Ponderings and rants
Old is the new new
I was interested to see this article by Kate Jackson in the Sun yesterday which highlights the growing popularity of retro ad campaigns for some of today’s well known brands…….
Old is the new new
If a company wants forward-thinking adverts, it seems looking back produces the best results.
Nostalgia not only sells but it’s much cheaper than thinking up new ad ideas.
We have seen the return of the Milky-bar Kid, vintage Fairy Liquid bottles hitting the shops and now Heinz have announced they will be reusing their original Cream of Tomato Soup labels to mark the product’s centenary.
Alex Beckett, food and drink expert at The Grocer magazine says: “While Heinz’s ‘new’ look is too old school for people to remember, many food brands have relied on our love of retro to boost sales. It’s worked for Monster Munch, Fairy and Wispa.
The only concern with all this looking back to the past is whether the industry is creating enough new products and brands for today’s youth to one day call their own.”
Here we take a look at the marketing campaigns that have come back to life:
FAIRY LIQUID’S white bottles - the sort that were regularly used in Blue Peter “here’s one I made earlier creations - made a return this year to mark the brand’s 50th birthday.
MILKYBAR KIDS are now played by a host of adults wearing the cowboy hat and glasses, 49 years after the original Kid hit our screens.
WISPA bars made a triumphant return to the shelves, in their original packaging, after a successful Facebook campaign in 2007.
OXO created a new family last year. The original Oxo family - with Michael Redfern as the dad and Lynda Bellingham as the mum -were used from 1983 to 1999. Each advert featured the family sitting down to a different meal made using Oxo cubes. A contest was launched last year to find a new family. Entrants sent in a video of their own Oxo ad.
CADBURY’S CARAMEL BUNNY made a comeback in 2009. The sexy rabbit, voiced by British actress Miriam Margolyes, originally advertised the chocolate bars in the late 1980s and early 1990s and told viewers to “take it easy”. The bunny was later voted the third sexiest cartoon character of all time, behind Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boop.
PANDA liquorice created a retro feel by changing the name of their Comfits sweets back to Torpedos in May this year.
AQUAFRESH toothpaste was famed for the catchy song and family in striped pyjamas in its 1980s TV advertising campaign. The commercial proved so popular it recently made a comeback to our screens.
PERSIL marked their 100th anniversary in 2007 by producing an advert made up of clips from past TV commercials, including the one where the teenage boy accidentally pours the powder all over the floor while trying to read instructions on the packet.
MONSTER MUNCH crisps returned to their original, larger size in 2008.
TETLEY tea was advertised by the cartoon tea folk from 1973 until 2001. They are said to be making a comeback next month in a £9million ad campaign, but this time with Sydney as a rapper and Gaffer in a City boy style suit.
MILKY WAY last year relaunched their famous TV advert featuring the red and blue car.
…….not only are brands seemingly benefitting from this attraction to the past but we are now seeing musicians that for many of us are gathering dust on vinyl suddenly on T shirts in H&M being worn with pride by fascinated teenagers.
So what is really behind this desire to connect with the past? Is it a recognition that some things were better in the good old days or is it maybe just that we move in cycles and ‘nothing is new’?
I have another thought in my mind. What if we have lost the plot in terms of what we think we are doing ‘in the name of progresses? What if the premise of ‘innovate or die’ is actually fundamentally flawed? Perhaps there is more truth than we would like to admit in ‘if it ‘aint broke don’t fix it!’ and that some things are best preserved and protected for posterity…..
Susan Boyle; beautiful voice and marketing phenomenon?
Ok so I’m a bit slow on the uptake; I’ve had my head in a project for the last few weeks and am, it seems, the only person to not know who Susan Boyle is. Well now I do and today I became one of the many millions to watch her famous performance on Britain’s Got Talent on You Tube.
Firstly, I want to extend warmest congratulations to her. Her truly beautiful rendition of ‘I dreamed the dream’ moved me to the very core (yes, I cried!). I’m glad she has proved that you don’t have to be visually stunning to be utterly beautiful.
