Brand: Lunesta
Execution: TV
Link:
Target: The Sleepless
Reviewer: David
Rating: *

Description:
The usual direct-to-consumer (DTC) ad schtick. Beautiful images, a tired woman finding needed rest and a voiceover with warnings about operating heavy equipment.

What Works:
Given the billion-plus dollar payout, you can be sure that the production value on this and all other DTC ads is top quality (and this is really a review of this whole class of ads, not just this particular spot as I doubt Lunesta would make an advertising blog on artistic merit.) Lunesta in particular has also made the clever move of making a $60mm ad purchase primarily against late-night TV which is as good an example of finding the target consumer when they need the product as you will ever see.

What Doesn’t:
Let’s boil the case against DTC advertising down to two major violations of good brand positioning practice.

First, brands represent a promise to consumers. They must present the consumer with a clear value proposition expressed through tangible or intangible product benefits. Tangible benefits may be the performance or other attributes and features of the product while intangible benefits are most often emotional – think prestige, style, sense of security, etc.

The problem with DTC advertising is that it presents an incomplete value proposition. The consumer is presented with medical benefits and risks. This is called “Fair Balance” in FDA-speak. But the consumer doesn’t really have the data set to evaluate the proposition. A doctor may understand that the relative risks of grogginess from Lunesta are less than Ambien and may assess a particular patient as being a good candidate for one or another. But the consumer is not really in a position to make this judgement. So ultimately, this type of advertising cheats the consumer. It asks us to accept a value proposition based entirely on product performance knowing full well that we are not qualified to make that judgement. It also does this knowing that we will then go to our doctors and ask for one drug or another when they may not be suitable for us or necessary at all. Doctors being generally inclined to try to help people are more likely to prescribe drugs that are borderline unnecessary when patients flood them with requests.

This is a branding slant on the standard argument against DTC advertising. It should sound familiar to anyone involved in the debate. However I think there’s another good branding reason to avoid DTC advertising.

DTC advertising is bad branding because it focuses the consumers attention on product performance and does little to build the more important emotional attributes of the brand. There has been some attempt to differentiate brand and to do pure image advertising for DTC brands, but without ANY brand proposition, they are singularly ineffective.

The ennumeration of side effects in DTC advertising (like being reminded that the Viagra erection may come with a blinding headache) creates a big problem from a branding standpoint. It immediately creates an emotional distance between the consumer and the brand. This drug may HURT me, you say to yourself as you listen to the ‘fair balance’ language at the end of the ad. You realize that you need to be careful with the drug. If you had never seen the ad and your doctor (being careful for you) prescribed the drug, you might not have had these side effects. Or you might not have considered them serious. If the drug had really helped you, you might have developed a strong loyalty to the brand. You might pay the extra co-pay to get it even when generics became available.

But with the DTC advertising warning you about the risks and dangers of the product, you won’t make that emotional connection. Your first impression of the brand – the one you will take with you throughout the rest of your relationship – was tainted with warnings.

I ask you why would any sane brand manager want a consumer to make this kind of ambivalent emotional connection with her brand? Why remind consumers that using a new drug is like going on on a blind date? By focusing on the aggregate risks and benefits of the drug, the DTC brands forego the opportunity to build a relationship based on the individual consumer’s actual experience. And they also may deprive patients of the emotional benefit they feel when they take something their doctor recommends that may help them feel better. Doing something good for yourself feels good in itself or there wouldn’t be much of a market for bath salts. Let’s not forget that the majority of these drugs are not curing anything – they help decrease symptoms (like pain) of disease or natural aging that we don’t like.

So here’s a thought for the pharma companies who are wasting money and our time with DTC advertising. Focus on making doctors as knowledgable as they should be. Don’t try to buy them off with lunches for the staff, speaking junkets or trinkets. Let our physicians be advocates for us as patients. If we as consumers want to know about drugs, we’ll read the PDA or search for good comparative information from medical websites online. If the drug does what it says it will and you keep the quality high, you will get our loyalty.

Branding Bottom Line -
Lunesta delivers a good quality spot which does nothing good for the consumer or the industry.

