*I say “mistake” because it may just be an elaborate and potentially risky publicity stunt.  Additionally, perhaps the brand is making the conscious decision to move away from their old targeted market segment to pursue an even more profitable one.  Ie. Burberry appealing to the younger generation by using Emma Watson as a means of celebrity endorsement after realizing it is more-so the younger female demographic that tends to enjoy spending more on higher-end luxury goods.

Examples: Do you think these were/are intentional publicity stunts, or “mistakes”?

1) The Old Spice “Mano a Mano in el Baño” Campaign (Gotta love that campaign name!)
Recently Old Spice launched this massive social media campaign where people can vote on who they want to be the official Old Spice Guy, after a challenge was set in place by the iconic Fabio Lanzoni to duel the reigning Isaiah Mustafa.  It appears right now that many want Fabio out, and Mustafa to remain supreme.

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely on Team Isaiah Mustafa.  This brand is rocked by P&G, the company that pioneered the entire concept of “Brand Management”–so I really think they know what they’re doing and that this is a terribly awesome publicity stunt.  I love the brand behind Old Spice, perceiving it as one that says how you don’t need to take yourself so seriously.

 2) The New Coke Debacle
In 1985, the Coca-Cola Company introduced New Coke, a reformulation of the cola set to replace the original formula we all know and love today as Coca-Cola Classic–which was met with a greatly displeased public response.

3) The notorious Gap Logo revamping incident
Gap unveiled a new logo hoping that it would be perceived as more contemporary.  The retailer eventually reverted back to its old logo after a huge social media backlash.

Another question I have for just the guys:
Would you say that you’re an #axeman or an #oldspiceguy? And which do you use, if neither? Would you consider switching?

The Evolution of Advertising: From Buy, to Push, to Pull, and now to Share is my new blog post from a year-long hiatus!? Instead of focussing more-so on how advertising media has evolved over time (print ads to online banner ads etc.), this post elaborates on how the mentality behind advertising has changed over time. 

Wow, I haven’t blogged for some time now! However, I have made it a personal goal of mine as a marketing student to fully establish my online presence by the end of the summer. I still have two more exams to write, but one of them is on Consumer Behaviour!!—so this blog post can be justified as studying for it! :)

A few months ago (or was it just last month?), I attended Style and the City 2011, a non-profit conference that is run by UBC students each year on personal branding, corporate branding, and image. I had been a part of the organizing committee last year for 2010 and wanted to support my friends. I was also excited to see what the conference looked like from the other side! Anyway, the keynote speaker was George Moen, the CEO of Blenz the Canadian Coffee Company, and he very briefly mentioned that through recent history, there have basically been three very general phases or trends in advertising that have evolved over time. Or did he say that there were four?

Well, anyway, this really struck a chord with me, as I found this fascinating. I guess, in a way, advertising has changed over the years when I think about it. With this blog post I will try to identify the different “eras” of advertising, techniques/styles/methods of advertising that were most popular during those time periods, how it has evolved over time, and further discuss why it has become slightly irrelevant for today’s average consumer. Hopefully I will be able to synthesize these vague fuzzy memory snippets together, combining it with the additional material I have learned from my Consumer Behaviour, Pricing, and Marketing Analysis classes, as well as the miscellaneous articles that I have been reading, all to add dimension to this discussion!

The Early Era: When it came to buying Media, more was better

An old newspaper advertisement from the 1900s

Here, companies just wanted to get their names out there through newspaper print ads, radio ads, TV, and whatever media they could afford. The more they spent, the more they won. The key here was brand awareness.

This isn’t very effective anymore. I guess at the time, tedium as a result of over-exposure was never an issue, due to the less developed technological reach for the era and how consumer tastes have evolved over time.

It wasn’t relevant for you to hear about a good bakery in a far-off town because it wouldn’t be as easy for you to get there, when travelling the same distances took exponential longer back then, than today. You were presented with local ads through posters, newspapers, pamphlets from the local blacksmith, baker, etc. There was also a lot more local word of mouth recommendations, due to a smaller knit community.

There is just so much media and content out there nowadays, that people have adopted personal information filtration systems, and simply buying media doesn’t make it through the filter.  For instance, I find the mass amount of ad posters running through the Canada Line pretty dull, mundane, and completely undesirable. It would be more memorable (and creative!) if a company bought an entire row of those ad spaces and created a larger, trailing image.

Perhaps this opinion is heavily influenced by the paradigm of this time, that basically you can’t simply rely on brand awareness to sell a product.  People are now faced with so many alternatives, they now want to know about what your brand stands for and what it can do for them over the competition.