But it did also make me wonder whether I would have been moved quite so deeply had she not been such an ordinary woman. Is it the juxtaposition between her visual ordinariness and her vocal beauty that has catapulted her from an unknown village lass to a worldwide phenomenon? She reported to be possibly the greatest viral video star of all time, with more hits already that Barack Obama’s inaugral speech and Les Miserables are using her name to promote the show - advertising as ‘the show that inspired Susan Boyle’.
It certainly shows the power of the internet for generating attention and the power of the public in determining what is worthy of viewing and passing on. It also shows the power of the public’s emotion, which many brands ignore at their peril, for it is an emotional tidalwave that is carrying Susan Boyle to stardom.
I’ll bet there are brand teams the world over pondering the ‘Susan Boyle Effect’ and wondering how on earth they could tap into it.
Now here’s a thought!
Browsing the blogs while nibbling on my Ryvita and Kipper pate this lunchtime, I came across Rory Sutherland’s missive More kittens: Or how Sir Martin Sorrell can end the recession overnight, in which he is bemused why the mighty power of media buyers isn’t twisting the arms of the newspapers to write at least more balanced, if not more positive news.
‘Because, at the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.
In short we are currently using our clients’ money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients’ businesses.’
He suggests: ‘Group M and the other large media buying houses should simply withhold all advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer the f*** up. And, correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the phone calls. “Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run a series of ads for IBM, but unfortunately you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So instead we’re going to put all the money towards sponsoring “Dogs do the Funniest Things on ITV3 and a gatefold pull-out in Hello! Now, don’t do it again, right.” ‘
I think Rory has a point. We might be heading into the biggest downturn anyone under 65 will have seen in their lifetime, but there are still good news stories to be broadcast. There are companies who are still growing and doing well, brands that bucking the apparent downward trend, small businesses that have never been so busy, not to mention millions of people doing interesting things worth talking about. And if the papers run out of good news stories, they can always resort to fluffy kittens, but I suspect by the time they do we’ll be out the other side of this and denationalising all the banks we now suddenly own.
There is a more sinister side to the media’s obsession with bad news, which is of concern, and that is the psychological effect the gloomy news has on us all. This recession hasn’t suddenly come upon us in the last year, it has been creeping up on us for several years and yet a year ago we were still thinking we were a booming economy and spending as such. The only difference in what was really going on in the economy then to now is that no-one told us we weren’t booming anymore.
Perhaps we would all be better off if the media just balanced their news-telling, so for every doom and gloom story they hunt down, they also sniffed out a good news one. Then perhaps we could all feel a little more balanced and our media spend would be supporting our thriving client’s businesses instead of contributing to killing them.
In the meantime, perhaps we really should put our money where our clients’ mouths would like to be - in media that attempts to support and reverse an ailing economy rather than media that just adds to it.
Ad recall - has it any relevance?
Marketing magazine’s weekly Adwatch Bulletin has just landed in my inbox, listing recent ads with the highest recall http://www.brandrepublic.com/marketing/AdWatch/. As I read through the list, I couldn’t helping wondering…so what? So what if the Argos ad has the highest recall. What interests me is what happened next. What did the viewers feel compelled to do as a result of that ad? What action did they take? Did they feel compelled to get off their sofa and reach for the Argos catalogue - or better still go to their local store or onto the internet and starting buying stuff?
I sometimes wonder if we are asking sufficiently penetrating questions in these surveys. It’s very nice to know that your ad is remembered. But wouldn’t you like to know that your ad caused a storming of the checkouts? Recall is irrelevant if the ad didn’t trigger an action and a consequence.
We’re all in business to keep the money flowing between us. As we are seeing in this current economic crisis - if the money don’t flow, we all grind to a halt. So perhaps we should introduce a new measure of advertising effectiveness: ‘to what extent did the ad compel you to reach into your pocket and spend its contents on that product or brand?’ Being top of that list would really be something to celebrate!
What has John Sergeant and customer knowledge in common? Everything!
We’ve watched with growing interest and amazement this week as the storm in a teacup over John Sergeant’s less than twinkling toes, has become a maelstrom of media activity. While the BBC could not have planned a better PR campaign for getting Strictly Come Dancing splashed across the news (even Newsnight devoted a 10 minute piece to it on Wednesday - the day Sergeant announced his retirement from the show), does it hide an underlying issue? On the ‘other side’ ITV are having a similar but much less public conundrum on the X Factor, where the public vote is saving the underdog at the expense of the better performers.
