Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity Into a Powerful Business Advantage

by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn

Book Overview

Too many companies think creativity means throwing money into marketing efforts and giving lip service to out of the box thinking. But such efforts rarely have a positive impact on the bottom line. Pat Fallon and Fred Senn argue that leaders have more creativity within their organizations than they realize--but they inadvertently stifle it or channel it in ineffective ways. Juicing the Orange outlines a disciplined approach to building creativity...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591399270
• ISBN13: 9781591399278
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Stories of Successful Advertising/Branding Programs

This is a book that talks about advertising/branding creativity. It's not about product design or R & D creativity. Advertising creativity has a particularily difficult sales job because while people say they want creativity in their ads they tend to look at a group of ads or ad campaigns and select the traditional. After all, if you get too creative you get outside of what people are accustomed to seeing. And since 'everybody' is an expert on advertising the managers with the budgets select the ads. A case in point was trying to sell the Skoda (automobile) brand name in England. The proposed campaign made a joke about how bad the Skoda brand name was in England. The boss from the factory says 'You want to run ads telling people the Skoda is crap? I won't approve it.' The British managers went around him, bought the program, it yielded great success. This book is mostly a book of stories of ad campaigns that were successful. The other kind don't get written up. The lessons to be learned are in the research they did into the brand images, etc. of their clients.

Excellent principles, and they're not afraid to talk about failures...

Have you ever wondered why some ad campaigns soar and others thud? It's definitely not the amount of money thrown at them. In Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, they argue that it comes down to creatively solving that one key business issue the client has. Contents: Redefining Creativity in Today's Marketing Environment; Outpacing the Commoditization of Your Brand; Fighting for Your Brand's Voice; Establishing and Leveraging a Category Advantage; Overcoming a Serious Branding Problem; Reviving a Mature Consumer Brand; Reenergizing a Mature Business Brand; Choosing the Best Media for the Message; Marketing a Network of Businesses Under One Brand; Rethinking Customer Engagement; Lessons Learned; Notes; Index; About the Authors Fallon and Senn are co-founders of Fallon Worldwide, a global advertising company. They use a number of real-life client examples to show what it takes to run a successful advertising campaign. Much of it starts by listening to the company and also to the people who buy (or don't buy) the products. These insights, coupled with an examination of the industry and competition, often points to the business problem to be solved. It may be an attempt to "uncommoditize" your offering or an effort to re-educate the buying public as to what they should or shouldn't be doing. For instance, Purina Dog Chow was a respected brand, but sales were slumping. After listening to pet owners, vets, breeders, and trainers, it became apparent that the brand wasn't the issue. The buying public had mistakenly assumed that variety was good for a dog's diet, where the professionals knew that consistency is more important. Instead of trying to push the brand, they started educating the consumer on dietary best practices. Once informed, the consumer reverted back to a single brand of dog food, and Purina was able to once again capitalize on their strong branding. I think the thing I appreciated most about this book was the honesty. Not all their efforts were stunning successes, and they didn't try to gloss those over or deflect the blame. There's risk involved in many memorable campaigns, like Skoda's ads making fun of their horrible reputation after they had reversed their engineering failures. Even the winners were not always a sure thing or nearly got axed before they were executed (like the EDS cat herder commercial). But after reading these stories and the underlying principles, you'll come away with a much greater appreciation for what goes into a successful marketing effort. A fun read, and one that I really wish had been longer... I was enjoying it!

Fantastic!!

I loved this book. I found this fun and entertaining while providing specific, salient, concise and actionable ideas on managing a business while being driven by creativity. I'm a recovering business executive just starting my own entrepreneurial enterprise and I found this work enormously helpful in helping me define and launch my business. I can't recommend this book enough. GET THIS BOOK!

one tasty orange

True or false: is advertising obsolete? Fallon and Senn say true---unless it changes. And they go about showing how it must change in recounting their best campaigns(with some intellectual honesty in mentioning their losers). The Big Ideas: don't steal a competitor's emotion, find your own; ads must bear an A to B connection in more revenue generation; take risks to survive because incremental change will kill you. The chapter on Lee Jeans is one of the best: trust the focus groups when they have passion(here, teenagers want to feel indestructible in their jeans); don't ape the competition(the strong desire to be sexy like levi's); don't be afraid to go to your roots(here, bring back a doll icon from the compnay's past); and know, above all else, that emotions drive decisions---the reason is tacked on later. They also talk about how they run their shop---fire prima dona employees or unreasonable clients; understand what is worth fighting over; undertstand that creativity is team driven; believe in a few core idea and push them over and again.

A Juicy Congratulations to Fred Senn and Pat Fallon

I found this book as enlightening and delightful as sitting and having a drink with a great leader in advertising. Personally, it has reinvigorated my own perspective as an agency Account Manager and I'm excited and motivated all over again about the accomplishments and contributions we can all make in marketing.