Me and Nestle

My second venture into consumer champion land has left me feeling a little dejected, yet determined that my voice shall one day be heard.  This time, I wrote a carefully worded letter to Nestle, airing my ideas and feelings on Nestle's chocolate world.  They were mush less receptive than Cadbury, no cool brand stuff, certainly no free chocolate. 

They even said that they were going to send my correspondence back to me - oh, so my letter isn't even good enough to sit in their bins it seems! 

The second lot of Cadbury letters have been posted - this time with a focus on their Roses brand - I'll let you know how it all goes. 

This doesn't end here...

Retro brand action!

It's great to see Monster Munch - the ubiquitous packed lunch legend - is back on top retro form!  Bigger packs, vintage stylings!  I love all things vintage, but I think that when brands hark back to their 'good old days', they can really benefit from that past equity.  Consumer memory is a powerful thing and when brands evolve and are shaped by markets as they move into the modern age, they can develop different values and a different personality to the one they had in the beginning.  Allowing consumers to step back in time to how things used to be, not only credits them with intelligence, but gives the brand that dimension of being just as rich as a person - with values and personality which grows and evolves over time, which in turn gives the brand a sense of humanity, allowing consumers to be much more receptive to it. 

I know retro is a brand tool that is arguably being overused these days, but as each brand has a different nostaligic route and can benefit from such activity, is it really so bad? 

Me and Cadbury

I recently wrote a carefully worded letter to Cadbury to express my desire for them to research and develop a fruit only chocolate.  They've got Fruit & Nut and Whole Nut, but not just Fruit - an incredible oversight by the brand! (??) Anyway, I sent three letters and yesterday I received a reply!  Huzzah! They thanked me for my interesting letter and said that they had researched my idea in the past and gave some schpiel as to why this whole R&D process is so difficult for brands like themselves - obviously this was a generic letter, but it had my name on it, so I felt a little bit special at least.  They also enclosed lots of super cool brand information, which I shall carefully peruse at my leisure.  No chocolate though, damn, but a good effort nonetheless.  I might write Nestle some letters now.  Interestingly, I saw some posters the other day for Cranberry and Granola Dairy Milk - that's all down to me that is I reckon!

Where have all the opinions gone?

To properly critique a campaign, it's best to talk about why the campaign is effective / ineffective, what messages come across, if any, target audiences, brand positioning etc etc rather than just focus on personal preference. You can hate something, but it might be really effective at generating recall because of that. 

I was just reading this week's Campaign and Private View just seemed flooded with 'I like its' and 'I don't like its'.  Fair enough, but where's the real opinion? Where's the real meat to the argument?  I can't see that liking a campaign just because it makes you smile is an effective critique of it. 

Maybe I'm being overly harsh - Private View is just about views, not full-on campaign autopsy - but it just got me thinking that if people are writing on there, it would be better for them to have something weighty to say.  They're representatives of our industry after all 

Brand value and the pharmaceutical industry

Stephen King once said, "Values beyond the physical and functional ones contribute to the brand's personality".  With this in mind, we can understand why blind and named brand tests often turn out the way they do.  When audiences are presented with unnamed brands X and Y, they may regard them as equal.  But when X and Y are named, people may have a clear preference for brand X, for example.  This shows that brands are something over and above their functional features.

We can put this idea into the sphere of medicine.  When we consider brand names, like Prozac and its generic equivalent, Fluoxetine, it would be interesting to note how these fair in a doctor's surgery.  Everyone has heard of Prozac, there's a social proof around that brand, so in a named test, it's very likely that Prozac would be chosen over Fluoxetine.  However, what is interesting about applying this idea to medicine is whether people not only choose Prozac, but think that it works better than Fluoxetine?  They're the same physical drug, with the same medicinal properties, but how much would that brand name and its association have an affect on the perceived efficacy of the drug? If it does have an effect, that really shows the power that brands can have!

Idea of the day!

Yesterday I launched Heavenly's 'Idea of the day' board for the planning department.  Well, it's not so much a board, but a bit of paper stuck on the wall!  I was inspired by our creative team's ideas board and as our account management team are quite partial to sticking timelines and what not to their wall, I decided that the planning department was leaving their wall to waste.  I like how it'll get us motivated and it has become quite a focal point in the office.  What sort of nuggets of inspiration and motivation go on in your office?

Anyway, today's idea of the day is that Cadbury should launch a fruit chocolate.  They've got Whole Nut and Fruit and Nut, but not one that's just fruit, which is very frustrating for us nut haters!