This morning we received an offer from Groupon (incidentally a pretty cool site/service for Los Angelenos) offering us a hotel stay and extras worth $424 for only $150. (After today, you can see the deal here for a few more months.) We immediately noticed this language in the offer:

“For $150, you’ll get a romantic retreat at SeaCrest Resort complete with ocean-view room, wine tasting with appetizers, vineyard tour, bottle of wine, and $10 toward Marie Callender’s…”

We don’t know about you or your significant others, but Marie Callender’s is not typically how we like to end wine-filled romantic beach retreats. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Marie Callender’s. It’s just that as a brand it’s not really the right accompaniment for a resort, a weekend or an outing purporting to be escapist, passionate or vinicultural.

Escapist, Passionate, Vinicultural

Marie Callender's

There’s a lesson here for b2b brands and the professionals in charge of them. Do the partners, third-parties and ancillary products/services associated with your brand do it justice?

• If you want the brand to be seen as technologically advanced, you’d better make sure your salespeople don’t show up to meetings running PowerPoint 2004 on Windows 98.
• If you want the brand associated with service, you might not want to co-market with TimeWarner Cable.
• If you want the brand to be known as dependable, giving away crappy bags that fall apart a week after the tradeshow isn’t doing you any favors.

If you’re serious about building your brand, then it’s up to you to ensure that you surround it with other brands that present it to best effect.

It takes planning, it isn’t always cheap and it often involves someone or something you can’t directly control, but hey – if building great brands was easy it just wouldn’t be so rewarding, now would it?

Even if you’ve never flown them, you’ve probably heard of European low-cost carrier Ryanair. And if you haven’t flown them it’s something you should try – at least once in your life. It’s less like Southwest and more like the second-class train car from Cuzco to Puente Ruinas: cramped, with people relentlessly trying to sell you something, but at a fraction of the cost of alternate means of transportation. And if you haven’t heard or read some of  CEO Michael O’Leary’s precious gems, well, that’s something you should experience as well.

From a WSJ interview: “…that’s what people really want—affordable, safe air transport from A to B. It’s a commodity. It’s not some life-changing sexual experience, which is what the other high-fare airlines have tried to convince you that it is.” (The rest of the short article is equally entertaining)

If nothing else, Ryanair is consistent: the taglines (see logo above, and sometimes they use “The Low Fares Airline”), a website that sets a new record for price promos per pixel, the CEO’s talking points and even in-plane advertising:

Adopting a strategy anathema to branding professionals, it’s all meant to focus travelers’ attentions on one thing: price. And is that really so bad? There are many competing low-cost airlines in Europe, but – based on our vast European network and our own extended sojourns abroad – Ryanair is where travelers go first when looking for low-cost travel.

Like Mercury in auto insurance:

and Walmart in retail (though they’re trying to change):

Ryanair has been able to build a strong brand based on cost.

But, to use our own old saw, the delivery must match the promise. Flights may be advertised at 1 cent, but airport taxes, online check-in fees, credit card fees, bag fees, sports equipment fees and many potential others bring the price up considerably and – in our own experience – into the same ballpark as advance fares on full-service airlines.

We applaud Ryanair’s focused execution, and we acknowledge that sometimes it makes sense for a brand to position on price. We believe, however, that if Ryanair’s extra fees mean that the company doesn’t make good on its low fare promise, then Mr. O’Leary – despite his protestations to the contrary – may just start looking for ways to make his airline a little more sexy and a little less commodity.

Perhaps that effort has already begun?

It’ll be a long time before the results are in, business success depends on far more than advertising and we’re not predicting the death of the Blackberry or of Microsoft anytime soon…but we’re willing to give a strong shout-out to this Droid campaign. And the takeaways for marketers, communicators and businesspersons couldn’t be simpler.

1. Don’t try to out-Apple Apple (whoever Apple may be in your particular industry). When you do, you look as forced as the employees at the Microsoft store, and you feel as much like a me-too as those Blackberry ads.

2. Do take advantage of the flaws that frustrate even Apple fanboys (whatever those flaws may be and whoever those fanboys may be in your particular industry). Product superiority usually isn’t meaningful enough or enduring enough to base a long-term brand strategy on, but it can give prospects a powerful reason to consider, evaluate and purchase your product or service.

3. Have fun. Could there be a more magnificent send-up of Apple’s aesthetic than the reflections below the ad’s “iDon’t” lines?

Few financial services brands have suffered the recent public spotlight with greater dread and discomfort than credit card issuers. In past cycles of scrutiny, the answer to credit card industry critics was “increased transparency” — if consumers could understand the terms and conditions of their credit cards, they had some chance of actually abiding by them. But transparency alone hasn’t worked, given the dire state of household consumer credit debt, estimated at $8,000 – $10,000 for every American family with a card or close to $1 trillion dollars in total. Even upscale customers find their mailboxes largely bereft of enticing offers and existing credit lines curtailed or canceled. There’s no doubt that consumers overspent, but the card industry also overreached, creating concepts like “universal default,” where card issuers hike interest rates when consumers made late payments to a different, unrelated lender. Double cycle billing to maximize interest charges for consumers who occasionally carry a balance. Fees for exceeding credit limits even when purchases have been authorized by the lender. Such practices culminated in President Obama’s signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (notice the clever acronym . . . Credit CARD Act) shortly before Memorial Day, promising a new era of better behavior by all parties.

