Campaign Catch Up!

Campaign catch up and the beauty of a simplified position! Some of the popular campaigns that Mark and Lorraine discussed last season are continuing their efforts into 2026. Back for round two is Sydney Sweeney with American Eagle and Walter Goggins with Walmart’s “Who Knew” campaign!  Another brand seeing huge success is Starbucks, thanks to CEO, Brian Niccol, who has successfully enforced his “Back to Starbucks” plan. Tune in to this week’s episode of Brand Shorthand to hear the latest on these brands!

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

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is our positioning knowledge vault, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, speaking of vaults, it's hard to believe we are starting our next 100 episodes. So here we are. 

Lorraine Kessler 
I know, I feel like I'm starting my 100th year.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, here we are with 60 hours of recording later, approximately that and your legacy lives on in the podcast sphere.

Lorraine Kessler 
I guess so. 

Mark Vandegrift
Did you ever think that would happen.

Lorraine Kessler
Whatever. That's one legacy. There's others we won't discuss.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, since we have so much on tape, right? I thought it would be good for us to revisit some of our past season's prognostications and see how we did. You wanna go through that with me? 

Lorraine Kessler
Sure.

Mark Vandegrift
Okay. Well, let's do three. I think that's enough to get us through today's episode. Let's start with the first one. You recall the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad last year.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift 
And it was the jeans, J-E-A-N-S/G-E-N-E-S ad. And that created all the controversy because she said it was in the jeans, right? And everyone seemed to be talking about it. It was on every news show. It was on social media. It was everywhere. And I would call that amazing PR. I don't think in this case, we had any bad PR out of it, even though there was a negative side to it. And we talked about it on our podcast and how we thought it was a brilliant move to make American Eagle relevant to a new generation. So, guess what? American Eagle, they decided to do it again. And so they just released a new ad that we'll have Lindsey put up on the screen for us. So Lorraine, give us your thoughts on American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney teaming up for round two.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, it's applause for brand constancy. It's not just consistency, it's the constancy. You have an idea, and we'll talk in a minute about how it's working or how it's worked. And it's working, and so stick with it. And that's rare today. We have so many advertisers who have amnesia or go through these hoops to reinvent things that are working for things in favor of things that aren't working. So, you know, I would give applause. I think it was a smart partnership last year. It's still smart. It gives the brand that has lacked any kind of panache for a long time, a bit of a kick, a bit of a hipness. She certainly does resonate with the younger generations. So, and I think I even said that in August of last year. I said something about that, that, you know, they went from hip from not hip, from ho-hum to relevant, cool, and they did it sexy and quickly. So I think that's all good. And that's one of the core principles we talk about a lot about positioning is we talk about this idea of staying, constancy of sticking with an idea. And I will just remind our audiences, the controversy was to me made up by the media. It was ridiculous. It was that this pun of jeans to genes, they said that this was about a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman promoting eugenics and white supremacy. I mean, you know, if there's ever a proof that people don't think about advertising and branding as much as we do, that's it. And that was just a ridiculous kind of leap from the media. But what it does prove is that there's this old principle we've talked about that there's no bad PR. It did create a lot of negative PR, but it ended up working in their favor. So I wouldn't say that all bad PR is good PR, but in this case, it worked out well. And the real thing is that, you know, Sydney Sweeney, by the way, I don't know if you know this, she's a pretty smart chick. She has her own production company. She's young, right? And she graduated like R. Charles Henderson did, val Victorian of her class only in Burbank, California in 2026.

