ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

If you want to try Colgate Sensitive Teeth Toothpaste, here is your chance. You just need to buy it anywhere and send back your receipt to get your money back. It's probably a mechanic we should learn from when we do sampling. Easy and simple. Worried about the administrative works involved ? Contract it out to a third party. Seems it has contracted the tedious handling to a company called ActMedia. By giving out free samples with such a generous mechanics, it will add credibility to your products that it works too. Not bad at all.

Mannings has come up with an ad talking about their nutritionists. Note that nutritionist is different from dietitian. To qualify as dietitian, you will need to complete internship and exams to get registered. Like this ad says, there is no accreditation system for dietitian in HK and it is only available elsewhere overseas. There are limited number of registered dietitians, like 200-300, in HK while they are either practicing privately or working in public health services. In recent years, both Mannings and Watson's are trumpeting about professional care with the presence of pharmacists and so called 營養師 but their 營養師 are not actually registered dietitians. On and off we hear some negative coverage that their nutritionists are in fact product promoters rather than giving neutral professional advice (note registered dietitians are not supposed to sell products). To counter the negative publicity, Mannings has come up with this ad to "clarify". Will it work ? It reminds us...

Just came across this TVC on YouTube. Who would have posted such this ad ? Someone in the government you bet. YouTube is about sharing. People would only share something worth sharing. It's not funny, not creative and not obscene. Would you share this ad ? Nowadays advertisers upload their TVC onto YouTube as a standard act and hope they would be shared and viewed as a free medium. Yet it boils down to whether your ad is creative in the first place. The swine flu vaccination campaign is another learning about advertising. The government has been airing this ad quite heavily for a while. It fails to jet up the number of people taking it. Why ? Because there have been negative publicities about the safety of it. It shows PR is more credible. If the government is to push any policy, it will have to improve the PR initiatives, not advertising. Yet looking at then increasing number of public affair ads in recent years, it doesn't quite understand the power of PR.

Didn't have much time to watch TV lately but lucky me, I saw this full version of the new TVC of Konew. It lasted 2 minutes. Here it is for your enjoyment. You may like it or you may hate it but you would appreciate the production value of this TVC. It seems it is really committed to building a brand in the property-based loan financing market. It's always good strategy to build a brand in a specific segment of the market. Yet I'm worried that spending on marketing communications in such a fast pace is like firework display at the end. Sustainability is more crucial as brand building takes a long time.

位元堂養陰丸 is a health supplement which has been around for a very long time. User imagery is associated with the mature, older people aged 50+ years old. There should be some die-hard users among this consumer group but they are now exposed to a lot of choices of health supplements and competition is very keen. One strategy for 位元堂養陰丸 is of course to stick to the same target segment and invest to compete with other brands/products. Another strategy is to diversify into other consumer segments. It seems the latter is adopted in this case. However, I feel it is too ambitious to jump to cover all walks of life, from kids to the aged. Such jump is not so credible and maybe it should have made the attempt to target the next younger age bracket as the first step, i.e., 40 - 50 years old consumers.

The founder of 海天堂, 吳耀明先生, keeps enjoying the fun of self-pleasuring. He has been investing quite a lot in TV advertising and he has become the icon of the brand. He is also the pioneer of rejuvenating the aged 龜苓膏 category by coming up with different new products : 龜苓膠, 龜苓茶, 龜苓糖... for more convenient consumption by all walks of life. Most of the TVCs are not great at all except this 海天堂 x 黃飛鴻 campaign. It's still self-pleasuring but at least it's fun to watch and attention-grabbing in the current boring ad scene.

Here we go again ! With the same old Hello Kitty, it's not easy to come up with new promotion idea where a lot of gimmicks have been used before. The mechanics is the same old "spend n collect" but I have to say the promotion TVC is quite enjoyable playing on good old childhood memories. It's obvioulsy targeting those under 25 but savouring childhood romance is one thing, wearing a Hello Kitty wrist chain is another. I would be surprised if there are people who are willing to wear it ... LOL.

Seen this series of TVCs during the Christmas season ? There are like 4-5 versions featuring 洪金寶 playing different games with different people. It's just a simple demonstration to show that Wii is fun for all age groups. The campaign has caught the right timing of the festive season where people might buy it as gift for fun sharing during the holidays. Right product, right timing. I bet quite a bit of products should be sold with this campaign.