Where the decisions over who stays and who goes are made by public vote, it is a very clear indicator of customers’ preference. But what is the real motivation? Do the TV companies truly understand what internal emotional levers are being pulled when their customers feel compelled to pick up that phone and vote? Since the BBC had to shut down the Strictly message boards last night because of the overwhelming number of people posting their comments on this week’s revelations, we rather suspect that they don’t!
Let’s get real……..
The Times reported today that official interest rates were slashed yesterday by one and a half points to 3 percent leaving base rates at their lowest level since 1954.
The International Monetary Fund are also warning that next year would be Britain’s toughest since 1991 and predicted that the economy would shrink by 1.3 per cent – the biggest fall in GDP since 1991. This would leave Britain by far the worst performer among the world’s leading industrial countries. It also factored in a global recession for the first time, saying that the world’s developed economies as a whole were headed for their first full-year contraction since the Second World War.
This has to be the most conclusive indication so far that that it is time to change the way that we think about marketing expenditure.
The smart companies will already be saying that this is exactly the time when we should be holding our nerve and continuining to spend at the same level, if not higher to protect market share. But what if we now start to take our thinking rather than our budgets to the next level?
As Einstein said we can’t solve problems at the same level of thinking at which they were created!
No longer can we afford to spend marketing budgets hoping that it will have the desired effect. Our thinking and language need to change so that we are focussing on getting the best possible return on investment and are really certain that that the investment is being made in the right place to give the best possible customer leverage.
Knowing how to get this customer leverage comes firstly from making sure that we have extracted all that we can from customer information that already exists, only gathering more customer information where there are clear gaps in our knowledge. Then by looking at all customer information sources from a key leverage points perspective, we can start building a map of what the customer is focussing on and identifying what they will be prepared to invest in.
This perspective shift has to be coupled with being brave enough to admit that some areas of past investment have not been working hard enough and that these investments need to be cut to enable more investment to be made in areas that will deliver better returns.
Given the choice, which will be the better levers for you to pull?
Do your customers want to be hugged or educated?
Do they want deals or directions?
Do they want freedom to choose or reassurance?
Do they want evolution or revolution?
Deciding which customer levers to pull requires not only the skill to be able look where others have looked and see what others have not seen but to also to know with certainty what effect pulling them will have!
The days of hopin’ and wishin’ and prayin’ are over. We now need customer insight that will deliver this level of certainty, because it is based on fact not hypotheses, behaviour not opinions, experience not projections and is intrinsically linked to the bottom line.
As marketers we need to get a clear perspective on the real world of the customer as they see it , hear it, feel it and spend money in it to make sure that their interest doesn’t fall to an all time low!
Thoughts on the ‘credit crunch’
Yesterday I went to the local branch of LloydsTSB. I was the only customer for the few minutes I was in there and I got chatting to the ladies that worked there about dancing, because one of them mentioned she dances regularly. After a few minutes I went on my way, feeling chirpy from that encounter, even though banks generally do not induce chirpiness in me. I’ve been pondering why I felt good leaving the bank, and I’ve come to this conclusion: I felt good because I felt I was a human, a customer, and not just a number and a bank account. For a brief moment or two I had entered into a relationship with these ladies; I’d interacted person to person, not just teller to bank account.
And it got me thinking…
Is that what really lies behind this whole banking crisis, I wonder? In the drive for ever increasing profits has the financial industry forgotten that money is only a ‘promise’ and that people and relationships (i.e. their customers) are the only way that promise is actualised? Trying to cross-sell and up-sell, and loaning more money than the house value to people who can’t really afford it, is just chasing the cash while cloaked in a mantel of customer service.
Is the credit crunch the come-uppance for the financial industry for placing profit before people? Is this a warning for companies that put cash before their customers and forget that their cash flow is directly proportional to customer flow? (And that customer flow is directly proportional to the relationship you bother to build and the interest you take in really understanding them.)