brands
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…..
Live Insights
True Insight comes from allowing customers to tell us what they want to tell us when they want to tell us and how they want to tell us
Anything else is merely validation
If you ask a customer a question chances are they will respond with an answer (especially if paid to do so!) but this doesn’t tell you:
- · how much the topic/issue really matters to them (if at all)
- · what influence it will have on their buying behaviour (if any)
- · what the words and phrases that you use really mean to them (if anything)
This means that a lot of money spent on collecting customer insight is currently wasted because it is asking about stuff that is not relevant, important and motivating for the customer
This flawed and dated approach is now turning on its head because….
‘Customers are doing it for themselves’
Tired of mass marketing, product development without consultation, retailer supremacy and being asked to take part in tedious and irrelevant surveys customers are taking things into their own hands. They are ‘following’ brands they like, co-creating new products, buying through whatever distribution channel gives them what they want in a cost effective and convenient way and sharing customer reviews.
Problem is with a few notable exceptions, brands have not kept up and Marketers are still banging the old drums!
The way in which customer insight will be accessed in the future will require marketers to do
- · Less talking and more listening
- · Less questioning and more elicitation
- · Less promoting and more responding
- · Less developing and more evolving
This means a change in mindset and learning new skills. Right now, Customers are moving faster than Marketers and the pace is quickening. There’s no question that quick action is needed and those who hesitate will be ‘lost’ still sitting in their Ivory Towers wondering
‘What happened?’
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.
Dairy Milk - I’m thinking of defecting
I am somewhat bemused. Cadbury’s have released a new ad featuring children with dancing eyebrows. I freely admit to being a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk fan and consume far more of the stuff than is healthy, but I am seriously considering defecting to another brand because I just cannot see what their ads have to do with chocolate consumption. The brief apparently was to ‘Create a piece of content that gives people the same joyful feeling they have when they eat Cadbury Dairy Milk’. Hmmmmm, drumming gorillas and dancing eyebrows… I just don’t associate them with that ‘joyful feeling’ I get. Perhaps I am odd.
Last week Media Week reported that WPP, the global communication group, is set to significantly shift its competitive profile away from traditional media and advertising operations to become a more strategic, insight-led organisation, according to chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Speaking at an International Advertising Association luncheon Sir Martin noted that WPP revenues stand at about £15bn, £4bn of which is generated by consumer insight, and he announced that WPP would be focusing more of its business in that direction. He cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”.
“Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
So I am fascinated to know what ’strategic consumer insight’ led to the Cadbury’s ads (created by Fallon), and what quantitative justification they are getting to support them. Reports are that Dairy Milk sales are not soaring and that it has lost market share to Galaxy (and am I the only customer who is actually considering defecting to Galaxy or maybe Lindt?). Perhaps it is doing more for the Cadbury brand as a whole, let’s hope so.
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!
It is indeed a question of behaviour!
Hats off to Mark Ritson in this week’s Marketing magazine for banging the same drum that we have been banging since the mid 1990’s. He writes that ‘focusing on what consumers do, not what they say they do, is key to building effective strategies.’ Actually we go one stage further - focus on what the customer is focusing on and then seek to understand what is driving them to focus on that. Therein lies the key to their behaviour and the success of your strategies.
Ritson also says ‘I have umpteen war stories of focus group findings and opinion surveys that sent me and my client in the wrong direction from the consumer behaviour we were trying to predict’.
We also have plenty of experience of clients going down the wrong track and then asking us for help in getting back on the right one. The problem is, as Ritson points out, customers do not do what they say they will do. But they will repeat behaviours that they have done in the past - in fact they are programmed to do so! So the answer is to model what they have already done. That way you get a much better predictor of how they will behave in the future.
Truly impactful customer modelling and mapping that gets to the heart of the customer, their focus and their behaviour, is an art. It is not done to the customer, it is extracted from them. Rather like taking a blank canvas and enabling the customer to paint their real story upon it. It’s not about prediction based on opinions, attitudes or hypotheses. It is about future behaviour projection based on mapping actual behaviour in the past.
You see, there are certain drivers of behaviour and motivation that we all display in the different contexts of our lives. Knowing which ones are in play in a specific context is crucial to understanding how we are likely to behave when we are in that context again.
Let’s just look at an example. Marketing cites New Coke as famous failed prediction. ‘In 1985, Coca-Cola ran more than 200,000 blind taste tests on its new Coke formula. When results revealed that a majority preferred the new taste to traditional Coke and Pepsi, the company launched the new formula. The public hated it. Research had failed to account for the difference between blind product tests and real brand loyalty.’
The problem was not that the research got the wrong answer - the problem was that it did not ask the right question. It did not ask whether Coke customers were motivated by trying new and different products (even within the brand) or by sticking to the same old favourite they loved. Had they asked that question, they would have known that customers would not accept a ‘new’ replacement Coke, even if they preferred the taste. They might have accepted it though, if it was marketed as the same old Coke they knew and loved, just with a slightly improved taste. It might have been a whole different story - or maybe the same story with an improved ending - for Coca-Cola. Note how they have succeeded with brand extension (Diet Coke, Diet with Lemon etc) -but these are additions not replacements.
Discovering the point of greatest leverage to influence the customer to repeat their behaviour in your favour, is the intuitive art within the art of customer mapping. As the old story goes, the value is not in how hard you tap the pipe, it’s in knowing precisely where to tap. You can’t know where to tap, if you don’t know your customer’s map!
The sad demise of Hardy Amies
The Guardian, Saturday September 27th 2008, reported the sad demise of Hardy Amies, the Queen’s official dressmaker for more than 50 years. So what happened?
Designer Jeff Banks is quoted in the article as saying that the brand’s clothes had become ‘distinctly mumsy’ and that the firm had failed to understand its customers. Richard Dennen, features associate at Tatler said: ‘I don’t know who their market is supposed to be’. Clearly neither do they.
Have they asked their existing customers what they value and want from the brand? Probably not! Now that is sad… or maybe just foolhardy.
You won’t fall into that trap, will you?