This past week the teams were tasked with creating a new brand of cleaning product. The teams had to create a look for the product itself, as well as a television and radio ad to support the product.

In recognition that the products of both teams were similar, let’s take a look at the campaigns of both teams from a strategic corporate image perspective.

Alex’s Team: The Germinator

Key Elements:

• Black bottle, a red label with the image of a tough female.
• Tag line: “It terminates germs and dirt”.
• Television ad: A little boy can use the Germinator to clean gravy better than a strong man, because he has the Germinator product.

Chris’s Team: Octi-kleen

Key Elements:

• Orange bottle and pastel label with the image of a smiling octopus.
• Tag line “Eight hands are better than two”.
• Television ad: A mum can clean the house like an octopus, very quickly, as if she had eight hands.

The scope of this task was very unrealistic, the teams had to create product packaging and two supporting ads.  Unfortunately this Advertising task only asked the teams to consider a very limited scope of deliverables, and did not portray an integrated marketing cycle.  Although product packaging is important and most products, especially new products, benefit from television and radio ads, neither team discussed a strategy, a potential target demographic or even a corporate image as a whole.

As well, neither team developed a great brand name. Some of the questions to be asked when developing a strong brand name (Cow and Baack, 1997 p. 40):

• What are the brand’s most compelling benefits?
• What emotions are elicited by the brand either during or after the purchase?
• What one word best describes the brand?
• What is important to consumers in the purchase of the product?

Neither team discussed the relative benefits of the brand in comparison with others, or even attempted to portray an amount of competitive advantage. The Germinator had packaging that made it appear as though it belonged in another aisle, but neither team had any idea of what their brand equity would be.

Neither team actually considered the needs or desires of the target audience. Considering that the majority of consumers who purchase cleaning products are female, neither product or campaign targeted females specifically. Alex’s Germinator was a very masculine looking product, and Chris’s Octi-kleen television advert was very old fashioned and focused on the man of the house relaxing while the wife cleans up with her eight hands.

Lord Sugar certainly imposed on the team that there is much more to an effective campaign than making a snappy commercial. As he used the Titanic movie as an example, it won many Oscars but it was a poor advertisement for a cruise ship.

Ultimately, the critical failure of the Germinator was that the goal of the use of the product in the television commercial was to clean gravy, whose core function does not match with the name Germinator. Considering that a product is the most critical component of a campaign, the Germinator name was ill suited to a product that removed stains and removed kitchen grime.

Overall we were very disappointed by the efforts and results of the advertising task!

When I was in business school and we were deciding on our areas of specialisation, I am certain that not one person in my graduating class would have told you they wanted to go into sales. In our classes, we talked about overall business and corporate strategy, and we believed that we would be doing business strategy, which of course in actual fact we would not. No one really told us the truth, whether they feared we would run away and finish another degree or perhaps they really did know that for the most part our lives would be spent coordinating, not strategising.

I believe that many of my fellow graduates (myself included) could have benefited from a solid foundation in selling. Selling is a core function of many businesses and a tangible, highly lucrative area to excel in. Yes, excelling at accounting beneficial, but being really good at selling is an art form that will bring both personal and organisational success.

Now that I’m in the real world, I can fully appreciate the fact that selling is the ugly duckling of marketing. It was far from the cool thing to do in school, but now I can fully appreciate how important it is to many core business functions. I am now envious of my fellow peers who have mastered not only the confidence but the expertise of selling.

As a mini-lesson in sales or selling in particular (one that I should have gotten years ago), the three functions that you should be primarily concerned with are:

1.     Being absolutely clear about what is for sale.

2.     Being absolutely clear about how the product or service benefits the potential purchaser.

3.     Being absolutely clear about why the potential purchaser should buy from you rather than somebody else.

Once branding and competitive advantage have been established, most integrated marketing activities are driven by the desire to increase a variety of factors such as awareness, familiarity and likeness and in the end are all efforts used in a strategic way to increase long term sales and long term business profitability.

Although consumers are constantly bombarded by information and are constantly targeted, it paramount that your customer understands what it is you are selling, that they understand how your product or service will benefit them, and that they understand why they should buy from you rather than somebody else. There are various means to communicate these principles and you can be as subtle or as persuasive as is appropriate, but in the end it comes down to communicating the points listed above in the most effective way for your audience.

Welcome to our new mini-series of blogs where we look at each episode of Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice and discuss the differences between how we, the integrated marketing agency Marketing Team Direct (or MTD for short), would have tackled the challenge using our effective approach.

