Archive for October, 2007

You don’t have to touch it to feel it - Print can be experiential too.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, experiential marketing is not always reserved to live three dimensional events and sexy brand experiences.  Good creative capable of evoking feeling, can (when done well) exhibit itself through more traditional mediums like print and television.  When I speak about this topic I normally use more dramatic examples like this one below from Mothers Against Drink Drivers in a campaign to raise awareness amongst high school teens during graduation.

And there are several others that shock to make consumers feel, like child abuse, drug abuse, and anti-smoking campaigns to name a few.  But I stumbled across this cool new campaign from Canadian Club in MediaPost which I thought showed how marketing in print can be experiential.  

Now I have to admit, I am not a fan of the brown water - theirs or any one else’s.  Yet as a marketer I would only imagine that Canadian Club (or CC as you may remember it) had an issue with their brand becoming a bit dated, stodgy and ultimately less relevant to today’s twenty somethings.  

Having spent a few years in brand management with the Purina Dog Chow brand I can totally relate to brands where tenure in the marketplace is a double edge sword.  So Canadian Club apparently wanted to re-stage itself with a younger audience.  What better way to reconnect than to show images of what could be just about anybody’s Dad (including mine) in scenes that show what a loose and cool time the 50s and 60s were. 

Canadian Club Whisky launched its first national ad campaign in almost 20 years and it’s damn good. “Damn Right 

Your Dad Drank It” uses imagery from the 1960s and 1970s and provocative taglines to remind consumers that their dads were once cool and stylish — as is Canadian Club. Many of the pictures used in the campaign came from employees’ photo albums. “Your Mom Wasn’t Your Dad’s First,” begins one attention-grabbing ad. “Your Dad Was Not a Metrosexual,” “Your Dad Never Got a Pedicure” and “Damn Right Your Great-Great Grandad Drank It,” read other headlines. Ads launch in the November issues of Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, and December issues of Playboy, Men’s Journal, Esquire, Outside and Men’s Fitness. Click here and here to see the ads. Energy BBDO created the campaign; Zenithmedia and Moxie Interactive handled the media buying.

As I’ve mentioned before, great brands tell a story.  BTW, anyone looking for a good read on the subject should pick-up Legendary Brands by Laurence Vincent. 

AS Canadian Club approaches its 150th anniversary, they’d like to remind today’s guys that the men that came before them knew what they were doing.  The really cool and retro images (even the dusty Polaroids) translate the CC story so well in print.  A story they hope will have meaning, relevance, and connectedness - to the male 20 somethings it is targeted at.  I would think what CC is striving for is a bit of Rat Pack, bad boy image.  Maybe the other side of your Dad that was kept from the kids, but you can kind of relate to due in part to a DNA fast forward into your social scenes.  The old film cameras are now digital SLRs, and the hair-dos a bit more subdued, but the good times haven’t changed much; we just call them social communities. 

And how authentic - another badge of strong brands.  CC actually used many of the images pulled from employees family photo albums.  So even though the experiential enlightened often thumb our noses at traditional mediums in favor of the bright shiny objects like events, guerrilla, sampling, viral buzz, Web 2.0 an all the other buzz words - including buzz marketing.  Don’t think that print is incapable of creating an experience.  As long as it’s experience-based (as opposed to features and benefits product focused) and really good creative.

Great sampling: A “Cutter” is more than just a pitch in baseball.

A little down time with the blog due to some travel and a Dell meltdown that I should have foreseen.  Lesson learned:  Back up often!!

But anyway, we’re up and running again and I thought I’d throw out a post about a great little piece of sampling done last night at Jacobs’ Field, the home of the Cleveland Indians.  A 4-2 win for the Indians puts them up 2 games to 1.  But as a marketer, that’s not what I remembered when I saw the highlights. 

A little background for the non-sports world:  It was the first game at Jacobs Field since an invasion of midges pestered Joba Chamberlain and the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the first round of the Divisional playoffs. “The Bug Game” was still fresh in everybody’s minds last night.  In fact some called it the Indian’s secret weapon in their win over the Yankees.

