Brand Shorthand Season #3 Wrap-Up

That’s a wrap on season 3 of the Brand Shorthand Podcast! Join Mark and Lorraine as they go back through some of the biggest brand moves and marketing trends seen throughout 2025. The positioning duo will touch on AI, storytelling with long-form video, the loss of high-profile CEOs, the ongoing battle of the healthy sodas, and of course, the importance of positioning. 

Join Mark and Lorraine for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is the Wizard of Wrap-Ups, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, it's our wrap-up session for the season. Can you believe that?

Lorraine Kessler
Hey, what a great one. I can't and I have a little task for Lindsey. She should go through all the ones we've done and make a list of all the names you've given me.

Mark Vandegrift
Positioning Prodigy, Branding Brainiac, Dazzling Differentiator, Marketing Magician, Advertising Ace, Advertising Allstar, Marketing Maven, Branding Buff, Strategy Superstar, Branding Backbone, Creative Catch, Strategy Sorcerer, Campaign Captain, Hero of Heuristics, Brains of Branding, Creative Conqueror, Positioning Prophet, Loraine Kessler

Mark Vandegrift 
There you go. That would be really interesting.

Lorraine Kessler
excluding any profane, which were not part of the podcast. It would be fun.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, I think we're getting really close to our 100th episode, which is really rare. There aren't many podcasts that make it that long. So, you know, our longevity is a testimony to either our long windedness or the power of positioning and all the things that it applies to.

Lorraine Kessler
Good. Self-aggrandizement, need to be significant.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, that's for sure. Well, we're going to look back on the season here. I'm going to just kind of prompt you with a few questions, Lorraine. And we had to go back and get a summary from Lindsey of everything we talked about because we've had 32 episodes already, which is hard to fathom. But we always take a break in November, December for the holidays. And of course, January, we got to get our legs under us again. So, this week is our last of the season and we'll be back again for season four in probably late January. So Lorraine, thanks for hanging in there with us for three years. That's just hard to fathom. Feels like yesterday. 

Lorraine Kessler
It does.

Mark Vandegrift
It does. Yeah, let's start out with something pretty easy here, because I know that we always like to start out with what the bad news is, but we're going to start with the good news and it's always easy to target the brands who do not so smart things. But from this standpoint of good news, what was your favorite brand move this season? And maybe it's not even on our radar. Maybe we didn't talk about it yet.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, it is one that wasn't on our radar, and it's Heinz. We talked about the corporate Heinz Kraft. That doesn't touch consumers as much as Heinz ketchup, right, the product. But they did something in a campaign this year that was both obvious and paradoxically surprising and brilliant. Really great. It's a commercial titled Looks Familiar and it was built on the distinctive brand assets and the recognition that people have for those assets, you know, its colors and the shield heart shape of its logo. And what they did is they showed french fries in a box and they outlined, they showed how all the french fry boxes, you know, resemble the Heinz shield logo, but they had all these shots of french fries and boxes from all sorts of countries. I mean, from, and cities, right? From Charlotte to Perth, Australia, Bangkok, New York, Milan, you name it. It's a great commercial. There's no words, just these visuals. And then the beautiful Rossini's William Tell Overture. And so what they do is they take the recognition of their shield and they compare it to the fries and make this connection that looks familiar that worldwide Heinz is the ketchup for french fries. And I think the last line is something like, yeah, I'll have to look it up. Here it is. Yeah. When it's fries, it has to be Heinz. It's a brilliant spot. It makes you feel good. It's fun. It's obvious. Like, oh my gosh. Yeah. And it certainly, I think, reinforces their global presence as a product, as what I would call a super product, a super brand, super brand. Cool.

Mark Vandegrift 
Very cool. Well, my favorite was actually having the guests we had on this season. We had a lot internally. Scott Edwards started out, he kind of pitch it for you for the Super Bowl episodes. We had Alyssa and Lauren for programmatic advertising. Alicia did creative. We had the entire creative department at one point or most of it. Tony with multi-channel marketing. And then we had two outside guests, Steve Vandegrift, my brother, talked about franchising and then James Warnken just finished our last two episodes around website accessibility. So it was a good lineup of guests this year and it's always good to get some other perspectives on here. Although, you know, having you Lorraine is always the best option.

