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Men’s body wash is a subject that rarely bubbles to the surface on a typical girls night out. But last week that is exactly what three women were chatting about on a muggy summer’s eve in a downtown bar in Durham, NC. The conversation centered on Isaiah Mustafa, host of the new Old Spice body wash campaign created by Portland’s Wieden+Kennedy.
The conversation went something like this: “Have you seen the new Old Spice campaign?” “No, what’s so special about it?” “The guy in it is the perfect man. It is incredibly funny, he walks on water, bakes a cake and SWAN DIVES onto a motorcycle in a Jacuzzi.” “Ahh-mazing.”
Giggles ensued as each woman talked about her “ideal” man. All this before Mustafa and Iain Tait teamed up to do a perfect storm of viral marketing. The 48-hour weekend campaign featured the sultry-voiced, smooth-muscled Mustafa’s filmed responses to a slew of people who posted comments or questions to the Old Spice spokesman online (notable responses are to celebrities Ellen DeGeneres, Rose McGowan, and political correspondent George Stephanopoulous). Clearly, Wieden+Kennedy hit a home run with their extended campaign, pulling off the social media marketing event of the year. The original commercial was nominated for a Grand Prix award and the latest installment of YouTube videos should stick with the internet community for a long time and in many manifestations.
More importantly, Wieden+Kennedy may have found the secret to actually selling body wash to men through catering to the eyes and ears of women. For most dudes, body wash is not an inherently cool thing to purchase nor is it top of mind in the store. Guys are known to lather up with any bar, chunk, or semblance of soap hanging out in the shower, leaving appalled women everywhere to search for, long for, and even lust after a character like the Old Spice man played to perfection by the brawny Mustafa. While AXE commercials use bathroom humor and Playboy-style sex appeal to reach their target demographic, the sleepy Old Spice of your grandfather’s generation has wised up and reached out to the holder of the purse strings, the man, man’s woman. Only time will tell the result of Old Spice’s hot new man’s impact on overall sales, currently Red Zone body wash sales have dipped. But hey, it can take awhile to wake a septuagenarian up.
All of the great stuff from Old Spice got me whistling…
A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovations theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Given the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant lagg
ards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
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A recent article from Wired discusses the hidden sales potential in marketing innovative products to laggards. (A fragment of the consumer segmentation scheme borrowed from the Diffusion of Innovation theory, laggards refer to traditionalists who are generally wary of innovation and tend to wait till a product has become accepted and established before purchasing.) Writer Clive Thompson forwards a theory belonging to marketing professor Jacob Goldenberg, who posits that disregarding laggards[k1] in marketing efforts for new gadgets and toys could prove to be serious negligence.
Goldenberg believes that laggards[k2] tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch. Gven the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power. Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.
The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate. How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant laggards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution. Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.
HBO’s witty, iconic show, Sex and the City, saw better days on the small screen before it’s second film installment received a caustic lashing from film critics nationwide. Now the single girl empire built by stilettos and Cosmopolitans is accused of being bigoted, offensive, and abysmally juvenile for it’s outlandish portrayal of Middle Eastern sexual politics and irreverent take on marriage, motherhood, and the economic recession.
But while the filmmakers-director, screenwriters, and producers- got the formula wrong, the marketing team had the recipe for empirical success. This sequel “outbrands” its predecessor through product placement on screen (think luxurious Mercedes Maybachs on parade and cameos of glittery Louboutin stilettos) and off (HBO marketing has created bra styles for each of the four characters, cocktail glasses, and a “Carrie” necklace).
From a marketing perspective, the former cable series’ transformation into a big-budget franchise is like hitting pay dirt. American women who are sipping on the hype of sisterhood and “labels or love” will flock to the screen and then to retailers to open their wallets for Sex and the City approved (and applauded) bling. Still, some true blue fans are getting frustrated with the series market expansion, condemning it’s capitalistic embrace. Time will tell whether fans are “Carried” away with the sequel’s product placement or eternally turned off.
Perhaps it was those all long nights during production week which I spent editing articles and designing pages for my high school newspaper that gives me a great appreciation for newspapers. As a journalism major I can’t help but sometimes fear for the future of news and the newspaper as reports of large daily papers downsizing or going completely out of business become more frequent.
However, a report issued by the Newspaper National Network the number of unique visitors to newspapers web sites in the top 25 markets grew 10 percent from March to April, reaching 83.7 million. So while people are not picking up paper copies of their daily newspaper, they are still reading the paper—it just happens to be online. Jason Klein, CEO of the Newspaper National Network, reported that newspaper web sites recorded 2 billion page views in the top 25 markets in April alone.
So the problem for major newspapers is not how to increase traffic to their web sites, but how to make a profit off their online versions. These online trends are promising, especially during a time when advertisers are currently reducing their reliance on print advertising. While online advertising is still considered by many advertisers as ‘uncharted territory,’ national advertisers would be foolish to ignore the data provided by the Newspaper National Network. The increasing trend of unique visitors to online newspaper web sites will hopefully inject more confidence in advertisers who have already taken their ad dollars to the web.
