Tag: campaign analysis

Medicine Breath: Scope gains market share

Medicine Breath: Scope gains market share

Listerine had a dominant market share in mouthwash for decades. That position was built in part on the strength of their mouthwash. They actually used the harshness of its taste as a selling point, with the slogan “The taste people hate, twice a day.”

In hindsight, this set Listerine up for a very obvious repositioning campaign. After all, it doesn’t take much to move a forcefully unpleasant taste from a strength to a weakness. It was Scope that took advantage of it. If Listerine left a medicinal taste in your mouth then it probably left that smell too, Scopes ads usually implied, and well, is that smell really much better than how it was before? One particularly creative ad showed how much more pleasant an alternate scent could be. This ad is from the 70’s and incorporated scratch and sniff technology to give consumers a visceral sense of the difference:

Medicine Breath Scratch & Sniff
Notice Scope is really pushing the question “How would you rather smell to other people?”

Just like in other classic competition repositioning examples, Scope isn’t the immediate focus of this ad. Remember, they have to shift how consumers think of  the other brand before they can fill the void. So, the ad waits until the negatives of Listerine (not mentioned by name) are fully explored.  Note, the focus isn’t on making Listerine seem less effective. Most people using mouthwash used Listerine. They already thought it was effective and changing their mind would be difficult. What they didn’t think was that Listerine was unduly medicinal, or perhaps that the medicinal smell was necessarily a bad thing – now Scope showed that your clean breath could be just as unpleasant.

Scope chose to attack it’s effectiveness at actually making your breath smell better rather than its effectiveness in killing germs. That’s the great thing about repositioning campaigns. The strategy is readily apparent.

Judging by sales the campaign was effective. The formerly unassailable Listerine lost market share and was forced to change its products’ formula to achieve a more friendly taste (and then of course spend a lot of money broadcasting that).

As a bonus, here’s a list of all the weird ways Listerine has been used in the past, or you could go deeper into the world of repositioning with our article on Tylenol.

Budweiser’s Buds for Buds campaign

Adweek put out a list of the best Facebook Marketing Campaigns of the past year. The Ice Bucket Challenge was the obvious winner and several others did really well, including Always’ Like A Girl campaign.

They also lauded the success of Budweiser’s Buds for Buds campaign.

Certainly, offering free beer is going to increase sales in the short-term¹, and that was Adweek’s measure of success for the original campaign. For Budweiser, thrown into uncertain conditions by the booming craft beer industry, any increase, even at the expense of margins, might be very satisfying. They certainly did some things well. In particular, the campaign did a good job of lowering the cost of the good without lowering the perceived value of it, which is a key struggle for brands that use sales. I also tend to believe it brought in alternate consumers rather than cutting the price for those who would have bought Bud anyway.  

However, the ad included in Adweek’s list is actually for the follow-up campaign promoting the success of their Buds for Buds campaign. While the initial campaign ad may have been a success the promotion of that campaign (which was a much bigger project) could have done a lot better. Let’s take a look at that ad. Unfortunately you’ll have to view it here and come back.

Doesn’t the over-dramatic writing makes it seem ungenuine? There are certainly a few points where it could be improved. The thing to focus on is that most consumers understand there is a bias in advertising and view ads critically. Thus, making overly dramatic claims in turn gets consumers overly critical.  Let’s zero in on the first paragraph. Take a look at what it says:

“Budweiser’s been a part of American life for almost 150 years.
For generations handing a friend a Bud has said more than words ever could.
But you can’t always be there for the moments in life that matter,
And as much as social media has helped us stay in touch with each other’s lives,
The truth remains, a like is still not as powerful as a high-five, a heart isn’t a hug, and nothing’s as meaningful as handing someone an iced cold beer.”

It’s not terrible, but do you really want to overstate your case as much as “handing a friend a Bud has said more than words ever could”? Put that together with “Nothing’s as meaningful as handing someone an iced cold beer” and, especially as a beer on the lower end of the spectrum, you might be getting laughed at. Nostalgia’s not a bad start for Budweiser, combine that with a lower price point and you might be able to start moving product. Here’s something less clumsily direct that could play out better:

 

“Budweiser’s been a part of American life for almost 150 years.
We were there when Ruth hit 713 and when Aaron hit 755.
We were there when Armstrong ‘hit’ the moon.
We’re still here.