Mark Vandegrift 
I didn't know that about her.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, so she's not just an actress that's become quite unclaimed, but in a personality. But here's the real push, right? It's the results are what matter. All this surround that we get caught up in, it's just pap. The campaign in 2025 is considered to have contributed to a 77 % rise in stock price for a ho-hum brand, a brand that was going this way. And it had 790,000 new US customers and a 4 % lift in loyalty. So, and just in the short time since this Syd for short, which I think is a great little campaign name, since it debuted in August, it's now, the shares have been rising 6 to 9%. So that's what matters. That's what advertising is intended to do. And so it's working.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And, you know, we haven't ever really gotten into the sex sells side of things. But the fact is, is that the younger generation, as much as they say they're rejecting, you know, things of the past, that's one thing that just doesn't seem to change a whole lot. And, you know, she's, I think, developed kind of a ecosystem around her as well that is a group that finds her very appealing in a lot of different ways. Like you said, the smarts, and it's more about loyalty to her as much as it is to the sex sells type thing, which I find interesting with a lot of the influencers these days that there's a depth there other than what we couldn't develop back in our day when celebrities were doing their thing. Celebrities were whatever the media made them out to be. I think influencers today can develop their own depth in the way that you can almost have direct contact with that celebrity or influencer. So it's been interesting to see. I don't follow her. I don't know her from Adam or what she stands for. But you can tell there's a depth there based on looking at the way this campaign came about.

Lorraine Kessler 
And I gotta tell you, the product looks great. And maybe it just looks great on her. But that's selling the product, right? So kudos.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. So good. Well, let's go to number two here. This is one that I did not like, but it is working out in a good way, but it might be a multiple layer thing. So back in August, not that long ago, I asked you if you thought Walmart was going to see positive results about their "Who Knew?" campaign. And it's that "who knew, who knew" which that right there drives me nuts. So maybe that's what I was repelled by. But it's been over six months and "who knew, who knew" is still alive. That might go to the power of jingles too, because as much as I hate it, it's stuck in my head. So you were high on it. You thought it was a good move and you understand the nuance, the layering of it. So what are your thoughts? There's, there's been more ads coming out. I think they're on at least five or six in terms of this campaign.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think what they were intended, this wasn't, and I think maybe when you came at it, you were thinking about it's being a positioning change or something of that ilk. I looked at it more like there's an advertising objective apart from positioning. Their position is solid. It's always been low price, even though they say it now in a different way. I always have to remember how they say it now. Save more, live better, something like that. But they built the franchise on always low price and they still stand for that in the mind. So this campaign to my mind has a very specific objective and I would equate it to the old days. You rarely see these campaigns anymore but they're very effective. New and improved, right? It's like a new and improved campaign. "Who Knew?" So it's not a, "Who Knew?" is not a position, it's not a change from the position. It's simply a new and improved reinvention because they have a lot to communicate about the Walmart as the second largest online store to Amazon. Now it's way behind Amazon, but it's still, I mean it's a wide gap, but it's still number two. And now you can buy a world of things through Walmart. So I guess my only argument would be in the campaign. One, the recent ad that has been shown is very complicated. It's really hard to enter in. It doesn't get my attention right away. So, you know, I think if you confuse your audience, I think they could simplify the campaign or that at least the advertising itself. There's like way too much going on and it doesn't grab.

Mark Vandegrift
Do you think they didn't know where to go with it? Like it almost feels like they are trying to get into storytelling of some sort, but they didn't know that this would stay a campaign this long and now they don't know where to go with it next. What's your sense?

Lorraine Kessler 
No, I think they knew where they wanted to go. I just think they jammed too much into it, which sometimes you do. You don't sit back, advertisers don't sit back as consumers and always look at an ad and test. I don't know if they tested the ads. I would have with all their money. I would have tested a couple of different concepts. I always thought one of the things you need to do, particularly today in TV advertising more than any other time is those first three seconds, right? One to five seconds. You don't have attention, you're out of here because we know like that's how YouTube values revenue. So there's money tied to that. So you got to grab that audience right away. I'm sure that's why the jingle's there and they're hoping on that recall. But there's just so much going on. So I just, I don't think it's that they didn't know where to go. I think they just tried to jam, jam too much into the spot. And the only thing I would have done, you know, I understand "Who Knew?", because it's simple words and there's a jingle and all that, but, it makes you discover kind of what Walmarts new and improved about. But I guess I would have just said, whatever you can imagine for less. Like, I think I would have been more direct to back to the position because that's just where my heart lies. I would have really liked to have that tie back. But it's working. I mean, sales and what matters most, they're up 4.5 % with 21 % in e-commerce, which really was the point, was to get their app downloaded and to get e-commerce up. So, if it helps people rediscover a new and improved e-commerce Walmart, then it's working. So I'd have to give it high marks for that.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and I think brand awareness is up like 11 % or something, which