I think that this mass space-buying technique would work well today, though, only if it were combined with other forms of advertising, such as being a part of an integrated or guerilla marketing campaign. The location of these ads being placed everywhere would act as casual reminders to something great that has been started. For instance, advertising Google Maps by temporarily placing huge statues of the yellow man icon or placement pins in various locations around a city.

I really think street artists should collaborate more with larger corporations to create the most epic guerilla marketing campaigns

It’s not all about awareness, it’s about getting the message across, too!

Post-Early Era: The Persuasive Ads & Push Push Push!

These guys shaped the industry for quite some time

Later on came the glamorous MadMen era with lots of push-advertising and persuasion. “Don’t you want to be like so-and-so?” Here, large corporations would fabricate ideal images, and push how their product could make the average consumer become that ideal person, or achieve that ideal state of being. Advertisements such as, “Buy this now! It’s a limited time offer!”, and “This is the best, because X celebrity uses it!” were once popular as a result of this era. However, these exclamations mean nothing to many consumers of today, appearing tacky and artificial, leading us all to suspicion. An average consumer would now think “If they are pushing so hard, is there something wrong with their product? Are they not selling well on their own?”, making the brand undesirable.

This trend of push advertising stayed with us over time and evolved into other forms, such as luring consumers with various incentives like discounts, coupons, rebates, and free trials—psychological pricing strategies. (How is this psychological? For rebates, think Prospect Theory. People like to receive their wins/gains separately, as it achieves greater overall utility.)

The problem with this is that the perception of aggressively increasing incentives leads the risk of a weakened brand image. Why should a consumer focus on what your brand means to them, when your product is plain and simple cheap? Sure, many will buy this product, but they just did it because it had saved them the most money. You’ve just attracted and mixed into your customer pool the price-sensitive consumer–and guess what? These guys aren’t loyal. Your initial customers may have lost affiliation with the brand image that you initially created, as well. You now have a new pool of un-loyal current users, and a lot of these customers can easily be lost or taken away once their purchase cycle ends.

This is problematic, unless a company wishes to consistently target the price-sensitive with its brand. If a brand wished to do this, though, it must consistently maintain its position as an affordable brand—and this task is daunting! With an increase in globalization, companies may well be in direct competition with others halfway across the world (people ordering things off the internet), making it increasingly difficult for companies to maintain their stance as a price leader. An example of an industry changing its advertising from push to pull is the auto industry, with many car manufacturing companies having learned the hard way after surviving (barely) an economic melt down mixed with a huge incentives war that carried negative-sum gains. (may talk more about this in a future post!)

Post Post Early Era (nowadays): Pull Advertising & Adding Value

What products create more pull than Apple?

Nowadays products are basically being sold through pull-advertising–the reverse! This basically means that a company’s product should sell itself. Instead of creating a product and telling people about how good it is, corporations are trying to add value to their products and convey this sense of value to its consumers—whether it be horizontally positioned (targeting a different demographic from its competitors), vertically positioned (increasing R&D spending to add superior features), or simply catering its image or product around a current social-economical trend (eg. sustainable sourcing, fighting diabetes, recyclable initiatives, anti-animal testing, etc.)

People have become skeptical of what corporations tell them is true and question source credibility. Instead, they now prefer word of mouth recommendations, and reading professional reviews and forums to retrieve a good sense of the brand and to determine if the product really suits their needs and is right for them. For instance, rottentomatoes.com for movies, and app ratings for the iTunes store.

This table can best express the difference between the Push Era and the Pull Era of advertising, showing the difference between corporatation-created “Hype” versus consumer-generated “Buzz”.  (Credits go to my Consumer Behaviour prof. for it!)

An excellent example of pull-marketing are “brand butlers”, a term coined from an article by Trendwatching.com.

The Starbucks App, helping loyal customers find their nearest Starbucks coffee. An excellent example of a Brand Butler

Basically, a brand butler enables consumers to adopt a brand for a purpose, resulting in a pull-strategy as opposed to the traditional push method. For instance, Starbucks has a mobile application that enables their customers to geographically locate the nearest franchise to order to buy their next cup of coffee. The average individual sees over a thousand advertisements a day, and creating a “butler” that ties both advertising the brand and benefiting the customer is the new route in getting through consumer’s advertisement-resistant shells. Traditional marketing and branding has changed from simply selling a lifestyle to consumers towards emphasis on how a brand will make their lives easier, through the brand butler technique. People are not responsive to the same old advertisements as marketing is changing every day. This is why I am interested in integrated brand management, since it is Marketing in its most dynamic form and it acknowledges the use of various channels to engage various customers to a brand.

The more recent now!: Social Media advertising—Information Sharing & where anyone can influence.