Handing a friend a Bud still says “Thank you”, “congratulations”, or “well done”
Unfortunately, you can’t always be there for the moments in life that matter,
And as much as social media has helped us stay in touch
The truth remains, a like is still not as powerful as a high-five, a heart isn’t a hug, and nothing’s better than grabbing a beer with a friend.

Which is why we created Buds for Buds
So friends could share beers, no matter the distance, as easily as they share anything else online.
And they have, with thousands of Budweiser’s travelling millions of miles through facebook, text, and email.
For birthdays, promotions, bachelor parties, and for… people who just thought it was cool

We brought the age old tradition of buying a friend a beer into the digital world
Proving that buying a Bud for a bud is as relevant today as it was in 1876.
Something’s will never change.

Budweiser:
Be there. Even when you can’t be.”

 

 

  1. In terms of product moved if not necessarily revenues. Though you’d certainly hope that increases as well.

Samsung Galaxy S3

“The Next Big Thing is Already Here”

I’m going to disclose upfront that Samsung’s Galaxy S III commercial is one of my all time favorites. I remember the first time I saw it. When it was over, I was standing saying to an empty room, “That was f***ing amazing”. No other ad has ever struck me in the way the Galaxy S III’s did. The thing is, the ad didn’t just generate a lot of buzz, or attack Apple, or promote the S III. In a minute in a half, it did all of that and so effectively that it contributed to record sales.

We could break the commercial down a few different ways, but I think it’s most important to look at what Samsung was doing with positioning. I’ll always believe that part of the reason the iPhone took off, at the expense of Blackberry, was that the Blackberry became seen as a product that kept people working while they were away from the office. The iPhone, on the other hand, offered people a chance to play while at work. Even as top dog in 2012, Apple was benefiting from the rebellious brand image it cultivated in the 80s. It was still seen as young, hip, and counter-culturish. In fact, at the time Apple’s commercials against Microsoft still promoted this idea.

But, of course, the iPhone was undoubtedly the category leader, and Apple’s omnipresence was becoming a liability to its rebel brand image. This point is exactly what Samsung wanted to attack, while simultaneously marking their technology as outdated.

To do that, Samsung shows long waiting lines at several locations painting the iPhone (appropriately) as mainstream. Sandisk tried to knock Apple off years before by exploiting the “iHerd” mentality. Samsung builds on that. In their commercial, the iPhone users are uninformed and their ranks are being filled by parents and grandparents. The iPhone fans are also talking about really insignificant changes as the big draw for the new release (which was credible, because the 5 didn’t offer a big leap from the 4S).

It takes 30 seconds before we even see the S III and even longer before they begin to talk about its advantages, but it’s done in a way that serves to pique our interest and sets up a comparison of the products. It becomes the S III that is creating buzz and is buzzworthy.  As I said, the ad is credible: it doesn’t attack the look of the iPhone, which has always been an advantage, for instance, but instead attacks its size, its market, and its technology. Then it wraps up with a summation that stresses all of these things “The Next Big Thing is Already Here”.

But the reason I love the ad is that Samsung doesn’t tell us all of this. It shows us. This is important because when people already have information they tend to hold on to it in the face of contradictions (you can look into cognitive dissonance or at Ries and Trout’s Positioning: The Battle for Mind for background on this bias). Rather than outright contradicting our brains, which would be met with cognitive resistance, the commercial forces us to compare the products and attempts to reframe how we think about them. It wants to be seen as cooler than the iPhone and technically superior. You’ll notice that it doesn’t compare its design or layout with the iPhone (which it would probably lose on), and it didn’t discuss its lower price point either because of the general belief that a higher price equates to cooler and technologically superior items. Instead of being a selling point, mentioning that could actually erode the S III’s position as the hip alternative to the iPhone.

Generally, it is unfortunately hard to track ads sales successes from outside of the product’s company. However, this ad was successful enough both the S III and S 4 set sales’ records after this campaign was launched.

If you want to read more case examples on successful competitor repositioning: Here’s an analysis of Tylenol’s brilliant campaign.