When your brand is shit, what do you do? Make a sophomoric joke? Apparently, the K-Mart marketing department was willing to try anything and went along with an agency idea that, while well executed, and amazingly went viral, was a bad idea. But, if you read the trade press, it was a great campaign:
How could a “best of the year” rundown be complete in 2013 without Kmart’s “Ship My Pants”? DraftFCB made brilliant use of sophomoric humor to create one of the year’s biggest cultural moments from the ad world, which comes in at No. 9 in the TV/film category. It all began with “Ship My Pants,” although the gag later extended to “Big Gas Savings” and “Ship My Trousers,” too.
No, customers generally don’t think shit is funny when it comes to where they spend their money- unless, you run a comedy club. Or run a commercial where you never say the word and do it elegantly like Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.
A local middle Eastern themed QSR, “Shish Wraps” try’s the same gimmick- “Shish Happens,” “Don’t let Shish Happen to you on this Friday the 13th,” and “Get your shish together and stop in today for $5.00 wrap or bowl” the message is shit- especially when the shop is tragically empty and they have a special selling all wraps for $5 in a high rent location.
While humor, irony and exaggeration are all perfectly acceptable foundations for great advertising, the most critical, fundamental piece of the package is a strong brand to begin with, and K-mart hasn’t had that for years. Our local restaurant- never even had the chance to get there. Shit may be funny, but, it’s not a good place to take your brand.
McDonald’s brand managers are fanatical about protecting the brand and the image. No birds ever appear in a McD’s commercial- “rats with wings” as one campaign concept was shot down to a friend in the business. McDonald’s knows its brand is built on family friendly wholesome happy times. K-mart’s marketing is now built on a pun? Not happening.
Brands that understand their brand equity and work to build it, know that being funny is great- but, always where your brand isn’t the butt of the jokes. It’s time K-mart rediscovered the blue light special, and figured out why dollar stores are beating them at the game they created. As to Shish Wraps, it’s a little harder than just taking the shish out- we’d recommend adding a Gyro to your menu, since people already know what that is, and focus on the healthy Mediterranean diet as an alternative to burgers and pizza. “Welcome to healthy” anyone?
iChat and Apple Messages are the same program, but the new name is unsearchable.
My last name is Esrati. For all the years of having it misspelled, mispronounced and having to answer questions about it’s origin, it became an amazing asset with the advent of the search engine. If you search for me, you’ll get one of three people, me, or my parents.
Apple had an application called “iChat” for years. With the advent of System 10.8 it went from being iChat to becoming the innocuous sounding “Messages” and that’s when Google suddenly became useless. iChat was a very specific program that ran on the mac, while “Messages” are what every email program sends- as well as every other chat program- and, how many times have you searched for “Error message….XYZ” All of a sudden, access to useful, pertinent information about a very specific program became impossible to find via search.
The branding geniuses at Apple apparently don’t use Google.
This isn’t the first time that Apple has made things difficult by not thinking about naming conventions. The Apple Macintosh has had an issue since the 2nd version came out. The original mac only had 128mb of RAM, version 2 has 512mb of RAM, but there wasn’t any indication that this Mac was different unless you got into the tiny print on a label on the back of the machine- and knew Apples product code or some such. The market had to distinguish between these two products- and version 2 became known as The Apple Fat Mac 512″ Hardly the marketers dream name.
Version three got the name MacPlus with a whopping 1 mb of RAM - and was “expandable to up to 4mb of RAM” if you were willing to risk electrocution and had a very long torx screwdriver. Then came a whole long line of confusing names like the SE30, the FX, the 2CX, the Quadra which had numbers. There are entire websites devoted to sorting out the differences of the different models and configurations.
Car makers generally try to avoid this problem by identifying products by model year and trim levels. Computer makers seem to be horrified by attaching a date to a computer, and at some point, Apple started naming models with nomenclature like “mid-2010” as if that’s more helpful than simply calling it by a model number- version 2.1 which Apple finally began doing, but only if you could boot the mac and check in “About this Mac.”
Branding and choice of names, be it in the company name (Apple had a long running lawsuit with Apple Corps, the Beatles label, over the name costing Apple hundreds of millions of dollars.).
When looking for a name of a product or your company, there is a lot more to it than making it easy to remember or spell or search. Make sure you think before you name, since it can become a very expensive and difficult proposition to fix later, or as in the iChat/Messages example- make your valued product worth considerably less to it’s users as frustration trumps productivity.
Ads won’t make your life better. That’s the promise of what ads sell.
Political campaigns promise all kinds of things, but rarely deliver, and certainly not before they get elected.
So when our Chief Creative Officer was running for City Commission, he decided that instead of buying $3 political yard signs, he’d buy $2 basketball nets, paint the bottoms green, and go hang them for free, anywhere in the city. The sticker on the pole told the kids who to call when they needed a replacement.
Late at night, early in the morning. He’d go clean up courts that hadn’t seen a broom in years, cut weeds out of the cracks, even paint some backboards, hang some new rims. It took time, but, the kids in the community ended up with better places to shoot hoops. To fund the campaign, he went to barber and beauty shops, and sold a poster talking about the abysmal conditions of the city courts for $2 each. The video was made by two high school students who were interning at our office as part of the YouthWorks program. It’s not up to our normal production standards, but it tells the story.
He lost the election, but guilted city hall into investing over a million dollars in repairs to the city basketball courts. Four years later, and 500+ nets, he still goes out and climbs the ladder. He’s hung nets on other continents too. As our friends at Zeus Jones always say “actions speak louder than words.”