Twitter and Peter Chao, arguably an influential figure

This era of social media advertising blends really nicely with the pull-advertising era. Nowadays, people CHOOSE what they want to see with the Internet. When consumers shop, they’re searching for something that they are 1) already aware of -and- 2) are actively seeking. Since the internet is so vast, it’s impossible to buy media slots everywhere across the web, and since consumers are actively seeking their modes of travel on the web, it’s hard to push something to the target consumer, when other companies are targeting that same person and wants to buy that same slot (eg. make-up ads on a beauty site). This is a double-edged sword: companies have the opportunity to identify where exactly their target market hangs out on the web and place advertisements there, but all its competitors know, as well, so products are being compared (whether it be direct or indirect substitutes)–and it’s a huge fight for the consumer’s attention and disposable income!

Additionally, another issue is that with the number of Internet users nearing 2 billion, nearly anyone can have his or her space on the Internet, and a voice. You are important to whoever follows you, and these people follow you because your opinion matters to them. To refer back to what my Consumer Behaviour professor once said (or something similar):

If your name is Jim and on Twitter you say ‘This Starbucks coffee SUCKS!’ and if you’re Starbucks and you write back to him saying that it doesn’t, there’s a risk that Jim’s followers will go “Hey! The big corporation is attacking our man Jim! We should support him!”, and then you’ve created a problem.

Any average Jim or Joe has the power and voice to either actively support or defame your brand.  All the people that follow Jim view his opinion highly, and to them he’s way more important than you are. So marketers should be aware of this and take this into consideration when working with the medium of social media.

And unlike the first era, social media is free, and free for all. This is problematic for companies because they may begin to lose control of their desired brand images set out for their products. Companies want to try and mold their brands in a specific way, but basically since anyone’s voice can be published through the internet, the aggregate opinions of many may influence and shape a brand’s personality into something slightly different than what a company intended. (Think about my past tweet regarding Morgan Spurlock and his attempts at finding sponsors for his upcoming film, THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD! “Morgan Spurlock’s “mindful and playful” TEDtalk on Branding&Transparency, extremely engaging RT @ jackseesworld http://on.ted.com/96B5“)

An example of this is Brand Viagra. It is arguable whether Viagra lost control of its brand image when it launched. It was the first drug that directly addressed erectile dysfunction, which was something initially considered taboo. Many jokes revolved around the brand, and it eventually became something so iconic and was embedded in pop culture. They took advantages of this and played it up, targeting the drug towards frisky middle-aged men, as opposed to Cialis that brands itself on relationship-building and trust, fixing a problem to make the relationship between you and your partner stronger.

The most a company can do to mitigate this effect and shape their brand is through action and PR. For instance, if you want to be viewed as a freedom-of-expression brand, the brand converse sports many different designs and edgy patterns for its shoes, targets the edgier crowd, and has developed presence in skateboarding and street wear circles. Converse has sponsored a tattoo artist and a digital design contest, which further stabilizes its brand personality.

Additionally, Television advertisements don’t work as well as they used to. Video ads from companies are now viewed more-so as forms of entertainment, and for the purpose of memory and awareness. A good example of this is Brand Kobe, with Nike’s The Black Mamba short film.

However, companies should be aware that entertainment value or shock-value may lead to lack of identifying the message/brand, perceiving it as vague, especially with you were initially unfamiliar with the product. (Examples are those random commercials you see on TV with people randomly screaming.. you remember them screaming! but you don’t remember what the ad was about).

Here’s a table that shows how the phenomenon of social media is changing the advertising game, with this table on advertising versus word of mouth and social media. (Credits again go to my Consumer Behaviour prof. for it!)

Lady GaGa in her MV for Telephone

I thought that was the best part of the video, and since then I started noticing celebrity sunglasses.  Not just the typical RayBan aviators that they all seem to be wearing, though.  I’m talking about the really trippy sunglasses, ones that only celebrities can pull off wearing and look good.

I did a bit of research, and came across this brand called A-morir by Kerin Rose, which is based in New York.  I do not know who designed Lady Gaga’s cigarette shades, but A-morir’s style is pretty unique, as well.

“A-Morir, the eyewear and accessories collection by Kerin.Rose, has become a much publicized favorite among fashion’s biggest trendsetters. Her designs have been commissioned and loved most notably by Rihanna, Lady GaGa, Mariah Carey, Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg, Fergie, Nicki Minaj, Estelle, Cassie, Jazmine Sullivan, and Kid Sister; and have been featured in multiple editorials in Vogue Italia, Rolling Stone, Vibe, and international versions of Marie Claire and Nylon, among hundreds of mentions and shoutouts in print, TV, and on the web.”

