Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Page 2 of 2

Ying and Yang by Asics

Published on Wednesday, March 18, 2009 in Advertising, Business and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So, imagine you have to come up with a campaign for selling shoes, sports shoes, trainers. You tell yourself well there is a right foot, a left foot and what does that make you think of. The Ying and Yang concept of course, or opposites attract, etc. Well Asics have come up with such a campaign and they are putting the left and right forward… “What’s a left without a right?” And pronto you think about Adam and Eve of course. I started thinking about the left and right parts of my brain but then I’m a bit weird ;)

Asics Body Mind Sound Left Right

And of course the temptation to go back to basics and talk about Adam and Eve…

The place of premium products during the recession

Published on Sunday, March 15, 2009 in Business and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , .

P&G are getting good results on premium products (see article on Brandweek) but at the same time private labels are winning market share.

Fantastic housewarming

Published on Sunday, March 8, 2009 in Event and Photos. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Just a little note, to say that the party was great. It was super to have spent such a great WE with some great friends and colleagues. I’ll post the photos soon. I have to work on a presentation for Monday so haven’t had time to upload the photos yet. Promise I will tomorrow night and I’ll amend this post with the link to the photos…

Note: hectic week so late getting the link, but here are the housewarming party photos :)

Surfing the focus groups

Published on Saturday, March 7, 2009 in Advertising, Brand and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Using focus groups to test an upcoming product / service / system is common practice and can really help pin point issues before launch date. Depending on the money behind the product, the size and variety of the target population there can be several focus group tests and/or different phases before launch. On the other hand some companies don’t do anything, considering that their knowledge is paramount to any form of focus group feedback.

It is more and more frequent that companies launch web based services as a ‘beta’ and thus acquire testers to provide feedback on the system and help them perfect it. When done properly it can even be sold as a special invite only, VIP type event so that users feel special. But companies that launch their new product or service, with a new look and feel, can get a deluge of feedback from unhappy customers. If a focus group has one person representing loyal customers and gets swayed by the whole idea of being part of the focus group this can skew the feedback. The other loyal customers may be really unhappy about seeing a change in the packaging or look and feel of the new product. Tropicana recently changed their design but has now decided to switch from their new packaging design back to the old following all the complaints. As a Tropicana loyal customer it was a shock for me to see this new packaging (even though it is for the US). I mean it looks like some cheap orange juice and has no soul to it!

Tropicana new packaging

And the one that I just love to see in my fridge:

Tropicana old packaging

What is interesting around the whole Tropicana packaging debacle is that how the message got back to Pepsi the owners of the Tropicana brand. There was a deluge of messages telephone calls, forums, letters, emails, twitter…

An article on NY times about the Tropicana incident talks about the ad for Motrin pain:

And in November, many consumers who used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn.

Is the Internet as safe as we think…?

Published on Tuesday, March 3, 2009 in Society, Tech and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Is the Internet itself safe, with more and more internet users each day? Should the ‘deep internet’ be interconnected with all it’s hidden information ?

In a time of recession it is clear that gloomy ideas are more common and a very interesting article on nytimes.com discusses the difficulties of the current Internet system as we know it and love it. There are serious security issues with the way Internet enables attacks to be carried out via the Internet on systems, and even how whole sections of the Internet can be throttled through malicious attacks. Defenses or rather ways that it is being patched are referred to as a Maginot Line approach.

There are currently over a billion internet users since December 2008 according to comScore World Metrix. This survey in Canada (in French) shows how even though Internet is starting to dominate the media world, people are still far more likely to trust TV as a source of information than the Internet.

And even though you think that Google is giving you good results this article on the NY times explains that what is called the ‘Deep Internet’ is holding out on our friends at Google, or is it the other way round… Search engines only cover a small part of the Internet with numerous services and data that is not indexed. But this joins the initial paragraph in that it is probably better that way, since the information is often highly sensitive and should not be available to just anyone…

How much is that blog worth in my window?

Published on Monday, March 2, 2009 in Blog, Business and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Just read MacIntyre’s great post about the value of blogs out there. We are of course talking about professional sites that are not really on par with the likes of the majority of blogs out there though. You’re talking about people who make a living out of writing on their blogs (or getting others to write for them). MacIntyre created a previous top 25 list of blogs and their valuation in 2008, he’s back again with another list for 2009 of the top 25 blogs.
As we are nearly all faced with the reduction in spending on advertising, one would expect sites like the ones listed in 2008 to have dropped in their ‘value’. I mean Wall Street are having hard times so it seems normal that this would have a ricochet effect on the rest of us. But it seems that it isn’t necessarily the case for all, and on the contrary some of the sites listed have gained value… It’s like christmas come early ;)

It’s cold outside

Published on Sunday, March 1, 2009 in Advertising, Business, Marketing and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Articles are flowing about how big companies are cutting away at their budgets, if they are not cutting then they are renegotiating costs with their agencies, here and here…
The article on AdAge explains how companies are also taking a look at consolidating:

PepsiCo last week reported a 43% drop in fourth-quarter profits on write-downs and restructuring and a 9% drop in full-year profits. During Coca-Cola’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Feb. 12, CEO Muhtar Kent said the marketer has slashed its agency roster by more than half. “We have consolidated, ” he said. “Agency numbers have gone down by more than half, and I think we have driven a lot of efficiencies in our marketing, our market-research costs.”

The survey in the above emarketer article indicates cuts are increasing in the various marketing and advertising areas.

The survey also demonstrates it is not always about cuts in spending but also about reallocation of Ad spending. We are seeing during this time of recession that ROI and the ability to provide hard data about ROI is important. There is a distinct move of money from TV to Digital and big companies are putting their money behind the idea that there is a better return on investment in digital media.

Being more efficient with money that is available to spend on advertising is therefore very important. You see so many catch-up campaigns where companies are just trying to better their competitor without looking about being innovating and really thinking about what will allow them to provide interesting and hopefully even innovative services to their customers. There is great article from the creator of the subservient ‘chicken campaign‘, not really innovative or providing an interesting service but as memorable ads go this is right up there with the effective few.

But even though it is cold outside, paying attention to clients needs does pay off and companies that are doing a good job in this arena, like Google, are getting top scores.

“Since new customers are harder to come by in an economic downturn, firms need to pay even more attention to building loyalty with their most important customers,” wrote Bruce Temkin, author of Customer Experience Correlates to Loyalty.

Companies that have a good brand, that people will trust and who also advertise efficiently are highly likely to come out of this recession far better than the others…

Note: there is a new article on emarketer (20 March 09) concerning a Myers Publishing survey providing a new view on how ad spending will evolve.