Brand: Heinz Ketchup
Execution: Consumer Generated Advertising Contest
Target: Burger Eaters
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
Heinz launched a promotional blitz in December of 2007 for a consumer-generated advertising contest called “Top This.” The challenge was to create a new television spot for Heinz. The winner would get $57,000 (the number taken from the ‘Heinz 57′ days) and would be aired on television. Runner ups would receive $5,700. Heinz promoted the contest on-pack with mentions on 57 million customized bottles and 200 million tailored packets with catchy taglines such as “Hungry for Fame?” and “Starving for the Spotlight?” Heinz also ran full-page ads in the New York Times and USA Today to promote the contest.

The winning ad was created by Chicagoland resident Matt Cozza, a Northwestern graduate, freelance cameraman and award-winning documentary filmmaker. The ad takes off from a personal experience of Cozza’s, where he sat down at a restaurant and found that Heinz ketchup was missing from his table, proceeded to swipe a bottle from another table and set off a chain reaction.  The ad will air on the Food Network.

What Works:
A win-win campaign for both Heinz and its consumers.  The 130-year-old brand pours some vitality into its creative efforts from outside the walls of agency-of-record Cramer-Krasselt.  Heinz consumers get to dream about creating a spot to air on national television and of winning a substantial prize.  Heinz builds momentum for the contest by picking the finalist videos from the thousands of entries itself, but allowing consumers to choose the winner.

This is all, of course, textbook script for a consumer-generated marketing campaign, but Heinz has been exceptionally savvy in the way it has managed the process.  The promotional efforts sound impressive and reach a huge number of consumers, but they’re also exceptionally thrifty.  On-pack advertising has virtually no incremental cost for Heinz and one-time insertions in two newspapers are small cost items done more for publicity than actual consumer awareness.  Heinz also creates a customized, low-cost forum to air these spots before a friendly audience (on the Food Network) and consider them for further exposure.

The announcement of the winner creates a big PR opportunity for Heinz and results in some national news media coverage including a Fox Business News segment.

The final benefit may be as important as the rest.  Without abandoning its agency of record, Heinz essentially gets thousands of fully produced concept ads for free.   And many of these are not handicam efforts.  The myth behind consumer-generated marketing  campaigns is that every Dick and Jane can win.  The reality is somewhat different.  These campaigns have become a resume-builder for talented film school grads and independent producers.  Just the sort of folks that brands have difficulty accessing directly.

What Doesn’t:
Brands rarely consider that a consumer-generated advertising contest will wind up putting a new tagline – and possibly a new brand positioning – on air nationally.  While it seems inevitable that consumers play an increasingly large role in positioning and marketing brands, this is something different.  The contest format is artificial and can result in a tug on the brand in a particular direction that is larger and less gradual than consumer co-creation would normally produce.

While the campaign winner was a very solid ad, it does not break new ground for Heinz, which as not yet found as compelling a positioning as it achieved with the iconic spot “Anticipation” of the late 70′s – fueled by the Carly Simon hit of the same name. “Now We Can Eat,” positions Heinz as “what goes with food” but the product-as-hero format features the bottle more than the Ketchup.  Heinz already owns the category – it needs to create more hungry people to expand the category.

Branding Bottom Line:
A better spot than 80% of what’s on television.  For $57,000.  Top that.

Brand: Brooklyn Museum
Execution: Online Viral
Target: New York Museum Goers
Rating: *****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
The newest in a series of intriguing online marketing initiatives for the Brooklyn Museum, Click! is an exhibition taking place from June 27 – August 10, 2008 which will be crowd-curated until May 23rd, 2008. A full description from the Brooklyn Museum Website:

Click! is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click!  explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts? Click! is an exhibition in three consecutive parts. It begins with an open call—artists are asked to electronically submit a work of photography that responds to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” along with an artist statement.

After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opens for audience evaluation of all submissions; as in other juried exhibitions, all works will be anonymous. As part of the evaluation, each visitor answers a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise.

Click! culminates in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks are installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process. Visitors will also be able to see how different groups within the crowd evaluated the same works of art. The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.

Click! follows a series of other new media initiatives at the Brooklyn Museum, including the online exhibit Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo and the Graffiti Exhibit from 2006.