In case you missed the first episode of this sixth series, the new candidates meet at midnight and they embark on a seventeen-hour overnight journey to buy, make and sell three kinds of sausages. They have to purchase the ingredients from a London meat market, have to create sausages in their own sausage factory, then sell their sausages to make a maximum profit.

The first key difference between teams Synergy (the men’s team) and Apollo (the women’s team) is that Synergy is going for a 40% meat, low cost, low quality sausage while Apollo is going for a 70% meat gourmet sausage which has higher associated costs and will ultimately sell for higher prices. Appropriately, Apollo sells in upscale Leadenhall Market, while Synergy opt for lower prices at Portobello Market.

MTD’s first step in working with clients is immersion, where we understand the vision, values and culture, market dynamics, customer relationships, current positioning and propositions. Both Apprentice teams did follow a similar process for a short while, as they considered who their target audiences were in their respective markets. As both groups are only in the bangers market for one short day, many of the immersion aspects will be more applicable to late Apprentice episodes when the teams work with real, established companies.

Interestingly enough, the show did not feature any of the teams discussing their competition. What are the market stalls next to them selling? The teams do consider how their packages of bangers will look to customers, and teams do realise the value of having the sausages cooking at the time, sizzling, having an appealing smell and being able to offer potential customers a taste. Using the grill becomes especially important when a local restaurant owner would like to taste the sausages before making a bulk purchase.

Team Synergy also missed a valuable opportunity in selling to those managing the other stalls. Neither team thought of other channels or outlets in which to sell sausages other than aimlessly running to businesses and restaurants, and finally neither team identified a story that they could rally behind and communicate to customers.

If team MTD were competing on the Apprentice, we would be looking for competitive advantage, not only in relation to our nemesis team but from the competing market stalls. How could we make a sausage so much more?

Very much unlike the environment created on the television show, we would insist on taking more that seventeen hours to learn about our new client and understand their place in the market to deliver true competitive advantage that brings increased sales and profitability for much longer than one day.

Unfortunately we do not all retreat to a fancy large West End townhouse at the end of the day, but we do get great satisfaction from the work that we do. Hope you will enjoy our upcoming blog posts on the Apprentice, and follow our live Tweets on how the teams are handling the competitive advantage!

In an effort to sustain sales levels, Harley Davidson are now officially targeting women specifically. Of course they have always had loyal female followers, but they are now targeting the thirty-to-fifty something female demographic who have high levels of disposable income.

After hearing last week that the Milwaukee family home of the brand will be staying open after unions voted to accept a seven year pay freeze and move from full time to more part time and seasonal employment, Harley Davidson are being frugal and are saving money through user generated promotional content.

In contrast to one of the brand’s recent extremely edgy, masculine commercials appropriately called “The Cheater”, here is the winning video from one of Harley Davidson’s newest targeted demographic.

Harley Davidson are being extremely smart in harnessing the devotion and cult culture that the brand have already established, and getting those same customers to create content for them in their spare time. The user generated content may not have high production value, is admittedly slightly on the cheesy side and may not appeal to the wider older woman demographic. It does however belong to a collection of content that increases top of mind awareness and fuels increased customer passion for the brand as they and their troupe of supporters vote for their favorite video.

I read in a blog that the brand have started to send out rings specially designed by one of the founders’ grand daughters to new and loyal female customers, but I couldn’t find any official word on that. The cost of a ring is a small price to pay for user-generated content and the development of long term brand champions.

While browsing in a local Oxfordshire shop last week, I was trying to decide which washing-up liquid to purchase, because mine had run out. It just so happens that I place a high value on helping the environment, and when I am deciding which products to purchase, I usually don’t mind paying a slight premium for products which are organic, derived from plants, and/or will have a minimal impact on the environment.

Interested in moving away from purchasing a leading brand, I considered the various options neatly displayed on the store shelf. Upon a quick glance, one alternative was in a clear/greenish container, had an illustration of a plant on it, and had some sort of ‘eco’ messaging on the label. I grabbed it, put it in my hand basket, and kept walking. Just for curiosity and because I was in no rush, I decided to actually read the label of the washing-up liquid, to see how much better this eco-branded product was than the other leading brands. Without revealing too much, it turned out that the eco-branded product that I had just been prepared to pay a premium for, was actually no more natural, and no more eco-friendly than any other product on the shelf.

My shopping companion who is already very skeptical of ‘spin’, found it very deviously satisfying when I discovered that the eco-friendly looking label on the bottle meant that I could recycle the package (as you can with all bottles of washing-up liquid). Also, when looking at the back and reading the fine print, the list of ingredients was no different than any of the other brands. After a careful search- (after all, I was eager to not only purchase eco-friendly washing-up liquid, but to prove to my shopping companion that there was some fact behind the eco packaging) I was not able to find a single justification on the packaging, other than the world “eco”, the color of the bottle and a picture of a flower on the front, to justify any bit of eco-friendliness. The cute illustration of a plant, it turns out, was just communicating that the product had been ‘inspired’ by nature.

