ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

Many people in HK start keeping pet. It's on a growing trend. And pet has become a reason for buying a bigger car ! Do you find this ad relevant to the intended audience ? The trouble is that only pet owners will be able to relate to such benefits of a bigger car. The execution is also "unusual" somehow where only the back of the car is featured to show its capacity. Is it a good thing to do ?

As I mentioned in my class, good promotional ads are not easy to produce. First and most important of all, we will need to come up with a promotion offer that matches with the proposition or the benffits of the promoted product. That is a relevant promotion mechanic. Only with such, we can do a good promotional ad that really helps drive the participation of the promotion in question and generate sales. In this particular ad, a bottle of perfum (the gift) is featured together with the hand phone that is being promoted. They are not really related in consumers' mind. So that it can be confusing as to which one is the gift and which one is the promoted product. BTW, the pinkish background is not highlighting any focus of attention as the headline, the perfum, the phone are all in pink.

Please don't complain me that I talk too much about hair loss redmedy. I bet that it's a big market. Stress, hormones, the rise of mertosexuality, you name it. Never know whether these things really work but they sell aspirations. Let's put executional details aside this time and look at the key message that this ad is trying to convey. You hair re-grows, you look young again and women admire you and they can't help running their fingers through you big rich hair ! You may say this is over-done. Yes, this is a promise that I also don't believe. 肉麻但有趣

In the marcom management class last week, we went through the disciplines in marcom formulation. In fact there is a step "zero" before we start planning our marcom. That is asking ourselves "why advertise" in the very first place. I saw this ad in Weekend Weekly and I wonder they advertised in the very place. As stated in the headline, it is about "food and drink for golfers", a very specific product category . Wastage is high if we go for mass media. Money can be better spent if we use other on-target communications channels, like joint promotions with golf clubs, distributing samples at driving ranges and so on (the products are available in UNY and SOGO ??). BTW the Serif fonts used in the headline and sub-headline are visually weak. The words are not quite easily recognized.

Usage of health food supplemts in HK is highly occasion-driven. That's why you see a lot of health food supplement ads make use of occasion as the handle to promote their products. In this case, 阿膠 is promoted for different occasions like 懷孕期保健及產後調理 and so on. This probably an on-brief ad but the tone and manner is rather old-fashioned. Remember tone and manner governs the personality of our brand that we want to convey.

"A powerful advertising campaign takes advantage of what is already in the mind and then reinforces that idea. A powerful advertising concept is almost never an abstract idea." - Laura Ries "In our factory, we make lipstick. In our Advertising, we sell hope." - Charles Revson "Advertisements may be evaluated scientifically; they cannot be created scientifically." - Leo Bogart "The consistency with which you behave and speak is of extreme importance ?one mediocre advertising campaign run consistently for 20 years will do you infinitely more good than 20 brilliant campaigns introduced at yearly intervals." - Drayton Bird "Brand identification. Research has demonstrated that a shocking percentage of viewers remember your commercial, but forget the name of your product. All too often they attribute your commercial to a competing brand." - David Ogilvy on advertising "The best ad is a good product." - Alan H. Meyer "The philos...

There is a new TV ad of Octopus promoting Automatic Add Value service. It is yet another brilliant ad recently. It uses a provocative approach of "why not ?" to call people to action. And it's humourous. The supports are spelled out very clearly too : 1. auto-debit from redit card, 2. point earning and 3. 20+ banks. Who's their ad agency ? Let us know if you happen to know.