Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

December 11, 2015 · 12:31 pm

How The Cookies Crumble

This Foodie Friday we’re doing something a little different and putting on our intellectual property hats. I know – how is that food-related? Well, I came across a lawsuit last week that involves both things: food and IP.

English: Milano mint chocolate cookies by Pepp...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’ve ever been to Trader Joe’s you’ve probably seen a number of products on the shelves or in the freezers that look vaguely like other products you’ve seen in supermarkets. There are goldfish shaped crackers that are not Goldfish (capital G), cream-filled chocolate cookies that aren’t Oreos, and oval-shaped cookies with a layer of chocolate that are not Milanos. It’s these last items that triggered the lawsuit.

Apparently Pepperidge Farm does not consider imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery. As Reuters reported:

In a complaint filed on Wednesday in the New Haven, Connecticut federal court, Pepperidge Farm said Trader Joe’s is damaging its goodwill and confusing shoppers through its sale of Trader Joe’s Crispy Cookies.

We can debate whether or not a consumer would confuse the similar shape and packaging with the original cookie, but I’d like us to think about something.  When you see a store brand or other generic product in a store, are you confused as to whether this is the name brand?  I’d venture most of us aren’t.  Generics generally are competing on price while offering relatively equal (they claim) quality.  The issue, then, is how unique is your product?  There are lots of phones running Android (yes, I’m aware most of them us a forked version, unique to the phone and carrier).  While there have been lawsuits (Apple suing Samsung, for example) about the various features of a phone, no one is confusing an iPhone with a Galaxy.  I know about laws on things such as trade dress (the package, for example), but can you protect a flavor?  A shape?  Generally, when I buy a store brand, I know I’m trading off something for the price savings.

Rather than worrying about consumers buying “fake” Milanos, maybe Pepperidge Farm needs to focus on educating consumers as to why their cookie is just better and worth a few pennies more.  As a society, I think we spend too much time looking for people to sue and not enough time making what we sell better.  Better products usually mean better sales and better market share.  That’s the way those cookies crumble in my book.  Yours?

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December 9, 2015 · 9:51 am

The Right Question

We’re filling out a survey from our homeowner’s insurance company. I guess they want to make sure that we’ve got ample coverage in case a party gets out of hand and we need to rebuild Rancho Deluxe. One of the questions reads as follows: 

Percentage of the interior walls that are plaster

Hmm. Would that be the percentage based on the number of walls, the percentage plaster represents of square wall footage, or something else? After all, in a rectangular room, if one long wall is plaster, then the right answer may be 25% or it may be 40%. How accurate does this response need to be?

There’s actually an excellent business point contained in that silliness. It’s not enough to ask the right questions. We also need to ask them in the right way so we get the expected, actionable data. In the example above, while my answer isn’t a huge data set, when aggregated into the other data the company is pulling together, the sampling error will be larger than it needs to be since half the respondents can respond using one way to look at the question and half the other.

Obviously, it’s not just a lack of clarity that can affect the outcome and usefulness of your research.  Asking leading questions which are almost certain to elicit a particular response is bad as well (do you do XYZ every day?).  So can asking open-ended questions since there is no guarantee that anyone will focus on the specific area you’re researching.  Then there are the folks who overlap responses (how old are you – 18-21, 21-30 – how does a 21-year-old respond?).  Or ask loaded questions (how long ago did you stop beating your spouse?).

Asking questions is really important but asking badly structured questions is a waste of time. Clear?

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December 8, 2015 · 11:22 am

Another Nail

Those of us who were fortunate to work in TV used to have a pretty good business, way back when.  You’d find a peach basket, open the window, and watch the basket fill up with money.  OK, it was a little harder than that, but TV has always been a business that grows exponentially in good times and shrinks only a little in bad times.  Growth was as reliable as the US Dollar.  So when I read the piece I’m about to show you, a quote from “The In-Laws” (one of my all-time favorite movies) jumps to mind: 

What do you think will happen when they run off this dough… and there’s trillions of extra dollars, francs, and marks floating around? You’ve got a collapse of confidence in the currency. People are gonna panic. There’s gonna be gold riots, atonal music… political chaos, mass suicide. Right? It’s Germany before Hitler. You can see that. Jesus, I don’t know what people are gonna do… when a six-pack of Budweisers costs $1,200. That’ll be awful.

In other words, when the basic currency of a business has changed substantially, chaos ensues.  It’s my belief that we’ve reached that point in media, as this report states:

For the first time outside of a recession, linear TV ad spend has stopped growing, according to global ad revenue updates by MAGNA Global and ZenithOptimedia, both released Monday. While national TV ad sales grew .3% to $42 billion in 2015, MAGNA predicted it will decrease by .3% in 2016. ZenithOptimedia’s Advertising Expenditures Forecast also found TV’s share of global ad spend will decrease from 38% in 2015 to 34.8% in 2018.

The basic currency – the TV CPM which is tied to the TV rating point – has lost its stability.  There are trillions (OK, billions, anyway) of extra GRPs available.  Pricing pressure has always been downward, but now there are options available that seem to be making that stick. I think we’re in a brief period where live events will hold pricing stable, but when only about a quarter of viewers are watching TV “live”, how long can that last?

This was the most ominous sentence in the piece: A shift in viewer attention and changing advertiser investments may therefore contribute to a decrease in both supply and demand for linear TV impressions.  The shift has happened.  The pretty good business is rethinking itself.  There will be political money and Olympics revenue in 2016 to serve as a band-aid as it does so.  But by 2017, the times could be, in the words of the Chinese curse, interesting.

Thoughts?

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