Branding Strategies

De-positioning: The Most Effective Way to Position a Brand in Market

Ask not how your branding agency can help you change the world. Ask how your branding agency can help grow your business.

 

My twenty-plus years career running branding agencies have taught me what works and what doesn’t work in terms of positioning a business for growth. Many trends, perspectives, and buzzwords come and go. New ones continually pop up.

 

You’ve heard of approaches like disruption, differentiation, relevance, unique selling propositions, and personalization. But today, what you hear the most is brand purpose. Not just the what, how, or who the brand is, but the “why” you should care and how it makes the world a better place. This “why” is supposed to align with something bigger, which is more important than the straightforward selling of products.

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DEWeezy

Helping Mountain Dew win in the urban market

The US’ third most popular soft drink, Mountain Dew, has traditionally enjoyed immense popularity with rural and suburban consumers. When they set their sights on the urban market, they came to us for help diversifying their audience by increasing brand awareness and adoption in a way that aligned with the company’s daring, high-adrenaline brand DNA and its connection to extreme sports and outdoor adventures.

To help the classic soft drink brand connect meaningfully with prospective urban fans, we created the “DEWeezy” campaign in collaboration with rapper Lil Wayne. The DEWeezy campaign name, a catchy portmanteau of Mountain Dew and Lil Wayne’s nickname, Weezy, communicated instantly to the rapper’s fans.

The campaign’s star-studded outdoor events celebrated youthful rebellion at the intersection of sports and music, by aligning Mountain Dew with the most influential hip hop artist of his generation and the aspirational world of extreme sports. We were responsible for developing the campaign’s big idea concept, name, brand identity, and all other creative executions across digital and traditional media.

Lil Wayne’s first endorsement deal, and the biggest in Mountain Dew’s history, DEWeezy made Mountain Dew synonymous with the urban skateboarding movement. As Mountain Dew brand manager Jamal Henderson described, “we are celebrating an artist who found his personal success by following his own path. There is no other artist who embodies that ethos more than Lil Wayne, who is not only always dancing outside of the box but makes no apologies for who he is.”

The DEWeezy brand proved remarkably versatile, transcending the traditional campaign role to become a standalone brand that synergized the most unique and exhilarating aspects of the Mountain Dew brand and Lil Wayne’s epic persona. The DEWeezy campaign drove adoption of the product in urban areas, with mountain dew seeing upwards ticks in the 10-20% range.

What we did

Naming, Brand Strategy, Brand Positioning, Visual Identity, Product Architecture, Product Naming, Messaging, Brand Marketing, Website Design and Build, Event Branding, and Brand Consulting

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