Brand: Geek Squad
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Frustrated Computer Users (i.e. everyone)
Reviewer: David
Rating: ****

Description:
A woman’s computer freezes up and she screams in frustration. Around the city, geeks look up from their computers. They are dropped from planes in black and white VW Beetles wearing geeky white shirts and thin black ties and showing a geek badge.

What Works:
This is an excellent problem-solution ad. The woman typing on a computer that freezes up instantly gets us to identify with her frustration. Then the rest of the execution is unusual enough that it keeps our attention to the payoff at the end. The insight here I think is that something that society thinks is usually bad (being a geek) can be very good for a particular situation (when your computer is broken). Trying to own “geek” for computer repair actually sounds like a good idea, particularly when you are the first home-computer repair service to advertise nationally on television.

What Doesn’t:
The standard problem of not having any branding until the end of the spot is not quite as serious here because the spot is so crisp, but it’s still an issue. The success of this spot also depends on owning the term geek. At home, I’ve been getting incredibly annoying autodialer calls from an outfit called “Computer Geeks” which I have vowed I will never hire. If that company gets any traction then there could be some real marketplace confusion.

Branding Bottom Line -
A crisp spot that delivers for a new service brand with a distinct brand positioning.

Brand: Stolichnaya Vodka
Execution: TV, Print
Link: Click Here
Target: Vodka drinkers
Reviewer: David
Rating: **

Description:
Various ordinary people in their homes find that everything is suddenly covered by a layer of frost. Ends with product shot and “Best Chilled” emblem.

What Works:
This is an intriguing spot. There is no dialogue and we have to discover each situation through the eyes of the character. The photography is excellent and the characters are interesting.

What Doesn’t:
The first problem is that you spend virtually the entire spot wondering what the brand is before the short payoff at the end for Stoli. Because it is a clever spot, the assumption is that this end-branding will be more memorable since we have to wait and wonder for 30 seconds. That’s wishful thinking with a field as crowded as spirits.

And that’s just the little problem. The big, glaring issue with this ad is in the brand positioning. “Stolichnaya wants to own cold,” Todd Wasserman writes for Yahoo/Adweek.com and he’s right: this spot is about owning COLD. Can Stoli really own cold? It’s not a bad idea. It’s not the direction Absolut or Grey Goose has taken. But there’s something here bothering me. Could it be that there is another Russian Vodka brand with an “S” name that’s doing the same thing? Check out this Smirnoff spot from the superbowl. It sure looks like Smirnoff just invested a hell of a lot of money to own ‘cold’ for Smirnoff ice. So what if it’s for the ‘malt beverage’? It’s still Russian, still is known for Vodka and still starts with an “S.”

This spot is a disaster for both Stoli and Smirnoff. So bad, in fact, that you almost have to wonder if someone bribed Stoli to bring down Smirnoff’s brand valuation and make the company a better acquisition target.

Branding Bottom Line -
What were they thinking? Does nobody at Stolichnaya watch television? A disaster for Stoli and for Smirnoff. I’ll go to sleep tonight with visions of cold Ssses swirling in my head.

Brand: Sony Playstation Portable
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Gamers and everyone else
Reviewer: David
Rating: ***

Description:
Instead of seeing the Playstation Portable through most of the spot, we instead see the gamers playing it.

What Works:
Showing the gamers instead of the game itself is novel and it gives a strong emotional link to the total absorption that the PSP gamers feel when they are playing. Fortunately, the spot starts with the Playstation brand (just a flash), so we are less likely to wonder what we are looking at for the first ten seconds. All the visuals are top-notch and the spot makes the unit look appealing. The soundtrack also lends urgency to the visuals, and keeps us moving throught the spot.

What Doesn’t:
From a brand strategy perspective, Sony makes two questionable choices in this spot.

The first is the choice of user. The spot has a hip, young, urban-culture feel to it. It is anti-establishment. Now in classic branding, you want to show the ‘brand lover’ – the core of all of the users of your brand. The folks portrayed in this spot are certainly brand lovers. But you also want the users to be aspirational for the rest of your target audience. And here’s where I’m not sure that the choice of users in the spot is a good one. The gaming audience is a lot older than people think (I believe the average age is pushing 30). And it is not particularly anti-establishment.

