AI is certainly new to marketing, and bringing all sorts of new challenges with it, although it may not be as big as headlines would have us believe.
Last year, the CMO Survey of the American Marketing Association, conducted in partnership with Duke and Deloitte, found a mere 17.2% of marketers reporting the use of AI to optimize or automate marketing.
Perhaps the percentage this year will be a step-change higher, but the self-estimated three-year projection by marketers last year was only 44.2%.
Nonetheless, AI is breaking out all over. It is a new force to be reckoned with. But in many ways, AI is nothing but the same reckoning as before.
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Indeed, this is typical of marketing innovations. Almost always, they are nothing but new ways of solving the same old problems. Which is definitely the case with AI.
Take search, for example.
Eight Oh Two, an SEO and PPC marketing agency, reported this year that 37% of brand-related searches now start with AI instead of a search engine.
This is a big shift, but it’s hardly anything new. There were headlines galore when Amazon became a viable competitor to Google for initial product searches.
The marketing issue then and now was shifting strategy and investments to meet consumers where they live. AI will require change, but the challenge itself is nothing new. Brands just have to adjust accordingly again.
This is true of every change being wrought by AI right now. Recommendations, in particular.
A recent study by location marketing platform Uberall found that 83% of restaurants are “invisible” to consumers in AI search because they don’t get mentioned when people ask AI for restaurants “nearby.”
But this, too, is nothing new. We have known for a long time about the importance of showing up on the first page of Google search results. That’s where the eyeballs are.
So, getting there is the task of getting in front of consumers. Broadly speaking, this is the necessity of getting into the consideration set, or at least the first step in doing so. That’s what SEO is all about.
For AI, it’s called GEO. Which is just a new name for an old challenge. It’s about crafting content and brand information that will get picked up by LLMs. LLMs are different, but what they do and the strategic challenge of influencing them is the same.
Influence is another thing about AI that is nothing new. Increasingly, people are relying on AI for product comparisons and purchasing recommendations.
In this sense, AI is the influencer of demand. But influencing influencers is a long-standing task in marketing — from children influencing mothers to friends influencing friends to content creators influencing followers on social media.
Marketers have been at this for so long that they have gotten very good at influencing the influencers. Marketers may need to go back to school on AI, but the basic idea is no different than before.
Much of this involves getting the attention of LLMs, and attention was the hot issue in marketing immediately before AI appeared on the scene.
In fact, attention is an issue as old as marketing itself and was the reason why the Advertising Research Foundation developed the original inverted pyramid back in 1961.
That funnel was not a purchase funnel, but a funnel for media-buying that began with the necessity of getting attention. All AI is doing is forcing marketers to solve the same old problem again. The answer will be different, but the issue is the same as always.
Marketers are also concerned that AI only cares about facts, not emotions, and that AI will operate independently of efforts by brands to enforce consistency of messaging with consumers. But these, too, are not new concerns.
It was concern about consistency that kept the Coca-Cola Company from using its flagship brand name with its first diet cola, thus naming it Tab instead.
It was a concern when Larry Light introduced the idea of brand journalism using many individual stories to deliver McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign.
It has been an ongoing concern as media have proliferated and fragmented. It is certainly an issue in managing the modern-day army of independent influencers that brands are using as gateways to consumers.
So, there is nothing new about this concern when it comes to AI. Brands will have to manage consistency differently for AI, but the issue of consistency is an age-old challenge in marketing.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
In these ways and others, AI is not new at all. Yet, there is one thing about AI that is very different and new. In years past, humans have been the audience for awareness, attention, recommendations, consideration, influence and consistency. That’s true for AI right now, but this is sure to change.
The way I’ve described it before is to say that marketers will have to learn how to “advertise to algorithms.” Which is to say that AI is going to transform shoppers into agents as consumers delegate shopping and buying. Hence, much of the marketplace ahead will be AI-to-AI.
Everything about marketing in the past has been designed for human audiences. Every theoretical concept, every practical application, everything has been about persuading humans.
