Our new puppy has an interesting way of evaluating if something is worth chewing: the more you try to take it away, the more he wants to keep it. Sometimes this makes for great fun, like when he’s playing tug-of-war with you. Sometimes it makes for a real headache, like when he’s carrying off your socks.
It turns out the solution was to teach him the command “trade.” Whenever he’s chewing something he shouldn’t, you corner him, say “trade,” and then present him with a treat. He has to decide if he wants the new-found toy or if he wants the treat. Most of the time his appetite prevails, and he’ll drop the toy to take the treat. If you can quickly get the toy out of his sight, he’ll completely forget it exists.
People work the same way. Deny them something they want, and they’ll work extra hard to get it back. Give them something better, let them voluntarily choose to take it, and they’ll completely forget about the first thing in a hurry. Think about how many people use iTunes and Hulu today who downloaded from Napster and Gnutella in the past.
Over lunch at a recent conference, I noticed that the catered cakes actually had serial numbers!
What you’re seeing is a flat chocolate shell sitting on the back of a piece of mousse cake. Look carefully at the bottom left of the chocolate:
Yes, that’s a serial number (sorry for the blurry iPhone photos). What’s not shown is that the chocolate also had a brand label printed on somewhere else. Neither of these things belong on fine food, which is what this purported to be.
Serial numbers help with inventory tracking and things like that, but that is rarely customer facing. Seth Godin had a recent post about serial numbers, but his best advice was simply “Think hard about whether you need a serial number at all.” Diners do not care that your desserts have inventory tracking codes that help you or your suppliers find them more easily. They just want to be wowed by taste and presentation.
While shopping in the HEB before leaving San Antonio, I ran across their store brand version of Wheat Thins, unimaginatively called Thin Wheat.
Store brands have a unique problem: they must look appealing while still communicating that they’re knock-offs of another product. Still, a branding crackers with “Thin Wheat” communicates more about knock-off and less about appealing. Consumers generally expect store brands to be less tasty than regular brands; so when the box is completely unimaginative, their expectations have no hope at all. Thin Wheat conveys Thin Taste, Thin Value, and Thin Quality.
Store brands are inherently low cost products, and people buy them to save money. However, a company can still at least try to make them interesting to the buyer some of the time.
Just like Coke and Pepsi are the big two of soda manufacturers, there are also a big two of SLR cameras: Nikon and Canon. (SLR cameras are the traditional 35mm cameras with the big lenses on the front you can take on and off, like this one here.) Both Canon and Nikon make top flight cameras, both are well respected, and both are far far ahead of the rest of the competition. Yet Canon is the top manufacturer, and has for the last several years outsold Nikon in every segment from beginner to pro. Many have recently accused Canon of resting on its laurels, and Nikon has certainly not taken its number two position lightly. So it’s interesting to look a little more closely at two recent ads from both companies.
Nikon D60 & Ashton Kutcher
The Nikon D60 is Nikon’s latest generation of entry level SLR camera, targeted at a market of beginner photographers. The typical buyer is best described as aspirational, wanting better photos than a point-and-shoot camera can offer. They want to take photos that look good, while at the same time branching out into more artistic photography when the interest strikes.
This ad perfectly delivers on these values. Nikon positions the D60 as the perfect camera for a wedding, and Ashton Kutcher’s portrayal as a goofy everyman nicely sums up the buyer. Even the use cases are spot on with Ashton photographing everything from the wedding party to a butterfly. The ideals of what an SLR can do for a market of aspirational photographers are presented clearly and effectively, and it’s no wonder these cameras are selling like hotcakes.
Canon Rebel XSi
Up until recently, Canon’s ads have focused more on consumer point-and-shoot models with celebrities like Maria Sharapova and her talking dog. This has long been a more competitive market, but when it came to their SLRs, Canon has always been a little cocky. Now the SLR fun is over, and they’ve begun their own advertising campaign:
The Rebel XSi directly competes with the D60 and targets almost the same market. With this ad, the not so subtle reminder is that when it comes to your photography, you should trust the company that has helped capture some of the greatest sports photos of the last 20 years. Canon dominates the pro market, and their telephoto lenses, painted a distinctive gray, are ubiquitous at sporting events. Their message is that if you want to be aspirational, aspire to use what the pros use.