I suspect that Sony was looking at the demographics of portable gamers when targeting the spot. Right now, portable gamers are younger – the skateboarder crowd. But this is mostly due to the platform that dominates at the moment (Gameboy Advance) which reflects Nintendo’s demographics which are a lot younger than the industry as a whole. Look at the cost of the PSP, however and some of the earliest games (sports games feature prominently) and you’ll realize that a lot of the folks who will be carrying a PSP around by next year will be wearing ties and hiding it in their briefcases. There is ONE young guy in a suit playing the game on an elevator, but the overwhelming user imagery is of young and edgy people. This imagery may not help SONY if one of the important early target groups looks at the commercial and can’t identify – even aspirationally – with the kids on the spot. Perhaps this might have been a chance for SONY to micromarket and produce different spots with different user imagery for different demographics and ad mediums.

There is a second problem with the way Sony portrays the user. As marketers we are much less likely than the general population to play video games. So we need to work doubly hard to understand the mind of the gamer. Unlike the image we may have of the gamer as a social outcast, the opposite is true. Most gamers play with others and gaming is a social activity for the majority of gamers. The real genius of the Playstation Portable is the wireless networking ability (similar to N-Gage, but likely to be on a much wider scale), allowing PSP gamers to connect with both friends and strangers, which may make the PSP the first truly new singles accessory of the 21st century.

As brilliant as the execution of this TV spot is, looking from the perspective of the video game out to the user tends to isolate the gamer. In fact, one of the brief shots is of a girl trying to get her guy’s attention while he is riveted to the game. The spot completely misses the connecting power of the PSP and that is a mistake.

Lastly, I’m not sure about the few brief glimpses of other functionality for the PSP. It’s true that you can play movies (in Sony’s proprietary format) and audio, but those should be follow-on pitches to make to those who’ve already bought the system. Given the cost of the movies (and the fact that there’s no way to watch DVDs you already own on it) and the trickiness of the MP3 player, this is not going to be a big draw for those who don’t already own the system.

Branding Bottom Line -
A brilliantly executed spot, but perhaps executed against the wrong strategy.

Brand: La Quinta Hotels
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Business Travelers on a budget
Reviewer: David
Rating: ****

Description:
An average guy in a suit is taking a business trip with a very large, very loud colleague in an economy car. The voiceover says “repeat after me en Espagnol – coche compacto – small car” and then as the large c0-worker gets louder – “coche muy compacto – very small car.”

What Works:
La Quinta sits in a very difficult space for branding. The field of budget business hotels is overstuffed with entries from Marriott Courtyard to Days Inn trying to woo salespeople and other frequent budget business travelers. It is difficult to compete purely on the quality of the product in this category. In fact, there has been something of an arms race and, unknown to many upscale business travelers, the amenities provided by the hotels often surpass the Hyatts, Marriotts and Westins of the world. A Courtyard or La Quinta customer can not only expect a clean room and a newspaper in the morning, but a complimentary hot/cold breakfast, free high-speed Internet access and free local calls. The main thing missing is room service and glitzy lobbies.

Given the stiff competition around product-oriented benefits, real branding is important for a chain to succeed in this category, particularly when competing against Marriott. The difficulty for any chain is finding something that is both relevant and ownable.

La Quinta – a Dallas-based chain – is drawing on the uniqueness of its name to convey a sense of Spanish or Latin Hospitality. The premise seems to be a type of old-world charm that might not be available in other hotels. They’ve nailed their target audience in this spot (the two guys stuck in a small rental car gets it perfectly), and if the proposition is relevant it might work. I’m not really in the target although I do occassionally stay in this class of hotel when I’m running workshops for companies with headquarters in small towns.

The brand manager in me loves the fact that La Quinta is embracing the ethnic implications of their name. That’s something that makes this positioning ownable. Marriott cannot copy it. And that is the first step towards great branding.

