ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

Healthy life style is the trend and many brands are seen to ride on it. There are more health tips on TV from different brands, no matter they are directly or indirectly related to health. One example on TV is Standard Chartered which gives us a health tip a day to draw the association between healthy life-style and wealth management. Here is another example from Lipton. The claim is that a cup of Lipton plus 15 minutes' Yoga will maximize the health effect. But the funny thing is that it is the same milk tea range they are promoting. The association of this range with health is rather distant. Would the idea be better used for a new health range of teas ?

Just spotted an ad from Garden that rides on stress to sell its Pop Pan biscuit. The ad uses an interactive approach where readers are asked to answer a self-complete questionnaire to check out the kind of stress they are facing with. Similar creative approach was used in our promotion of essence of chicken before. But the point is that the consumer insight is different. When we are stressed out, we always want a break or time out. Probably we want to drink or eat something to pamper ourselves. Such consumer insight is used by various brands of coffee, chocolate and so on. Nescafe, Time Out and Kit Kat to name a few.

Is it an ad using shock tactic as the idea ? Yes, in a way but it's not too shocking in terms of execution. No blood. No painful faces. It doesn't matter as the idea is there. A simple ad showing the consequence of not using Toyota original parts. I pick this ad not because of its creativity per se. It's a good example of single-minded message, on-brief idea and clean and tidy execution. Many ads are more creative but they just don't sell.

Let's go topical. The hottest entertainment news is about the outrageous act of 便利 taking peep-hole shots of 阿嬌. The act of 便利 is immoral for sure. But why 便利 would have done something like this ? 'Cos they know there are demands for this kind of 出位八卦 news. And they are right. The first print run was sold out in hours. Demand and supply. It's about culture. There are only 8 million of people in HK and how many 八卦雜誌 are there ? Too many. There are even entertainment channels on Cable TV and the paid TV of TVB where 八卦"新聞" is on 24x7. I think HK people need more educated to spend their leisure time. BTW I wonder what 便利 will talk about in their upcoming issue. Yes I'm quite 八卦 about how they would react in the next issue. Let's see.

Speaking of beers, let's go to the bars where there are biniki dancers, fun games and 李彩華's performance. Sounds very exciting ? Who is the organizer ? Heineken ! But can you tell easily tell from this ad ? When I looked at it, I thought it was some shopping arcade promotion. Where is the branding ? There are a small one at the top left-hand corner and another at the bottom right-hand corner. Hey we don't have to be too shy about what we are advertising. Add product shots into our layout. Have the talents to hold a bottle of Heineken. Or replace the banana boat with a big Heineken bottle !

Shock tactic is not too common for advertising consumer products and services. As as as I can remember, I only used it once or twice during the years of beer marketing. We can often do things a little over the edge in beer advertising to grab people's attention. Shock tactic is more commonly used by the public warning where you see bloody car crashes, collapsed lungs due to smoking and so on. This ad is about the the health warning of 肺炎鏈球菌 with a scary spider. Is it very shocking ? Not quite. What do we do executionally to push the idea more ?

Let's continue to talk about the tutorial school phenomenon. When we use the same approach, idolization in this case, to advertising within the same category, what will happen ? Brand confusion. People can't tell which is which. What's more, certain share of association would benefit the market leader who succeeded first in using the pioneering approach. If idolization of tutors is first adopted by 英皇教育, these 遵理學校, 嘉勤教育中心 and so on are basically advertising for 英皇教育 in effect !

Hong Kong people are quick, responsive and opportunistic. This is reflected in the culture of advertising. Remember who first started the approach of tutor "idolization" to promoting tutorial schools ? 英皇教育 if I'm not wrong. Now that the market is flooded with advertising with the same approach. In Hong Kong, whenever a market of anything starts to grow, players will join the game all in a sudden and all of them tend to take the similar business model, air same look-&-feel ads and compete with big budgets. What will happen ? Market explosion and then quick contraction in a short while. Slimming houses, health food supplements (Lingzhi in particular), telecoms and beers (in the 90's) are all examples of such cycle. Whenever a market grows, new marketing positions are created. As in my case, I moved from traditional FMCG to beers, then to telecoms and then health food supplements when these categories were hot. In the case of the private/semi-private education sect...

I don't know enough of female consumers but do they use this kind of things ? A cream that turns back the colour of nipples and "vital parts" into pink again ? It's pretty expensive too, HK$388 per tube. The ad is quite creative too. Sakura and the words underneath are arranged into the shape of breasts with "before and after". Before - brownish on the left and after - pinkish on the right. It definitely serves to convey the key message. The supports are all well in place too : 官恩娜 as the endorser (?), lab reports and some demonstration on the "magic". Well done indeed.

A tasteless series of ads. A comical approach with "before and after" creative idea to "demonstrate" the effect. Is a proper approach for advertising a drug ? (well I do have reservation about advertising prescribed drugs) The trouble is that they are using tongue-in-cheek humour to advertise a drug. It's not good for the consumers and it's bad for the brand image. I can't imagine a reputable pharmaceutical company would have done this.