What Works:
Necessity begets creativity and so it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most creative series of new media marketing initiatives in recent memory comes from a budgetary-constrained arts institution, the venerable Brooklyn Museum. The Click! exhibit shows that meaningful online interactivity can be as simple as asking the public to choose the works for an upcoming exhibit, thus giving them a stake in the outcome and a good reason to visit.

This advertising blog does not give many five-star ratings, and this one is earned not just for the clever use of the online medium, timely jump onto a popular bandwagon (crowdsourcing) and strategic pandering to a popular author (James Surowiecki) but for the continuation of a two year series of clever, low-budget new media initiatives which have effectively served to position the Brooklyn Museum as a daring innovator among its peers.

Even better for students of new media, the museum has documented the journey along with its results in an excellent white paper. This type of sharing is rare in the private sector and much needed in an industry where most of the big advertisers are struggling to understand the online medium.

The best parts of the Brooklyn Museum’s approach to using new and emerging media is its focus on simplicity – from the cellphone tour to the crowd-curated exhibit. It is a refreshing change from some of the lavish but unnecessary innovations foisted on us by the Fortune 100.

What Doesn’t:
Although straightforward, the website for the Brooklyn Museum is not nearly as innovative and user friendly as the online exhibits.

Branding Bottom Line:
The Brooklyn Museum makes us wonder what we got for the last million we spent with our online agency.

Issue: A small supplier decision comes back to bite Wal-Mart
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

[Image from NALIP.org]

In Accidental Branding, I write “Do Sweat the Details”. By this I mean that very small actions that do not at first seem to be related to our brands often have very big consequences for the brand. What I meant when I wrote this is that consumers often cue off of small details that are of no interest to brand marketers, like how the package opens, how customer service handles complaints or how business partners speak about our business.

This week, Wal-Mart has provided an excellent example of how decisions seemingly unrelated to marketing can affect our brands. It’s a big enough deal that I would call this Wal-Mart crisis a textbook example of “Brand Karma” – meaning that what you put out into the world eventually comes back to you. Wal-Mart has never had a great reputation among its suppliers. For years it has been accused of sourcing goods locally in new markets only as a competitive tactic to drive out other retail customers and then ending the relationship in order to bankrupt the local supplier.

This general attitude towards suppliers bit back recently as The Wall Street Journal reports. The company which Wal-Mart used to capture video of sales conferences and other internal meetings for thirty years, Flagler Productions Inc. was dismissed two years ago. It does not take much reading between the lines to suspect that this termination of a longtime relationship was not handled well. INstead of maintaining a fondness for Wal-Mart and seeking to regain the Wal-Mart business, Flagler has gone into the business of selling these candid and embarrassing videos of Wal-Mart events to the general public. It appears that in spite of Wal-Marts general legal rectitude, they never secured exclusive rights to this video.

It’s a brand disaster. The videos, as Gary McWilliams reports, contain:

A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores.

I have written a lot about Wal-Mart in the past several years, and I don’t think it’s an evil company. Their basic goal of trying to reduce prices for average working families is a good one. They have made some good steps forward (along with Target) on trying to bring prescription drug prices down. They’ve also tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to bring down the horrible, predatory purveyors of pay-day loans with fair competition.

Where Wal-Mart seems to falter is that they have no corporate instinct for the integrity of their brand. A corporate obsessed with costs is bound to bruise a lot of “little guys” in the process. (See Wendy Bounds nice blog post for more on this.) And not shockingly, one with the ability to really hurt Wal-Mart has finally bitten back.

The lesson? Everything affects your brand. If the way you treat your employees, suppliers or customers is not consistent with your brand, they will become a cancer in your system. Brands may not practice Buddhism, but they should believe in Karma. It all does eventually catch up with you.

If anyone has links to the Wal-Mart videos, please feel free to post them in comments.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands. The book evolved from a class in Positioning and Brand Development at NYU where I asked my students to write case studies of brands that had been founded by entrepreneurs without an MBA or any formal marketing background. I was surprised at the strength of these brands and some of the stories behind them. Two of the cases from the class became subjects for the book: Roxanne Quimby (founder of Burt’s Bees) and John Peterman (founder of J. Peterman). Peterman was actually the first of these entrepreneurs that I met – he agreed to talk to me even before I had a contract to publish Accidental Branding.

