Insights
Associating your brand with $h!t (shit)
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.
While it may be funny- it’s not making people shop at K-mart.
a 2.1% decline(d) at Kmart
via Sears posts wider loss as same-store sales drop - MarketWatch.
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?
The importance of a name and search
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.
The Pitch Season 2- and why we won’t waste time on it
We had high hopes for the AMC series “The Pitch” when it debuted last year. We thought we’d try our hand at a little social media leverage by previewing each episode- with predictions, analyze the client, the agencies, and then do a post show discussion video review. It took up time- it generated some traffic, we made a few connections with some cool people like Mark DiMassimo of DIGO- but, overall, we were highly disappointed with the show and the manipulative editing- and the insanity of the short pitch process. Turns out, the agencies that participated last year didn’t want anything to do with it this year- and for good reason, most of the clients weren’t sophisticated enough to either have a good brief- or the good sense that this is nothing other than an expensive PR stunt- that was watched by a very small audience.
Our recommendations to improve the show included having someone - preferably an outsized ad personality like Jerry Della Femina, as a host- who would work with the client to help guide the process, and provide some consistency from episode to episode. Studio Lambert apparently didn’t change anything- only this time, there isn’t an agency on the roster that we’ve heard of. Last year, they had Wong/Doody now known as WC/CW, BooneOakley, DIGO and the AdStore (2x) - which gave the show a little credibility. Here is the PR from AMC- but, we decided to make the post useful- by adding links- so you can investigate each on your own:
Season 2 consists of eight one-hour episodes and is premiering Thu., Aug. 15 at 10/9c.
Brands to be featured in season two include:
- 1-800-Flowers
- Bliss
- College Hunks Hauling Junk
- The Fuller Brush Company
- Gibson Guitar Corporation
- Little Caesars
- SquareTrade
- Tommy Bahama.
Agencies to be featured in Season 2 include:
- Daniel Burton Dean Nashville, TN,
- Fletcher Rowley Nashville, TN,
- Powell Creative Nashville, TN,
- breensmith Advertising Atlanta, GA,
- Innerspin Los Angeles, CA,
- MC2 Los Angeles, CA,
- COR Santa Monica, CA,
- Neuron Syndicate Santa Monica, CA,
- Central Coast Chicago, IL,
- Commonground Chicago, IL,
- The Monogram Group Chicago, IL
- Bee-line Communications Chicago, IL,
- Mischievious Studios Hollywood, CA,
- Heavenspot Glendale, CA,
- OneX Culver City, CA
- Pasadena Advertising Pasadena, CA.
The Ad Age article talks about how many big agencies and networks turned down the offer to be on the show. They say “The most recognizable on the list is Commonground, a gold winner in Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year competition last year” but, I guess that being a gold winner in their competition is like winning a local ADDY- it means something to the shop and the client- but not anyone else (we’ve won our share).
If we had a ton of time, we’d try to figure out what the annual marketing budgets were for each of these clients- our guess is that 1-800 Flowers and Little Caesars lead the pack and “College Hunks Hauling Junk” are one step above flyers at Kinko’s.
I’d love to say that when we were looking at the sites- that one stuck out as amazingly good- but, nothing grabbed us except how bad the “Heavenspot” site was. OneX looked interesting, only in that they feature a really funky building in their about video.
It would also seem that agencies that focus on multi-cultural got a little more representation this season, maybe thanks to the spot that Muse Communications did called “White Space.” Not that advertising is any less of a “Caucasian occasion” for most of the industry.
It seems like the show also avoided filming in NYC, probably because of the higher costs. Chicago, Nashville, LA for this season. As soon as we find the matchups and the episode numbers we’ll post.
Self limiting your brand is a mistake
When it comes to branding, naming your company after your location isn’t a great idea. We watched a hair salon move four times from it’s original eponymous address 23 Second Street and the local grocery chain, Dorothy Lane Market doesn’t have a single location on Dorothy Lane.
Of course, that’s just in the name, but what about your audience? A local company makes tarps and tents. They’ve been doing it since 1948, and only see two markets, farmers and local tent rental. The only advertising they do is in a farm equipment guide. Are they self-limiting their brand and their sales? Of course. Every roll-off construction dumpster needs a tarp to cover the debris as they haul it to the dump, yet, despite making the same product to cover grain trucks, the demolition and waste hauling markets are ignored.
Sometimes companies get confused about what they really sell. Department stores used to be a convenience, in that all the things you need for your household are in one place. That was great until malls came around and did the same thing, only the specialty shops within the mall often offered more focused service, and a better branding experience. The reason for a department stores existence stopped once every single department was duplicated in the mall- at least to younger shoppers. Sears was the sole exception, having built strong brands in Craftsman, Die Hard and Kenmore, while the rest depended on other peoples brands to carry them.
Amazon is what it is today, because Jeff Bezos specifically didn’t call it Amazon Books, but just Amazon. Don’t limit your brand by making it synonymous with your first product, and don’t think any company only has, or will have just one market, because limiting your vision will limit your ability to grow in the future.