Lorraine Kessler
Oh yeah. You must be afraid of my Italian family from New Jersey. 

Mark Vandegrift 
No, no, no, no. I did get to go to Italy this year, so that's another good thing, but that has nothing to do with the podcast.

Lorraine Kessler
But you weren't kidnapped. We're shaken down.

Mark Vandegrift
No, I was not. Well, let's look at the bad news front, because we do that much more than otherwise. You have a front runner for the most egregious brand move from this season.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, that is for me, Jaguar. right? I mean, 97 % drop in sales. think 49 cars have sold since like April or something. You have that statistic. The Bazzaro rebrand was part of the problem, but it wasn't the total problem because they made a conscious decision, strategically to stop making their internal combustion version of the Jaguar. So only electric. And you know, that literally the combination of that commercial, which to me reminds me of Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula film. You've never seen Andy Warhol's horror films, they're really freaking weird, just like the bizarro ad that Jaguar came up with. But, I think the combination of that strategy of getting rid of internal combustion and the commercial, the rebrand and what a dud it was, never showing the car, really contributed to unliving the brand. I guess you can't say the S word on YouTube, so I'll say unliving the brand.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, you know, the move here, I think that would have been better is just close it down and start a new company with all the buildings and assets you have because if you're going to take away that engine, then and go to all electric, you don't have a Jag anymore. That's just like part and parcel to the brand.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, plus they changed the logo. They completely stepped away from their heritage. In terms of understanding the design culture that Jaguar kind of embodied, unlike Heinz. I mean, it's a total opposite of Heinz, right? So.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Yeah. Well, speaking of things changing, we obviously talked about AI a lot because that's changing things. But I don't know how this happened. It's a little freaky and I'm nervous that AI has me more in their grasp than I realized. We talked about AI every 10 episodes, literally in episode 10, 20 and 30. Isn't that a little freaky that was not intentional.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, just dial us back to like 2000, 2001, 2003 when social media was the buzz, right? That's all we talked about. That's all we talked about was social media, digital marketing, social, digital, interchangeable in some respects. Every time we were asked to speak somewhere it was about social media. It tends to be the way things happen in our business.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, it seems to have a little bit more life to it. I think what we saw in the teens is we had that initial hit of social media and then it was a few new platforms. So I remember Snapchat was a big one and then Pinterest was a big one. I think that was it as far as like the big discussions until we got to TikTok and then TikTok you know, still kind of a lot of people think that that's changing the world pretty significantly. But even Twitter, I thought was interesting because that that went up and then dipped. And then once Elon Musk came, bought it, it came back and it's a little bit more in the conversation. But it is we're not sure where that level is going to land. But one of the predictions was replacement of 30 million jobs by 2026. And unless something happens pretty quickly here, I don't think AI is as, let's say Armageddon-ish as what they thought or apocalyptical.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. Well, none of these things are. I mean, do you remember Seth Godden and the permission marketing and that there'd be no intrusive marketing? Yeah, well, he's been real quiet on that front. And I'll never forget having that conversation with Jack Trout, right, our mentor. And he was just like, that is total bollycocks. I mean, that is never going to happen. And look at intrusive advertising at an all time high through the very platforms that Godden predicted would be all about permission.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. What'd you think about Chat GPT's commercials they've been running this year?

