Danone's shelf branding

I made these shelf pictures in a Continente hypermarket in Lisbon last week. They illustrate what is possible when retailers and brands collaborate.





In this dairy shelf, Danone blocked the different segments. One of the blocks was dedicated to children. To attract the children, they used attractive Disney looking characters above the shelves and toys at the bottom of the shelves. The branding was subtle and probably prohibited by Continente, yet very typical Danone thanks to the white-blue colouring and the Danoninho character.

Durex guerillia

I saw this campaign myself in Belgium in 2006. The pictures are from MM.
Cheap idea with guaranteed impact!

By McCann-Erickson

What about Coke Zero's long term effect?

Since the launch of Coke Zero, I've personally picked up drinking Coke again. And I've seen others doing the same. And according to the Coca Cola press releases, Coke ZERO in Australia broke "all records for household penetration after just 8 weeks". "The combination of a great ‘Coke’ taste with Zero Sugar and the unique black packaging proved a huge hit – with colas seeing an uplift in sales of 19% after just eight weeks."

But what will be the ROI on the long term? According to the book "The 22 Immutable laws of marketing", line extensions very often cause long term volume and profit loss. These might be some reasons. Don't hesitate to complete them in a comment or via a post on your blog:

1. Very often the budget and resources (brand manager) come from the original brand. In this case, part of the budget might have come from the Coca Cola equity budget and brand manager.

2. Coke Zero further scatters the original (and strong) brand positioning of Coke: The real thing. Coke Zero doesn't taste nor sound like the real thing! Does it lift the whole Coke brand? What does it do back?

3. And what about cannibalization on Coke regular and Light? Did previous Light drinking men switch to ZERO? If the margins on Zero are higher Light, then cannibalization is not that bad.

4. The logistic chain got some extra SKU to take care of

5. A key strentgh of Coke is its great in-store experience. Before Light or Zero, the whole shelf was branded in red. Today, you also see grey and black colors.

The business risk is often higher than one might assume, especially in the long term. But the good thing is all ot these 5 arguments can be coped with.

Trucks²

Our roads are getting more and more silted up with trucks. We don't always use this cheap medium to pass on our brand message. But watch out, this literally cluttered medium needs a creative way to be seen. Like this example of FedEx.

Windows branding evolution

This movie shows how even a fast developing product like Windows can remain consistent to its visual and audio branding. Like for a lot of brands, line extensions often deviate from this consistency. But luckily for Windows, the branding went back to where it came from at each large renovation.

Your skin as soft as a baby's

Commercials for shaving products often looked alike: a man enjoys his morning shave followed by a smiling girl who approves the good job with her hand or own cheek. And it works.

The difficulty with products for men is the targeting: the user group isn’t the buyers group. With this type of commercial, decided to fully concentrate on both target groups, based on 2 different insights:
- Female or buyers group: I would love to kiss my husband without irritating my skin
- Male or end user: I feel guilty because my cheeks are always shaggy

Wilkinson went a step further with this funny viral ad. As the father sees his wife kisses their baby all the time, he understands his cheek should be as soft as his son’s cheek!

Next generation washing machines

This machine looks innocent, but it might cause nightmares to every marketer in the multi billion dollar business of the giants Dash, Persil, Ariel, Coral and Vizir. This new piece of technology is made by the Chinese constructor “Haier” and is named WASH20.

So what? Well, it will wash your laundry as white and clean with clear water, without any help of soap or what so ever! According to the brochure of the manufacturer, the machine washes with a chemical substance called dihydrogen monoxide. It breaks down the water (H2O) into OH- and H+ ions, who both have a role in the washing process. OH- acts as the cleaning agent by attracting and retaining stains. The H+ ions sterilize the clothes.

It will soon be launched on the Belgian market for 699€ and exists already in France. Right on time, as with the global warming issue becomes more important for the consumer.

I know that Procter & Gamble and Unilever knew about this innovation since long. I’m curious what their reaction will be...

Nespresso for everyone

The new Nespresso commercial featuring George Cloony is out. This is the second in line to activate the “What Else?” campaign launched one year ago, when George Cloony became the new brand icon.



This is a best practice to illustrate the inclusive strategy of Nespresso. It takes into consideration the requirements of a specific target group (in this case baby boomers) without excluding the rest of your main target group (20-45).
George Cloony is aspirational for both age groups.
The opposite example is Dove with its Pro-Age range targeting 50+ women. It’s positioning is explicit in the whole marketing mix (packaging, product benefits, media selection, etc.).

Axe versus Dove - What's Unilever's message?

It's a pity how Unilever spreads 2 contrary messages into the world.
I thought consumers would think this is important: once they would start to understand Axe and Dove are from the same company, the credibility of the Dove’s self-esteem fund would drop below zero.

