To know more about telecom war in Saudi Arabia, see http://advertiser-in-arabia.blogspot.com/2009/09/competition-centric-strategy-mobily-stc.html
2020 update.
This time STC hijacked a full identity from an American IT company to develop its new strategic move to digitizing age.
It’s quite difficult to get excited about paint – hence the English expression that describes a boring pastime as “Like watching paint dry”.
Brazilian paint brand Coral (known as Dulux in most parts of the world) wanted to promote its premium decoration line, “Decora” and encourage people to be experimental with the colour of their walls at home. Traditionally, paint brands sell small quantities of paint as colour samplers, so that people can apply small swatches on their walls to compare different potential colour schemes.
However, it is hard to envisage the effect of an entirely new wall colour from a foot-wide square patch of paint. Coral therefore created a range of light bulbs in Coral colours, which when illuminated and pointed towards a white wall would show people what their room would look like if painted in that colour. These were packaged up to look like mini paint tins and distributed and demonstrated in various shops.
"Here we see a humble promotional giveaway creating a really valuable consumer experience which truly highlights the benefits of the product in a way that doesn't require consumers to get their hands and clothes messy."
Royal Mail was a company dangerously close to becoming unnecessary. Liberalisation of the monopoly markets meant it had new competitors able to provide customers discounts that it was barred from offering, whilst email and online activity had become the far more popular means of written communication than posting a letter.
However, another significant aspect of Royal Mail business is the assistance it gives to SME owners (Small Medium Enterprise), helping them to grow their companies. Although SME owners are the most receptive target audience to growth messages, as they have a personal commitment to their business, they are also the most difficult to engage with for that very same reason.
To generate publicity, Royal Mail ran an extensive TV ad campaign designed to shift attitudes about what its brand stood for. The TV ads directed people to royalmail.com where they could answer questions and generate a bespoke growth print, including case studies and product recommendations. To further promote the service, Royal Mail integrated its brand with MSN Office space, distributing content through special reports and channels within Growth Business and Fresh Business Thinking.
It also sponsored The Sunday Times’ Fast Track – an annual league table of the UK’s Fastest Growing Private Companies – and their Best Customer Service category. In addition, Royal Mail created a ‘Helping Hands’ channel within The Guardian online, a bespoke area containing case studies and commissioned content in the form of Q&As with business luminaries.
Overall, appeal for the Royal Mail brand has grown from 38% to 55%. SME owners claiming that Royal Mail is ‘providing new information’ grew from 20-47%, ‘better than other suppliers’ from 26-37% and ‘can help businesses grow’ 36-41%. There have been 216,000 visits to the website and, just 5 months into an 18 month campaign, revenue in the sales pipeline is already in excess of the media investment to date.
Nortel wanted to expand as an organisation but found its core telecoms business was shrinking. Determined to achieve growth it decided to instead focus its efforts on the entertainment networking sector, dominated by Cisco Systems.
With a 74% market share - in comparison to Nortel’s 4% - and an ad spend several times larger than any of its competitors, Cisco could out-manoeuvre and out-muscle the competition. Cisco’s key strategy was to ‘rip and replace’ companies’ existing systems, thereby providing an easy all-in-one solution for the busy decision-makers responsible for the purchase. Nortel discovered, however, that Cisco’s all-in-one solution was ‘energy expensive’, costing considerably more to run than its own offering, and creating a larger carbon footprint.
Its launch took place in the form of side-by-side comparisons at tradeshow Interop, where energy consumption meters were used on both Nortel and Cisco switches. Nortel’s product advantage was accentuated by the strategic placement of Nortel’s booth right next to Cisco’s. Print and TV ads asked provocative questions such as: “How much is your network costing you?” But rather than drive people to a website, consumers were encouraged to enter ‘Cisco Energy Tax’ into search engines. Optimised results would bring up a raft of blogs, IT Papers and Videos discussing the issue. An online energy efficiency calculator allowed IT staff everywhere to determine the potential cost savings of Nortel over Cisco.