What Doesn’t:
La Quinta is going to have to spell out just exactly what makes their brand of hospitality better. They may be playing a little coy about whether it is Spanish, Mexican or some other sort of Latin variant. And I think if they are serious they are going to have to differentiate the product more to reflect this. What would I expect at a La Quinta that would remind me of being South of the Border (in a good way)? Do the rooms look a bit different? Are the floors spanish tile instead of carpet? Whatever the answer, La Quinta would be more succesful if they made their product offering different and unique even if it is not universally appealing. That will give them the opportunity to build some true brand lovers.

Branding Bottom Line -
A promising start towards differentiated branding, but La Quinta needs to integrate it with some real differences in the product.

Brand: Coca-Cola with Lime
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Pepsi Drinkers
Reviewer: David
Rating: ***

Description:
The launch advertising for Coca-Cola with Lime features a hip, Caribbean-sounding track with lots of retro-chic images like 50′s vintage TV announcers and self-parodying Coca-Cola scientists and executives (who look remarkably like some not-long-forgotten Coke executives).

What Works:
The concept here is crystal clear. Coke with lime. Got it. The music is pleasing and the images are interesting.

What Doesn’t:
I chose this spot because it raises the very interesting branding question of “What is a Brand” and the separate but associated question of how to announce product improvements or line extensions.

The most difficult aspect of this ad is that it doesn’t necessarily meet the first test of good advertising, which is answering the question “Why Should I Care?” (Or What’s In It For Me). Not that lime in Coke is an inherently bad idea. But why do I need a commercial to tell me something that would be very obvious on shelf. Follow me here:

David [walking down the soft-drink aisle]: That Coke can looks different…
Passerby: You’re right, what’s the green swoosh on the can?
David [stopping, picks up can]: Ah. A “Coke with Lime.”
Passerby: Cool.
David: Cool.

That’s not too hard to envision, is it? And if the shelf presence of the new can isn’t enough, Coke could use some sort of callout like a shelf talker to get people noticing the new flavor. Even a full-circulation, full-page FSI (free-standing insert in the coupon section of the Sunday paper) would be a fraction of the cost of this ad. So, the question is – why is Coke spending the money (and this is a high-production-quality-spot which obviously cost a bit) running a television ad campaign for Coke with Lime? The cynical view is that from the Atlanta perspective, Coke with Lime is a big idea. But it is hard to imagine that even the most self-obsessed marketing VP at Coke would fail to notice the ironic tone of the advertising (which mocks the idea that Coke with Lime is a great leap forward).

If this is a line extension, it seems hard to justify this advertising. Coke gets noticed and people would figure it out soon enough. The proposition does not need explaining. The advertising doesn’t really clarify Coke’s already somewhat confusing positioning.

If this is supposed to be a new brand (as Diet Coke became a fully independent brand), then what are they thinking? It doesn’t seem like a big enough idea.

Lastly, it seems possible that somebody is thinking that this will increase overall share and grab some Pepsi-drinkers. The plan for a line extension almost always is justified on the grounds that it will grow overall brand volume and not be 100% cannibalization from brand Coke. But it’s hard to imagine that Coke with Lime will much affect Pepsi.

One more question here – why add lime to Coke (which doesn’t have a taste issue) and not Diet Coke? Lots of people ask for Lemon or Lime with their Diet Coke.

Branding Bottom Line -
Will gain awareness for Coke with Lime, but seems superfluous. Why not just make the pitch on shelf and at fountain outlets?

RANTER: David

Subject: Why better service is more important than good advertising
The greatest threat to consumer brands today is not bad advertising – it’s bad customer service. I say that in spite of the fact that this blog is dedicated to critiquing advertising and helping advertisers create better ads.

In fact, the biggest single investment that most companies could make to improve their brand equity would be to get rid of automated answering systems and have a person answer and route incoming consumer calls.

Is this shocking? Cutting a $70 million ad budget by a few million and hiring people to answer the phone, lend a sympathetic ear and find the right person for unhappy consumers to talk to? Won’t this just create a new “cost center” that an aggressive former-CFO (now CEO) will be eager to cut?

