to get away from his brands, the brands he is using everyday, but could not resist and came back using them. He is also showing how consumers get attached to brands because of fond memories and nostalgia, how brands are creating everyday different techniques to make us want them, to inspire us going into stores and getting them from shelves even sometimes without thinking.

Book foreword by Morgan Spurlock

From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider’s look at how today’s global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy.

Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Picking up from where Vance Packard’s bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals:

  • New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb!
  • Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends).
  • How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
  • The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction – it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
  • How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles.
  • How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
  • What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
  • And much, much more.
  • This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions – the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.

    About Martin

    True story. When he was a kid growing up in Denmark, young Martin had but one thought in his life: Lego. He hand-built and slept on a Lego bed. The family garden became his very own Legoland creation, attracting visitors from near and afar (including the lawyers from Lego).

    Then, still a child, Lego installed Lindstrom onto their advisory board. And then, of all the children in the world – they gave him the very first green brick in the collection.

    You’re guessing this is what got Martin started in the crazy world of branding, marketing and all things advertising. And you’d be right.

    Blame it all on Lego.

    Fast forward some three decades later…

    Consumer Advocate Lindstrom emerges from marketing and branding jungle; he has a fresh perspective. Times have changed and a new, more enlightened, more respectful way of marketing to consumers needs to be addressed. The challenge is clear. Consumers now dictate to brands how they want to be spoken to. The king is dead. Long live the king.

    In particular is the thorny issue of consumer manipulation. Most know it’s going on, this is nothing new. What is new, though, is the voice that is prepared to speak out and challenge this marketing status quo. Brandwashed, his latest bestseller, is a full-frontal exposé of the wanton trickery employed by many conglomerates, iconic brands included, to squeeze dollars out of their loyal customers. Lindstrom, using , t’s not as easy as he thinks. (When is it not.)

    Sugarpova is a premium candy line that reflects the fun, fashionable, sweet side of international tennis sensation Maria Sharapova. Maria has created her own candy business to offer an accessible bit of luxury, interpreting classic candies in her own signature style. A long time candy lover with a surprising sweet tooth, Maria is bringing a new level of quality to the candy category through fun, unexpected types and shapes – with playful names to match. Wrapped up in a beautiful package, it’s both style and substance, just like founder Maria Sharapova.

    In the retail universe, SRP and RRP mean respectively Shelf-Ready Packaging and Retail-Ready Packaging.

    SRP or RRP is “a product that arrives at retail in a ready merchandised unit which is easy to identify, easy to open, can easily be put onto the shelf and recycled or disposed of when empty, allowing an optimization of shelf replenishment and enhancing visibility… covers all types of packaging which goes into the retail outlet, including promotional displays, pallets, trays, etc…

    The main focus is to increase on shelf availability and the potential for end use packaging to add value throughout the supply chain – to the manufacturer, retailer and consumer. RRP provides benefits well beyond the product’s journey from stock room to shelf.

    The best players in the SRP & RRP are the European hard discounters and partially the drugstores and lately we have seen many classical retailers adapting this packaging technique to optimize their daily operational cost.

    It looks obvious that not all categories and sub-categories will manage easily to offer their assortment in SRP or RRP, but in the working categories, products will definitely have:

    • Better availability
    • Better rotation of stock & reduced product wastage
    • Improved blocking & branding on shelf
    • Improved safety
    • Smarter way to replenish the shelf

    Partial sources: The Packaging Association and Store Brands Decisions