But the numbers prove the contrary. On Youtube, the new Dove movie (Dove Unslaught; posted 4 weeks ago) has far more clicks (785.867) than this message (posted 2 weeks ago) with merely 21.562 clicks!

Viral champagne

It's a little bit early, yet this is an outstanding viral campaign as a lot of funny e-mails are sent at work.

A pitty the marketing team can't measure the number of views.

Nokia reaches out to angry iPhone early adopters

After only 66 days, Apple decided to cut the price of their iPhone with 200 USD. Protests from Apple lovers were loud. They felt abused when they discovered their passion was nothing more than business. For Apple, this was just a profit maximization, especially with the Christmas holidays to come. Everybody knows this was going to happen (electronics always drop in price over time), but not that fast and with that amount!

The Nokia marketing team immediatly understood the feelings of these early adopters. Only 1 hour after the announcement, the Finnish company launched an Adwords campaign towards this target group. When early adopters Googled "iphone price drop", a sponsored link named "Sorry, Early Adopters" appeared. It referred to Mosh, Nokia's social network. The impact was huge as Nokia reached Apple's most loyal consumers right at the moment when they felt betrayed.

With this campaign, Nokia used 2 of the benefits of the internet: speed and creativity. Of course, this is only possible if you understand your target group long before this opportunity occurs.

Adventure Ecology floods Second Life

After Al Gore's movie (An Inconvenient Truth), his book several of his speeches, the on-line community Adventure Ecology created a massive stunt. 6 months ago, they flooded Second Life in order to show what life would be when the ice-caps would melt down: sea levels would rise up to 20ft!

The stunt not only touched the 200.000 avatars, but the PR reached also 18 million people through classic media.

Campaign developed by Ogilvy.

1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial

With this commercial Apple introduced the first Macintosh in 1984. It illustrates how well the Apple marketers at that time already understood their customers. They recognized a lot of personal computers owners want to be different. They determined a rather large niche group in the market with great value potential that wants to stand out of the crowd. The new Macintosh gave the perfect answer: with this Macintosh, 1984 won’t be like 1984.

Another one to add to my favorite commercials' shortlist.

Dove Onslaught: the new Dove Evolution

This one might hit the same click rate, even though it gets less under my skin.

Nice follow-up for the previous one.

Drive cleaner with Golf BlueMotion

Last week, I saw this 4x3 billboard in Belgium.
I think the message is clear :-)

Ariston - Washing machine world ad

Great ad for Ariston washing machines with good impact because of its exceptional execution. Very esthetic with a single minded message.

It took me several times though to understand these were not just fish swimming around. And the branding was perhaps not strong enough. And indeed, they reworked the ad a little bit to improve on this: the reworked version starts and ends with a product shot and branding

Click here for the improved version.

Agency: Leo Burnett Milan

MARS – Smaller size, better sales

In 2006, Masterfoods Belgium understood consumers didn’t buy any candy bars like Mars, Twix or Snickers anymore because of their large size. No rocket science of course in a time were health and obesity are main trends, but it took a lot of courage to downsize the format. The business question was: will Masterfoods acquire enough new penetration by reducing the format to compensate the loss in volume / buying occasion?

The answer was yes. They reduced Mars from 54g to 45g (-17%), but shrinked 7 or 12 bars (according to the distributor) into a family pack to increase the volume per occassion. Communication was short and efficient: 15’ TVC with idiot proof messages.

Result? The product became relevant again and for the first time in at least 5 years, sales went up.

PS: The Mars commercial was 30" long in order to build the brand equity.

Stella Artois - The extra coupon

In Belgium, this Belgian brand is known as a cheaper, yet high quality beer. Outside the country, particularly in the US, Stella Artois has a super premium positioning. To strengthen this, they're running the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign. This hilarious top topical fits right in their campaign idea. Nice impact.

Check out the TV ad as well. It got a golden Cannes award in 2006.

Dash - The longest clothesline

Yesterday, Dash broke the world record with the longest white clothesline. Since last Wednesday, the 60.000 collected white clothings were hung on the lines. All clothing was carefully washed with DASH and then delivered to VZW Spullenhulp, a charity organization that collects clothing.

The action was a partnership between P&G and the main distributor in Belgium: Carrefour. The communication of the mechanism went via 2 Carrefour features (door-to-doors) in a unique way.

Result: national television (VRT). Unfortionally at the non-commercial station, so non-branded, meaning without mentioning the brand name. But, this action was another example of "truly branding", meaning it's so recognizable that even without the logo. For the Belgian consumer, it's obvious who organized the event.

Levi's when still straight

In addition to my previous post on Levi's, here the a campaign on their new straight jeans.