Archive for the ‘story telling’ Category

A Frothy War is Brewing

As many of you know I have posted often on the Starbucks brand, a leader in creating an experience around what was once a commodity.  In fact authors Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore use them to explain how products evolve through an economic progression as they move from commodity to true brand experiences and create consumers willing to pay for those experiences along the way.  The Experience Economy -a seminal read on the topic, is definitely a book that should be on everyone’s shelf.  

McDonald’s has been testing their proverbial stir stick in the coffee cup for a while and now seems to be brewing up a storm with the launch of their McCafé.  As I try and discern McDonald’s marketing strategy, it seems to be all about price and convenience.  No shocker coming from the pioneer of the value meal.  Starbucks won’t be going down without a fight however.  While they can probably match McDonald’s on convenience and location having a pretty similar footprint of stores- they seem to be very protective of the premium price (or economic progression) they have created.

A piece on the Starbucks marketing can be seen here.  It’s a nice warm and frothy (shot in high-def btw - very nice quality) 5 minute piece with Howard and some baristas talking about the Starbucks experience and why it’s better.  Said differently, why they need to defend their turf that they have earned over the last forty years.

Someone once said, “A rising tide floats all boats”.  McDonald’s may be the pirates coming aboard the Starbucks ocean liner.  My only advice to Starbucks is to play your game - don’t play McCafé’s.  If you react to a price strategy against a formidable player in that space like McDonald’s - you’ll come up a cup short.  Tell your story and let consumers decide.

Pardon me while I enjoy my Dunkin’ Donuts home brew.

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.