Great Advertising for a Good Product

This Baygon ad is what an advertisement should exactly be. It leads you to the product and its usage (and it makes you stand up and applaud the Ad agency that came up with such a brilliant ad, BBDO Kuala Lumpur in this case). By bringing in a well-known fictional character like Spiderman, the product has now been assured of a high brand-recall. The critical factor in a product's life is visibility. If it's not visible enough, it's as good as dead. Hence, the race to be visible at Superbowl where you have a guaranteed and a high number of target audience. Now when you are assured of visibility comes the hard part i.e. living upto people's expectations. More often than not, have products failed miserably because they failed to satisfy the need although they were efficiently advertised. Hence, a good visibily does not always lead to a good brand. Now comes the tricky part- brand recall. Unaided brand recall is what most companies would love to see. "Top of the mind" recollection of a particular brand usually indicates the popularity and usefulness of the brand. And then this varies on an individual basis. A person on being asked about shoes might come up with "Nike" as his first choice while someone else might come up with "Reebok". Now, this is due to a plethora of choices. The shoes niche in the footwear category has many well established and good companies who have been able to serve the needs of the people efficiently. So, in this case its a close call and "Top of the mind" fails to be the correct indicator. Although you need to remember that both Nike and Reebok have some great advertising campaigns behind them helping in a high brand recall rate. So, the essence is that in addition to a great product you should have high visibility to reap dividends else death is yours.

Missed Call Marketing

Meandering through marketing blog archives, I recently came across this fantastic application of human psychology in the domain of marketing. Fantastic because the idea was almost there on the shelf waiting for someone to give it a lease of life while on the other side I foresee a negative feedback in the reaction of the end consumers due to too smart marketing.At http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2006/09/013576.htm, Emily gives us a fabulous insight into "missed call marketing", a new form of mobile marketing.

"Missed call' marketing is the term that has been given to the practice of calling a mobile telephone for such a short period of time that the owner cannot answer the call. When the marketer disconnects the call, most mobile phones present a 'missed call' notification with the marketer's number. The marketer intends that the owner of the phone will think that they have missed a legitimate call and ring the number back, in which case they hear a recorded promotional message".

Let us spare a moment for the marketing guys who came up with this brilliant idea.In this era of marketing where consumer attention is so precious and almost fleeting ,this is nothing but revolutionary.How often do we get a missed call from an unknown number and our first reaction is to call back ?? That behaviour is on predictable lines and the marketing people are tapping exactly into this psyche to get to the consumers. And more often than not, they are reaching a dead end.