Month: October 2010

Today I’ll be talking about the interesting brand positioning that the “Halls” product has. As someone born and raised in the South American country of Brazil, I was always used to see Halls as candy. Over there, it is marketed, packaged, and sold as candy, seen in newspaper stands, corner stores, pretty much anywhere that sold a variety of candies.
One of the surprises that I had when I arrived here in Canada was that over here Halls is sold and marketed as medicine, as a cough drop or something like that. Of course, as someone who always saw it as candy I scoffed at that and couldn’t possibly imagine how someone could possibly convince people that candy was medicine. But apparently the brand positioning of Halls does just that in North America. When I decide to randomly chew some Halls for the pleasure of it, I sometimes get asked if I have a cold or something, and then I get a confused face when I tell them that no, I was perfectly fine.

I am still not really sure if there is a difference in the composition for Brazilian and Canadian halls, but from the limited results I got from Google, there isn’t any difference unless you consider the special Vitamin-C Halls.

If anything, this is pretty strong evidence that Marketing branding is of great importance for a product. If you can convince countries that candies are cough drops, or vice-versa, that is one fascinating feat.

(I apologize for the tardiness. I was in Toronto for a tournament these past few days, which severely limited my internet connectivity.)

One very entertaining advertisement strategy is when you respond directly to your competitor’s marketing campaign. Responses are usually funny, thoughtful, and are actually quite effective in persuading consumers that maybe the competitor isn’t all that much better.

A very recent example would be Axe’s response to the massively successful Old Spice marketing campaign. For those who live under a rock, Old Spice has been advertising their products using an apparently very classy, strong, and benevolent man who builds orphanages with his bare hands, rides horses, and responds to youtube videos while wearing nothing but a towel. A sensation among youth, the marketing campaign is widely seen as sucessful. Axe responds to this campaign with a simple ad, that reminds everyone of Axe’s single-minded objective: help men get the attention of women. The effectiveness of this particular response ad can be debated, of course. On one hand, it does seem effective in the sense that axe’s target market (young men seeking women) would be reminded that their brand is the most effective when it comes to “what matters” (to them). On the other hand, this reponse ad, just like any other, requires the consumer to be aware of the other marketing campaign. Basing your own advertisement on the assumption that your target consumer has already been targeted by your competitor is risky.
Here are some other example response ads:

Straightforward: Competitor says that they’re better now, company sneaks attacks them and says that they were responsible for that.

Also self-explanatory.
For those interested, the aftermatch was as follows: Audi puts up a billboard that says “Better check your luxury badge, it may have expired”. BMW responds by pulling their ad, and making it look like Audi is schizophrenic and talking to themselves.

One common and powerful useful marketing strategy used by most retailers, is the “SALE” word. When normal customers are walking around at a mall, they tend to go to places where there are having sales, because there they assume they are going to acquire the best value for their dollar. Of course, retailers know this, and they use that for their advantage. A few retailers blatantly abuse the SALE signs, by having literally year-long sales. An example of this would be  men’s clothing stores like International and Stockhomme, who are always having some kind of sale. The issue with abusing the SALE sign is that while it might attract unaware customers, soon enough people will catch on that the sale signs are meaningless.

Starter retailers use the SALE sign more sparingly, using them as a weapon of price discrimination and impulse shopping. You are a customer. There is a 24 hour sale on a sweet shirt. You are not totally sure if you really like the shirt, but it is 50% off and you know for sure that the store doesn’t have sales very often. Chances are, you are going to buy the shirt. Or so the stores hope. The idea is of “limited time offers” is that there is only one time that you should buy the product from the store – now. This tends to increase sales due to customers buying things they don’t really need at the moment, but hey, it was on sale!

The other extreme when compared to the first one is to simply never do sales and put up posters saying that your retails has “everyday low value” items, which is why you do not do sales. This is of course, not very effective, because it removes the whole price discrimination aspect that comes with sales. For example, a rich person might be willing to spend $100 on a shirt, but a middle-class person wouldn’t part with more than $40 for it. The smart move for a retailer is to sell that shirt firstly for $100, and if the item hasn’t been sold after a while, set up a sale for those expensive items at more friendly prices. “Everyday low value” strategies often aren’t very powerful exactly because the retailers lose out on that surplus from people who have more funds.

The bottom line is, therefore, that while the sale appeal is very powerful, it is very important to not overuse it. Just like anything else, too much of something turns nauseating and sickening. It should be used with care.