Stefan Stroe – Independent Brand Strategist

Our flight to Bucharest was cancelled and we were offered by the airline company staying at Continental hotel nearby Milano Malpensa airport. So now I’m writing you from here.

I went it the last 15 minutes of hotel’s breakfast time and the best food stuff left were the small breads, honey & jelly.

As I was looking for some sweets, among all the piles of jelly portions on the table I chose Granini fruit jelly because I know the Granini juice back from Romania. Beside that, because it is a premium juice back home, I eat it with even more appetite, although the product has the same strange-gel-look.

I think it’s a good line extension that could be done in Romania also by some of our nectar/juice brands, and I think especially of the Romanian and Moldavian ones, which could own good equities on “real fruits” and strong believability levels.

“Insight” is such a precious word… Unfortunately it proved to be too sexy so that now it is overused by many of our communication fellows. Yes, I know it’s a good jargon for Powerpoint documents, but because of its value I would prescribe “instructions”… What’s funny is that many times Romanian consumer insights come from brainstorming sessions… no comment on that, sorry.

Unfortunately, most of the times an obvious consumer fact (which I politely call in meetings “consumer truth”) is called “consumer insight”. Just like any other planner, I fight in every meeting for this term’s prestige, but I feel somehow like Don Quijote.
That being said, now I want to share with you a piece of work in a category that is so damned low involving… doing laundry! It’s a case study on P&G’s Lenor fabric softner provided by UK’s Government Communications Network, a highly active organism in consumer research field.

Download the document from here (use “Save Target As…”). Then tell me what you think…

I arrived today in Milan where I’m going to meet some of my fellow Context Planners from Starcom Mediavest offices. It’ll be a share&debate 2-day meetings where we’ll discuss about our Communication Planning results.

Its cold & cloudy, the city is really ‘grey’, but that won’t keep me to come back tomorrow with some new strategy topics after I get some rest.