An outdoor fund-raising campaign we created recently for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation. The outdoor treatment of the campaign uses adshel’s night time illumination to reveal a second stage to the creative treatment. The technique allows us to reinforce our key message – encouraging women to spend a night in with friends and donate the money they would normally spend on a night out to The Foundation’s cause.
We created different silhouettes on the reverse side of the poster to represent the different ages groups in our target demographic.
Based on an article first published in New Zealand Marketing, June 2008
Marketing and Sales, they share the same big picture, but never seem to see the same view. Is this a good thing or bad? Is the tension healthy or should it be eliminated? Recent research may well provide the answer. Read on…
This article was first published by Unlimited on 17 June 2010
Aardvarks, funny creatures. Rabbit ears, kangaroo tail, and a pig’s snout – they look like they’ve been assembled and exported from Australia in a rush. Although I’m yet to meet one, I already dislike them – well the associations they trigger at least. Let me explain.
The airline I use most often established a frequent flyers lounge network for domestic travellers in 1987 and I was a relatively early member. If annual membership cost $450 for the 20 years or so I’ve been a member, that’d be a $9,000+ spend (not to mention airfares and related incidentals). No small sum, in my books at least. So, loyal customer that I am, I anticipated being allocated my forward aisle seating preference on a recent trip to Sydney, as per my membership profile. And that’s where my bubble burst. Read on…
This article was first published by Unlimited on 14 June 2010
Bear with me for a while I recount two personal experiences of customer service failure. In the more recent case, my mobile stopped working after 11 months of use. By the time I returned it to the First Mobile store in Newmarket it was just out of its 12-month warranty. The sales assistant did not want to consider the option of a free repair given it was out of warranty, despite the phone’s high purchase price and that I had been a regular customer making relatively high value purchases for several years running.
Pointing out such early and fundamental failure meant the phone had not met the legal requirements of durability and being fit for purpose, seemingly fell on deaf ears. Read on…
This article was first published in Unlimited on 11 June 2010
I never wanted to write this particular article, purely for selfish reasons. But if you own or manage a retail store, then it’s probably in your interest to read further.
Perhaps you can recall Robert Fletcher and Cole Porter’s famous cowboy lyrics:
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, Don’t fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, Don’t fence me in. Let me be by myself in the evenin’ breeze, And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees, Send me off forever but I ask you please, Don’t fence me in.
While I live in a suburb that has doesn’t really have wide open country, what it does have is a previously small, boring and unattractive supermarket that’s been transformed into a light and airy, much larger and more accessible store, with a significantly increased variety of goods, and wide and welcoming aisles. Like Fletcher and Porter’s singing cowboy, I now actually enjoy being in those wide open spaces, and I do so on a much more frequent basis than I ever did before. No problem there, you might think. Yet there is some cause for concern (for me at least). Recent research published by Jonathan Levav and Juliet Zhu in December’sJournal of Consumer Research came up with fairly counter intuitive findings about the value of wide open spaces in supermarkets. Read on…
Christchurch’s new family restaurant and bar was to be named The Running Bull. The restaurant and bar was located on a busy urban roundabout and the owners asked us to develop a brand that was eye-catching and had a distinctive South-West grill feel but with a good dose of Kiwi flavour.
We developed our “no bull” solution based on a fictitious local farming character, the colour-blind Billy Grundy, and his tortuous relationship with a young bull called Bully.
When it comes to advertising to children, is ethics just another tag line?
Author: John Varcoe [Please note: This article was first published in Unlimited magazine, August 2007. However, our position on the regulation of advertising to minors was misrepresented by Prof Walter Wymer from the University of Lethbridge (who has since apologised for his mistake) in the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Business Research. We've republished the article here to help set the record straight.]
IT’S TIME TO FACE FACTS. We’ve seen former icon brand Ribena get a deservedly bloody nose for making false claims about its vitamin C content, Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung suggest it was fine to use confusion as a chief marketing tool to protect high margins over an extended period, and CHH fined for deliberately misleading its customers over many years. The obvious question is: whatever happened to marketing ethics? Marketers need to get serious about their wider responsibilities to the community.
Marketers and advertising agencies operate at the interface between companies and society. And while some like to pass the buck to the CEO of the clients they work for, the reality is they have a personal and professional responsibility for the way they position and promote products, particularly when targeting (directly or indirectly) minors or the underprivileged. The marketing profession, if that’s what it is, has to find a real social conscience, to define what it means to act ethically, and to then walk the talk. Read on…