Entries tagged with “Advertising”.
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Tue 15 Jun 2010
Posted by Mike Bawden under Advertising, Marketing
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Chicago (June 14, 2010)—Recent research from Mintel suggests that Hispanic women feel underrepresented in the beauty and personal care aisle. Over half of survey respondents said they would like to see more personal care products designed just for them and 64% would like more hair care products created specifically for Latinas.
“It can be a very daunting task for companies to hone in on the specific needs of their Hispanic customers,” says Leylha Ahuile, senior multicultural analyst at Mintel. “Latinas come in a variety of shades, so a wide range of products must be developed to cater to every pigment and hair type.”
Hispanic women are especially concerned with the box or bottle their favorite products come in. Eighty-one percent of Latinas surveyed report that they would like to see more personal care products with bilingual packaging. Younger Hispanic women are more inclined to express a desire for bilingual packaging than their older counterparts.
“Hispanic consumers often look at bilingual packaging as a way of being acknowledged and respected by a brand, not because they are unable to read English,” notes Leylha Ahuile. “The lack of Spanish-language packaging has the potential to make these women feel ignored by manufacturers.”
Latina women are younger than the average US female population, and 62% of the Hispanic female population has yet to enter their peak earning years (35+). As a result, Mintel believes Latina purchasing power is definitely on the rise.
Please join Leylha Ahuile for a FREE webinar on June 16 at 2 pm CDT as she presents, “Marketing to Today’s Latina.”
Register here: http://tinyurl.com/26ood6p
About Mintel
Mintel is a leading global supplier of consumer, product and media intelligence. For more than 38 years, Mintel has provided insight into key worldwide trends, offering exclusive data and analysis that directly impacts client success. With offices in Chicago, New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai and Tokyo, Mintel has forged a unique reputation as a world-renowned business brand. For more information on Mintel, please visit www.mintel.com. Follow Mintel on Twitter:http://twitter.com/mintelnews
Thu 3 Jun 2010
Posted by Mike Bawden under PR News Headlines
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Thu 3 Sep 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under Brand Central Station
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One of the things clients seem to hate is budgeting. I get it. Nobody likes to feel they’re the equivalent of somebody else’s Sunday dinner.
Last week, I had a client say to me: “I’m reluctant to give out a number for that project because I don’t want the vendor to keep loading it up with bells and whistles to meet my budget.” It was a refreshingly candid (and honest) statement.
So in a world of creative smoke and mirrors – where every job seems to be a custom job requiring (at best) “educated” guesses at costs and production timelines; how does an in-house marketing manager get things under control and make sure he or she doesn’t get taken for a ride by an unscrupulous ad agency or design boutique?
Believe it or not, the best process to use for controlling production costs on the client side is very much the same kind of process agencies should be using on their side as well … but more on that later.
The secret to controlling production costs is to take the guesswork out of it.
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Mon 31 Aug 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under Marketing
1 Comment
It’s the perpetual marketing question: “How do we know what we’re doing makes a difference?” And it’s a question that’s only answered by the most ambigious phrase known to man …
“It depends.”
The inability to quantitatively answer the question and all it’s related derivations (e.g. “How do we know it will work? What is going to work best? etc.) is the underlying cause for the continuous contraction and expansion of in-house marketing departments. It’s also the driving force behind job changes for marketing people (average tenure is less than two years), the tendency for clients to look for new agencies every three years and the high dissatisfaction level with “Chief Marketing Officers” at major brands.
We live and work in an industry that is, by its very nature, creative and changing with the times. As a result, it’s extremely hard to quantify.
And things that are hard to quantify are hard to measure.
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Thu 27 Aug 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under Advertising
[2] Comments
There’s probably no consumer product that has done more to ruin the moral credibility of the advertising profession more than cigarettes. After all, there aren’t any more credible arguments that can be made against the dire health warnings issued by doctors, governments and just about everyone else who DOESN’T SMOKE. But people still do it.
There’s no denying that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs out there – but it’s the advertising and the image created around the act of smoking that has drawn people in for generations.
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Fri 21 Aug 2009
There’s a tug-of-war going on between traditional marketers and those who consider themselves on the vanguard of the social web. This post by Mitch Joel, about the end of THE BIG IDEA, is indicative of this battle.
Some consider it “old school” to pitch THE BIG IDEA to a client when, in the age of the Internet, the individual is the thing and success is only, really attainable through the successful implementation of a succession of smaller, more highly targeted and customer-reponsive ideas. Big ideas are a thing of the past and should be relegated to Mad Men (or Bewitched, I suppose). It’s all about the small ideas that can make a difference.