So far, AI is just another tool for persuading humans, and thus the same challenges as ever. But when consumers hand off shopping and buying to AI agents, humans will be completely out of the loop.
This is not an issue that marketers have had to face before. Humans have always been the target.
But algorithms or AI itself will soon be the target. That’s fundamentally new. All the other stuff is old wine in a new bottle. AI agents are a new vintage.
Until then, marketers would do well not to get ahead of themselves or allow themselves to be intimidated by the changes at work with AI.
The nature of today’s challenges is identical to the challenges of the past. Marketers have successfully met those challenges. There is no reason to suspect anything different now — as long as it’s people at the receiving end.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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]]>I listened to the interview with great interest, having consulted with Mars for decades. Some of the most intelligent, actionable, and creative research providing extraordinary directions came from Mars. The projects on food, from physiology and biochemistry to sports, dental hygiene, and nutrition, were diligent, smart, and, at times, visionary.
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So, I was surprised that there were no insights into the drivers, reasons why people snack and consume foods and beverages. Mars has always been an enterprise where this type of thinking has been prioritized for innovation and renovation.
I contrast the Mars discussion with another Wall Street Journal interview with the president of Pepsi US Beverages, who peppered his conversation with compelling insights into consumer behavior and attitudes toward beverages.
Decades ago, to clarify the brand promises and positions within the Mars portfolio, Mars developed, with the input of an anthropologist and behaviorists, a psychological and physiological understanding and actionable construct of why people snack and also consume food in general.
The elements of this structure were, and still are, universal. Understanding universal needs and problem solutions is critical for building brands. Although the Mars construct may seem to you to be common sense, common sense is not common in today’s world of brand building and brand management. The discipline of brand leadership still depends on informed creativity: the ability to turn research and observation into actionable insight.
Companies that focused their resources on snack foods over core product lines are now seeing dents in profitability. When relevance weakens, the answer is rarely more messaging. Brands need a more disciplined understanding of what people now need, value, and are willing to choose. These companies are also predicting negative or so-so outlooks for the year ahead. Weight-loss drugs and attitudinal changes regarding snacks are affecting brands. Campbell Soup is one of those companies taking hits to its snack line, which includes beloved Goldfish and Pepperidge Farm. PepsiCo is also working diligently to maintain interest in its Lay’s division while seeing its cola brand, Pepsi, falter against Coke.
Focusing on the physiological and psychological spectrum of universal needs may provide some additional strategic direction. The Why People Snack construct pointed to the following:
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
Additional Mars’ work focused on food design. Height, mouth feel, chewiness, time of day food needs, and other product specs have an enormous impact on how we feel when we eat.
With our newly-found love of AI, we tend to overlook or dismiss the human needs that drive our attitudes and behaviors. But marketing still succeeds or fails on behavior change.
Brands need the actionable insights that derive from a foundational understanding of and responses from the human users who create brand value. Organizations exist to meet human needs. Revenues and profits follow when people believe a brand meets those needs better than the alternatives.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>When business leaders talk about winning a market, they often think first of their product—maybe its features, funding, or its first customers. All are necessary, of course. But the crucial, often invisible, vector that separates the market winners from all the rest is positioning. Without strong positioning, even the most remarkable innovations become generic. With great positioning, an average offering can dominate entire sectors.
But what is positioning? How does it differ from messaging? How does it work in partnership with category design and thought leadership? And how can you purposely architect positioning for lasting advantage? Let’s explore.
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How Positioning Differs From Messaging
Positioning and messaging are among the most misunderstood and commonly conflated disciplines in marketing and business strategy. For years, I’ve observed teams fumble by confusing the two or assuming that one can be a substitute for the other.
Positioning is the mental real estate you own.
Positioning is the deliberate act of defining—and occupying—a uniquely advantageous space in the mind of your target audience. It is the answer to: Where should we place this company or product versus all others in the market? It governs what your market thinks of you, what you are best at, who you’re designed for, and which alternatives you are compared against.
