Category: Marketing Ideas

Last week, I attended an event held by the Utah Chapter of the AMA where the topic was co-branding. I wanted to share the project I heard about and some of my takeaways.

The presenter was a Utah company called Instructure, who has an educational platform software called Canvas (It’s along the lines of Blackboard but cleaner and easier to use. I used it at the University of Utah). They are only a couple years old but they have over 200 employees and serve over 500 college and high school campuses.

To help create brand awareness and recognition, they are involved in a hot trend right now called M.O.O.C. (Massive Open Online Courses), which are typically developed by a university but are free and open to the public. (https://www.canvas.net/).

To get more people excited about the idea, they researched what they could do to latch on to something in pop culture and came up with the idea to build a course around the zombie apocalypse tv show, The Walking Dead, which is the #1 show on cable right now (16 million viewers for this season’s premier).

AMC was immediately onboard. They went through challenges with a few different schools developing the curriculum until finally settling with UC Irvine. The course is a collaboration of professors from multiple disciplines – Sociology, Physics, Public Health and Math – and takes lessons from the plot of the show including wilderness survival, nutrition, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, infectious diseases, handling stress, etc. (https://www.canvas.net/courses/the-walking-dead).

They announced the program right after labor day and it was a huge PR success, with over 600 stories. They currently have over 60,000 people enrolled in the course.

Takeaways

• Align the interests – The reason that this worked so well is that it was a win-win for all parties involved. AMC got to engage fans of the show and bring in some new ones without having to front any money. The university got name recognition and introduced people to its course offerings. Instructure got more people using their platform and name recognition in this space. No money exchanged hands. When they tried partnering with other schools, they had problems with the school wanting money or the professors they were working with missing deliverables and wanting creative control. They had to work with the right people where everyone bought in and was on board.
• Timing – It’s taken them several months to launch the campaign/course (with all the parties involved and the challenges they encountered), but they were able to time the announcement of the course a few weeks before the new season and take advantage of the anticipation and excitement around the premier. There were even a few news outlets who ran the story early and they had to contact them to have them pull the story down so they could have the timing be perfect.
• Be Brave and Attempt Something Big – When they were first brainstorming the idea, it was more of a joke – like “Wouldn’t it be funny if we did this?” But when they started actually pursuing it, AMC was surprisingly easy to get a hold of and was immediately onboard. The rest of process was not without its challenges but eventually they were able to pull it together and have some great outcomes.

Have you ever noticed the “A to Z” in Amazon’s logo, implying that they have everything?

Or the arrow between the E and X in the Fed Ex logo, implying direction and speed?

A great logo has depth and meaning. In these cases, it literally symbolizes the companies’ missions. Head over to Web Design Ledger to see more examples.

A few years ago when Netflix raised their prices and split the mail/instant services, they became everyone’s favorite company to hate. They’ve since improved their image by expanding their content, including resurrecting Arrested Development and cutting deals with Disney and other networks.

Another more subtle thing they’ve done is put some fun and personality into the way they interact with their customers. Buzzfeed has posted a series of great Netflix responses to tweets from customers, including the one above. Also floating around the internet is this conversation between a customer and tech support. It begins:

• Customer: I have a problem to report.
• Netflix: This is Cpt. Mike of the good ship Netflix. Which member of the crew am I speaking with today?
• Customer: Greetings. Lt. Norm here. Engineering has a problem to report.
• Netflix: Lt., What seems to be the problem?….

What a great way to engage their customer in a potentially tense situation! It goes on like this for several minute and ends with the customer saying they wish they had another problem because the conversation was so fun! This is a good lesson other companies would do well to learn: corporate communications doesn’t have to be stiff and professional; it can be fun and full of personality. It’s the little touches that make an impact.

This is a great emotional ad by Extra Gum. The visual tells the story of a father who makes origami cranes out of gum wrappers for his daughters on occasions through out her life. As he is packing up her car to send her off the college, a box falls with all the origami cranes that his daughter has kept throughout the years, indicating how special and meaningful the small gestures were to her experience growing up. The least few seconds end with the phrase: “Sometimes the little things last the longest. Give Extra, get extra.” It’s an interesting twist for a gum ad, which typically talks about the taste or long lasting flavor. This ignores the product itself and instead emphasizes the social experience surrounding sharing a stick of gum. I think it’s brilliant.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “David and Goliath.” If you aren’t familiar with Gladwell’s work, he has written four other books: the Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. He also writes for the New Yorker.

“David and Goliath” is full of great stories and examples of how the concepts of strengths and weaknesses or advantages and disadvantages are often the opposite of what they seem. For example, we think of David and Goliath as the classic underdog story but the reality of the situation is that Goliath was slow and expecting to fit hand to hand giving David, an experienced sling shooter, every advantage in the fight (watch the TED Talk below to hear Malcolm tell the story). He goes on in the books to talk about how people with dyslexia often become great listeners and negotiators – not in spite of but because of their lack of reading ability: their weakness becomes in advantage.

Here is a great article discussing what business or marketing insights are to be gained from the book: Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book: 5 Critical Business Lessons. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it, along with all of his other books.

This recent hidden camera stunt promotes the new remake of “Carrie” by using the same telekinetic/anger themes from the movie. The reaction on the people being pranked is great! With 33 million views so far, I would say this viral clip has been a success.

This is a great non-traditional installation campaign that advertising agency M&C saatchi milano did for insurance company, europ assistance IT. They built the top of a submarine to make it look like it had just bursted through the streets of milan and wrecked someone’s car. They even had live actors portraying sailors, scuba divers, and emergency crew. The overarching idea is that you never know when an unforeseen event will happen and take you by surprise.

Head on over to Designboom to see the more pictures and footage of the campaign.

1. Look for the up sale – The obvious up sale on the consumer side is concessions. We started with bottle/canned soda, chips and candy. Eventually, we upgraded to more of a cafe that served sandwiches, fountain sodas, Italian Sodas, and Hot Chocolate. There were some remodel costs involved but we were able to do it fairly economically.

Another up sale opportunity is the bands/artists that play at the venue. The nice thing is that with any service, you can apply what you would paid them toward the service, so the money doesn’t have to come out of their pocket. Think about what kind of additional services you can provide. One of those is providing a live recording of the show. At the very least, If you want to keep it simple, you can throw up a pair of condenser mics and record to a laptop. Another up sale ideas to bands is custom one inch buttons. You can buy a button machine and die cutter for around $200. The materials for buttons cost about 5 cents a piece. I would typically sell 100 buttons to bands for $35, leaving $30 for about an hour of work. Not bad.

There are plenty of other side businesses you could pursue to leverage your network of bands and the potential to keep more of a cut from the door: merchandise such as t-shirts, selling local CDs on consignment, etc.

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I came across this article in Ad Week today. Burger King is pretending to change it’s name to Fries King…. and people are actually believing it for some reason.

The funny thing is that it’s been done before. I can remember back to one of my advertising classes around 2007 where we debated for about 10 minutes whether Pizza Hut’s claim to change their name to “Pasta Hut” was real or not. Of course, the fact that it was April 1st should have given us a clue! But the parallel thinking here seems to be that in order to introduce or place emphasis on a new product, it’s not enough anymore to say, “In addition to what we normally serve, we now serve X.” You have to do something a little more shocking to get people’s attention.

It’s kind of a strange promotion gimmick but hey, if it gets people talking, it’s working right?

Here is a TV spot Pizza/Pasta Hut put together back in the day to really drive the point home.