An interesting key visual - surfing on a slipper. Executionally, it could have stood out more if the colour combination is managed better. The headline is pretty unmatched with the key visual. A bit too generic to spell out the attraction of the promotion. But come to think of it, this promotion is just giving away T-shirt and slippers. Is it worth the advertising ? Particularly, will you be motivated to shop at the Skymart in the airport because of this promotion ? Technorati Profile

D-Link, is it a well-known brand for wireless router ? Not really. They claim they are the best selling wireless router brand. Do you know/believe that ? Well, if it is No.1, we must know it. Anyway, let's talk about movie sponsorship. The usual mechanics : a joint ad that promotes both the movie and the product/brand plus some tickets to give away for consumer promotion. In the past it might be a good way of promotion. Now that there are way too many movie sponsorship arrangements like this. So let's not kid ourselves that this kind of sponsorship will uplift our brand image and awareness. Look, we are overloading a single page ad space too : the movie, the product and promotion messages. Will readers read them all ? Probably not. Who will enjoy the benefits more through this so called joint promotion/sponsorship ? The movie promoter/publisher !

You must have seen the latest Wing On Travel TV ads featuring 周汶琦. A very unusual way of advertising travel services using sex appeal. At the beginning, the legs, the sexy back and so on got me to think it is some cosmetics or slimming parlor advertising .... but it manages to surprise me. Let's not argue it is good to use sex appeal to advertise a travel agency. It's got us to remember at least. It's a good try.

Recent ads of 稻香 do add some freshness to the advertising of Chinese restaurants. Strong visuals with clean and tidy executions. But I have to say their fonts are way too small for averages readers. In this series of ads, they are promoting some "special" menus called 公主宴 and 貝勒宴. As a 為食鬼, these ads attract me to find out what are special about these fancy menus. But tell you what. These menu are not too special at all. They are normal dishes with some fancy names. Dishes like 貝子紅白灼蝦, 南北進貢生果盤, 妃子花姿映蚌片 and so on. What a disappointment. A saying comes to my mind : Advertising would not build product advantage. It only conveys it. In other words, if the product is common, advertising will not make it special.

Make a guess where this 御前麵 comes from. I can't be 100% sure but I bet this is the own private label of Park'n Shop. What brand does it look like ? Obviously it is an imitation of 日清合味道杯麵. This is how retail chains launch their private labels. They imitate the packaging design of the market leader where consumers will mistaken that it is the brand they want to buy. Of course the price is set at a much lower level than the market leader. Trials occur and it may become accepted if consumer find it of similar quality at a lower price. This is how they grow their own private labels. Tricky, huh ?

Benefiber is quite a new product concept. Fiber powder that you can add to your favourite food, making fiber intake easy. I'm not sure whether such a new concept would be accepted by consumers. But one thing for sure. It's rather inappropriate to use 韜韜 as the endorser. He's a cute old man and I personally quite like him. He loves eating and the more I see him eating in front of the camera, the more I'm worried about his health condition. It looks like he's going to burst ! The question is whether he's a credible one to endorse a diet-realted health food at all. It may be more credible for him to endorse a slimming house when he manages to lose 100 lb.

Nokia is holding a SMS competition and they have launched heavy print ads, MTR posters and radio sponsorships to announce it. The idea is quite interesting : fingers are dressed up to take part in 武林大會/打擂台. However, this idea is not easy to execute in 2D environments. The fun of the idea is about actions and excitement of speed competition. I think it is more suitable for AV media like TV, Internet and so on. Agree ?

Just aware that Consumer Council has pinpointed that Diamond Water makes false claims about its water purifier. This water purifier is claimed to do magic to energize tap water, giving loads of health benefits. i-Cable News discovers that their scientific claims are misleading where all the scientists who they quotes denies any endorsements. The healthcare market is blooming and there are a lot of cowboys making different health claims about their products. Some of them are over-claims and some are misleading. Speaking of ehtics in marketing and advertising ... there is one quote about it : 'Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable.' -- Leo Burnett

This is yet another 上身着西裝, 下身着唐裝 kind of ad. Why ? What is the key visual about ? Someone in a suit playing 雜技. An interesting visual that catches people's attention. But when I read on, it does not really help to send a key message about this promotion. It looks totally unrelated. But hold on ... the headline is 程程送你驚喜.... oh it is referring to the Chinese wine "酒酲", 程 and 酲 phonetically. Ad should be simple and direct, rather than testing the intellect of the readers....

What do we call this type of creative ? "All you can paste !" Many advertisers just treat an ad as a noticeboard and paste whatever messages they want to put onto every inch of the space. In order to highlight the messages, words in different typefaces, colours and treatments are used. Worse still the font sizes of the body copies are so small that you may think they are testing your eye-sight. As a reader, would you really read them or just by-pass it ?

Watch ads usually take the product as hero route. There is nothing wrong with that. Fashion products, by nature, are short term. New ones come and old ones become faddish. We need to feature the product prominently for people to appreciate its look and style. Let's get back to this Timex ad. It sounds simple common sense to arrange our copies according to the habit of reading. However, such common sense is simply ignored in many ads. In this ad, the "introduction" copies are arranged top-down. But when it comes to the descriptions of the watches, copies are arranged left-to-right across. David Ogilvy once said, if we want to increase the chance of our copies being read, they should be arranged like the editorial articles. Do we usually see editorial articles are arranged like this ?

Guess who is the most active snack player in HK ? I think it's 旺旺. They really invest heavily in TV advertising. Every morning when I wake up and watch the morning news, there are heavy bombardments of their spots. And they go heavy around the evening news as well. But look, their ads are real clichés. It seems all these ads are from the 70's and 80's. The tone and manner and even the hair styles of the talents are very dated. If TV ads are supposed to build image, then I wonder they use these old ads. Or they are the current ads they use in Taiwan ? Anyway, if they pay for the heavy media, why don't they produce some good ads suitable for HK market ? You afford to spend. Spend it well.