Accidental Branding has just been released in the U.S. and is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Books-a-Million. If you have a group of 30 or more entrepreneurs or marketers and are willing to buy and read the book, I’ll be happy to speak to your group on the phone or in person for free during the months of May or June this year.

EXCERPT FROM ACCIDENTAL BRANDING: HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE BUILD EXTRAORDINARY BRANDS

CHAPTER 3 – THE STORYTELLER JOHN PETERMAN (J. PETERMAN)

“This is a single-action Colt 45 Peacemaker, the gun that tamed the West,” Peterman says, as he slides the long revolver out of his custom-made shoulder holster, flicks opens the cylinder, and loads .45 caliber bullets one by one. Then he hands me the gun. The sun hangs low in the Kentucky sky, pouring red light over Peterman’s ranch on this midsummer’s evening and making me squint as I inspect the Colt. It is a craftsman’s piece that looks like it has been hammered out of a single hunk of iron. The handle is inlaid with smooth Bakelite, which is cool in my hand. It is heavy, much more so than it looks, and as I extend my arms to aim it I feel gravity pulling it groundward. I hold the gun carefully with two hands and sight down the barrel. Then, releasing my breath, I gently squeeze the trigger. Nothing happens.

“Just ease back the hammer when you’re ready to fire,” Peterman says calmly, as if he has not even noticed my failed attempt. I nod and slowly thumb the hammer toward me until it clicks into place. Then I line the shot up and pull the trigger again. This time the Colt jumps in my hand. It is loud, much louder than gunshots in the movies. Peterman looks through binoculars at the can I’m aiming for, which is 40 feet away. “You’re down and to the left. Don’t flinch when you fire.” I hadn’t realized I’d flinched, but I notice it the next time, and the next. I continue firing through two reloads, shooting 18 rounds in total. My flinch gradually lessens, but although a stout poplar tree showers chips every time I fire, the can sitting in front of it does not seem to budge. Peterman is gracious with the limited supply of bullets. He gives himself a mere six shots. When we retrieve the coffee can, there are five holes in it. Peterman says, “Looks like you hit it a few times.” He is being polite. I am pretty sure I’ve missed the can altogether and he’s hit five of six.

The Peterman in question, the one I’ve come to central Kentucky to visit, is none other than that Peterman: John Peterman, the founder of the J. Peterman Company. He is the man who built his mail-order business to $70 million dollars in sales and reinvented the catalog as we know it. His name is familiar to over 40 million Americans. In 1991, Holly Brubach in the Sunday New York Times called Peterman a “merchant poet.” He is also famous because of the buffoonish caricature of him played by John O’Hurley on Seinfeld starting in 1995. Four years later, Peterman went spectacularly bankrupt at the height of his fame. And now he’s back, quietly rebuilding the empire he lost.

Peterman has invited me to spend two days with him in Lexington, where I will interview employees at the J. Peterman Company (including his wife, Audrey), sit in on merchandising meetings, and see how the business runs. I am not sure he realizes that my central goal for engineering the entire trip is to visit the ranch I’m now standing on. After spending four hours interviewing Peterman in New York City a few weeks earlier, I’ve become convinced that the ranch will explain some of the mysteries of the myth he so successfully created. Even before Seinfeld, people were telling stories about J. Peterman. He was the world traveler who had fought in three wars, who hobnobbed with sheiks and maharajas, who looked equally comfortable at a state reception or tending a farm in Provence. Peterman’s little Owner’s Manual was a secret handshake for a certain set of people.

Along the way, the J. Peterman Company attracted some incredibly loyal customers, loyal enough to see their beloved business go bankrupt and still return as consumers two years later when Peterman revived it. In Lexington, I hope to answer a simple but elusive question—how did Peterman build this myth that motivated so many fanatic customers? And I have become convinced that the answer lies hidden at the Peterman ranch.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from Accidental Branding. Copyright (c) 2008 by David Vinjamuri. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com, or call 1-800-225-5945