ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

Thanks to a friend who sent me this. This video only lasts 5 minutes or so. It's worth the time to watch it and think it over. Everyone is talking about the importance of social media in marketing communications. It's free and it can reach the younger generation. Is it simply about posting your TVC onto YouTube ? And you expect people to send and share it ? If it's not creative or anything funny, people would not share it at all. Heineken here is a good example. You may call it a PR stunt, with the use of internet to spread it out.

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.

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.

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.

The prime objective of any corporate communications initiative is to establish favourable reputation with the public. HKJC is in gaming business which is prone to corporate image problems and public criticism. Its image risk increases since it has been allowed to advertise in the broadcast media on a regulated basis so that it can combat against its competitors, illegal bookmakers. It has become a balancing act between revenue and image protection. In recent years, HKJC has therefore increase effort on trumpeting about its values to the society. It supports numerous charitable organizations, subsidizes public facilities and creates job opportunities directly and indirectly. In fact, some of the corporate communications inititaives are quite good. We can learn from them and steal some ideas.

Doesn't this make some good sense ? During the current financial tsunami, AXA guarantees that you will get refund on the paid premium if you turn unemployed within a year. However, you can only enjoy this guarantee if you subscribe to a policy before May 25. It's a promotion for new customers only. It may not be viable but if this guarantee were extended to all existing customers, it could be a great PR initiative to build AXA as the caring insurance company that goes through tough times with its customers. There would be short term impact in terms of revenue and costs but it may be worthwhile for long term brand equity.

It's surprising to see P&G come up with a "one-stone-kills-two-birds" ad too. In the key visual, it is trying to say that various brands and products would make you beautiful and radiant. The cause-related initiative is like a tag-on. If the objective is to build a good corporate citizen image with the 希望工程 donation, why doesn't it play it up and make it the focus of the whole ad ?

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.

For every pack bought, Pampers will donate one Tetanus vaccination injection to Unicef. It's not a big deal but it manages to make use of this CSR initiative to provoke emotional resonance with the users with this TVC. If you are the user of Pampers, I suppose as a parent you would feel you are doing some good for the less fortune children. On the other hand, will this kind of initiative encourage people to switch brand ? Probably not. It would only strengthen the brand equity of brand and it works best for the brand leader. Does anyone know which brand is the market leader in the diaper market, Pampers or Huggies ?

If you watched TV lately, you wouldn't miss this campaign. The teddy bears are designed by 5 different artists and with any purchase, you can redeem one at HK$20 for charity. It's a pretty good CSR idea while you can drive some sales at the same time. The role of the TVC is of course call-to-action and let people know that McDonald is doing some good for the society. It's 1'15" long and there are cut downs. When I first saw it, my reaction was : that's quite costly. Would it be better to put that kind of money to the fund ?

This Olympics-tied campaign of McDonald's is on lately with TVC as well. I'm wondering whether it's only me who has problem with it. Sending 11 elite to serve at the Olympics should sound pretty alright. But will the athletes really eat at McDonald's ? Don't they need healthy diets during the game ?

The Olympics logo is appearing in many ads and promotions. It seems not too exclusive. Big or small sponsors are enjoying the use of the very much the same logo and consumers can only tell the different types of sponsors by reading the small prints beneath the logo. Neutrogena sunblock is the official sun protection product of the Olympics. Didn't know there is such a type of sponsor but the product nature sounds like a logical tie with the Olympics. On the other hand, Sun Hung Kai is the so called "supporting property developer of the Olympic Equestrian event". I wonder why such a sponsorship would be granted. It's so minor and there is no association with the game. Such sponsorships will definitely dilute the effort of other more major sponsors. If you were Coke or UPS, what would you think ?

