Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Absolut: Biography of a Bottle by Carl Hamilton ISBN: 1-58799-002-4 Publisher: Texere Pub. Date: 09 November, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.7 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Absolut Creativity!
Comment: Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.
I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.
Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.
Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.
Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.
What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.
But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.
The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.
There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.
After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making your own personal image more appealing and vibrant. Who do you want to appeal to? Who can help you with that?
Have Absolut pleasure from this book! Skoal!
Rating: 5
Summary: The Form of Pure Image!
Comment: In Absolut: Biography of a Bottle, Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.
I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.
Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.
Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.
Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.
What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.
But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.
The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.
There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.
After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making an important task something that everyone wants to do. Who can help you with that? What is the purest form of the concept?
Have Absolut pleasure from this book!
Rating: 5
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Comment: Absolut provides a rare behind-the-scenes look into the Madison Avenue minds who are able to manipulate the critical faculties of America as surely as if we'd all downed a double shot straight up. In short, the book details how advertisers were able to fabricate a brand out of a product that consumers could not distinguish from the competition in taste tests. We [...] recommend this immensely enjoyable book as must reading for advertising and marketing professionals, and to anyone interested in understanding how advertisers manipulate consumer tastes.
 |
Title: The Milk Mustache Book : A Behind-The-Scenes Look at America's Favorite Advertising Campaign by Jay Schulberg ISBN: 0345427297 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 06 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: Twenty Ads That Shook the World : The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All by James Twitchell ISBN: 0609807234 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 26 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: got milk? : the book by Jeff Manning ISBN: 0761518010 Publisher: Prima Lifestyles Pub. Date: 03 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: Milk Mustache Mania: An Inside Look at One of Your Favorite Ad Campaigns by Bernie Hogya, Sal Taibi ISBN: 0439388899 Publisher: Scholastic Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: Where the Suckers Moon : The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign by Randall Rothenberg ISBN: 0679740422 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