We are facing an epidemic of bad customer service and it is hurting brands. Right now, I would be willing to recommend any brand that has the common sense to have a real person who is trained and knows the company and its products answer the phone. Making me feel better about the service experience is critical in an era where products are getting ever more complex and all of us experience product failures in many categories from time to time.

This is not just my opinion. The link between good customer service and brand repeat rates (the percentage of consumers who will purchase a brand – whether product or service – again) has been proven again and again. A very good article on this is “The One Number You Need to Grow” by Frederick Reichheld from the December 2003 Harvard Business Review. I haven’t found it online for free, but click here for the HBS version for $6.00. Reichheld showed that the best way to understand brand loyalty was to ask consumers the likelihood that they would recommend the brand to another consumer. The stronger the recommendation, the higher the likelihood that that consumer would return to the brand. This was true of companies across a wide variety of industries.

My point is this – a huge amount of money is being wasted advertising brands that may deliver good product but have terrible customer service. When customers become disillusioned by bad service, they become “Brand Terrorists” who tell lots of their friends not to use the brand. Advertising then serves to remind these consumers that they hate the brand and they spread the message further. Sadly, it seems that “brand terrorists” are even more effective than brand lovers or “brand apostles” in spreading their message. So the maxim “good advertising is the quickest way to kill a brand” may be truer than ever.

I’ll give you a good example of this trend that is staring me in the face – literally. I’m writing this post on a HP Pavillion dv1000 laptop. It is a sweet little machine, but I cannot and will not recommend it to friends or any of you. Why? Because I bought the laptop with an expansion base and a 200gb backup drive that plugs into the base. When the whole deal arrived, everything worked except for that backup drive, which whirred and purred but could not be found by Windows. So I called the HP customer service center. Or more accurately, I called various parts of India attempting to get trained help for my HP.

Don’t get me wrong. I am half-Indian and I think India is a great place. I visited last year. I also don’t think outsourcing is inherently evil. But the idea of randomly delegating the most crucial part of your branding experience (customer service, where you have the chance to take dissatisfied consumers and turn them into brand lovers) to untrained people is absurd.

During the week of my conversations with HP customer service I became absurdly grateful for the GE speakerphone in my office. I also became familiar with a lot of elevator music as I clocked over 7 hours of hold time. My problem was simple – a hard disk drive with a faulty controller. But I couldn’t find a single person in HP support who even seemed to be able to pull up the specifications for the HP xb2000 Notebook Expansion Base let alone understand that I plugged a hard drive into it which did not seem to be working.

My daily routine was something like this. Sit down with a cup of tea and attack e-mail. Call HP customer service. Wade through menu after menu of entering digits. Spend a half-hour or more on hold. Finally talk to someone. Spend a half hour explaining my problem. Get transferred to another number that is busy. Get put on hold. Spend another half hour explaining my problem. Repeat from the begginning.

Finally, at the end of the week, I had a revelation. The sales staff at HP Direct was obviously American and very knowledgable. (It’s easy to see the revenue implications of a poorly trained sales staff.) So I called as if I was going to buy something new. Still had to wade through a stupid automated menu, but when I got a real associate on the line I explained my problem. She immediately shipped out a new drive and gave me a return authorization for my old drive. The new one worked fine. Total time spent: 11 minutes. Tell me that my week on the phone with India cost HP less. It certainly cost them a customer. And don’t go running to Dell. I’ve had similarly awful experiences of late with them.

As a marketing trainer and branding person, I find myself in the strange position of telling customers who come to me for better branding campaigns to either spend less on advertising or hold it altogether until they can get their entire user experience to meet the promise they are making with the advertising. The legacy airlines don’t seem to understand this. We sometimes will post the press release for an ad we are about to critique. Eva Lind-Mallo did this for an American Airlines spot that she hated. Even before she posted her scathing commentary on the ad, however, the press release got picked up by other blogs which attacked it (and us for posting it). That’s how strongly bad customer service can make you feel about a brand. Anybody who has been stranded on the runway by NorthWest, crammed into a middle seat by a surly flight attendant on Delta or had their knees jammed up against the seat in front of them on a “new less-spacious” seat in American just hates those brands. And the advertising just reminds you of the problem.

