Tag Archives: advertising

Marley Brew


First Music News reported that the estate of reggae singer and song writer Bob Marley may license his name and image to a range of products including snowboards, hotels, coffee, headphones, and beer. This is in part a defensive strategy to capture revenue from unlicensed use of his name or image, but is this good marketing?

Marley’s music remains popular 28 years after his death. A visit to the iTune store, shows that 16 of his tunes have a popularity rating of 7 bars or more. Start searching on iTunes, YouTube, or even Google for “bob” and “bob marley” is the first suggestion. His YouTube videos such as Buffalo Soldier and No Woman No Cry have been viewed millions of times. This is brand equity.

Marley and the Marley brand are known for music and associated with Rastafarianism, Jamaica, and cannabis. He has no relation with any of the product categories he may be endorsing from the grave. Just as, say, Tiger Woods has no logical relation to the cars, watches, and consulting firms he endorses. Marley Beer looks like an extreme case of brand extension and brand extensions are often a bad idea.

There could be McDonalds headphones, Ford coffee, Apple snowboards, etc. There aren’t. These, and most other companies are very cautious about what their brands mean and what businesses they compete in. If Procter & Gamble had a new way to clean something, it would very likely launch this as a distinct brand rather than as an extension of an existing brand. Similarly, Coca Cola is in the juice and water businesses, but not under the Coca Cola brand.

Most brand extensions disappoint. They risk diluting the position of the core brand and the extensions seldom thrive. Even multi-business wizard Richard Branson has had indifferent success with his derivative brands such as Virgin Mobile and Virgin Money.

Conventional marketing wisdom is not always right. Unlike classic brand extension, no investment or market risk would be born by Marley. The brewer or snowboard maker affixes a new label to an existing product and assumes what business risk there is. None of the proposed brand extensions appears to clash with the Marley brand as perhaps a Marley breakfast cereal or motor oil might.

I’d recommend they do a deal if they have credible licensees. Excuse me, I have to don my IBM athletic shoes and get the gym.

It’s Back – This Time in 3-D

Superbowl XLIII is charging down upon us. We are the worst recession since this annual rite of advertising with football obbligato began. Large advertisers are writing off assets, closing facilities, firing thousands, and reporting record losses. This has caused panic – and panicking executives are even more likely to do the familiar, including the familiar, which has never been shown to work.

In particular, major advertisers have agreed to pay up to $3 million for 30 seconds of air time during the game. Of course with production, not to mention the expense of senior staff “needing” to attend the game, the total cost can be substantially higher. So we’re starting to talk about real money for a marketing expense, whose value remains to be demonstrated. Rather than worrying about the niceties of ROI, PepsiCo and DreamWorks, will try to make their Superbowl ads more memorable, by presenting them in 3-D.

Those of us old enough to remember an earlier generation of 3-D movies and comic books also remember having to wear cardboard glasses, whose right and left lenses were of different colors. The movies tended to be horror movies and westerns, in which the monster or villain, though thought dead, somehow survived to appear in a sequel.

So much for progress, the funky cardboard glasses are back. No glasses – no 3-D. Pepsi is using its considerable retail distribution to try to get 125 million pairs available to the viewing public by game day glasses. The Wall St. Journal(1/23/09, B8) reports that the glasses alone will cost about $7 million. To PepsiCo’s and DreamWorks’ credit they have gotten Intel to pay this.

What Intel gets for this another remains to be seen, but kudos to the deal makers at Pepsi. This challenge has made the commercials themselves news and DreamWorks is even advertising the commercials. Dreamworks new 3-D feature Monsters and Aliens is a major product push. Thus the game gets prime real estate on its animation site (warning – visiting this link will shift your browser to full screen).

In case you didn’t find the glasses at your local supermarket, you can get some by calling Pepsi at 1-800-646-2904.Curiously, Pepsi does not invite consumers to order online. There was no promotion of the event either during the on-hold recording (background music) or when I spoke to an attendant, who indifferently took my shipping information. The promotion is not featured on Pepsi’s or Intel’s web sites.

What does this have to do with selling SoBe Lifewater or microprocessors? Perhaps this would be clearer seen through a pair of 3-D glasses.

The Texting of a President 2008

The title draws from that of a book about political marketing – The Selling of a President 1968. That books author, Joe McGinnis, was upset not just with Richard Nixon (about who you can make your own judgments), but with the notion of candidates as products. Products to be marketed at that.

The candidate as product is no longer novel or controversial. Yet despite the record expenditures and length of this presidential campaign, little interesting marketing has appeared in the 2008 campaign. Enter the pregnant text message.

The Obama Campaign’s tactic of heightening interest in the vice presidential candidate by informing voters of the choice directly by text message is intriguing. It bypassed the established news media and attempts to make a connection directly with voters. The audience who signed up for this message – excluding the small percentage of media types, Republicans, and students of politics – is a potential nucleus of committed fans and product evangelists. They became a bit more involved with the product by being first, though I doubt many were at their phones at 3:00 am when the message came.

Text messaging can be a problematic medium. Spam messages are even more inconvenient on a phone than a computer. They also add injury to insult, because recipients without an unlimited message plan have to pay for the offending messages. The text message section of Obama’s website is a very good example of permission marketing. In a single page, it shows how to sign up for different levels of content from the one time to the occasional to the frequent, an assortment of free ringtones, and a simple one step procedure to unsubscribe.

The Obama text message also emphasizes a difference with John McCain, who notoriously uncomfortable with email. McCainSpace, McCain’s own social networking site is, to my eyes, less usable and engaging. McCain himself seems ill at ease in the welcome video on the home page. In my tests, the site was surprisingly sluggish.

At a dime a message, this campaign may have something for us marketers.

TV or Not TV

One of our consistent themes has be lack of enthusiasm for television advertising. This is not just the curmudgeon in us. Although TV can be cost effective to reach large numbers of viewers and useful to introduce or support a brand. However, TV campaigns are usually structured so they are difficult to evaluate. The commercials can be expensive to produce and difficult to target to your market.

Traditional ad agencies have not helped and often sacrificed accountability in pursuit of creativity. Senn and Fallon’s interesting but unconvincing apology for ad creativity, Juicing the Orange, continues in the wrong direction. Fallon produced the memorable herding cats Superbowl ad a few years back. Though the production was memorable, viewers couldn’t remember the sponsor or that its business had to do with the ad.

What’s a marketer to do? An intriguing option is provided by online agency, Spot Runner. They deliver three benefits, which make TV at least worth a test – cheap yet professional production, easily targeted media buying, and convenient detailed reporting.

Spot Runner offers extremely low costs through web based automation. A full service ad agency can charge tens or hundreds of thousands for a custom produced TV commercial. With Spot Runner, you choose a generic commercial from a library of several thousand and then customize it for your product or business with your logo, graphics, offer, and a professional voice over. The result looks like the real thing rather than a homemade ready for YouTube spot. This costs all of $500 to $750 depending on the amount of customization. The ad can, and usually should, display trackable information such as a unique phone number, URL, or email address.

Once you have a commercial, where do you run it? Spot Runner has an automated media buying process, which allows targeting as precisely as individual zip codes as well as specific times. The process is roughly similar to creating ads through Google’s AdWords. Spot Runner’s appears easier for the novice TV advertiser. Unlike Google, you can call Spot Runner with questions and problems.

Does this mean that TV should be part of your marketing mix? It does mean that if you have $1500 to $2000 for production and a media buy, you can find out.