Fast Talk: Brand Revivers

We have a program called Follow Me Home, an Intuit innovation, where we literally follow customers into their homes and watch them use our products. We also have pizza parties where the marketing, engineering, and quality-assurance teams analyze market research together rather than marketing handing down conclusions. They're very scrappy meetings, but the result is that the engineers have a lot more faith in the outcome. It all helps bring meaning to work in a way that's beyond taking home a paycheck. When you realize that you can fix what ails users, it jazzes you to get up in the morning.

In my years at Intuit, we had smaller budgets and a smaller team than Microsoft, but Quicken outsold Microsoft Money nine to one. We have a long way to go, but we've enjoyed six consecutive quarters of profitability. That's what jazzes me to get up in the morning.

One Sip at a Time

Yuengling, America's oldest brewery, was the number-one "Power Brand" in the United States this year according to Information Resources Inc., which tracks supermarket and retailer data. David Casinelli, who came in to run operations at the family-owned brewery in 1990, is largely responsible.

Over 176 years, you have good years and you have bad years, and I think the bad years probably outweigh the good years. Right now we're experiencing the best time this brewery has ever experienced. People always ask me, "What's the magic bullet?" I tell them there really wasn't one. It was a series of seeds we planted over time. It didn't all come together one morning.

When I started, a lot of the beer we sold was sold in our local market. If we were going to survive, we had to venture out. They weren't grandiose plans -- we just wanted to get to western Pennsylvania or Delaware. If I'm going to come into a new market, I have to present our products in a way that makes sense. We were selling beer in little old steiny bottles, and our labels looked like they were designed and bought from Kmart. I wanted to change the look and feel of the brand, and CEO Dick Yuengling and I fought about it a lot. Once I did, then I had to come up with change everyone could live with.

We rolled up our sleeves and did a lot of grassroots stuff. We'd go into small towns, and we'd take the sponsorships that the other beer companies turned down. Maybe the local fair or Philadelphia's Book and the Cook event. We made friends in bars, retail outlets -- right in the communities.

You get a couple of small successes and you build on them. One thing we knew: We had good liquid in the bottle. We're a discovery brand. If you serve us to six of your friends, maybe three say, "I really like that beer." You pick up three customers like that. The beer hasn't changed. It's marketing.

Keep Your Cool

Tamara Rosenthal

Director of marketing
Lacoste USA
New York, New York

After a moment of preppy chic in the 1980s, Lacoste USA had been dormant as a brand until Robert Siegel came in as CEO and hired Tamara Rosenthal, then 31, to run marketing. It has been hypercool ever since.

We tried to create a groundswell. To get noticed early on, we went after smaller specialty retailer shops, like Scoop. They have the ability to seed the brand with influencers, because the type of people shopping in those stores are setting trends. It was a viral, word-of-mouth thing. If you say you're cool, you're not. It's a property that needs to be demonstrated. We would gift product to some celebrities and then we'd literally see them wearing it in magazines. We also use a lot of outside agencies to help us do product placement. My mother would call me and say, "Did you know Lacoste was in the movie Hitch?" Yeah, Mom, it just randomly ended up there! Some things do happen on their own: Justin Timberlake went out and bought his own Lacoste track suit.

We talk about how to keep from getting overexposed all the time. Although we're expanding to 35 Lacoste stores by the end of the year, we've also narrowed down and eliminated many of the department stores we sold to. The mistake Lacoste made in the 1980s was trying to be everywhere -- you could buy us at T.J. Maxx. Our distributors want to explode the brand, and we probably could have sold a lot more goods last year if we had decided to sell to everybody. We didn't make every move we could. We had to pick and choose our moments. I get offers all the time to put Lacoste in award-show gift bags, like at the Grammys. Sure, we can land our product with a lot of B- and C-list celebrities, but what is that doing for us? The same with distribution. We could be in Loehmann's. But where would the brand be in two years?

It all comes back to the product. When I worked for Salvatore Ferragamo, they had great ad campaigns all the time. But at the end of the day, they weren't willing to make any changes on the product side. It doesn't matter how you're advertising or where your stores are. If you go in and there's nothing you like, it doesn't matter.