So here’s my advice to airlines, banks, computer companies and others intent on wasting our time with advertising – good or bad – that we won’t believe. Train your customer service representatives. Give them the power and the decision-making authority to actually solve consumer’s problems. Ditch your five-step interactive menus and have an intelligent person answer the phone and route callers to the EXACT person they need to talk to in order to solve their problem. Accept some fraud in return for no-hassles returns (remember that this is how Nordstrom’s built a legendary brand – by accepting exchanges on things they didn’t even sell). Stop arguing with the consumer even when you are right. We’re tired. We’ve been taken advantage of for too long. We don’t want to have to get our EE degree to use your products or spend our afternoons on the phone to make them work. And as soon as someone else comes along and treats us better, we’ll be gone in a heartbeat. Just ask SouthWest or JetBlue.

okay – here is the site feed. We’re powered by Blogger.com. If anyone knows how we can get an RSS button up, please let us know.

http://www.brandtrainers.com/blog/feed/atom.xml

Brand: Quaker – Rice Cakes
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Gym-adverse female yuppie-something dieters
Reviewer: David
Rating: ****

Description:
A thirty-something woman expresses angst about diet fads and going to the gym unreconstructed and flashes Quaker cakes as the ‘classic’ solution.

What Works:
Us ex-brand managers just love the big food companies (General Mills, Kraft, Kellogg’s) because they are usually incredibly disciplined about brand positioning. Obviously being part of Frito-Lay and the Pepsi empire has been good for Quaker. This spot is a good example. It’s not flashy or showy – and has just one set-up (I bet it cost under $150,000 to produce). It also creates a solid positioning in a very tricky situation, which is:

1. An old warhorse of a brand
2. A commodity category

So how does it work? First, like all really good positioning, Quaker does not try to skirt the negatives or argue with the consumer. Instead, they flip the negatives on their head and with a little judo find the positive. The classic example of this is Listerine which overcame a strong product performance issue (hurts like hell) with a rhetorical flip (hurting means it’s killing bad germs). Quaker has done something very similar here by taking the bad (BORING) and discovering the good side of it (not trendy, not unreliable, not subject to further medical review – i.e. CLASSIC).

The Classic positioning also gives Quaker a lever against the rest of the category. Not only are rice cakes a classic, trustworthy snack, but Quaker is THE classic, trustworthy name within the category. So if you are sold on “classic,” you’ll not only be drawn to the category, but you are prepped to believe you ought to pay a premium for Quaker.

How do we know that we are in the hands of master marketers? Here are three things to look at in this spot:

1. “Parachute Pants in 1984″ – what looks like a self-deprecating comment is in fact an anchoring reference – bringing back the viewer to the era where Rice Cakes were IT.
2. “Doughless Meat Heaven Pizza” – did you catch the sticker on the fast food cart behind the woman in the park? That’s a jab at Atkins and reinforces the point that fads are just that – fads.
3. “Fad-Free” – Here’s a phrase that our 30-something woman uses which again sounds like self-deprecation. But it has the dual role of reminding you subliminally of yet another trend-diet (fat-free, the last dead warhorse before low-carb).

It’s amazing how much you can do with how little when you think first (hopefully Quiznos and Microsoft are listening here

What Doesn’t:
The trick with these ‘talk shots’ is that you have to listen to them for them to work. I’m sure that the Frito people did their research to make sure they were getting measured attention on this spot, but I’d want to be careful about where I placed it. All the brilliance in the world won’t work if you don’t find your consumer in the right frame of mind to stop and hear the message.

Branding Bottom Line -
It’s nice to see professionals at work. Game on.

NOTE TO FRITO-LAY – if you are listening please POST THIS SPOT ON THE WEB – I hate directing my readers to a paid site to look at the ad!!)

Brand: Quaker
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Fast Foodies
Reviewer: David
Rating: check back soon

Description:
This is the Quaker Press Release for the Commercial we’re about to blog