Your position is the unique point of view and focus your product or company occupies in the minds of your customers and prospects. It guides every decision others make about you—whether to buy, recommend, invest, or join. —April Dunford, Obviously Awesome
Messaging, in contrast, consists of the crafted statements, stories, and proof points you use to communicate your position to the world. Messaging brings positioning to life. It translates where you stand into language the market can absorb—in sales calls, investor decks, websites, PR, and onboarding. Positioning is strategic, long-term, and conceptual. Messaging is deliberate, repeatable, and tactical.
An analogy:
Why The Distinction Matters
If you have strong messaging but weak or unclear positioning, you may have clever campaigns but achieve no lasting differentiation. If you have great positioning but no effective messaging, you’ll be misunderstood, forgettable, or ignored by your market. Great positioning tells people where you fit in. Great messaging tells people how you stand out.
Successful Market Engineering hinges on building both—but positioning always comes first. Messaging then serves positioning.
Why Positioning Matters: The Strategic Imperative
Category Gravity And Market Memory
The world’s most iconic companies became that way not because they launched their products and services with the most features, but because they owned a new position within a new or evolving category.
This category gravity isn’t accidental—it’s the result of surgical positioning, repeated until it becomes market memory.
A brand is simply a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. —Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
Positioning Is Inoculation Against Commoditization
Markets inevitably become crowded and confusing. Strong positioning inoculates you against commoditization. It enables you to:
Consequences Of Fuzzy Or Me-Too Positioning
Without clear positioning, companies end up:
Positioning is the single largest influence on a customer’s decision to shortlist, trial, or buy you. Get it wrong, and every downstream activity is harder, slower, and more expensive.
Case Study Spotlight: Patagonia
Market/Competitive Insight: People who wanted high-quality gear for outdoor adventure were also becoming more conscious of environmental impact, and traditional brands ignored issues of sustainability.
Category Design: Patagonia created the “eco-conscious adventure brand” category.
Positioning/Messaging: Taking a clear stand on ethics and environmental sustainability, the company declared, “we’re in business to save our home planet.”
Storytelling: Their ads sold values, not just goods—“Don’t buy this jacket”—and highlighted founder Yvon Chouinard as an authentic hero.
Thought Leadership: They maintained activist leadership, with transparency in sourcing and taking bold stands (e.g., anti-Black Friday; repair, don’t replace).
Result: Patagonia is a global cult brand with a loyal customer base that sets the industry’s sustainability agenda.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
The Four Key Questions of Positioning
Brilliant positioning is rarely discovered overnight. It is engineered through persistent customer observation, thoughtful differentiation, and systematic iteration.
To engineer robust positioning, your leadership team must be able to answer, and get prospect validation of, the following:
Positioning is not a crossword puzzle. It is a competitive chess game:
For every position you aspire to, the market and your competitors will make countermoves. —Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm
The Strategic Link
Category design and positioning are mutually reinforcing. The more novel and defensible the category, the more you must engineer your position to lead it.
Neither can be successful without the other, and both must be synchronized with messaging, storytelling, and thought leadership.
Crafting Your Position: The Six-Part Framework
Thousands of companies try to claim leadership, but generally only those who execute intentionally, using a framework, succeed. Here is the six-part framework I recommend and deploy for positioning:
1. Reference Frame (“For whom are we solving this?”)
Is it a function (Finance vs. HR)? Industry? Market segment? Size? Geography? “For mid-market B2B marketing teams” (Marketo).
2. Competitive Alternatives
What are customers doing now (including DIY, spreadsheets, other categories)? “We’re replacing not just ossified spreadsheets, but all your business applications.” (Airtable).
3. Key Value/Outcome
What measurable gain do we enable? Is it time, money, risk, experience, and/or innovation?
4. Unique Attributes (“Only–ness”)
What about your solution is hard to copy? Tech, methodology, data, go-to-market, and/or ecosystem?
5. Proof and Social Validation
Who’s using your solution? Customer stories, hard data, analyst reviews.
