Built for coffee table browsing, this hefty volume on successful retail branding is visually rich and, for marketers, perhaps even inspirational. The campaigns it covers range from Ikea to Saks Fifth Avenue, Crate and Barrel, and DKNY, with a wide variety of other assorted fashion and lifestyle brands included.
Bright color photos dominate each page, and the authors’ value-added for each campaign is commentary that peeks behind the curtain to explain how the campaign took shape. One company facing a brand challenge was Timberland, the footwear manufacturer. Timberland boots may be ubiquitous in the backwoods, but when the company decided to target the urban market it needed to make a strong statement with eye-catching illustrations of boots that were both tough and cool enough to handle demanding environments like the subway. “Rather than creating a new brand image, the ads send the message that, whatever the journey, a different path may be just an alternate route to the same destination,” the authors write.
The text and visuals should give marketers many ideas for creative media strategies.
The Winters are consultants while Paul is Editor in Chief of Retail Ad World. Other editors of Retail Ad World also weighed in on this book.