BUSINESS MONITOR ■ From previous page.
not as think as you drunk I am”, he or she will likely regard it as conflicting with the Drink Aware programme.
Click. Guilt by association always feels unfair, but itʼs a reality. Nor is the taste issue a level playing field.
If a commercial organisation asked you to print images of starving children, abused animals or child prostitutes you might well decline the opportunity. If, however, that organisation were a charity, you wouldnʼt turn a hair. Nobody said this was easy. Letʼs look at some examples where people have got it wrong, starting with United Colours of Benetton. They would say that the imagery they use is challenging and inclusive and despite the care they apply, the research and the focus groups, they still get it wrong occasionally.
weden is a nation noted for liberal values and tolerance of difference; sex, nudity and pornography are part of the warp and weft of national life. So you wouldnʼt expect bad taste to be a big issue, especially regarding such an everyday product as mustard. But Johnnyʼs Senap brand got into trouble by promoting it as manly mustard. The tenor was “real men donʼt iron clothes but they do buy Senap”. Cue wailing, and not just from feminist groups!
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In this case the marketing director – a woman, incidentally – was unapologetic. “Weʼre targeting men,” she said. That raises a tricky marketing issue. What creates that emotional engagement with the target group can cause howls of rage elsewhere. In this case, was a macho message so wrong? Fundamentally, yes. You canʼt mass market so accurately that youʼll only hit precisely the target audience. Few businesses have one product or brand; upsetting the market as above on one brand can lose a lot of customers and revenue on other brands. It isnʼt just feminists who get on their high horse about gender stereotypes in marketing. Ragu cook-in sauces came under the cosh in the US for a commercial featuring Homer Simpson as the inept dad in the kitchen. Boy, did the fathers enthusiastic about skillet-wielding not like that! Ragu is owned by multi-brand giant Unilever; you can imagine how popular the Ragu marketing team would have been with their colleagues if customers chose an alternative to the brand they were managing through no fault of theirs. A personal favourite of tasteless gender stereotyping was the Bootsʼ Christmas commercial which showed women creating the tacky Dickensian Christmas while men just slept. Itʼs quite a trick to patronise the whole population (and start lots of marital arguments) in 30 seconds. Do a web search on this topic and youʼll come up against plenty more American examples. Our transatlantic pals complain more and fair play to them. Thereʼs more bad taste to complain about as well. Weʼre back to the internet issue and it
| 22 | February 2012
matters. Brand owners keep an increasingly close watch on feeds to Facebook, Twitter et al. This tends to be portrayed as defensive, but it can also present positive opportunities to balance the negative feedback which typically hits the rest of the media. As I never cease to state, people buy printwear and wear the gifted version to state their allegiances. To take the above example from Sweden, the marketing director might have turned a problem into an opportunity by offering free shirts saying ʻIʼm a man and Iʼll go on buying Senapʼ.
Major brand owners such as Levers are starting to advertise their corporate brand with their product brands as support. Itʼs fuel-efficient in marketing terms and demands corporate standards. It has brand benefits too: I trust Persil, so now Iʼm a mother Iʼll buy Pampers. In the process, the Pampers brand manager canʼt screw sales for Persil by portraying fathers as non-changers of nappies and, by association, non-loaders of washing machines.
The marketing press expects this trend to continue and it will tend to demand an increasing sensitivity to matters of taste. A brand manager handling a minor product can get it wrong without impact on the overall corporate image – not so when an offending message is attached to that corporate name.
believe that this is a good development. The best marketing people already understand their customers in depth – not just what they do and buy but the issues that concern them, their principles not just their practices; in other words, how they define good and bad, including good and bad taste. Everyone else will be aiming to follow suit. Thanks to those social websites they have an infinitely large amount of research
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material available to help. You may have noticed that, whereas large multi-brand businesses used to refer to their brand portfolio and their marketing spend was an investment in that portfolio (all business-like, the language of the City), more recently this has become our family of brands as in “our family of brands looks after your family”, perhaps due to the unpopularity of the City. In this context you can expect to see other similar positive, personal imagery such as “team of brands”.
is clearly there. P
Reinforcing corporate messages is what printwear does and that family of brands concept looks tailor-made for enhancement with printwear. This isnʼt about the classic clothing products at first although they can follow through. Itʼs about shopping, specifically about shopping bags. The retailers are all selling variants of the ʻbag for lifeʼ shopping bag.
There is a huge opportunity for multi- brand owners to steal a march on them with their corporate brand plus their family of product brands featured. It is the ideal cross-brand promotional opportunity (on- pack, I suggest) and they can also apply all the socially virtuous elements that this industry offers.
About the author
Paul Clapham is a marketing consultant with more than 25 yearsʼ experience covering a broad range of business sectors and a full spread of marketing disciplines. He works with small, medium and large companies alike to increase their profitability.
rintwear has always been in the business of selling the corporate message so the business potential
GOOD IDEAS WORK: But an ill-thought promotion could backfire on you in a big way.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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