6. Emotional and Human Resonance
Do you make the customer feel safe, innovative, heroic, smart, and/or relevant both today and for tomorrow’s problems?
Write these down. Pressure test each with prospects, your team, your board. Use “Five Whys” for every claim. For each core message, ask, “Why does this matter?” five times until you get taut, differentiated, and market-facing responses.
Notable Quotes: Why Positioning Is Everything
It’s not who has the best product or service who wins. It’s who is perceived to have the best product or service who wins. —Jack Trout, pioneer in marketing positioning theory
Positioning starts with a product. But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of a prospect. —Al Ries (the “father of positioning”) & Jack Trout
Storytelling and positioning are partners in memory and meaning; one who controls the label can control the market. —Andy Raskin, legendary strategic narrative consultant
People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe. —Simon Sinek, Start with Why
The right position isn’t just a slot to fill; it’s a perch from which you shape the market’s evolution in your favor. —Christopher Lochhead, Play Bigger
A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is. —Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Bruce Cleveland, Excerpted from Market Engineering. Reprinted by permission of Silicon Valley Press. Copyright 2026 Bruce Cleveland. All rights reserved.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>Watching the debate unfold, I was reminded of the television game show Family Feud. Two camps emerge, each convinced they hold the correct answer. One side sees necessary innovation and progress. The other sees compromise and dilution of what made Ferrari special in the first place.
Yet what makes these discussions fascinating is that they rarely remain focused on the product itself. The conversation quickly shifts from what the company is making to what the company is meaning. What begins as a discussion about a vehicle quickly becomes a question of identity and belonging.
Beneath the surface lies a deeper tension. More than reacting to a new product, people are reacting to the feeling that an invisible boundary may have been crossed.
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Brand Territory Is Really About Permission
That invisible boundary is what marketers often refer to as brand territory.
Traditionally, brand territory is described as the space a brand occupies in the minds of consumers. While useful, that definition only tells part of the story. A brand territory extends beyond a place a brand occupies. It is also a set of permissions.
It shapes what customers believe a company has earned the right to do and, equally important, what feels inconsistent with the meaning they have come to associate with the brand.
Consumers rarely evaluate brand decisions through a purely rational lens. They interpret them through accumulated meaning. Over time, every successful brand earns legitimacy within a particular symbolic space, and that legitimacy becomes permission. Permission to move beyond existing boundaries, or not.
This helps explain why some extensions feel natural while others provoke resistance. Porsche’s Cayenne was once criticized as a departure from the brand’s sports car heritage. Today, it is widely accepted as part of the Porsche story. In the process, Porsche expanded the territory that customers were willing to grant it.
By contrast, many would argue that MTV and BlackBerry gradually drifted away from the territories that originally gave them relevance. Unlike Porsche, they struggled to earn permission for where they wanted to go next.
Their challenge was never capability. It was legitimacy.
Brands rarely lose relevance because they are unable to evolve. More often, they struggle when customers no longer grant them permission to evolve in a particular direction.
When A Territory Becomes Shared
Which raises an interesting question: who decides where those limits are in the first place?
Most organizations assume the answer is obvious. They define the strategy, launch the products, and decide where the business is headed. Yet the reality is more nuanced.
The moment a brand becomes meaningful to the people it serves, it stops belonging exclusively to the company that created it.
Customers are not passive observers of a brand’s evolution. They become participants in its meaning. Through experiences, memories, cultural conversations, and personal interpretations, they help shape what a brand comes to represent.
This creates an interesting paradox. The stronger a brand becomes, the less freedom it often has to redefine itself.
Young companies can pivot, experiment, and reposition with relatively little resistance because few people have invested meaning into them. Iconic brands operate under different conditions. Their recognition, loyalty, heritage, and symbolism create value, but they also limit how far the brand can move without consequences.
Ferrari, Harley-Davidson, and other iconic brands benefit from extraordinary emotional attachment. Their customers are doing more than buying products. They are buying into ideas, values, communities, and identities. Over time, those associations become part of the brand’s territory.
