Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

March 3, 2015 · 11:39 am

Too Much Coffee?

Sometimes brands do things that are so dumb it’s hard to know if they’re satire. This one comes right out of a bad joke on “Weekend Update” and it courtesy of the folks at Dunkin’ Donuts. They are an official sponsor of Liverpool, a legendary team in the Barclays Premier League. The club’s hands aren’t clean in this stupidity either.  

As you can see from the graphic, Dunkin’ altered the club’s official shield to sell coffee. They replaced the two eternal flames you see with coffee cups. Unfortunately, no one, either at the club or in Dunkin’s marketing depratment, pointed out that those flames memorialize the 96 people who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.  They replaced the club’s motto – You’ll Never Walk Alone – with America Runs On Dunkin’.  Fans openly weep as the song is sung before club matches, as it has been for half a century.  I’m not sure the Dunkin’ slogan has quite the same meaning.

You might expect there to have been a backlash.  That’s an understatement.  The response was so widespread and overwhelmingly negative that Dunkin’ issued the following statement:

“We apologize for any insensitivity regarding our tweet supporting an LFC-themed promotion featuring the LFC Crest,” said the statement. “As a proud partner of LFC, we did not intend any offence, particularly to the Club’s supporters. We have removed the tweet and halted the campaign immediately.”

Nice job responding and doing damage control.  However, some genius at Dunkin’ thought this was clever.  Another genius at LFC had to have approved it – my years in sports remind me that every team-related campaign required an approval.  Of course, these aren’t the only tone-deaf folks in marketing.  I’ll remind you of The Gap, Urban Outfitters, American Apparel and others who blasted out emails and tweets after Hurricane Sandy full of hurricane puns and special Sandy Sales.  Who can forget Kenneth Cole‘s saying the Arab Spring riots were over one of their sales?

We can be edgy in advertising.  We can’t be tone-deaf.  We can’t make fun of tragedy nor can we try to exploit it to make a buck.  Maybe everyone at DD headquarters had too much coffee that day and needs to switch to decaf?

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March 2, 2015 · 1:55 pm

Misplaced Problem Solving

A new week and another bit of news that has me shaking my head.  Today it comes from the folks at thePlatform which is a widely used video streaming service.  thePlatform announced that it has been working on a feature to defeat ad blockers and they have something that protects against ad blockers, making it easier to get ads onto new devices with minimal client work.

Diagram of Unicast Streaming

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like thePlatform and have worked with them so please don’t misconstrue what follows as anything but me trying to a little wider perspective.  I’ve written before about the challenge of ad blockers for the ad-supported digital community.  To quote one article on the subject:

There are stats out there that say nearly 28% of users have some sort of ad blocker installed, a percentage that has spiraled by nearly 70% in a year. Ads that are blocked, combined with all the other ads that aren’t seen because of viewability issues, makes for pretty bad business.

Indeed.   In this case, thePlatform is looking out for the businesses that support their services.  I applaud them for that even though it’s a misplaced solution that doesn’t cure the underlying problem.  It’s fine to defeat some of the ad blockers for a short time and to help your clients with generating advertising revenue.  However, when you have 70% annual growth in something that runs counter to your business model, maybe the answer is to examine why people are using ad blockers in the first place.

Ad blocking is most popular with younger users – 41% of American internet users aged between 18 and 29 used ad blocking software, rising to 54% when only young men are counted.  Those are the prime years for developing habitual customers.  Yet rather than figuring out how to get product messages across without being annoying and intrusive the industry is figuring out how to thwart customers’ technology.  “We’ve been extremely diligent about making sure that ad blockers can’t find patterns in our URLs they can block on” says thePlatform’s CTO.  Hmmm…

I believe in the ad-supported business model.  I also believe that you can’t force-feed consumers.  Defeating ad blockers is a band-aid and a misplaced one at that.  We need to focus on how to make ads that don’t tax computer resources and crash web browsers.  We need to respect privacy, which is another reason people install blockers.  We need to stop producing band-aids and focus on real solutions.

That’s my opinion.  Yours?

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Filed under digital media, Reality checks, Thinking Aloud

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February 27, 2015 · 12:11 pm

The Real Thing

The topic is syrup this Foodie Friday – maple syrup specifically.  You might know that I’m a fan of the work done by the Cook’s Illustrated folks.  Despite their incessant hawking of yet another Cook’s product, the work they do is always spot on and I’ve never made anything using one of their recipes that hasn’t been delicious.

Grades of Vermont maple syrup. From left to ri...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They do product tests as well and one of them concerned maple syrup.  To me it also contained a business lesson.  I’ll let them describe the test:

Sold side by side, genuine maple syrup and so-called pancake syrup (made with high-fructose corn syrup) can range from more than $1 per ounce for the real deal to a mere 14 cents per ounce for an imitation. But, price and product names aside, which tastes best? To find out, we pitted four top-selling national brands of maple syrup against five popular pancake syrups, hoping to find the best one for pouring over pancakes or using in recipes.

As you might guess, there was no comparison.  Genuine syrup was easily distinguishable from imitation and was universally preferred in the taste test.  As the Coke people learned a long time ago, consumers can spot and usually prefer the “real thing.”  Fake brands taste “off” even if they are more friendly to the consumer’s pocketbook.  Not only does authentic taste better but it sells better too.

The concept of authenticity has been researched.  A recent paper in the Journal Of Business Research found that quality commitment, sincerity and heritage all contribute to consumers labeling a brand as authentic.  Many brands ranging from food products to vodka to shoes use this notion to market their products and it works.  As a story in the Times reported:

Several studies have shown that authenticity — real or perceived — can affect the bottom line. Brian Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University, found that when menu items had geographical or nostalgic labels (“traditional Cajun” red beans with rice, “Grandma’s” zucchini cookies), diners bought them more often and said they tasted better.

The real maple syrup just tasted better.  Isn’t that something we’d want for our businesses too?  We can get there by being real in all of our communications with consumers and holding our products to high standards, even if it means they cost a little more.

Make sense?

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