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, recall and so is recall almost equal numbers. They're both up like 11.1 and 11.5 percent respectively. So that's really good and it does have high engagement. So but I think again the proof it could have we know the subservient chicken. Right? Who was that for? Burger King.

Mark Vandegrift
Burger King.

Lorraine Kessler
They had enormous, right, views and engagement and didn't do anything for sales. So that can happen. So those KPIs, those advertising KPIs that sometimes people in our field hang on, I'm always like, well, where's the beef? Right? Did it deliver? Did it deliver? Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, you touched on something there with testing. So we've reached out to quite a few clients about this need to make their brand famous, right? That was something that you started hitting on a couple of years ago using kind of that line. And what we've noticed is that organic search as we do brand awareness is actually following along with those impressions and it's actually making the performance media perform better. We know that's a rule, right? But it was always hard to show a client, hey, look, you didn't do anything with organic or with brand awareness and your organic search is either flat or going down. And you do any kind of brand building and you have to do it with sufficiency, right? So not only sufficiency, but constancy you would see a spike about two months in after the campaign rises where you almost get a doubling or tripling of organic search on the brand. And then one month after you start running that it goes back down to where it was before. And so it just, there's, there's a way now to show brand awareness. Now that's the one thing. So what, what folks get nervous about what, what executives you know, from the CEO suite or C suite on down to like your marketing managers. They're like, well, how do I know this is going to work? And, know, where should we run this and all that? And you mentioned testing, you know, with, with our media available, CTV, we can target a stinking zip code for goodness sake. It doesn't cost a lot of money to test. And like you said, why wouldn't Walmart, they don't even, I don't even want them to do regular research. Pick three areas of the country that are not like connected, you know, maybe do something in California, something in New York and some something in Texas and run three different spots and see which one gets better engagement, you know, or pick more equal areas. Those are all I think there's philosophical differences and such. But it's so easy for them to test these days and do true testing. And that is let's not go into a lab for a focus group room and show an ad where you're asking people to give them your logical feedback, just run the ad in three places and see what it does to your sales. That's perfect research.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, the focus group way of testing ads, which were always like animatics or flat screens, is to me very flawed because there's so much that goes into it. The talent, the pacing of the film, the cinematography or the art direction, there's so much. The music, they're not hearing any of that. So it's so artificial to me. And as you know, Google right now, Google is moving towards total random testing of everything and you don't even give them ads anymore as an ad agency. You give them pieces and parts for like text ads and also display ads and they Google itself reparses that and constantly tests. So it's a new day and I think for our viewers who watching this, the book they want to read to prove the point that you started with that brand advertising or brand awareness familiarity floats all ships and not the reverse. You could do a lot of sales generated kinds of campaigns. It's not going to increase brand awareness or value is the book, The Long and the Short of It. And I think Lindsey may have a copy of the cover and we should show that. That book proves the point that we've long believed but lack the means, which we now have today, affordably to test, just as you're saying.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Yep. Big difference from what we have. 

Lorraine Kessler 
It's really exciting. It's really an exciting time.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, it is an exciting time. You know, what's amazing to me is there's some other platforms available now too, that Google is working on and we're seeing near immediate results. It's like, it's mind-boggling. So maybe one of our upcoming episodes, we'll go through that.