The results of the campaign were emphatic. A $2 million order for Cisco was pulled and instead invested with Nortel – and this became the trend rather than an anomaly. The campaign resulted in a 46% in sales, over three times the stated goal of 15%, taking Nortel’s baseline from $722,000,000 to $1,055,000,000.
According to its brand identity, Mercedes-Benz’ stands for business people with success and leadership. The problem is that this demographic, usually hardworking with little free time, are often difficult to reach by traditional means.
The perception that these executives never use digital media, however, Mercedes-Benz found to be incorrect. Its research showed that business leaders are voracious consumers of digital media. 30% read blogs on a regular basis and 72% said they were tech-connected by necessity, knowing that keeping up with the latest technology is vital to the success of their businesses.
Partnering with social networking site, A Small World – which offers membership on an invitation only basis – the car manufacturer provided users with exclusive information, content and competitions, at the same time being careful not to interrupt the user’s online experience or bombard them with too many advertisements. Offers were mainly related to activities already sponsored by Mercedes-Benz; its Fashion Week, for example, or opportunities to join its Formula One race team for a day out.
67% of those surveyed after the campaign said the advertising had impacted on their perception of the Mercedes-Benz brand positively. Nearly 40% of respondents said the campaign had made them want to find out more information about Mercedes-Benz in general. In addition, 30% said that the advertising would cause them to recommend the brand to someone else.
It is imperative for car companies to be associated with cutting-edge technology, but at the same time avoid anything potentially seen as superfluous. So, Mazda’s announcement that it was using augmented reality in its latest campaign came as something of a surprise.
Augmented reality has, until now, been rather gimmicky – 3D lapdancing girls appearing out of 2-D paper, and the like. However, JWT’s new augmented reality application – Layer – is something different, something potentially very useful. By integrating Google maps into its service it allows users to see what is happeningaround them by displaying real-time digital information on top of reality.
Mazda has built the first ‘layer’ on the new network. Through a combination of QR codes and barcode technology consumers can scan special Mazda ads in the traditional press with a smartphone and find all available Mazda dealers within the vicinity. The tagline on the video demonstrating the new service is: ‘From magazine to Mazda in 80 seconds’.
And where Mazda lead, it looks like others will follow. 10,000 applications were downloaded in the first two days and JWT says it has clients wanting to build ‘layers’ in Amsterdam and Russia.
Healthcare is big business, particularly in the US. Kimberly-Clark wanted to reposition itself as the leading global provider in Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI) solutions and information. To do this, it needed to prove its knowledge to the people who would gain most from it.
Each year, over one million people worldwide acquire an infection in a hospital facility. Many of these infections could easily be prevented if the right training and equipment was provided to hospital staff, but hospital staff are notoriously busy and can’t afford time off for training and conferences. Kimberly-Clark’s solution - bring the training to the clients.
It took to the road in its HAI Education Mobile Classroom - a 45-foot customised coach – designed to bring the classroom setting to the door of healthcare partners. Equipped with 12 laptops, a server that ran multiple programs at multiple stations simultaneously, a speaker platform with large TV screen and a specially designed Kimberley Clark toolkit, the mobile classroom had all the elements necessary for healthcare facilities to implement their own internal HAI campaign. Two websites supported the healthcare tour, giving testimonials from those that had participated, tour locations and dates and media resources.
The tour was covered by 20 major medical publications giving Kimberly-Clark exposure to its target market. 6,500 Continuing Education Certificates were issued at over 70 locations. Overall perception of the tour was very positive: 99% of clinicians who participated strongly agreed/somewhat agreed that they felt more empowered to do their part to prevent HAIs; 79% of clinicians viewed Kimberly-Clark as a provider of Education and Information and 81% of clinicians agreed that Kimberly-Clark products and services help them do their job better.