As described in the last post on competitive advantage, appealing to consumers who have a particular value set creates an area of uniqueness, of differentiation. The brand of washing-up liquid that I was drawn to did have what appeared to be eco- branding, and perhaps actually was more environmentally friendly, or natural, than the competition- but the package certainly didn’t communicate that. This is an example of how not to do it. I am forever cursed to read each, last label to determine how eco-friendly a product actually is.

Social media and green-living agency Max Gladwell presented their research on the four types of green-teen social media consumers:

1. The first type of green teen is one who is ‘living green’. This teen eats organically, shops in vintage and thrift shops and genuinely wants to make the world a better place, one used sweater at a time.
2. The second type of green teen is a ‘core fashionista’. This teen is in a powerful social position and is not a trend follower, but buys from eco-friendly brands.
3. A ‘walking-green’ teen feels a sense of belonging to a green community and is a trend follower for this lifestyle subculture.
4. The fourth and final group is the ‘spending green’ teen. This shopper views eco-friendly purchases as a luxury not a sacrifice, and feels a sense of exclusivity when enjoying eco-splurges.

By no means are these categories mutually exclusive or definite, and are based on the research of this firm only. However, these teen consumer profiles do give us a slight insight into some of the motivations of green consumers, and who these customers might be in ten or twenty years. Not being a teen, and not wanting to box myself in to either category listed above, I do wonder would these teens read the label of the washing-up liquid as I did? Is having a green image enough?

As someone who has spent a great deal of time learning about branding, a little piece of my heart gets chipped away each time I see a product image or brand that is clearly not an accurate representation of the product or service. It’s a shame, because I do know that there are many companies who are making genuine efforts to be environmentally friendly and who want to provide these types of products and services to their customers. As this market grows- no matter if you are targeting none, one or all of the green-teen consumer profiles listed, are you accurately communicating your message and your brand identity to these customers? Will they put your washing-up liquid back on the shelf like I did?

Curious? Why not start tracking one of many eco-hashtags on Twitter, like #EcoMonday, #green, or #eco-friendly and see what motivates this audience.

One of the writers that we work with has some great regular tips at The Oxford Word Barber. His observations are sublime, his content is funny as well as educational and he makes complete sense… sometimes!

Whilst sitting at the traffic lights on the busy Talgarth Road junction near Earls Court, my attention was drawn to a For Sale sign on one of the very attractive buildings fronting the carriageway. It reads ‘RememberTheWindow.com‘. 48 hours later I was sat at my desk and guess what popped into my head for no conscious reason?

Through a stroke of pure memorable relevance and then personal intrigue, I was drawn in to the Blog site of Christian Braun and his family who, having had no success through Estate Agents, are trying to sell their home privately online.

I’m not in the market to part with £1.395M for a slice of England’s not so green and pleasant juxtaposed A4 despite the buildings beauty, but you have to applaud this chaps strategy and passion for promoting this house. It’s certainly drawing a crowd. Good luck Christian.

Check out RememberTheWindow.com and also see the coverage he got in The Sunday Times.

As the cars pile up during this global recession, interesting to see Nissan’s strategy for encouragement and customer reassurance is blatant and bold within it’s latest communications -’Just in Case’ cover, which includes 12 months’ free unemployment cover with a new vehicle.

Things work best for me when they are simplified. Marketing and media in today’s world are a complex but essential component of any business and agencies have a duty to distill and simplify things for the client. When like minded professionals on both the client and agency side collaborate successfully the results can be very powerful and effective but things feel easy. However, a large percentage of SMEs, with limited resources and often limited expertise and knowledge, often struggle to understand and implement marketing strategies to lead their sales and business growth.

Thanks to the launch of a new Go To Market packaged marketing service, SMEs now have access to tried and tested, affordable marketing. Ideal for single or multiple campaigns, it could even act as an annual marketing strategy. It eliminates the need for the some of the traditional marketing campaign planning that determines the marketing strategy and deliverables, saving SME’s time and money.

If you were running a seasonal marketing campaign in summer for example, the package can be easily re-skinned for an autumn winter and spring offer to give you one campaign per quarter, all for

Similarly, it is ideal for event driven marketing campaigns such as promotional periods (Christmas, New year, Easter, Mothers Day etc.) or product promotions.

For more details, packages and prices go to www.go-to-market.uk.com.