#HolidaySpam| Three

Three UK has backed an integrated marketing push to support the extension of its ‘Feel at Home’ offering allowing mobile users to use their handsets abroad at no extra cost.

From April, Spain, the UK’s most popular holiday destination, and New Zealand will join the 16 existing ‘Feel at Home’ holiday hotspots.

The campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy, builds on last year’s #HolidaySpam campaign, apologising for the social media deluge of hot dog legs, plane wings, sunsets, palm trees and cocktails. This time the public is encouraged to ‘prepare themselves’ for even more holiday spam flooding their feeds.

Tom Malleschitz, director of marketing at Three, explained the campaign is based on holidaymakers love of bragging about their breaks.

“The campaign will drive awareness of this unique proposition and now we have added Spain even more of our customers will be bragging abroad to their heart’s content,” he said.

A second TV spot features holiday spammers, Dave and Sherri, discussing their well-documented trip to the Grand Canyon. Both commercials will run with supporting 30 and 10-second cut downs with a suite of executions running across cinema, video-on-demand, press, social and radio.

Out of home and digital out of home sites will be used to make an example of holiday spammers and prepare those left at home for more.

Three’s award-winning ‘Holiday Spam’ campaign promoted the brand’s offering that enabled customers to use their phones abroad at no extra cost.

Tracking the data usage of a group of customers abroad, the teams found that they used 71 times the amount of mobile data they would have used had they been charged as normal – mostly to post holiday snaps on social media.

The creative tapped into this finding, warning UK viewers to expect an onslaught of ‘holiday spam’ photos, thanks to the new offer.

The campaign featured a series of 60-second TV ads showing travellers sending clichéd holiday photos to friends and family members back home.

Using insight to drive awareness of their unique proposition and appeal to the emotions of their target consumers, the campaign led to a 90% increase in Three’s social conversation volume, higher brand metrics, and customers saving a collective £2.7bn on roaming charges.

True colors: Colors by gender [infographic]

True colors: Colors by gender [infographic]

Differentiating in increasingly undifferentiated markets

In the increasingly cluttered world of branded packaged goods it is quite common for brand managers to say in frustration that a category has become commoditised and that there is absolutely no possibility of creating a sustainable functional brand differentiator. 

But here are 2 examples which show that that need not be so. 

As we all know the starting point for functional differentiation is to offer some product attribute that meets a consumer need. However, to expect research to discover any substantial unmet needs nowadays is often too ambitious - in fact much research on cluttered categories comes to no other real conclusion than that all the consumer needs is a better product at a lower price. 

Hence it is more realistic to set out with the declared objective for your research to search for any insight on a new facet or extra dimension to a consumer need to help your brand stand apart.

To illustrate this, recent research conducted on the crowded toothpastes market revealed that consumers had no real unmet need - and that the only call from consumers was the old story that the benefit of brushing one's teeth should simply last longer.

More exploratory work on this theme led to the insight that consumers believed that toothpastes work best during the process of brushing and immediately afterwards - but that the benefit of the toothpaste vanishes immediately the user consumes the first morsel of food/drink thereafter.

This insight led to the creation of a "brush brush" audio mnemonic (i.e. the sound of brushing every time users in the ad opened their mouths ) that told the consumer that this toothpaste continues working for a full 12 hours regardless of whether the user is eating, drinking or sleeping. Evaluation of this as an ad concept revealed that consumers did indeed believe because of the "brush brush" mnemonic that the therapeutic effect of this brand of toothpaste continued working even after eating/drinking.

This produced one of the most memorable ad campaigns ever in the category - and subsequent brand tracking revealed high identification with this benefit, and an increased brand share.

Our second example comes from a category that you might expect would be an even greater challenge - the household insecticide market.

Advertising for mosquito coils typically talks of increased efficacy and lasting longer - and every brand in the market says the same things. However, a stray consumer comment in research, that smoke from the coil does not penetrate curtains (where mosquitoes are believed to hide) because the smoke loses its strength by the time it reaches the corners of the room, led to the development of an ad campaign that spoke about new properties in the smoke that took it to the furthest corners of the room and able to penetrate the thickest of curtains.

This attribute quickly became the acid test of efficacy for the category and single-minded communication on this property led to our brand being uniquely associated with it despite other brands trying to jump on the band wagon later.

Summing up :
• In many product categories these days all functional needs that were there to be discovered, have already been discovered

• Insights therefore are no longer so much about discovering new consumer needs...but about exploring well recognised needs to greater depths to uncover a hitherto unused facet or dimension.
This means:

• looking for a new dimension to the functional brand benefit

e.g. goes on working despite eating - as a new dimension to the works longer need;

e.g. penetrates curtains - as a new dimension to the efficacy need

• discovering an executional device like the "brush brush" mnemonic to express this new dimension of the brand benefit.

As seen by these 2 case studies the dimensions and the executional device were new - not the basic underlying consumer needs themselves.

When you have nothing new to say - as is the case in most cluttered branded packaged goods today - then say it differently. Scope for brand differentiation will rarely lie in addressing a new need, but more and more in presenting a solution to an old need from a new angle.

In other words in the world of brand differentiation today the 'How' has become more important than the 'What'.

BBC World Service Trust::: Say condom aloud

BRAND OWNER:BBC
CATEGORY:Pharmaceuticals/ Healthcare
REGION:India
DATE:2008


Condom usage in India is very low, with only 15-20% of sexually active people using them. The problem was that anything associated with sex is taboo in public, and the word “condom” connotes negative associations with HIV and immoral behaviour.

The BBC World Service Trust, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, wanted to get people to accept condoms and remove the stigma attached to them.

The key aim was to get people to say the word condom aloud in public without taboo. If they couldn’t say the word, they were never going to ask for condoms at the pharmacy.

Quantitative and qualitative research done by the AIDS Foundation, showed that men who talk about sex and condoms freely are more likely to be consistent condom users.


BBC World Service Trust adopted a strategy to get people to say the word “condom” aloud in public and start discussions bout them.

Media, in addition to the ads on air, took on the task to act as a catalyst to make condoms an acceptable word.



The campaign started with a contest where the consumer had to answer a riddle, the answer to which was the word “Condom”. The contest was aired on several TV channels, radio stations and cinema halls.

Consumers had to call a voice portal and say the correct answer to win prizes. As the second leg, we created a buzz by leveraging the creative in which the words “Kabbadi” used by the players in a popular local sport got replaced with the word “CONDOM”.
We got editorials in publications and radio anchors to report a fictitious tournament in which the players actually used the word “condom” instead of “Kabbadi” in real life.
This acted as a lead-in to a debate asking consumers for their opinion about saying the word in public. Thirdly they created a ringtone using the word condom, downloadable through SMS from campaign site www.condomcondom.org.

The campaign reached 139 million adult men nationally versus the targeted 48 million. 400,000 people participated in the contest riddle; 475,000 people asked for the condom ringtone download through the SMS short code, 200,000 downloaded the ringtone from the website.
The website received over 3.5 million hits over the campaign period. As per NACO, (National Aid Control Organisation of India), condom sales through government channels grew by 5.0 million units in the last six months.

Gum…Usful