On the PR side we see the same thing happening. Big media, newswires, mass audiences are breaking down (either as part of their own strategy or by circumstance) into smaller, more focused publications, distribution channels that often bypass reporters and editors and go straight to the people who have the need to know. It’s the triumph of small over big.
Or so it might seem.
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Wed 19 Aug 2009
I’m not sure why clients never understood this … but when it comes to getting the best out of their ad agency or PR firm for the least amount of money, clients turn from being “marketing partners” into “general contractors from hell.”
I an’t tell you how many times I’ve received RFP’s from clients that read more like a purchase order for gravel than a request for our best thinking on a tough marketing assignment. I’ve always wanted to respond: “Thanks for the bid request – we have a sale on four-color ads this week but we’re a little short on brochure ideas, can we arrange for a two-for-one swap?”
Now comes a study commissioned by Jones & Bonevac that reports at least 30% of marketing agency staff time is ineffective or wasted due to poor communications from their clients.
See, it was just as we suspected … it’s all the clients’ fault.
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Mon 17 Aug 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under B2B Marketing
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One of my favorite B2B Marketing Blogs (the Red on Marketing Blog) posted this great little article on B2B copywriting at the end of last week. In fact, the lesson to be learned here applies to all kinds of copywriting – whether you’re writing for the Internet, for the news media or to sell something in an ad:
Don’t bury your lead. Tell people who you are and what you do.
Clearly.
In fact, I can remember the day I first heard an advertising colleague refer to a client’s service as a “business solution” – I thought it was brilliant. Apparently, so did every other B2B copywriter in the 1980′s.
And when everyone uses the same words to describe different things, everything starts to sound the same. Even when they’re not.
Learn the lesson the easy way now. Check out Robert Celashi’s post here.
Mon 17 Aug 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under Advertising, Much Ado About Marketing
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On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anheuser-Busch InBev NV is trying to reverse a slide in market share for Bud Light by ginning up another 15 ads for the brand. All this in response to the first drop in market share for Bud’s younger sibling in over 25 years.
The ads are set to break when the NFL football season kicks off. The ads will continue to make people laugh, concentrating on bringing back the humor associated with the brand over the past generation. What does this mean for the often-lame “Drinkability” campaign? According to the article, it sounds like DDB is planning on sticking with the theme but will freshen things up a bit.
The ads will refine the company’s “Drinkability” campaign — which sought to persuade drinkers that Bud Light is neither too heavy nor too light in taste — that began last year and has struggled to gain traction.
Some creative executives at Omnicom Group‘s DDB Worldwide, an ad agency working on Bud Light, struggled with the “Drinkability” strategy while creating this year’s Super Bowl commercials, finding it difficult to fit in the “Drinkability” message without sacrificing humor, according to a person familiar with the matter.
So, don’t plan on the return of Spuds McKenzie – but for those of you who are jonesing for some classic Bud Light moments, check out this link.
Fri 24 Apr 2009
Posted by Mike Bawden under Marketing
[3] Comments
Aaron Smith, writing for MediaPosts’s Email Insider, provided an interesting sumary of the most common misconceptions about email marketing. Aaron is a founder and principal at Smith-Harmon, a design agency focused on email marketing. (Visit the Smith-Harmon site.)
In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are turning to low-cost marketing tactics that offer potentially high rewards – tactics like email marketing.
The problem, as Aaron points out, is that this potential for a high return on the marketing investment can lead executives to make incorrect assumptions and uninformed business decisions that can have significant (and negative) consequences over time.
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Tue 21 Apr 2009
No, it’s not the latest iteration of Mad’s classic “Spy vs Spy” comic drama.
When it comes to advertising creative, it doesn’t always have to come down to an “all or nothing” proposition, does it? For small and mid-sized businesses especially, the hard reality is that many times the design, content and sometimes finished production of a piece needs to be done in-house or it won’t get done at all. Some agencies look the other way, some get all “high and mighty” about it.
Here’s the reality: it’s gonna happen, get over it.
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Tue 21 Apr 2009
Bill Bernbach may have passed away from leukemia in 1982, but the work produced by DDB under his supervision in the 60′s and 70′s is the epitome of great advertising. While every student of the business remembers the “Think Small” campaign for VW, we often forget how counter-intuitive VW’s entire positioning was to the automotive market of the day.
This classic ad explains why VW didn’t discount the Beatle the way other car manufacturers slashed prices to move stock each model year.
Politically incorrect – maybe so – but still another in the line of classic VW ads from Bill Bernbach’s book.