After the Sichuan earthquake, I bet all PR or corporate communications managers would have faced with the same question : should we do anything about it to show to people we are good corporate citizens ? With the expectation that many companies would be working on some charity acts of some kind. The issue has become how to stand out from the crowd. Watsons has chosen to do a charity sales with TV advertising. The purpose is clearly call-to-action and corporate image enhancement. But look, should it donate the advertising money to charity instead ? The more you advertise, the more people would ask this question. If you have not enough media weight, there won't be enough participation. A dilemma indeed. Would it better to use PR all the way through ?

Hair loss treatment. My interest. Playing with Shakespeare, this creative idea is called parody. That is, twisting the original to send a message. This one is an interesting creative that should be able to catch people's attention. However, I'm more interested in the tag-on message about trial of the treatment at a small price with proceeds donated to 苗圃行動. Potentially this charity act can be campaignable alone. If resources allow, we can do a thematic ad first to spell out the effectiveness of the treatment. After the thematic message is gotten by consumers, we can then do this charity act in a bigger scale.

This is quite an interesting corporate communication initiative. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is not new and many companies have this sort of plans for their employees. Yet, I haven't seen any really advertise about it. The objectives are obvious : attracting talents while projecting itself as a good employer. The ad doesn't mention the details of the actual plan but it does say about everyone, regardless of length of service and grade, can enjoy this plan. That's the unique selling point could have been more upfront as the key message in the ad.

Standard Chartered Marathon will be on again this Sunday. It has become one of the biggest sports event in Hong Kong and participation grows year after year. It's a successful case of event marketing where Standard Chartered is able to make use of this event to uplift its brand awareness and leverage on it for promotions. The fact is that Standard Chartered has been sponsoring the event for more than 10 years. Unlike soccer and basketball, Marathon is not a spectator sport and it wasn't too popular at all back 10 years ago. If you were the corporate communication/marketing manager, would you recommend such sponsorship ? Probably not but someone in Standard Chartered did. 人棄我取, that's the name of the game if you want to own something unique. However, uniqueness doesn't warrant growth in popularity. With a bit of luck, SARS struck in 2003. Health consiciousness of HK people has been uplifted and there are more people participating in sports. Compared with ot...

There is another version featuring 林海峰. Art direction wise, it's quite attention getting. However, if you just listen to the voice-over without paying attention to the small prints at the bottom, you cannot easily tell what the message is. It's a cause-related marketing initiative that should have been worth telling consumers loud and clear. Well in fact it's not really a big deal : EPS will only donate HK$1 to grow trees for every 10 purchases with it. I guess it is just too shy to tell consumers explicitly. Come to think of it, why advertise ? Let's not kid ourselves that airing advertising will build image. It is the message in advertising that matters.

This is quite an enjoyable TVC. However, I'm not a big fan of corporate advertising, I have to say. In many cases, corporate advertising can only bring up the awareness and saliency of the company. Nothing more. Nothing less. Corporate ads are not really selling any product or service in specific and they usually target at broad audiences. Well, if your audiences are from 3 to 80, how creative can you be ? Creativity is not about pleasing everyone after all. So the corporate ads we see are usually warm, motherhood and nice to watch but easy to forget with cliche messages. For this Construction Bank TVC as an example, its message is basically "Construction Bank helps you realize your dreams". Sounds familiar, doesn't it ? Every bank says so one way or another. While advertising is often taken as the easy way out in corporate communications, PR is in fact a more effective tool for building awareness and image. The Standard Chartered Marathon is a very good example.

This is quite a creative offer. Green is hot and Hang Lung rides on the trend to come up with a carpark offer for green drivers. If you have an environmentally friendly car, you can enjoy a range of carpark offers. I think it is a PR idea than a sales promotion idea though. The penetration of green hybrid cars is still low. So this offer is rather limited to a small group of car owners and I doubt it would be able to really generate additional revenues for its carparks. However, if turn it into a PR or CSR initiative, there could be more mileage to trumpet about Hang Lung as a good corporate citizen. How ? For example, it can join force with the government which is already promoting the use of green hybrid cars with tax benefits.