Lorraine Kessler 
Right. You know, and hopefully we'll get past the problem we've had for a long time where even clients will say, if you show them different concepts to choose for their advertising, and they'll say, well, I like this one. Like is irrelevant, right? It's effectiveness. So you could say, I think all of these are good candidates. Let's see which one's the most effective. And if we can even just change the language and the thinking to always expect testing. I think that's a new day.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, that's great. Very good. Well, let's go with one more as we finish up here. We talked about the Back to Starbucks campaign when it was first introduced at the beginning of 25 and how much we loved it and thought it was the right move in the right direction to take Starbucks back to their community coffee house feeling, right? So we're a year later and the numbers show that we were all good with it and their sales are up. There's a lot of other good metrics. Their global comparable sales rose 4%. Their revenue hit 9.9 billion, which is up 6%. Their reward members have reached an all time record of almost 36 million. And both loyalty members and non-members grew their visits for the first time since 2022. So why don't you explain to our listeners why the Back to Starbucks plan has been successful.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, I think Brian Niccol, the CEO, really strategically understood the core, what we call the company core, what you believe beyond making money that creates a passion for the business and whatever. And he went back to what Howard Schultz believed, which was this is about a coffee experience. It's not just what's in the cup. It's everything that surrounds the cup. And all we taste images. We don't taste the product. And so, and ironically, Howard Schultz got that idea from, and there's a great documentary on this, which I think I mentioned maybe last time we talked about a year ago, about, it's called the Automat, but it's about Horn & Hardart, which had two main stores, one in Philadelphia, one in New York City. And I grew up with Horn & Hardart, and they created the Automat. But what they did is they created an experience that was unbelievable. So all the immigrants who came to America and were working in cities way before the suburbs could get a five cent cup of coffee, sit in a room that was absolutely gorgeous, full of community, with marble and granite and just glitz unbelievable and have the best cup of coffee ever, as well as other things that Horn & Hardart made right there in its kitchens. So, Schultz was taken with that experience and that's what he, he's actually in the video talking about that. So I think that was smart by Brian Niccol, but then unfortunately the recent media, is, as media does today because they love creating arguments and division, royally roasted him for his comments about the nine dollar cup of coffee as a premium experience. Well, they took that totally out of context because if you read everything he said, what he said makes all sense. It's not saying that they were saying, how is this equalized? You know, how's this promoting equality? Well, that I think is a hold back from Starbucks getting too involved in social issues and losing the focus on the ball of what they really are, just make and sell damn good coffee with an experience that people love. End of story. I don't need to have your politics and all that stuff. But if you read what he really said, I think in context, it's not argument. It's not divisive at all. He said, this is really an affordable premium experience because people are saying, Well, it's less than $10 and I get a really premium experience. Well, you go to any other coffee place, you're going to pay that much. So my point is, as long as they keep the experience premium and people are willing to pay $9, value, price is determined by the value people put in it, not by anything else. So I just think, again, a slam on the media for trying to create controversy where there shouldn't be.

Mark Vandegrift 
Very good. Yeah, it's interesting because I think I told you when we talked before, my dad and I go down to a Starbucks every Thursday morning. That's kind of our hangout time. And we have certainly noticed the service change. You walk in now, they say good morning. They deliver our coffees to us. Sometimes we get breakfast sandwiches. They deliver those to us. They check in on us to see if we need a refill. I mean, it's almost to the point now where you feel like you're at a regular restaurant where a waitress comes up or a waiter and asks if you need anything. So it's definitely gone that way. And we've noticed over that period of time, much more traffic, even to the point that the traffic's out to the road for their drive-through and the number of people coming in and just hanging out is way up. In fact, there's some days where we don't get our chairs when we walk in there. Like, we have our names on them.

Lorraine Kessler 
Oh my gosh. Well, here's the thing. You know, branding, to really have a brand that endures and doesn't die out like a dying star requires a lot of work and continuous work. That's what we call constancy. So they have to continue to deliver on that experience because that is really the heart of their brand cache. And the thing with brand cache is it's mercurial, it's powerful, but it's fragile. So I think as long as they stick with it and they have to commit to it and they seem like they have, they'll survive these media hits about $9 coffee.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep, definitely. Good. Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. Thank you, Lorraine, for joining us as usual. And thanks to all of our listeners for joining us this week. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. Until next time, have an amazing day.