Lorraine Kessler
I thought that was, I thought they did a really good job not focusing on the sci-fi, the techie, the features, but on what real people, it's very human, right? What real people can do that betters their lives in a very simple kind of self, a set down way, not overstated. So I think that's the absolute right path to go. Show me, this is the problem with technology, right? There's always the techie heads who are in love with the technology. And what they miss is, unless this is a benefit to the customer, and they can see the benefit as something in real terms, in real life, they get, actually there's a fear that raises. The more you talk to tech, the more afraid I get. The more you start labeling things with these big terms, which when you figure them out, it's pretty simple. I could search a recipe and it will tell me, hey, here's the kind of recipes you would like. Now it becomes a tool that makes sense in my life. And I think that's what ChatGPT is doing with this commercial. And I think it's really smart.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I mean, they make it less sci-fi and make it more approachable. And that's kind of the key thing whenever you're doing, I think, anything. You know, I always, I go back to 2001, A Space Odyssey, which you remember Hal, and I can't do that, Dave. You know, that's kind of where we think technology is for us older enough to remember that movie. But when you humanize it, it's certainly changes things. Speaking of cool developments, I think that one of the topics that happened this year, and I know it's not new, but it's still great storytelling, is we had a couple really good uses of longer form video. Volvo, they did their car launch, and then Apple used it for their AirPod launch. So the long form video, what do you think? Is that a fad or do believe that a lot of brands will start to lead with it like Volvo and Apple did?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I don't think it's a fad. I don't even think it's new. I think it's been around for a very, very long time because any long form film or video allows the storytelling to expand in a way that can be very extremely engaging and memorable and you can get a lot of information out in a very creative, engaging way. So I don't think, I mean, a few years ago, we called some of these things infomercials, right? I mean, that's a particular style of long form. It's not all long form video are infomercial in their construct, but that's huge. So I just love how our industry always tries to relabel things as if they're new and when instead they're just kind of new and improved or you forgot that they existed, so now they seem new because someone brings them back. But yeah, I think it's the most powerful form of storytelling you can ever have is video, right? Because you got action, you have pictures, sound, music, personality, right? The trick is to make the long form commercial worth the time for the customer. In other words, interesting because you cannot bore the customer into buying. And I've seen some of these that are done not so well, that are so boring that there should be marketing malpractice. But you get the right type of creative staff who knows the medium really well. The medium is the message and knows how to construct that story in a way that it has an arc and it keeps you interested and there's a main theme, then it's going to be successful.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of those get so much social media commentary. And so they wick, you know, they that's where you're getting your viral sharing going on and such. But boy, if you do it incorrectly, it's just that can really backfire. You know, that's where you got to be careful about. I want to create a viral video. We actually get people that come to us and go, I want a viral video. Well, what's a viral video? That's called good advertising. when it's, you know, commented on socially, then that's when you get the viral show.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, they're like little films. And if you think of film as a medium versus print or more stagnant or static media, it involves the most complex orchestration of talents. You have a script writer that has to write a great script. It has to be produced well. It has to be in the right environment. The sound has to be good. Whatever sound effects you choose, whatever music, the talent is so crucial. You can take a great script, great production, all those elements can have the wrong talent it's gonna buy. So casting is so important. So all these things have to kind of work together in a really effective way and that's why you need a really good professional production studio and creative team who's been through this before to do these kinds of things.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Another big item that happened during our podcast season is we lost a few high profile CEOs. So you lost Jaguars, of course, right? Targets, Starbucks. Of those that I recall, I know one made the new CEO made an immediate impact and that was Starbucks going back to the coffee experience and stores are seeing an uptick in sales and by my own anecdotal evidence, it seems as though our local Starbucks are much busier. They went back to their position and I've seen things like writing on my cups. When I walk in, I hear, good morning. When I've actually sat down, I've had a few times where they bring the drink to me instead of having to go up to the counter. I mean, a lot of things are correcting and my spidey sense says that they've righted the ship. You know, what's your take on that or, you know, maybe Target or I don't think Jaguar has any hope, but, you know, we already talked about that, but maybe, you know, your take on Starbucks or your take on a Target.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think Starbucks is a great story of a new CEO who understands the core of the brand and what it really stood for in the beginning that was able to congeal huge audiences who cared a lot about what they did, which is the coffee experience, which means there's a community to that. There's a social angle, people hanging out at Starbucks, seeing people at Starbucks, feeling comfortable sitting in front of a fireplace. And when they went overboard with all their drive-through mania. They lost all that. So, but there's been a lot of misinformation, so I'll just go through a couple things. One was, you know, there was a lot of reports that they were closing 900 stores. Maybe you heard that. I heard that. But when you research that, that's totally wrong. They're cutting 900 corporate and non-retail jobs. You know what that means to you and I? Overhead.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, they're making, yeah, over, useless overhead.

