By Andrew Hughes Only a few years ago jokes about home brand products were quite common. Having a blue and white or red and white dinner meant enjoying generic brand fare that night around the table. But the recent intensification of the supermarket wars has seen the introduction of more sophisticated and aggressive branding strategies by Coles and Woolworths.
Tag archives: FMCG
[Digital Grandad] Will QR codes ever take off here?
by Mr QR Just-maybe. Dear Digital Grandad, we are a SME and been around for decades selling products B2C. But my MD has just asked me to consider using QR Codes in our Marketing, as his son (graduate from overseas), think’s it is so cool and thinks we are so behind to the rest of the world and not seeing the trend or being innovative! Firstly I am not too sure what it is and if it any good? Please help Grandpa
Regards
Mr QR Just-maybe
There’s nothing like a back-seat marketer in every company. Ask your MD to give me a call and I am more than happy to speak to his graduate son and tell him a few things about marketing, life in general, and the birds and bees before he starts throwing around one-liners to egg on his dad. Before his dad gets egg on his face!
Let’s get local
So, Mr QR Just-maybe, let’s get to the basics and firstly understand that South Africa is not like the rest of the world. Just take our smartphone penetration — 80:20, the other way around.
Ad of the Week with Oresti Patricios – Yawn for a Cuppa Joe
For many FMCG products, the best way to win customers is to let them experience the brand directly. To interact with it, taste it, touch it and hopefully to watch as people come away with an enjoyable, happy memory of the experience.
Brand activation in the form of in-store promotion—if done correctly—has been shown to work well in consumer research. So much so that these activations can even convert customers from entrenched or established brand allegiances. However creating activations is labour intensive – much more work than creating a commercial that is flighted for maximum reach and penetration, and is therefore more financially lucrative for the agency.
That said, real world experiential branding can have a limited reach, so it must be part of the broader marketing mix. It also works if brand activations are in themselves creative and clever, and can drive social media campaigns that broaden their reach and engagement.
One way to extend the reach of an activation exercise is to make the experience fun and memorable enough for the conversation to continue beyond the original event. In DouweEgberts’s recent activation, conceived and produced by Joe Public, the ‘zinger’ was the addition of technology that allowed users to interact with the brand in a fun way.
A coffee machine with DouweEgberts branding was placed at OR Tambo International Airport. But there was no coin-slot: all the tired travellers had to do was what comes naturally after a long and exhausting flight: yawn.