At that point, the territory is no longer owned solely by the company.
It becomes shared space.
This helps explain why reactions to major brand decisions can feel so emotional. Customers are more than evaluating a new product. They are evaluating whether the brand still feels like the one they chose in the first place.
In many cases, reaction becomes a way to protest and protect. Customers are not resisting change; they are defending a meaning they helped create.
Seen through this lens, loyalty becomes a two-way street. Brands expect customers to remain loyal as strategies evolve and portfolios expand. Customers, in turn, expect brands to remain loyal to the meaning that made the relationship valuable in the first place.
Beyond The Boundary
The Ferrari debate will eventually fade, as most brand controversies do. The Luce may prove to be a brilliant strategic decision and become an accepted part of Ferrari’s future. Whether that happens or not is almost secondary to the broader lesson the controversy reveals.
People buy more than products. They buy continuity. They invest in stories, symbols, and meanings that help them make sense of the brands they choose. While customers generally accept that brands must evolve, they also expect them to remain recognizable as they do so.
Perhaps this is why the most interesting question is not how far a brand can stretch.
That question assumes the territory already exists and that the challenge is to avoid crossing its boundaries.
A more useful perspective may be to view brand territory as something living and constantly negotiated. Not because brands own their meaning, but because they share it with the people who believe in them.
This perspective also invites another question. If a brand hopes to expand its territory, what is the thread that must remain visible along the way?
For Porsche, that thread may be performance. For Harley-Davidson, it may be freedom. For other brands, it may be something entirely different.
The point is not the thread itself. The point is that customers need something recognizable to follow. More often than not, what they are following is not the product, but the meaning they have attached to it over time.
If this perspective is true, then perhaps brand leaders should spend less time asking how far they can stretch their territory and more time asking:
The strongest brands are not those that never change.
They are the ones that earn permission to change.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Martin Ducharme, Brand Strategist & Creative Thinker
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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]]>More specifically, it is co-branding: a brand with a brand, designed to create access without collapsing the distance that makes luxury desirable. The collaboration combines Audemars Piguet’s heritage of authenticity, design authority, scarcity, and horological prestige with Swatch’s colorful, playful, innovative, modern unorthodoxy.
Those who see only multicolored plastic may be missing the strategy. Audemars Piguet understands scarcity, provenance, and luxury authority. Swatch understands accessibility, cultural participation, irreverence, and mass fascination. Together, they are not making luxury common. They are making desire more visible.
In 2022, Swatch Group, the watch group that owns Swatch and other brands, including Blancpain, Breguet, Certina, ETA, Glashütte Original, Hamilton, Harry Winston, Longines, Rado, Omega, and Tissot, envisioned the evolving nature of luxury.
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To generate renewed interest in the affordable Swatch brand, Swatch partnered with its sibling brand, Omega, to create the MoonSwatch. According to observers, the MoonSwatch created an offering called Budget Luxury. The customer buys heritage, status, authenticity, and exclusivity, as well as savvy, one-of-a-kind, in-the-know fun at an affordable price.
The March 2022 Swatch launch of the Omega x Swatch Speedmaster, known as the MoonSwatch, at US $260 was a massive hit. The Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch design resembled the iconic Omega Speedmaster, known as the Moonwatch, since it was worn by US astronauts. At its release, the MoonSwatch generated such enthusiasm that crowds surrounded Swatch stores around the world. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that in Geneva, hundreds of buyers “snaked around the block,” and there was a police presence to ensure safety.
The response to MoonSwatch was so extraordinary that Swatch Group released a limited edition of the “most desired” MoonSwatch, the Mission to Neptune. Mission to Neptune became a collector’s item after its original release.
Following the success of MoonSwatch, Swatch Group introduced the five-watch Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Fifty Fathoms Collection. Each Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Fifty Fathoms watch reflected the ethos of one of the world’s five oceans. Prices started at US $400. The average price of a Blancpain was US $12,000. The original Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, a 70-year-old watch designed for divers, was featured on the wrists of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s team for the filming of the Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World. Its list price was US $14,000, but it can sell for as much as US $21,000.