Lorraine Kessler
Non-essential overhead. And they're closing only 1 % of the North American stores, which equates to about 200 stores. And they're closing those stores judiciously based on the fact that they'll never be profitable, right, or they can't be remodeled to bring forward the new experience. And this is all the work of Brian Niccol. I don't know if it's Niccol, Niccol, I don't know how you say his name, so I apologize for that. But, you know, he's come forward with this plan called Back to Starbucks, you know. So, and it's a $1 billion restructuring plan. How does that compare, by the way, to Cracker Barrel? Weren't they spending more than a billion?

Mark Vandegrift 
They spent, I thought they spent 700 million to redo everything. But if you now have to go back, which they're doing, they're unremodeling. In other words, they're remodeling back to Cracker Barel. So I would guess it's gonna be well over a billion by the time they're done.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah. So the huge, the new, the back to Starbucks is, you know, adding new stores, refitting stores to make them more warm and welcoming, which is what I think I remember from Starbucks in the beginning as community centers. And I think that's all really smart. Now, Target, we already said Jaguar off the table, but Target, I would just take a play. I would just take a page from Niccol's playbook at Starbucks and I would say back to Target. Get jiggy again with the core customer, who's largely female, mothers, families, who they are, what they value, what they care lot about, what makes the brand experience remarkable. And I would reinvigorate on that basis. And that might mean some changes in their store, it might be adding some new services that are high touch and doing those kinds of things. And stay away from the politics, just stay out of that. This is not where your shopper wants to be reminded of when they're shopping for their family and the things that they think about, why they go to Target.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, speaking of Starbucks and drinks, we had the soda topic a lot this year. And we know about Pepsi losing out to Dr. Pepper as the number two, but the big kerfuffle was all about the healthy sodas. And Pepsi bought Poppi and then proceeded to come out with its own healthy soda, which is like, I'm not sure about that one. And then Coke came out with Simply Pop and Coke was originally gonna buy Poppi. So they avoided buying them and came out with their own, but it was more of like just there's fruit juice in it. It's not really healthy soda. So right now, Poppi is outselling Olipop by about 20%. So you have Poppi, you have Olipop, then you have everyone else. So how do you think this craziness sorts itself out?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, you first of all, you know, when you yourself split a category, like a new category, rather than being uber focused on building that category with one brand, you then introduce another brand. I don't understand that thinking at all. You have just truncated the growth of the category and confused the market. And if you do it to yourself, again, it's un-living both brands. I think the whole category will level off to a fixed percentage of the soda market and it'll be very small at the end of the day. And so there'll be way too many competitors and they'll have to be some rationalization. It's not unlike in the early parts of my career I worked for a pork producer who did hams and bacon and hot dogs and lunch meats. And they went crazy over the fact that what was really happening then, and it was a big topic, was the lean hot dogs, the type you buy in the package. And Eckrich was killing it in the Midwest with this, supposedly. But they had the category to themselves. So I remember doing research on lean packaged hot dogs. And you know, you're always kind of guessing even with research. And they estimated that this lean, no fat, low fat hot dog in the case would be level off about 12 to 20 % of the total hot dog packaged goods market. It never got that big. And it didn't get that big because you can never see what's going to come. It's going to affect it came that affected it, it's kind of what's going on in this healthy soda, like fruit juice and so is that a healthy soda? I don't know. What is healthy? So the unanticipated trends that kind of stymied this lower fat was organic and natural. So I doubt, and there's no real evidence in this, but I really doubt that the lean hot dog market is more than two to three percent nowhere near the 12 or 20 percent. And right now healthy soda, coincidentally, is at 2 percent of the near $43 billion traditional soda market. So my guess is at best it will level out at about 5 percent or below. Because now I'm going to include prebiotic, I mean it's like what type are you talking about? Is it fruit mix in? Is prebiotic? Is it probiotic? Is it low calorie? I mean, what the heck is it?

