Marketing – Page 15 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

A Dirty Yellow Pages Trick

Let’s say you own a pizza shop, and want to accomplish two things:

1. Attract more people to your establishment

2. Inflict some damage on the competition

What can you do? According to brand guru Martin Lindstrom, here’s what an Australian shop did:

Instead of spreading money between off- and online ads, it spent the entire budget on radio. The spots were simple but extremely effective. So effective, the restaurant’s increased business caused most of the local competition to shut down…

The pizza place’s radio ads asked listeners to tear out all the pizza-restaurant pages from their yellow pages and bring them in. In return for the pages, customers received a free pizza of their choice and a sticker with the restaurant’s URL.

Because the contact information for all the other pizza joints in town disappeared from customers’ primary reference source, only one set of contact details was left in households that complied… the restaurant that dreamed up the promotion.

This particular shop used radio — the same approach would have worked just as well on television. More important than the medium of choice was the fact that the shop chose to concentrate the attack in one place.

And before I go, here’s a legal note, insisted upon by the Bernstein Worldwide Legal Department: I am not suggesting that you do something like this. But if you do, let me know how it goes.

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McDonald’s vs. Quiznos: Singing Fish Beats Singing Cat

The other day my ex-radio colleague and fellow blogger Jennifer Schurter brought the a recent Quiznos commercial to my attention. Quiznos has decided to use singing cats to promote their new value menu:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD3y6DAeK_A&feature=player_embedded]

In this endeavor, Quiznos is emulating Mcdonald’s’ iconic singing fish campaign. Like McDonald’s, they’re using a deliberately-obnoxious singing “animal” to cut through the clutter and grab the viewer’s attention. And they’re making an offer, which is a good thing.

Problem is, it makes THREE offers, and the offers (in spite of the attempt to tie them together with “5-4-3”) don’t have anything to do with each other. Too much detail equals confusion, and that’s the state the viewer will be in when the ad’s over.

By comparison, the McDonald’s ad makes one very simple offer: buy two filet-o-fish sandwiches for $3.00.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIq92yp_a0c]

And unlike Quiznos’ wimpy “for a limited time”, McDonald’s gave consumers a hard deadline — in this version, you had to buy your sandwich no later than April 4. Viewers of the filet-o-fish commercial will have no doubt what McDonald’s wants them to do, why they should do it, and how long they have to get it done.

In this particular battle, the fish beats the cat.

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Another Unsung Hero of Marketing is Gone

In the past decade, we’ve lost some important behind-the-scenes giants in the world of brands.

Adolph Levis, who developed the Slim Jim meat snack, died in 2001.
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Arthur Schiff, the advertising copywriter who coined the phrases “But wait, there’s more!”, “Isn’t that amazing?” and “Now How Much Would You Pay?” passed away in 2006. His most famous and enduring work was the Ginsu Knife campaign.
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Fredric Bauer, who invented the Pringles Potato Chip can, reached his sell-by date in 2008. According to the several media reports, his family honored his final wish:

Baur’s children said they honoured his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave in suburban Springfield Township.

Now comes word that Morie Yohai has died. You might not recognize his name, but you’ll recognize the product he invented: Cheez Doodles.

“Is this Mr. Cheez Doodles?” a cashier once asked Mr. Yohai’s wife, Phyllis, when he accompanied her to a local supermarket. Mrs. Yohai liked to let everyone know of her husband’s contribution to between-meal crunchies, according to a 2005 Newsday profile. Their sumptuous home overlooking Long Island Sound was “the house that Cheez Doodles bought,” she liked to say…

In 2004, he, his wife and children visited a museum in Napa Valley, Calif., where an artist, Sandy Skoglund, had mounted a life-size installation showing several people at a cocktail party — all covered in Cheez Doodles.

Rest in peace, Mr. Doodles.

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Swipe-and-Deploy Marketing: Shelter Borrows From the Car Dealers

I’m one of those who’s come to the conclusion that there are no new ideas. Sometimes when you’re looking for a hook, the most “creative” thing you can do is move a technique from one industry to another.

Multnomah County Animal Services in Oregon, recognizing the fact that there is more demand for kittens than for full-grown cats, has come up with a nice little bit of swipe-and deploy: the “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign.

With hundreds of cats crowding the Troutdale shelter, the county plans, effective immediately, to temporarily eliminate adoption fees for mature cats (over one year old). The “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign aims to place as many cats in homes as possible in the upcoming summer months.

Multnomah County took the concept a step further with this inspired touch:

All Certified Pre-Owned Cats adopted from the shelter come with a free “multi-point inspection”: the cats have received a complete health exam, all their current vaccinations and a microchip, and have also been spayed or neutered.

There’s nothing particularly newsworthy about an overcrowded shelter; and because the older a cat gets, the less likely it is to be adopted, reduced-fee adoptions for older animals are fairly common. Meanwhile, certified pre-owned programs are a-dime-a-dozen in the car business.

But when an animal shelter borrows the certified pre-owned concept from the car business, it becomes a “man bites cat” story.

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