While beginner photographers make up the bulk of the Rebel market, Canon has a fine line to walk with their advertising. The Rebel line is actually very popular with pros as well, largely because it’s a light weight camera with a lot of hidden power. Canon can’t alienate this market and needs to remind them that the Rebel makes for a great small SLR. However, beyond this point, Canon also needs to keep their pro customers happy in general. Nikon’s new D300 and D3 cameras have attracted tons of glowing press, and just about everyone has started questioning their brand loyalties. Any pro related advertising is good advertising.
Conclusion and Grades
Both ads are good, but Canon’s ad comes up a little short. They’re an 800 lb gorilla with an 800 lb gorilla advertisement. Their value proposition is essentially “we’re the choice of pros,” but that’s entirely because of product choices they made in the past and has nothing to do with the average consumer. Nikon, on the other hand, ties their message to what the consumer actually wants today, creating a more powerful ad that nicely connects with the needs of the buyer.
Nikon: A-
Canon: B
Coming soon, a look at another camera manufacturer: Leica.
Hello FedEx Office. FedEx is reportedly eliminating the Kinko’s brand and leaving their own on all stores starting sometime soon. FedEx acquired Kinko’s in 2004, so the name is theirs to toss, but any time a company eliminates a strong brand they face trouble. In FedEx’s words:
“Kinko’s was primarily a copy- and print-service provider when it was acquired in 2004,” said Brian D. Philips, president and chief executive of FedEx Office. “The name FedEx Office more accurately represents our broader role. … We are a back office for small businesses and a branch office for medium to large businesses and mobile professionals.”
Since when was FedEx about the back office? That was always UPS’s territory while FedEx built their brand around reliable overnight delivery. The stores may have become a back office for small and medium businesses, but have they done so as FedEx or as Kinko’s?
The UPS Store
And speaking of UPS, they actually did this successfully a few years ago when they acquired Mail Boxes, Etc. and renamed it to the UPS Store. The renaming worked very well for them, mostly for reasons that do not apply to FedEx. Mail Boxes Etc. was never as strong of a brand as Kinko’s, while UPS had already started to establish itself with some backoffice credibility. On the other side, the Mail Boxes Etc. shtick had always been about shipping first, other stuff second, making it easy to move the brand for UPS. Today this differentiation still works - when you visit a UPS store you see more shipping material than copiers while a Kinko’s is all about document preparation
FedEx’s Path Ahead
FedEx has a very difficult path in front of it. I have a feeling this won’t work out so well for them and that in a year we’ll wonder why they spent $891 million doing this in the first place. Besides, when was the last time you heard someone say “I’m going to go make a copy at FedEx.” When one strong brand disappears, it’s usually the competitors that win. Expect some turmoil in the office supply and copier space soon.
“Cheap small cars.” When was the last time you ever heard someone say “nice small cars” or “expensive small cars?” Everyone dreams by dreaming big, but nobody ever figures out how to dream big on the small scale. That’s unfortunate because you can make a lot of money on the small scale. Gordon Ramsay gets this when it comes to food:
A great chef in a fine dining restaurant can take something ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary, and charge an extraordinary price as well.
-Gordon Ramsay
The New York Times recently ran an article about buyers switching to small cars because of high gasoline prices, causing even more pain for GM, Ford, and Chrysler. All of them made their money on big SUVs in the 90s, and each of these manufacturers fell into the same trap: small cars must be cheap cars, and people with money want to spend it on expensive cars which must be large cars.
Where was their imagination? Why can’t small command a price premium? Toyota dreamed small and made the Prius - a small car that you can equip with some seriously nice stuff. Today, they make a lot of money on that model. Elsewhere, BMW is bringing their compact 1 Series to the United States while Audi has already been selling the A3 here for a few years. The small Mazda 3 series is very nice, and Subaru just redesigned the Impreza which comes in a price range from $17,000 all the way to $38,795!