Even with the new regulations coming on line nine months from now, there will still be plenty of room for shenanigans for those who rely on the act’s protections and ignore the fine print. Take a solicitation BrandCultureTalk received for the First Premier Bank Platinum MasterCard.

At first blush, this offer looked pretty great: a 9.9% APR on all purchases and a 5% rebate on all on-time payments for 12 months. What’s not to like?

What this card gives on the one hand it takes away — and then some — with fees . . . and more fees. Account Set Up Fee: $29. Program Fee(?): $95. Annual Fee: $48. Monthly Servicing Fee: $7/month or $84 a year. An additional card will set you back another $20. For those savvy consumers who think they can make up these fees with the 5% purchase rebate, think again: the credit line on this card can be as little as $250. The final analysis: the First PREMIER Bank Platinum MasterCard, less the fees for the first month leaves you with $71 of credit available and $179 in new debt. And this is their “Platinum” card? After six months, you may be able to increase your credit limit, but you’ll pay another $25 fee each time your limit is bumped up. There are fees for obtaining Internet access to your account ($3.95), automatic payments ($11 or $7 for each payment), Priority Mail for your card ($35). Incredibly, the fees keep coming even after you close your account; in addition to ongoing interest, there is an additional fee of $3 a month if you close your account, but have an outstanding balance of $20 or more.

Rather than focus on fees, First PREMIER understandably chooses to accentuate the positive (“we didn’t take TARP funds”) in a jaunty little intro called It’s Time for UP!, summoning sufficient positive momentum to rival that of Levitra. And here’s President and CEO Dana Dykhouse promoting “U + PREMIER. Stronger Together.”

No amount of peppy branding or “UP” messaging can cure the confiscatory fees that put this card in the running for “worst ever.” Distracting sophistry aside (“Response in 60 Seconds!” Low APR!” “5% Rebate for on-time payments!”), this card is a financial disaster. Now First PREMIER doesn’t target people with pristine credit with this card “[b]ecause we know that bad things happen to good people.” But hasn’t the sub-prime consumer suffered enough?  A different card from First PREMIER features an annual fee of $75 and an unprecedented 79.9% APR:

It’s pretty clear that qualifying for these cards represents less a reversal of fortune than a cure that is worse than the disease. Folks with damaged credit should look elsewhere — department store “house” charge cards, gasoline cards, secured cards, etc. — to rebuild their FICO scores. And others with better credit profiles can find far better Platinum MasterCards to shoot for . . . like that offered by the Farm Bureau Bank. Currently it offers an APR of just 7.24% with no annual fees.

The earlier “Pass it on” FedEx commercial was even more explicit about the need for speed, featuring a package with the admonition, “If this package doesn’t arrive in Peoria tomorrow, it’ll be your job.”

Over the years, FedEx naturally expanded its shipping operations from urgent overnight delivery to shipping packages and parcels to less than truckload to full truckload freight to FedEx Ground.

Then in February 2004, FedEx took a major step beyond logistics when it acquired print and copy shop Kinko’s for $2.4 billion. Last year, FedEx spent nearly $700 million to rebrand the 1,900 FedEx Kinko’s “FedEx Office.”

But with FedEx now standing for so many different services in addition to overnight delivery, the consolidation may be fracturing the core FedEx brand promise to the point of fracture. An example: the other day, a member of the old guard here at BrandCulture HQ was out of the office and enlisted the aid of a colleague to ship some urgently needed documents. A frenzy of coordinated activity ensued, with electronically circulated drafts edited, finalized, packaged, labeled and dispatched by the early evening. But instead of arriving at their destinations the next morning, the FedEx envelopes greeted the dawn in the same courier bin where they had been deposited after the FedEx pickup the previous afternoon.

Our old guard member never explicitly said “these documents absolutely, positively need to be there overnight,” but instead thought that “these need to go out by FedEx” meant the same thing.  Back at HQ, the co-worker (who wasn’t even alive when the spot above aired, let alone in 1971 when FedEx started its overnight delivery service) simply didn’t realize that there was a need to get the package out that day. Apparently lost in intergenerational translation as FedEx has expanded its brand significance is the focus on speed; the FedEx brand is no longer inextricably interwoven with “extremely urgent,” but spans the value proposition of “Make it, Print it, Pack it, Ship it” — all valuable offerings to have under one roof, but no one of them terribly imperative.

FedEx is without question one of the great companies and among the most valuable brands the world. It is perennially ranked among the world’s best companies to work for by FORTUNE, this year claiming the 7th spot tied with Southwest Airlines.  But perhaps it is time for FedEx to adopt a more explicitly tiered brand architecure, separating ancillary services from the core promise of reliably pulling off the nearly impossible through millions of overnight deliveries a day thoughout the world.  Not only would this help FedEx justify continued premium pricing, it could help usher in a new era of Baby Boomer/Gen X/Millennial workplace productivity and harmony.  Perhaps a switch back to FedEx Kinko’s for another $700 million?