ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

It's quite a laugh with the play of words and the old 賭聖 movie. It's not a sophisticated kind of humour but it catches your attention and makes you remember. Positioned specifically to smokers, this smoke stain removing toothpaste has been around for ages. Compared with whitening toothpaste, the potential market size is much smaller. Yet the bigger whitening market is occupied by bigger brands like Colgate and Darlie. Smaller brand can still have a chance to succeed by occupying a specific niche.

Tissue paper, like many other FMCG products, is a saturated market. Brands are competing for market share while there is literal no market growth. Kleenex, Andrex and Scott are the first comers that developed the category. Yet over the years, their shares are eaten up by other cheaper alternative brands. Why ? First the category is generic in the sense that there is minimal product differences among different brands. Second, the more well-known brands did not invest much in marketing communications. Now it's all too late. Will consumers buy more of these three brands because it is a famous international company that produce them ? It gets consumers more confused in a way. What are the differences among the three brands ?

Let me use textbook theories to explain the intention behind this consecutive ads. Print advertising is an one-way non-personal communications . It's not easy to grab people's attention and reader involvement is low in the communication with print ad. So we need to think of a good way to involve and engage the readers better : give them an IQ test. Better still, if the IQ test is related to our product, we can do the selling at the same time. Prefect thinking but the result like this is more like a self-talking piece. I consider myself educated and got some IQ.... I still can't understand the questions and answers .

Will you be more inclined to support the 2012 constitutional package after watching this ad ? It just provokes more criticisms. Advocacy advertising is an two-edge sword and it's not easy to handle. When done badly, it would only work against you. Advertising is considered not so credible and using advertising to advocate an issue would easily attract more rejections and cynicism. Our government should learn more from the political advertising in countries like the US and the UK . They have one common characteristic, that is, emotional appeal.

What does it mean by Da咩"火羅" ? Da咩 is Japanese meaning No/Stop. "火羅" is Cantonese slang meaning embarrassment. So the ad is trying to say you are smart drinking Fanta and there is no more embarrassment. Yes yes yes you are clever enough to understand what Da咩"火羅" means and there is no need for me to explain. This was exactly what I had in mind when I heard the radio ad of Fanta explaining what Da咩"火羅" means ! The ad is intended to create some kind of new buzzword for the young in the hope that it will be a 潮語 among them. Yet it is feared that this new buzzword is not understood. So an radio ad is produced to explain. Who planned all these ? The adult marketers. Buzz is not created by advertising. It tells in your face. It's not quite the way of communications to the young.

PCCW Wi-Fi is offering 2-month free trial of its hotspot Wi-Fi service. Don't get too excited about it. First, only users of mobile phone can enjoy this free trial. Why ? Data volumes used by mobile phones are usually smaller than computers. So it would be safe to offer free trial to mobile phone users only. Even if many people try it for free at the same time, the network wouldn't be overloaded so that the speed experience is maintained. Another catch is that the ad trumpets about the 100M speed. Yet in fact it's only available at certain hotspots only... how much longer can telco kid consumers with small prints ? I wonder.

When I saw this ad, I said to myself I must be getting old and dumb. I didn't understand this clever ad. It's selling non-stick pan alright but there is a creative idea which I found it hard to understand. I tried look at it closely, turn it upside down and even flipped a few pages of the magazine to look for follow-up explanation, presumably it's a teaser. None... I managed to figure it out after spending some more time on it... know what it's about ?

Quite many people are talking about the new launch of GUM 5 by Wrigley's. I bet the heated talk abouts must be generated by the TVCs and the packaging design which resembles to condom packs. I have clipped all three ads from YouTube for your enjoyment. The campaign has centred around taste sensation. No doubt these are great ads which are of high production value as well as successfully set up the expectation and build up the excitement for trial. The risk is there when consumers try it and find the taste nothing special. It will become an over-claim and the heat will only be like fireworks that last for a short while.

This must be a pretty memorable ad, probably not because of Andy Lau but the cute monkeys. Ads of 道地 TVCs is very consistent over the years. Andy Lau, the natural environment, and the soothing feeling of the music. I suppose 道地 is the leader in bottled tea. Does such consistency in advertising have anything to do with its leadership position ? Well sales do not depend solely on advertising but consistency in advertising would definitely give you a better chance to build the brand in the mind. Back to this ad. It's about a new product called 清烏龍 with the selling points of 茶清解渴 and 真正茶味. It's nothing special at all. What's the point ...

McDonald's has been with us for 35 long years and it's definitely part of HK people's life. I scratch my head when it only chooses to use the anniversary to do price-cut promotions. It can do better than that as it should be a good excuse to strike a chord with the consumers. I can only imagine it needs to face the reality : it needs to generate higher revenue to make up with the rise in rent. The sad part is that promotions after promotions like this will only project a cheap eat image for the brand.

