Marketing.....nothing

What happens when your company has no competitive advantage? What happens when your company is in an industry where acheiving a competitive advantage is near impossible? When differentiating yourself from your competitors is a tough thing to do.

Do you fold up shop? Do you spend oodles of money marketing your brand?

This blog idea came to me yesterday as I was watching TV and saw an add for Wal-Greens pharmacy. The entire ad didn't really say anything and seemed like an incredible waste of time (would post it if I could find it on youtube but a cursory glance returned nothing for obvious reasons). Then I started thinking, well how else are they going to get customers to get their prescriptions there, because lets be honest there is a lot of money to be made in prescription filling. But the question behind their commercial/marketing campaign should have been "Why would customers get their prescriptions filled with us?" and they should have developed it based on that question.

Maybe answering it is the tough part and will take a lot of research or getting everyone together for an entire day of brainstorming, but its probably better than burning your marketing dollars on a commercial just to say your doing something. Use your customers, find out what they would like in a pharmacy, maybe its speediness, price, comfort, customer service, knowledge, you never know until you ask.

But that is the challenge that their marketing department should accept greedily as this is their e=mc squared.

How long can you make sex sell?

I've never really liked the Go Daddy.com commercials that use sexy female celebrities to encourage people to go to their website and check out a "exposed" video of the celeb making it seem like they will be exposing themselves. Go Daddy's business is selling domain names to people so I can only assume that they feel people hoping for a naked Danica Patrick will then feel inclined to purchase a random domain name.



They have been using this tactic for quite a while and I wonder how much longer it can really work? Does it really work for their business, sure they probably get a lot of views on youtube and from viral views but I question whether all the money they spend on celebrity sponsorships and production/placement of these commercials will really result in enough $10/year domain name sales. Here is another Go Daddy commercial that I feel had better messaging.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JHGCd_9U5E

Car Industry Creative Bailout part 2

Further evidence of my earlier post on the lack of creativity by auto companies and their creative agencies. It's like the pepsi taste challenge, can you tell the difference between these two brands?

Looking at these two ads you would think they were for the same company, only problem is one company is German the other is Japanese.

Pepsi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEg-0uE-6iM

Coca-Cola
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsJ6uLWPu78

I haven't looked into which agencies are behind the creative for each company, but the entire concept is the exact same. Rather embarassing for all the dough they dished out for them.

Second Chance Sponsorships provide big return

It seems like a lot of the sponsorships of conferences or events or athletes don't provide a tonne of value to a company. That being said these sponsorships are important to the party that is being sponsored otherwise they would not be able to do what they do. But is it really a good use of your company's valuable marketing dollars, especially in these penny-pinching times?

Here are a couple of sponsorships that i've seen recently that were clearly a well thought out, strategic use of their money to create goodwill among their customers.

The Keg Restaurant - Celebration of Light

Each year, Vancouver has a fireworks competition that brings teams from around the world to the city to compete and provides 4 nights of free entertainment for locals while at the same time keeping restaurants, bars, and shops in the downtown area packed with people. Over the years the event has had trouble finding sponsors and entering this year they were a sponsor short of being able to put the show on. It was announced as being cancelled. Well within a short period of time of this announcement The Keg Restaurant (a canadian steakhouse chain) stepped up to the plate and contributed what i'm sure is not a huge chunk of their advertising dollars. The event was back on, all because of the Keg. So what happens? They get countless value out of the blogs/media coverage of their sponsorship that easily makes the amount of their sponsorship seem minimal.

Here's one such blog that published the event http://vancitybuzz.blogspot.com/2009/03/2009-celebration-of-light-vancouver.html


Vancouver Canucks playoff games in HD - Save-on-Foods

Being a Canadian city, Vancouver has some of the most passionate hockey fans in the world (if not the most passionate ie. i'm one of said fans). This year they are in the playoffs after missing last year and the city is buzzing with excitement. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is a public television network that has first rights to air canadian teams playoff games. They aired the first game from Vancouver in High Definition and it was found out after that games 3 and 4 to be played in St. Louis would not be televised in HD due to the extra cost associated with it $100,000. They had just gone through some rounds of layoffs and felt they could not justify the cost (weak excuse). Cue Save-on-Foods, a lower mainland based supermarket chain, who jumped in and basically said "$100,000??? That's it. We'll pay for you to have HD for our consumers." Boom! Now not everyone in the province has HD but even those without are going to be happy with Save-On for stepping up to the plate. This was a great sponsorship move and got buzz all over the radios and television stations throughout the province.

So maybe a sponsorship investment isn't the worst thing in the world for your company. Especially if it is for something that has a passionate following. Your generosity will fuel a lot of goodwill with those followers and they are quite likely to be pleased enough to spread the word to their network......especially if that something was on the verge of going kaput.

The automotive industry needs an advertising bailout

If you have seen one car commecial, you have seen them all. They all blend in to one soupy monotonous mash of person announcing that this "amazing car" gets you so many miles to the gallon, handles like a gem, and is as quiet as their empty showrooms. Well news to car companies, your not fooling anyone and you are all saying the exact same thing. So why would you continue to waste so much money on basically promoting the exact same car as your competition. Here's a crazy idea:

a) Design a car that is different from your competitors, get crazy with the look of a car
b) Have something in the car that differentiates you from every other car company out there and is actually of use to someone (just spitballing but apple is a pretty hip company maybe you can make an arrangement like Nike did with the ipod shoes)
c) Market the crap out of your unique offering (this is pretty much the first lesson in any marketing class)

It baffles me that car companies haven't been able to come up with something like this. As much as I don't really like Scion, at least they are thinking slightly outside the box and not trying to be everything to everyone. GM, Ford, and Chrysler seem to be mailing it in like a lot of the union workers that are on the line.

It also seems like none of these poor advertisements are available on YouTube which is definately a great way to help not drive traffic virally. Good thing they have now gotten to the point where they are appealing for national pride "Over half of these quality Pontiac products are made right here in Canada including......"

Well that did it, i'm sold. I'll buy a car for my country. And full disclosure, I own a GM product currently that I bought brand new 4 years ago and can say that it is not really the "quality" that a lot of these commercials tell me it is. My family has always owned GM so we are pretty loyal, but I can tell you this much, the loyalty ends after this car is done.

The easiest/most effective marketing tool

Happy employees who enjoy what they do.

That leads them to tell their network of friends about your company and also creates amazing viral opportunities such as this one shown on the Velopig blog (a daily breakfast blog expressing the blogger's feelings through pictures of his coffee and muffin).

Southwest Airlines gives their employees that ability to have fun instead of adhering to a strict corporate code heaved upon them by the higher-ups. The net result is an employee that has found a way to do his job which entertains him and at the same time entertains his audience (Southwest's customers). It's almost a guarantee that a good portion of the people walking off that airplane will then be passing on this unique experience to the person that picks them up and asks "How was your flight?". Great word of mouth marketing through a companies employees.

So instead of the consumers thinking about how little room they have and how they don't get a meal on the plane, they have a positive feeling after being engaged in an out-of-the box routine announcement.