ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

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.

AEON and KFC , is it a good marriage ? Co-brand card is one of the ways for credit cards to expand their share of consumer spending. There are co-brand cards of all kinds and the market for co-brand cards is saturated. I suppose you can buy KFC at a good discount with this AEON KFC credit card. Is it motivating enough to apply for another credit card and keep it in the wallet ? It's funny to see it invest in TV advertising. Just wonder how the return on investment would look like.

Speaking of health supplements, you may also notice this initiative by Mannings. It joins force with HKBU to conduct extra tests on the health supplements sold at Mannings. The tests are not thought to be very sophisticated but it's the image projected by such intitiative that counts. Health suupplement represents a sizable chunk of business for drugstore chains. By providing extra quality and safety assurance to consumers, Mannings would be able to attract more consumers to buy health supplements there. You may ask if the same products are sold in Watson's as well, would it also benefit Watson's ? Maybe but Mannings will take in exclusive products to minimize that, I'm sure.

I still remember the price war among different telecos in the 90's. Voice call services were so cheap and every telco was competing to win a bigger customer base. At that time, 3G hadn't been launched yet and everyone was thinking it was alright to slash the price on voice call service while placing the hope on the data services realised by 3G for future revenue. Now that 3G has been around for a long while and 3G data services are not as popular as expected. So what would they do to increase their revenues ? The pie is not growing big quickly enough and one way out is to slash the prices again. This is one of the examples where one2free is offering data and voice services at attractive bundled prices. Will there be another round of price war ? Maybe. If yes, let's see whether market price reduction would lead to a wider use of 3G services.

The EPS I DO campaign is a CSR program where you spend with EPS and EPS will donate a small portion of your spending to plant trees in HK city. It's so strange that it uses the EPS I DO image of Wyman for a joint promotion with a watch company called 貴仁. The promotion has nothing to do with planting tree but it's about cake coupon giveaway upon purchase of HK$10,000 or above. HK$10,000 for a cake coupon ? That's not too attractive in any sense ...

This seems an interesting promotion idea. Work Hard Play Hard is the theme and it takes a segmentation approach to targeting different professions with different promotion mechanics. Check out its website . The first promotion targets people in the insurance industry with a singing competition. There will be more promotions addressing people in the telecommunications, tourism & hotel, property and retail industries. If it is able to come up with promotion mechanics that are really relevant to the people in the respective industries, it will be a successful promotion. It's not going to be easy though.

We do promotion either for image or sales. It's not always easy to kill two birds with one stone. If the objective of the ad is to reinforce the "priceless experience" proposition of MasterCard, it makes sense to use Japan as the theme as it's one of the most visited countries by Hongkongers. However, when it comes to the exclusive spending offers in Japan, I don't know who would really care although it's a logical tie-up. If it is really to generate revenue, it would be more effective to do joint offers with local restaurant and fashion chains. So these Japan spending offers just act as a better-than-nothing tag-on in a thematic ad.

It's a pretty strange promotion for CNY. The promotion offer is quite attractive. However, is KFC a kind of top of mind food for CNY ? It should be 盆菜, right ? KFC is more western and perceived to be a party food for western festivals like Christmas, new year and maybe Easter. I wonder why Aeon doesn't tie up with 盆菜 for promotion. CNY is about family gathering and KFC not really the kind of food for that. Guess this promotion was scheduled to be launched in Christmas but delayed somehow. Or the promotion schedule of KFC is so full with other bigger credit cards that it can only slot in Aeon for CNY ?

When I saw this promotion, I tried to dig into the brain of the marketer and figure out the intention. As we all know, there is a hype of whiskey + green tea mix at bars and I'm sure sales of green teas have increased tremendously over the years through such usage extension. Perrier + red wine is a similar attempt. Will it work ? Well, I thought some amateur drinkers might like this bubbly diluted alcohol. But I started to scratch my head when I looked closely at the copies. 10 parts of red wine + 1 part of Perrier ??? That means you can only one bottle of Perrier with 10 bottles of red wine. What's the point ? Very bizarre. Well, here is the catch : you will finish a bottle of Perrier straight up anyway even though you are not drinking 10 bottles of red wine !

Let's continue our discussion about how Nissin manages its brands. Instead of launching new variants for 合味道 , it chooses to build the brand among the young consumers with advertising, promotion and event marketing. Here is an example of an event marketing initiative, a Hip Hop dance competition. Although this event could be appealing to the young, my problem is that it is not quite associative with the brand, in terms of positioning, consumption, location, occasion and so on. Except you may argue : you hip hop, feel hungry and eat cup noodle. Can we come up with a better idea ?

Anything creative in this ad ? Nothing. It's just a simple product ad plus a promotional message of a Towngas cooking class teaching you how to cook 薑醋. Boring, you say. Look, it's not easy to come up with a promotion idea that is both RELEVANT to your product/consumers and CREATIVE at the same time. As marketers, we launch dozens of promotions a year. Can we be creative every time ? Not really. Yes, we should constantly look for creative ways to promote our products but to me, relevance is the important basic requirement for every promotion. Over time, we have seen too many promotions and advertising that make us scratch our heads. This one is a boring promotion ? Think again. What else would you do ?