On September 7, 2023, there was a Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Fifty Fathoms five-page advertisement in The New York Times featuring each of the five styles, designs, and colors: Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and Antarctic Ocean.
A Different Kind Of Swatch Collaboration
The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection is another collaboration between an exclusive luxury heritage watchmaker and Swatch. But this collaboration is strategically different. Omega and Blancpain are Swatch Group brands. Audemars Piguet is not. That makes the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection an even more explicit act of co-branding, not merely a portfolio move within one corporate owner.
The co-branding brand architecture that Audemars Piguet and Swatch are employing is basically an architecture of “a brand with a brand.” The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection combines Audemars Piguet’s heritage of authenticity, luxury, design authority, and exclusivity with the colorful, playful, innovative, modern unorthodoxy of Swatch.
Co-Branding Is Brand With Brand
With co-branding, both brands share the identification as the source of the promise. Co-branding differs from component branding, where one brand is the host brand, and the other brand is a component within the host brand. Component branding is a brand within a brand, while co-branding is a brand with a brand.
An example of component branding is a Dell computer with Intel inside or Timberland boots with Gore-Tex outside. An example of co-branding is the MGM Collection with Marriott Bonvoy.
With component branding, the brand promise is the host brand promise. The component adds a benefit. With co-branding, the source of the overall promise comes from both brands.
Why Brand Architecture Matters
Brand architecture is essential for brands. Brand architecture is the particular brand identity approach used to define the relationship of one brand to another in the portfolio. When brand architecture is properly managed, the customer knows what each brand contributes, what each brand stands for, and why the combination makes sense.
Audemars Piguet has an eye to the future. Every brand needs new customers while maintaining bonds with existing customers. Younger customers who desire but cannot yet afford an Audemars Piguet watch can gain entry into the franchise with an offering that is within reach. They are not buying a Royal Oak. They are buying an accessible expression of the codes, culture, and desirability around Audemars Piguet, filtered through the Swatch spirit.
This is important. Luxury dilution does not come from access alone. Luxury dilution comes from unmanaged access. A co-branding approach allows an offering that is both exclusive and accessible. It creates a controlled point of entry without collapsing the distance that makes luxury desirable.
For Swatch, the Audemars Piguet collaboration reinforces Swatch’s “with-it” image. Swatch reinforces its image of irreverence, innovativeness, and cleverness. The collaboration shows that Swatch continues to care about accessibility and affordability. Swatch continues to behave like Swatch: colorful, democratic, unexpected, and culturally alert.
The Luxury Paradox
The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection has reignited the ongoing debate about the democratization of luxury.
Many in the luxury business continue to debate the tension between product access and exclusivity. Many question a luxury brand’s ability to remain exclusive while being more widely visible. Can abundant rarity really work?
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
There are those who do not believe that luxury can be both restricted and available. These experts believe that excessive exposure saps the luxury from a product or service. Is it possible to be a luxury brand and be available to everyone? A co-branding approach can help solve this tension because the accessible product is not the core luxury product. It is a separate, jointly authored expression of the brand idea.
Also consider the driving paradox defined by the optimization of both timelessness and timeliness. We want the authenticity, heritage, customs, and legacies of products and services steeped in tradition, while also seeking innovation, novelty, and uniqueness. We desire the latest and the legacy, the old and the new. Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection maximizes this paradox: the timelessness of Audemars Piguet with the timeliness of Swatch.
Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection is a savvy brand-building move. For those who were vocal about the diminishment of their Audemars Piguet investment, one word: relax. Strategically, the move to collaborate with Swatch may strengthen Audemars Piguet’s cultural relevance without undermining the scarcity of its core luxury offering.
Please do not sign onto the short-term view of Wall Street that wants payout now. Brands build value over time, but only if properly managed. Please give credit to Audemars Piguet and to Swatch for identifying a strategy that continues to build both brands.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
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