Newspapers and the news industry are guilty of helping create a culture in which people are accustomed to getting their news virtually for free. Large newspapers must work collectively to begin to change the culture of ‘free news’ if they want to remain in business. The New York Times has already started to implement a type of payment plan for frequent viewers, but until other large newspapers begin adopting similar measures people will always have the option of circumventing paying for their news.
While their paper versions might be faltering, online newspapers in top markets are doing well, and they must begin to take advantage of this success by promoting online advertising. The internet has helped sustain and revitalize this old medium, but now it is up to the newspaper industry as a whole to work hard to incorporate advertisers in this new medium and change a culture in which people are used to paying little, if any, for accurate and trustworthy news.
Apple is letting go of their famous “Get a Mac” campaign, which featured Justin Long and John Hodgman in a verbal battle (Mac vs. PC).
I must admit that I always enjoyed the commercials because they were often spot on about the problems that a PC would have, and a Mac didn’t. It was a clever and quiet way of introducing the Mac to ‘regular’ people that doesn’t really know what a Macintosh is all about. People are now speculating about what’s next in the Apple era of advertising. The actual ‘Get a Mac’ campaign and all the TV ads has been removed from the Apple website, and now there’s only facts and reasons about the world of Macs and why you should get one.
So, what’s next? The problem hereafter for Apple will not be to tell people how good they really are – it will be to create a new, successful, interesting and fun campaign that can bring the essence of the brand further into the future. In two weeks Apple and Steve Jobs will open this years ‘Apple Worldwide Developers Conference’ in San Francisco, which will probably reveal many interesting stories. That tells me that we shouldn’t have to wait too long before the new introduction of Mac takes place. The question is; how creative will they be? In the meantime, you can check out this mash-up clip from all the ‘Get a Mac’ videos we’ve been seeing throughout the years. Enjoy!
I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot of advertising lately that is attempting to be green or to connect with consumers via social media or create community. Too often, my response has been “REALLY?” The idea is somewhat sound… give consumers what they want and like to get them more involved with your brand. Create some love. I get it. The problem is the execution.
Today on my way in, I heard a radio spot for a body groomer for men. The ad highlighted two things: 1) the company will plant a tree for each unit sold and 2) you can go to their website to create an avatar, a virtual shaved you. Honestly, what’s the point? They have a series of humorous videos to both explain the product benefits and drive interest, that makes sense to me. But the social/green aspect feels out of place.
First, if your brand wants to go green, that’s great. But don’t greenwash. If you go green it needs to be related to your product. So if you plant trees but still use toxic chemicals or kill indigenous plants and birds to make your stuff, that’s no good. How could a body shaver go green? Maybe they could make the product more energy efficient or use a high percentage of recycled plastic in making it. Those would both be relevant. Otherwise, don’t bother.
Second, not every product needs or deserves a community. Using a viral video to highlight benefits, drive interest, etc. makes sense. If it’s cheap and you think it will have any impact, do it. The problem is do I really want to be in a community for a product like this? Do I need an avatar just for me? Does any guy really talk to their friends (or strangers for that matter) about grooming and how they look? The answer is not really. So while you might think it’s great for your customers to talk to each other about your product or brand, you still need to understand if they’re actually going to do it.
I’ll give some brands like this credit though. They provided a few how-to videos to let guys escape embarrassment and learn about new ways of using the product on their own.
Green and social were new and interesting and have become “expected.” However, as with anything else in life, they’re only worth doing if you do them well.”
Well, it was only a matter of time before Twitter found a way to incorporate advertisements into its social networking structure.
Today is the apparent unveiling of its advertising plan, which Twitter calls “Promoted Tweets” (although after searching for 30 minutes and not being able to find an ad I promptly gave up). With Promoted Tweets, Twitter plans on incorporating advertisements into the Twitter live stream that relate to the personal search choices of its users. The promoted Tweet advertising plan, however, differs from that of Google, Yahoo, and even Facebook, which all place their advertisements on the right side of their web page. Unlike other social networking sites, Twitter only plans to display one ad at a time and plans to place the individual ads, which resemble normal Tweets, above the search results Twitter feed.
Advertisers will initially have to purchase key words that allow their ads to be displayed at the top of the Twitter feed when users use that key word in their searches. Twitter is also in the process of developing a performance model called ‘resonance’ to determine pricing for its Promoted Tweets. Similar to the pay per click model, Twitter’s resonance model will attempt to judge the impact of a particular ad by measuring the amount of times the ad is passed around, marked as a favorite, or how often users click the posted links on the advertisement, in order to determine price for ads. The more demand and popularity for an ad, the longer it will stay around.
I was skeptical at first about Twitter’s Promoted Tweet’s plan, and not able to recognize the difference between a Starbucks Promoted Tweet and the normal tweets Starbucks puts out daily to promote its brand and products. Why would a brand pay for something that it is already doing for free? However, it is important to recognize the fluidity of Twitter. Twitter is constantly being updated by its users, and as a result individual Tweets do not remain in one place for long. The Promoted Tweet plan allows advertisers to display a message without fear of it being engulfed in the constantly updated stream of Tweets. While Twitter’s advertising strategy is certainly unique, it is up to Twitter to convince advertisers, who will still have access to the promotional capabilities of a Twitter account free of charge, that its Promoted Tweets plan is worth the investment.