Joint promotion is the name of the game nowadays. The simple reason is that we all have tight A&P budgets. Coming up with a good joint promotion is not easy. Ideally we should find promotion partners that share the similar brand image or target market so that there is real synergy, true partnership. However, many joint promotions are done just for the sake of giving away something. Like this one, I just can't figure out how fast-food is associated with candies. We can always do better than lining up someone who is willing to give away something, working out an unattractive ad, putting up a though-to-be catchy headline ... and hiding away the actual terms and conditions of the promotion. (This promotion looks attractive but in fact the T&C says you need to spend at least HK$17 at Fairwood in order to enjoy the offer).

Maybe you have also noticed that there are quite a few Little Prince promotions lately. This is just one of them. Looks like their licensing agent is doing their job. Will he get a wide popularity ? Like Hello Kitty ? Little Prince is a already 60 years old. It comes from a French novel/children's book translated into 150 languages. It makes several profound and idealistic points about life and love and the simple truth that people seem to forget as they grow older. He carries deeper meanings than Hello Kitty which only sells on its pretty image. But in the shallow culture of HK, Hello Kitty wins and I bet Little Prince won't be able to go into the mainstream.

Joint promotion, cross-over, partnership, whatever you call it is a serious matter like marriage. We just don't marry anyone who is willing to say yes. This is a strange marriage. Bonluxe, the shape-up lingerie, is being promoted at Park'n Shop where you can enjoy attractive price offers with enough stamps collected at Park'n Shop. Well, you would appreciate the thinking : Who are the frequent supermarket shoppers ? Middle-aged working/non-working housewives. As being middle-aged, they probably need this kind of shape-up lingerie to look good. Let's catch them where they shop ! The thinking is perfectly logical. But look, there is one important factor to consider : image fit. It's silly to promote expensive image-driven lingerie at a place where consumers buy their groceries.

睇好戲影靚相, this big headline caught my attention but when I read on, I scratched my head. Everything is in fact in the body copies : buy Warner Brothers videos and you will get a discounted price at HK$500 for a so called "Venture拍攝之旅". What does it mean ? What is Venture ? I scratched my head. So I searched the net : Venture is a family portrait photography studio. If you are not as 八卦 as I am, I bet you would never know. This is a case where joint promotion is wrongly taken as a tool to build awareness for a new brand. There are always better alternatives.

Haven't been to Karaoke for a loooong while. Guess I need to be re-educated about the latest Karaoke scene. According to this ad, we can now select our favourite songs with our Nokia phone in California Red and there is no need to "compete" for the remote control. It's a great idea indeed but I'm just curious about what kind of technology is used to enable this. Infra-red, Blue-tooth or via the mobile network. Is it convenient or complicated to operate ? Too bad that these are not mentioned in the ad. Could someone tell the backward old man please ? I won't be able to check that out as I'm not a Karaoke singer at all...

Just can't help keeping talking about Halloween promotions. They are just flooding the market. But let's talk about creative this time. I quite like the creative idea of Maggi European Snack. The creative idea is called "Play with the product". If we compare it with other Halloween promotion ads, it obviously stands out from the rest. On the other end of the spectrum, the Mega one is yet another "one stone kills two birds" approach. What does 周麗淇 have to do with Halloween ? Yes you may argue "驚喜" is related to halloween ma...

So how does Ocean Park promote their Halloween Bash ? The secret of success is joint promotions. They "own" Halloween and they leverage on other people's money to build the hype. Look at all these brands. They are running Halloween promotions and giving away the Halloween Bash tickets with different mechanics, one way or another. It's much like the World Cup when everyone is pretty much doing the same thing. Isn't that great ? For Ocean Park ! During hot promotion seasons like Halloween, Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year and maybe the Olympics in 2008, you either stay away and save some money as it's hard to cut through or you spend big money and make sure you are the one to stand out.

Let's not do promotion for promotion sake. Ice-cream and memory cards are completely unrelated. Although everyone loves Haagen Daz ice-cream, it doesn't mean that it's a good promotion idea. And it doesn't mean that it will able to drive more sales of memory cards. Memory card is something you either need it or you don't. Will we buy more memory cards because of the ice-cream giveaway ? Probably not. Let's think harder. Joint promotions with DC and hand phone can be more effective and relevant.

Ericsson again. This is the promotion idea. Upon purchase of Ericsson W810i, you will receive a coupon book for discounts up to 25% off at 50+ restaurants. Is that attractive ? Not really. What kind of promotion does it sound like ? It sounds like a copycat of credit card promotions. If I'm not wrong, it must be organized by one of those promotion houses which arrange merchant offers for banks. That's why the promotion is not that attractive as we can always enjoy similar offers with our credit cards.