teachthe4ps.com - teaching the 4 ps

I love this new campaign for Tropicana in Canada. The brand is launching a new juice Tropicana Essentials with added calcium and vitamin D (the sunshine vitamin). Tropicana’s ad agency, BBDO Canada, found a great way to portray the campaign’s slogan “Brighter Mornings Brighter Days.” Proclaiming itself Canada’s National Provider of Brighter Mornings, Tropicana spent a month in Inuvik, one of Canada’s northernmost towns, where 3500 residents live without the sun for several weeks every winter.  The television commercial (see below) was supplemented with a Facebook page, and a behind the scenes blog.  For more details link to this article.

The ad provides a nice example of international marketing (for us non-Canadians anyway) — because I think that Canadians have an understanding (maybe with our Scandanavian friends) of the short days of winter.  I will show it when I talk about integrated marketing communications or advertising.  It provides a nice example of how advertising supports a positioning objective.

FedEx is targeting small businesses with a series of web parodies.  One commentator in the Wired article “TV Ad Powerhouse FedEx Woos Small Biz with Web Parodies” (FEbruary 26, 2010) wonders how well this will work.  I watched a couple of the 3 minute videos — they are kind of funny and educate customers on FedEx services at the same time (not an easy task).  They are modest budget productions and the media costs are zero.   The videos I saw had anywhere from 20,000 to more than 400,000 views.   At this point, the payback from the use of YouTube and other social media is hard to predict, but there is only one way to find out and that is through experimentation.

The video is a versatile example of many marketing concepts.   It is always nice to have clear, understandable B2B examples.  The video shows how FedEx tailors its strategy for the small business target market and could fit with chapter 2’s discussion of strategy planning and chapter 4’s coverage of segmentation and targeting.   The video might also be shown with a lecture on organizational buying, where we talk about service businesses.  Finally, it also fits with integrated marketing communications and advertising on the web.

It is always great to have marketing examples that show problems with translation in foreign markets.  It is easy to fall back on the classic Chevy Nova (”no va” in Spanish means “no go”) — but this new article will give you some newer and more relevant examples.  See “Don’t Let Your Brand Get Lost in Translation” in Brandweek, February 10, 2010.

Sometimes students think that developing a successful marketing strategy is so easy.  Maybe it will help to show that some big companies can have bad ideas.  See “9 Poorly Conceived Marketing Campaigns” over at the Business Pundit blog (February 18, 2010).    The examples are all pretty dated, but the explanations for their failures are helpful.

Many of us are familiar with the old “Man in the Chair” ad (if not, link to the blog post first).  It does a nice job of demonstrating integrated marketing communications and how in business markets, advertising works in combination with personal selling.  I saw this post at Mac Macintosh’s Sales Lead Insights blog that brought this point back home to me (click on the ad in the blog to see if full size).   One of the comments on the blog post pointed me to this great presentation (see below) by Ralph Oliva at a Business Marketing Association event.  It is a bit long (5:41), but might make a nice video to show when discussing organizational buying — or for an example of IMC in the B2B context.  It updates the “Man in the Chair” ad — but also shows how the core marketing concepts have not changed.  To fully appreciate this, I suggest you check out the blog post first and click on the ad to see if full size.  Then watch the video below.

Kellogg Professor Derek Rucker and his MBA students evaluated ads based on their ability to achieve strategic objectives — sure beats the popularity contests we usually have.  You can hear what Derek has to say in this BusinessWeek video

The day after the Super Bowl there are plenty of pundits ready to crown the best and worst ads shown during yesterday’s game.  Plus, there are plenty of sites dedicated to crowning fan favorites — see “Super Bowl Ads 2010” at the Wall Street Journal (I don’t think you need a subscription here), which as of this writing ranks the Audi “Green Car” as tops based on the votes of WSJ readers.   Probably the grand daddy of Super Bowl ratings, the USA Today Ad Meter (which uses a panel of 250 adult volunteers) had the Mars’ Snickers with Betty White at the top (we embedded that ad below).  Here at “Teach the 4 Ps”  used the Media Curves widget (see post below) — it’s online voters ranked the Budweiser Bull #1.   All these sites include links to all the ads.  Among pundits, you might enjoy reading reviews of the ads from Seth Stevenson at Slate.com, Stuart Elliott at the New York Times, or Bob Garfield over at Advertising Age (subscription may be required for this last one).

By the way, I would love to hear how you use these ads in class.  I usually show a couple of the AdMeter’s top rated ads and one of the lower ads.  I explain the research methodology used by USA Today.  Then I ask students why the top ones are “better.”  Eventually, I ask how we should judge these ads — and use it to bring us back to Promotion objectives.  If the objective is “likeable among a large cross-section of Americans” then these ads score well — but maybe the goals are to drive purchase, build awareness, or inform a particular target market.  This points out that these “popularity contests” may not be the best metric for judging the success of these commercials.

I will try to send you a variety of post Super Bowl advertising links on Monday.  But if you are looking for something real-time, check this out.  If you click on the “Learn More” link in the widget, you can read about the research methodology that Media Curves employs.  It might be interesting in class to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the approach in a market research class.

MediaCurves.com is conducting a study with thousands of Americans on the 2010 Super Bowl commercials. Participants of the study will evaluate the ads shortly after they air during the game. As the preliminary results come in, an online widget (see right) will be updated with the ads’ scores and overlaying “curves” to represent real-time interest levels.

The top 20 commercials from the previous year’s study are displayed until the first commercial from the 2010 Super Bowl is ready. After the study has concluded, the widget will be updated with the final results.

…and I was not impressed. But somehow, it shot up to #1 (with more than 1.6 million views last week) on Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video chart — knocking the Evian roller skating babies out. What do you think?

Looking for something fun to show to class.  Everybody has their favorite Super Bowl ads – here is one “Top 10″ list at MSNBC, “Ah, the good-old days: The best Super Bowl ads,” (February 2, 2010).  While the MSNBC article shows each ad in a small screen, you can search on YouTube for most (if not all) of these ads for a larger format for class.  Many of our students may not have even seen these oldies but goodies.  My favorite from this list is the classic Larry Bird and Michael Jordan from 1993, “The Showdown” which I embedded below.