My Three Favourite Marketing Ideas

Every now and then at home I think about what I could do for our Digital Marketing clients if they had an unlimited budget. These three marketing campaigns would be my inspirational source if that situation ever happened:

3) Old Spice – The Man your Man Could Smell Like

This campaign, by Wieden + Kennedy for Procter and Gamble’s line of Old Spice products, shows what is possible when you understand internet communities.

The buzz kicked off when the video above was released on YouTube. It quickly spread, being talked about within the internet communities 4chan and Reddit.

After this initial spread, the Old Spice campaign started asking the internet for questions.

Secretly armed with a stock pile of videos and a team of copywriters (and I can only imagine a tray of espresso shots) replies to questions came almost instantly. The internet is fast and Wieden+Kennedy understood that if they delayed posting then the video would seem to be old news.

The thing I find most impressive, however, is the understanding of how to target different social media groups. Take this video, in response to the users of 4Chan. Here the writers for this video incorporated a standard 4Chan phase, “delicious cake” into the video. This understanding and customer research stopped these internet communities from feeling manipulated and encouraged them to spread the campaign further.

2) Windows 7 Phone – In your Browser

Visiting the above link will take you to an interactive demo of the Windows 7 Phone Operating System. Although interacting with something is more effective than just watching a demo, Microsoft went one-step further.

Visiting the page on a smart phone, such as an iPhone or Android, will bring up a different page where only the demo is visible. By making a smart phone optimised demo, and asking users to visit the page on their mobiles, they are inviting people to examine the Windows 7 Metro interface directly on a competitor’s product.

This webpage can then place the thought into a user’s mind that the Windows 7 Metro system is useful for all of the things the advertised person’s phone is already used for. And of course, Microsoft is trying to say that their software works better and looks nicer for all the tasks the phone already does. If a user does end up liking the look of the operating system for whatever reason, after closing their browser, they may start instantly hating an operating system they otherwise saw as perfectly acceptable.

1) Corelle Chip-Resistant Plates

To me this is the perfect marketing story. Corelle, a maker of dinner plates, had a problem. Corelle’s product had a unique selling point (USP), but Corelle could not find a way to get the USP across to consumers.

In response, someone in Corelle’s marketing department came up with this amazing, ingenious, elegant idea:

Source – Ads of the World

These plates are chip resistant. Their marketing department determined that many consumers did not know that chip resistant plates exist. So, a series of Corelle vending machines were set up in heavily populated places. Imagine it; a person comes off a train, and idly drifts by one of these machines, then takes a step back after realising the product inside of them. They insert a coin out of curiosity, and a plate tumbles down from the top shelf, crashes on the dispenser alerting all the other travellers to their selection. The new customer now bends downs and picks up a perfect, un-chipped plate.

These vending machines created a massive talking point. Images such as the above can be found on many websites, all talking about the unique way that Corelle solved this problem. Sales of Corelle’s plates for the month went up by 10%.

That is the common thread for all of the marketing stories that I enjoy; they revolve around creating something so unique that users just want to share it. The advertisement or product creates something cool or fun that users feel that their friends would enjoy. Even if these campaigns are out of budget for most of us, I feel that we can learn important messages about how any campaign should work from them.

Luke

Luke graduated from university in 2010 with a degree in Psychology and joined WDL in 2012. He enjoys using analytics and research to find the best way to market a website. His absolute favourite use of this data is to find the best way of increasing the social media engagement of a website, but he also enjoys using statistics to inform SEO, Link-Building, and PPC campaigns. In his spare time he can normally be seen with his nose in a book at various local cafes.

More Posts - Meet the rest of the team