Mark Vandegrift
Well, you we were down at Oglebay Resort this past weekend and it was interesting because we went into a restaurant and they were, you know, quick serve and they had a cooler and it had drinks in it. But, you know, usually you have a water section and you have a soda section. Every single shelf or slot in that was a different drink. And I look at the commercials out right now, you can actually get all these mixed drinks in a can now. If you want a gin and tonic or a white bludgeon or, you know, like there are so many drinks available, options available. Where does that stop? I mean, it's no longer water or pop. Those were two choices in the past. I mean, we remember when Snapple came out and that was a whole big thing. And then you had flavored Snapple and you know, now we're talking, I don't know what they call the, the, like the White Claw. I don't know what that officially is called or all of these mixed drinks and cans, or you have craft brews versus regular beer. I mean, the number of options in drinks is just, it's unfathomable. How could you even store all this stuff as a vendor?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, even as a vendor and then as a consumer, I mean, and as a producer, now you have all this time and energy and focus going into broadening this line. I mean, just the amount of different canning, different bottles, different, it's got to hurt profitability at some point, right? If you don't establish a great market. So yeah, I think it's mind-numbing. I mean, you walk in even to, a carry out like a BP, here we have BP. Carry outs are pretty big, but we have an Independent and their walk in cooler is bigger than any, bigger in what they carry is bigger than what Meijer carries. I just don't know how they make that go.

Mark Vandegrift 
You might be better off going and playing the Power Ball versus predicting where that one's gonna land.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, might be. I might be. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem with predictions is like they're rarely right because you never see what's going to come that you didn't see on the horizon.

Mark Vandegrift 
Right. Okay, Lorraine, let's wrap up this season wrap up and I'm going to give you the floor of all the episodes we had this year. Which one was your favorite or perhaps which topic was your favorite?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, and this will be no surprise to you and maybe to those who really tuned in, but my favorite topic rather than the podcast, I'll let the audience decide that, is the importance of positioning, which to me is always about a one-two punch. The first punch is getting the right idea, the idea that differentiates your brand from competitors in a meaningful, distinctive way. That's number one. Do we have an idea here that makes it easy for people who have choice to choose us and not the competitor? If you don't have that, you don't have a hand, as they say. The second part, and the absolute critical component, is getting the idea right, which is in how you express your idea through the disciplines of branding and advertising. Because you can have a brilliant positioning idea, which is the strategy, but it's innately boring unless it's brought to life in an engaging, memorable, and relevant way, in a way that somehow creates the magic, that mercurial element. That comes from the creative side. And that's what makes positioning the idea stick in the mind. And you've got to have both. Getting the right idea, without getting the idea right is dead on arrival, right? DOA. And creative that fails to deliver a sustainable, meaningfully important difference, the positioning idea, is like cotton candy. It collapses before it's ingested. It has no substance. It has no life. So that's what I'd like to have people always do is work hard to get the right idea and then work hard to get the idea right. And what I've learned is the talents needed for one are rarely the same talents that are needed for two. So this is where you need a team. You need a team of collaborators who really understand the importance of positioning.

Mark Vandegrift
Very good. Love that. Well, as we publish this, we are two months from Christmas and two months in a week from the new year. And of course, we always have our New Year's resolutions. So as we sign off for the year, what advice would you give our audience that they can use as their 2026 guiding principle?

Lorraine Kessler
Keep it small, keep it obvious, be real.

Mark Vandegrift 
I like it. I like it. That's good. Well, we're going to wrap up this episode of the Brand Shorthand podcast. Lorraine, as always, thanks for joining us and thank you to our listeners. If you can like, subscribe, subscribe and subscribe and share this with your friends. Shout it from a mountaintop. We don't care how you share it, but we appreciate you joining us. And until next season, have an amazing last day of the year, last couple months of the year, whatever is your amazing, have an amazing day.