Upon his hiring in August of 2014, new Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure vowed to ‘get Sprint back in the game,’ announcing to all employees during a town hall meeting that he would be aggressive in his approach to shaking up the struggling wireless carrier in order to put the company in a better position to compete against its main competitors AT&T and Verizon. One of Claure’s first moves was to essentially kill the Sprint ‘Framily’ plan and immediately pull all advertising related to it. Claure believed that among many things, the group data plan, commercials and advertising campaign was just too confusing. Framily was replaced with the ‘Sprint Family Share Pack,’ a plan that offers customers significantly more data for their dollar than what they would get from other carriers.

It has been more than a decade since Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player to ever play the game, last laced up his now famous ‘Jordan’ brand of shoes and hit the hardwood competitively. Now in his fifties, a picture of ‘his Airness’ from the 2014 Ryder Cup went viral and in my opinion is a perfect example of a brand doing a great job of incorporating its brand idea consistently through all touch points. 

In the first chapter of Allen Adamson’s ‘Brand Simple,’ it is stated that, “to make a brand worth ‘saving as,’ you’ve got to come up with a different meaning for your brand relative to other brands in your category. The difference in meaning has to be simple to understand. It can’t be a complicated concept in any way.” When I read the requirements for this assignment and saw that we needed to identify a brand that lives in my head while serving as a promise linking a product or service to a customer, this quote from the ‘Brand Simple’ made my decision easy. I just so happened to be planning a weekend trip to Ames, Iowa for the Iowa State vs. Kansas State football game and was charged with the task of organizing the food for the tailgate. Whenever it comes to anything related to meat or grilling, there is only one place, one brand that I trust to fill that need. That place is the Local Pig butcher shop located in the west bottoms of Kansas City, Missouri

Is there anything more awkward than when witnessing someone totally embarrass themselves? You know, it’s like a train wreck – one you can’t turn away from despite the horror you see. Prior to the United States match against Germany in the 2014 World Cup, I came across the following tweet in my feed from one of my childhood idols, the one and only Mr. Hulk Hogan, that left me with that feeling.

According to a recent poll referenced in an article entitled “Social Media and the Evolution of Us” from the website Creative social, there are 500 million people using Facebook, 250 million people actively tweeting and 259 million monitoring their LinkedIn accounts. In most cases these are not casual users and the age groups engaging are wide spread. Due to technological advancements resulting in smartphones and tablets, no one has to sit down at a computer to use social media. People are utilizing social media all around us, all the time. If that isn’t reason enough to connect to consumers via social platforms, Shell Robshaw-Bryan provided these eight impossible-to-argue reasons for businesses to go social in a story posted on the site Social Media Today in early 2014. 

The 2008 recession has had a profound impact on all Americans and significantly changed the budgets and spending habits for everyone – regardless of background. There are numerous valid points used in arguments that my generation, the Millennials, have had it the worst since this “great recession.” Overall joblessness is between two and three times higher for 20-somethings than older workers and according to a Pew Report released in 2013, a third of Millennials are living at home with parents. My generation has entered the “real world” in debt, particularly student loan debt, which infamously eclipsed credit card debt in 2012 at $850 billion. Paying back that debt will be a tough challenge – resulting in a not-so-bright future for us. That said, why would a company like Sprint target Millennials, or as they call them, “can-doers,” so aggressively? What makes this market so appealing?