You can make money on small, and something does not have to be big to command a high price. The American auto companies never saw that, and so they made cheap small cars. The rest of the world saw that nice things can come in small packages, and so they made expensive small cars. Guess who’s winning now?
Quick: did you notice the amazing new Starbucks logo? It’s a little different from their old one and a lot more like their really old one. Still drawing a blank? Well, here’s an informative BusinessWeek article with all the details.
Starbucks has long used the funny looking crowned creature in its logo, but as you can see from the image here, their original logo depicted a classic Siren. Well, actually it showed the Siren’s more bawdy cousin: the Melusine. This interesting article has all the details on the evolution of their logo, but the short version is that the big breasted mermaid was toned down over time into something very…corporate.
And that’s the problem. Howard Schultz, their new CEO (who was actually their old CEO), is trying to reposition Starbucks as a provider of quality coffee rather than the ubiquitous purveyor of over-roasted corporate flavored coffee that many people describe as “burnt.” So he decided to introduce a smoother flavored coffee and bring back the original logo in all its glory for eight weeks. The message: Starbucks is once again a neighborhood coffee shop founded on the principles of delicious coffee.
Interestingly, the logo you see here and the one they’re using on the cups aren’t quite the same. The melusine in the old logo shown here is showing a little more…breast. The new one (visible in the BusinessWeek article) shows a slightly more modest mermaid.
So has this new old new logo worked? Well, you decide. Did you notice the new logo? If you have noticed it, did you have any idea what it meant?
Based on an informal poll of my coworkers, not a single one of them had given it any thought. Starbucks may be fighting an uphill battle with this one.
With apologies to Thomas Friedman, the World is Flat. For a marketer, that means two things: your products must be global and so should your advertising. In the past, it was possible to brand and advertise differently in different markets, but that’s no longer true. An ad produced in one country will be posted on Youtube for the entire world to see, while branding can suddenly go from local to global in the blink of an eye. Witness the trouble with the Ford Fusion when Ford’s global marketers failed to communicate - they ended up trying to differentiate a sedan in the US from a totally unrelated little SUV in Europe.
Of course, nationalistic advertising can be real trouble. Nationalism rarely works on a global stage, either because only one group will actually “get it” or because some other group to which you market will find it offensive. Which brings me to this recent ad for Absolut Vodka:
The message is simple: in an Absolut world, Mexico would still own the Western United States. Of course, for anyone who has forgotten their American history, Mexico lost this region after Texas seceded in 1836 and the United States won the Mexican-American War with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
Obviously, it’s a subject of nationalism for both sides, but that’s beside the point. Absolut is a global brand, and vodka is consumed worldwide. While the ad was originally intended for a Mexican audience, the Internet thwarts attempts at regional advertising and makes all media global. Perhaps Absolut wanted “edgy” and this was their intention, but advertising this way is incredibly risky.
Border security and immigration issues are at the forefront of American politics, and many Americans are incredibly sensitive about these topics. While this ad may grow vodka sales in Mexico, many middle-class Americans who have long formed the core market for Absolut’s trendy alcohol will be turned off. Already, some conservatives are calling for a boycott, showing that Absolut has probably done more harm than good to their brand.
Quick question: why do so many advertisers not close caption their TV ads? While eating in a noisy restaurant the other day, I noticed the ubiquitous TV-tuned-to-ESPN had been muted with the captioning turned on. While the broadcast was close captioned, probably only about 30% of the ads were.
For advertisers, the economics of actually close captioning an ad should be a total no brainer! It’s a 30 second static piece of footage that may only rarely change between markets. It can’t be that expensive to get someone to type a page or two of text into the captioning system! Yet the number of people who are watching who would still see your ad, either because they are deaf or because they happen to be watching in bars or restaurants, is probably quite large.
Unless someone can tell me why these economics don’t add up, I’m inclined to believe it’s pure laziness; and that’s a total shame. For the amount of money spent on making an ad campaign, it strikes me as incredibly odd that nobody thinks of the strategy behind captioning it.
And if that’s not convincing, think of it this way. People who are watching TV and reading your ad are guaranteed to be paying attention to it! While their numbers are few, their attention is assured. Reach out to them!