Barracuda shades, famously worn by Rihanna

Rihanna looking notorious in the MV Run This Town

Found on Lee Hyori, Korean pop sensation

Lee Hyori in latest MV Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

For more A-morir x celebrity photos: http://www.a-morir.com/index.php/celebrity/#

I would totally buy Hyori’s sunglasses if they weren’t $600!

The first picture is of all the potential clothing candidates that I might bring on the trip.  The more dark rectangles that run across horizontally, the more practical it is to bring, as I would be able to wear it for more functions (Corporate, casual, dressy, pajamas, other).

The spreadsheet is vertically organized by locale (top, bottom, all), which is sub-divided into clothing species (blazer, jacket, hoody etc.), further elaborated on by the specific clothing item.

The second picture does not include how I will be dressing for classes at JiaoTong University, since formal dress is not required.. therefore casual outfits would be subject to weather, which is too much work to do for funnnn XD

Below: Conspiration Pilote canvas

Can’t wait to get this outfit in my head coordinated:
aviators (these ones), off-shoulder white oversized v-neck T, skinny jeans (True Religion gunmetal sequin if i’m not broke, or grey acidwash skinny jeans), brown heeled suide boots or flats… concerned that it’s too many name brands at once, though.  Love vintage looks with premium branded accents (small logo).

Below: Eva clutch in Damier Ebene canvas

For nice dinners, clubbing, or shopping downtown to command respect/good customer service from store clerks (kidding!, but we all know it’s true to some degree)

FLASH FORWARD: But Recently, I’ve been obsessing over infographics.  I think this is my new interest! (Woah, just realized that the above is a total digression to the point of the article.  Sorry for that, this is how my stream of consciousness flows and this is also why this blog is called “Off-Tangent”!) According to wikipedia (sorry for the poor quality of reference):

“Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information.”

In other words, it may look like this:

or like this!:

There’s a really cool one that was released not too long ago regarding popular health supplements and its effectiveness, which I really like.  Check it out!!

These images were all taken from the blog informationisbeautiful.net.  Aren’t they cool!? I don’t know, I guess it’s because I’m really into random facts and trivia, and I’m also very artistically inclined and into graphic design (oo! half-rhyme!).  Having an interest that amalgamates the prior with the later just makes my heart get all excited and fuzzy inside =).  It’s admiring pretty graphic designs while LEARNING! And because I’m a visual learner, this is just plain awesome.  It helps me remember the random facts and odd bits of trivia, which makes for great conversation starters!, which is so useful for business and networking! Anyway, my sister introduced me to the site, and I recently purchased the its book, The Visual Miscellaneum:

I was super excited when I recieved it in the mail, but, after flipping through the pages, I was a little disappointed.  Here are some points to note:

• I wish there were more supporting words than just the graphics itself.  The blog is definately a lot better because one can just click his or her way through to further interpretation.
• It takes a little while to understand what the graphics are trying to depict/say because I find that the legends aren’t the easiest to interpret. However, they are extremely creative.
• There are instances where there are no units to the numbers, so it can get confusing trying to interpret the comparisons as a ratio or what.

So basicallly, some of the infographics are a little over-simplified for me to comprehend, but it’s definately a trade-off for looks.  Or perhaps it’s only me who has a problem with this, as I’m a new to the infographic scene, and maybe every statisticians and infographic designer is having no problem at all, being knowledgeable in and familiar to the visual colloquial that The Visual Miscellaneum uses.

Oh well, it makes a great coffee table book no doubt for the unfamiliar.  Just something to flip through..but the fact that it’s not the easiest to interpret so quickly makes it not-so-flippable, if you know what I mean.  It seems more like a book of posters haha, I really do hope they start to sell some of my more favourite pages into posters, though =D!

Overall, great marketing on the part of McCandless.  He had free book giveaway draws to generate hype and awareness for his frequent blog visitors that cared enough to own a copy.  I’m sure that the fanbase of the blog definately allowed for him to create the book and earn extra revenue, as I feel that the book does not hold too well on its own.  Very smart of the book itself, at the end, to refer back to the blog.  The book was more of an assist to informationisbeautiful.net: it played the role of being a tangible version of the blog, giving informationisbeautiful.net fans a physical piece of their favourite blog to own, hold, & cherish. I did not feel that the book was descriptive enough, nor discoverable enough on its own.  Definately, more for the fans.  This was most likely his intent.  Woohoo for word of mouth! =D

I really want to try creating an infographic of my own..sometime soon! And when I have the time!

I have this theory that on every rocky planet there are little sea-monkey-like creatures just waiting to be animated with a little bit of water.  And as the suns of those relevant solar systems expand due to age, the heat radiating away will increase and thus melt the planets’ ice deposits into water, bringing said sea-monkey-like organisms to life!, which will then eventually grow and, over time, evolve into us!

The start of a good children’s novel?