Harper - defining Dion's Brand for him

This is actually a response to a blog entry written here by Ken Chapman. He questions the effectiveness of the Dion attack ads based on various research polls - while providing a lot of insightful information as to the status of current polls.

One question that remains unresolved is -
Is this a one-off reactionary attack or part of a greater marketing campaign?

If the latter (which I'm going guess at) then we have no idea of the impact and how it flows into the rest of the ads.

Kellogg's School of Management latest literature on branding (Kellogg on Branding, 2006) differentiates between two important styles in creating a brand:
1. Advertising on long term brand 'pillars' (this is who we are and what we stand for)
2. Tactical advertisting on why buy now (promotions, pricing)

As an example Verizon in the USA has some element of "can you hear me now" in every advertisement and they have entire "can you hear me now" campaigns. "Can you hear me now" is their brand pillar. Tactical examples would be when they started a campaign and promotoin on the KRZR, but always included a "can you hear me now" element at the end.

Kellogg's goes on to indicate that when creating a brand the initial split needs to be forward thinking - i.e. more money needs to be invested into creating and advertising 'brand pillars'. Then once your brand is well-defined and understood you start with tactical plays.

But... most corporates do not do this because they have to trade-off immediate pay-back vs long-term pay-back. So many marketeers are much more tactical right off the bat so they can hit numbers. Long-term pillar campaigns are not reliably understood until several months or years out.

Clearly the CPC advertisements is meant to brand Dion for himself and they are building pillars for him.

The pillars right now seem to be:
1. Ineffective
2. Doesn't talk/act like a leader - he is very stumbly and talks in a very high pitch voice and frankly unfair is not a word a leader should use

I think the conservatives will use the next few months before elections to continue the campaign of building Dion's brand pillars for him. Then once elections start they will be go tactical on issues and Dion's capabilities on those issues.

Thus it is premature to yet gauge the results of these ads because it is only the seeds of brand building.

Also Dion needs to get his own marketing team into high gear before Harper's marketing machine effectively markets Dion out of the race.