marketing
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…..
Brand loyalty – is it down to dopamine?
However, once the animal learns that the tone precedes the arrival of juice, the same neurons begin firing at the sound of the tone instead of the reward. Schultz calls these cells “prediction neurons” since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than receiving them. Once this pattern is memorised, the monkey’s dopamine neurons become exquisitely sensitive to variations on it. If the cellular predictions are correct, and the reward arrives right on time, then the primates experience a brief surge of dopamine, the pleasure of being right.’
These dopamine neuron signals are what allow us to make patterns and predictions in the real world. As long as the pattern is correct and the predicted reward follows, then we get our dopamine ‘fix’ and we feel good. So what does this mean for brand loyalty?
Well it seems reasonable to suggest that for brand-loyalists, their dopamine prediction pattern is that buying the brand gives them the reward of feeling good. And as long as the prediction of the reward is rewarded by ‘being right’, they’ll keep getting their dopamine.
There are however two other highly useful things to know about this in relation to buying behaviours and loyalty. Firstly there is the prediction error signal, which is how we learn what works and what doesn’t. If the event doesn’t produce the predicted reward, we don’t get the dopamine surge and so our sophisticated dopamine neuron predictive system flashes ‘error’. If we experience this error signal more than once or twice our predictive system starts to ‘look’ for rewards elsewhere.
This is what we refer to in NLP terms as cognitive dissonance or pattern interrupts. This is what we want to avoid doing to loyalists, but we certainly want to do with non-loyalists. We want to effect a prediction error signal on their choice of buying other brands or own label products.
How might we do this? The answer might be in another aspect of the dopamine reward system: the unpredictable reward.
Three or four times as much dopamine is released when an event produces an unexpected reward. The dopamine prediction error signal suddenly gets a nice surprise and then starts to pay attention to this thing that might create a reward again in the future. Is this why special offers work so well? An unexpected dopamine rush makes us feel soooo good. BUT if we want to maintain the effectiveness of the surprise, it has to be linked or anchored with something that will maintain the dopamine surge for the future; it has to create a new predictable pattern for that good feeling.
In other words a special offer may create the pattern interrupt we seek to get the non-loyals to shift, but something else has to happen as well to keep them and convert them to loyals. A series of dopamine rushes may be needed to get them ‘hooked’ again. This has interesting implications perhaps for the efficacy of certain marketing tactics and the sequencing of employing them.
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.
Why is it so hard to talk to women?
Men may still be the higher wage earners in most households, but women are the main holders of the purse strings, deciding what to cut back on, how much to save, and what to spend the hard-earned cash on. From techno-gadgets to the weekly shop, home decor to utility bills, women are the decision-makers (even when they let the men think that they are).
Belinda Parmar of Lady Geeks reckons the tech brands could be missing out on £0.5 billion in revenue by not marketing to women. ‘Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see battle for the living room) where much of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. ‘
Yet marketers seem to find it so difficult to talk to women? Is it because there are more male marketers? Is it because women are so complex? Is it that the marketing world just hasn’t learned women-speak? Or is it something else?
Perhaps the gender dynamics model developed by Pauline Crawford and Alana Mitchell can throw some light on the matter. ‘Not all women are the same, yet they are all ‘female’. Likewise with men; they do not all behave the same yet they are ‘male’. We all have within us mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics, preferences, and behaviours.
While having a female body means women have unique body parts and cycles, some women may be more ‘male’ in their thinking, decision making and in their logical responses, while many females portray the classic all female traits of nurturing, sensitivity and intuitive reasoning. Likewise within men, some may be more ‘female’ in their thinking preferences, emotional reactions, and actions and still be male through and through!’
A mere conversation about cars and handbags with Pauline and my colleague Di, bore this out. Pauline (the more masculine thinker of the three of us) wants great performance in her car and pure practicality in her handbag. Di (more feminine thinking) wants comfort and reliability in her car and a soft, squishy handbag. I (sitting in the middle ground) went for beauty and quirkiness in both, with scant regard for practicality, performance, comfort or reliability!
What is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of how to talk to women is that the language you use will vary depending on where on the masculine/feminine scale your female audience sits. So you’d need to have that knowledge as a fundamental pillar to your marketing strategy. Pointless trying sell a performance car to the Di’s of this world or a squishy handbag to the Pauline’s. But get the targetting and the language right and you are onto a winner!
In addition, your female buyers will have placed your product or brand in a specific context in their lives, they will have certain criteria relating to that context and they will have a whole other set of unconscious thought processes that drive their actual buying behaviours at the point of purchase.
It would be pretty good to know all these things before you start lavishing spending this year’s severely cut budgets. It would definitely make a difference to your ROI.
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!