I'm confused when I see this new TVC of Park'n Shop. I just find it hard to appreciate the thinking behind it. Wellcome and Park'n Shop have been competing on the low price image for so many years. Now Park'n Shop has seemed to give up on that. From 日日慳 to 日日賺, I can understand it wants to say that its products are worth the money you pay. Yet it looks like a confession that it's not the cheapest retailer.

This sponsorship makes some sense indeed. Teenagers having serious acnes would suffer from confidence and social problems. Joined some social work organizations, Jackeline has set up a charitable organization called "Ching Chung" where it's giving away its treatment to 100 teenagers. The idea is great. It's doing some good and it's worth letting consumers know. But such an in-your-face ad is a bit too much. Since it's PR idea, maybe it's better to use PR to let people know.

Said to improve skin complexion, collagen drinks have been around for about 6 years. The most pronounced brand is Fancl House. On and off there are brands going in and out into the market with advertising investments. It seems there must be some loyalists who really believe in collagen drinks. As a late comer brand, H2O+ has taken a direct competitive approach of dosage comparison. It has 8,000 mg of collagen and so it's said to be the most effective. This ad has been launched for a week or so and here comes the Consumer Council's report on the effectiveness of collagen drinks yesterday. I wouldn't call it hard luck for H2O. Everyone in the health supplement business know collagen drink doesn't work at all. If people still decide to put in big money to kid consumers, it's their choice and they deserve having their fingers burned.

This ad must be inspired by the movie 家有囍事 way back in the 90's. It plays parody with the role of 吳君如 in the movie. You would be able to get the joke only if you watched the movie before. Those who watched it before should be 30+ old, i.e. the target audience supposedly. You may or may not like the parody with 家有囍事 as the idea. The learning is that by parodying with a popular memorable movie, we can home in on a particular target audience.

If you take MTR recently, you may have seen this ad in MTR lightboxes. It's like a launch ad for a new free job/career magazine called fuel published by Classified Post. It's distributed free every Friday. Free job/career magazine is nothing new under the sun. I just wonder how it is different from others or how it can break through the same old same old like the ad says. Tried to find out more from the Classified Post webiste . It doesn't look too much like a breakthrough in any sense. Is it ad over-claiming ? Let's grab a copy on Friday and judge.

Play this ad and stop at about the 20 second mark. Guess what brand of DC is being advertised. Most of us would have thought it's Canon. No, it's Nikon. The execution is similar to Canon's ads again. One may argue that all DC ads should look similar as most of them are playing with the common category motivator : capturing the happy moments. True in a way and it's a creative challenge. Canon is the market leader and advertises more. The only way out for Nikon is to try harder and look different. Ok.... good creative is not easy to come by.... at least the branding in the ad can be played up...

Sharing with friends has long been a category motivator Coke trying to own. If you review the TVCs of Coke, you can easily find the element of sharing in many of them. This ad is also about sharing with friends in the festive season of CNY. Obviously the thinking behind it comes from the observation that young people today are heavy users of instant messengers and web video conferencing and hence the idea. Yet there is a very fundamental issue with this TVC. That is, why TVC in the first place ? If we believe they spend most of their time on the computer ... Another problem is that kids hate to be told what to do. The adults (who do the ad) sometimes fail to realize that.

Photo hunt ad is commonly used to grab readers' attention, increase involvement and make them remember the message. This Fedex tries to play with photo hunt to talk about the difference between two of its services, one cheaper and one more expensive. The ad seems to work to get people read the ad yet it can be done better to connect the play of the two photos with the message.

Is it a good move to come up with a new version of a popular ad of the past ? The song, the romance and the directorship, unquestionably the old 陽光檸檬茶 TVC is a classic. Some people may tend to compare the old and the new and argue which one is better. There is no point arguing about that. It is a good ad so long as it works to appeal to the target audience. The old one managed to do so as it was new and fresh in the advertising scene at that time. Over the year, there have been many emotional appeal ads with similar blends of song + romance. Since the target audience were born in the 90's and hadn't seen the old version before, it may just be another ad similar to what they have seen many times. It is actually their parents resonating with this ad. Note young people are rebellious. They hate what their parents like. This ad may just remind the young people 陽光檸檬茶 belongs to their parents' generation and provokes the "not-for-me" thought.

Other than confectionery products, pre-Chinese New Year is the season for promoting household cleaning products. How about having someone to do the clean-up for you ? Clorox is having a promotion to give away 2-hour cleaning service by HK Employment Development Service. It's not a bad promotion idea at all but 2 hours is definitely not long enough if one wants to have the whole flat thoroughly cleaned for the new year. We all have budget constraint understandably and it's a trade-off between number of prizes and the size of the prize (length of the cleaning service in this case). In fact, it can be potentially turned into a societal promotion initiative, more for brand building than sales generation. The mechanics can be the same but the saying in the ad can be twisted a bit to do that.