Cutter, an insect repellent brand of Spectrum brands based out of St. Louis, MO seized upon the marketing opportunity by handing out small repellent towelettes to all 44,402 fans in attendance.  Fortunately the weather stayed just cool enough to keep the midges down.  But the Cutter brand had made just as much of a statement in the stands as the Indians did on the field.   All for pennies worth of product to each fan. 

“We’re keeping the midges on the mound,” said Stephanie Strawbridge, hired by Cutter to wear a black and yellow bumblebee costume and pass out the bug repellent near the stadium. “That’s our secret weapon.”

Midges breed on the outskirts of lakes during warm fall weather. When temperatures reached an unseasonable 80 degrees on Oct. 5 with the Yankees in town, the bugs visited the ballpark just in time to distract Chamberlain into throwing two wild pitches as the Indians came back to win 2-1 in 11 innings.

Temperatures were only in the upper 60s Monday, but Gary Ramey, a divisional vice president for Cutter, which is made by St. Louis-based Spectrum Brands, was hoping it was warm enough for the pests to come back out.

What a great way to expose over 44,000 fans to your product, even if it proved unnecessary.  Sampling that is relevant and meaningful at the point of use.  It has all the makings of what great sampling programs should strive for.  Add a small dose of PR and you’ve got yourself an experience worthy of conversation.

Get the Word Out

Mark Twain once said, “Facts are stubborn.”  Well how about the enlightening analysis below pulled from the Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study from April of this year.  More of a reinforcement of what we may have already known, but I always like to support opinions with facts.

 To quote a summary piece on this from Retail Wire:

 The recommendation of someone else remains the most trusted source of information when consumers decide which products and services to buy,” said David McCallum, the global managing director for Nielsen’s Customized Research Services, in a statement. “Even though new media technologies are playing a role in ‘globalizing’ society, many purchasing decisions are still based on firmly held national and cultural attitudes. Furthermore, given that nothing travels faster than bad news - with estimates that reports of bad experiences outnumber good service reports by as many as 5:1 - the importance of responsive, high quality customer service is yet again highlighted.”

The survey of 26,486 internet users across 47 markets in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East probed consumers attitudes on 13 forms of advertising. Other findings:

• Traditional advertising channels continue to retain consumers’ trust. Newspapers rank second worldwide in credible advertising mediums while television and radio each ranked above 50 percent;
• Brand web sites were trusted by 60 percent of respondents, but brand sponsorships were only trusted by only 49 percent;
• E-media advertising received particularly low trust grades: search engine ads, 34 percent; online banner ads, 26 percent; and text ads on mobile phones, 18 percent. “E-mails I signed up for” rated 49 percent.

Some of you may be going well, “duh”, we all knew that word of mouth trumped just about everything else and is very powerful.  No wonder it’s the most trusted source.  After all it’s about as authentic and real as it gets.  But here’s the rub.  Why do we keep trying to influence word of mouth and harness it.  This is where I may disagree with such “sanctioning bodies” like the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

You can’t create word of mouth any more than control it.  Word of Mouth is the end product of a remarkable and memorable consumer experience.  As I like to say it comes after the = sign.  It is not created in some brand strategy Petri dish.  There is an old saying in small businesses that never really tires that goes, “If you like the service you received,  tell a friend.  If you don’t tell me”.  Me being the proprietor of course.

It’s simple in concept yet very difficult in execution.  Consumer’s words come from their mouths -not ours as brand marketers.  We can facilitate it and respond to it, but we can not create their words anymore than we can create their mouths.  What we can do is create an engaging experience worthy of discussion. 

From the simplest retail and transaction customer service experience to other related touch points like on-line, brands need to make it fun, stimulating, and pleasurable to do business with them and use their products.  That’s what people talk about.  The ordinary and mundane seldom gets a mention around the proverbial water cooler. 

And much to the dismay of price discounters….people don’t usually start a meaningful conversation with what they paid for something.  Not to slam the success of our friends in Bentonville, but price is very seldom a firm foundation for a remarkable brand experience.

Marketing is seduction.  Treat them like it’s your first date…every time.  Make them want to tell their friends how HOT you are!