Cineworld is the world’s second largest theatre chain behind AMC and globally just two films (Barbie and Oppenheimer) made more than a billion dollars in just 10 days this year. So the cinema industry remains a solid investment choice and Cineworld ought to have been a good investment. To boycott Cineworld was once an idea occurring to nobody.

Cineworld was founded in 1995 and by 2004 Cineworld was acquired by Blackstone private equity group for £120m. The following year, Cineworld acquired the UK and Ireland operations of French cinema company UGC (remember them?).  In December 2012, Cineworld bought the Picturehouse Cinema chain (no plans to boycott Cineworld at this point..).  In 2014, Cineworld completed the takeover of Cinema City International N.V. and from March 2015, the Greidinger family (who owned a controlling stake in Cinema City International) became the largest shareholders in the enlarged company too.  Mooky Greidinger joined the Cineworld board of directors as CEO, having previously been CEO of Cinema City International.  – Reference Wikipedia

Unfortunately the new leaders had a more aggressive risk-taking personality indicated by subsequent decision-making and the idea to boycott Cineworld probably should probably be linked back to this point.  In 2016, Cineworld acquired six cinemas from Empire Cinemas and in 2017, Cineworld bought Regal Cinemas for £2.7 billion! creating the world’s second largest cinema group.  It also allowed Cineworld access to the US market, the largest in the world (to boycott Cineworld for squeezing out the little guy can be one reason).  In 2019, Cineworld invested in a film production company and attempted to buy Cineplex Entertainment (Canada’s largest cinema chain) for approximately £1.7 billion (just two years after spending nearly £3billion for Regal Cinemas…).  – Reference Wikipedia

Well, this gave them £4billion of debt and when the COVID pandemic hit, they could no longer empty enough water from their boat to stop it from sinking.  That is tragic except that many people (figuratively) drowned and the Captain left his staff and passengers to drown whilst he was rescued (the senior management team negotiating an exit package worth up to £28 million according to a Financial Times report and Shares Magazine).  To boycott Cineworld for this reason seems justified.

But don’t worry everyone, the company said it will be ‘business as usual’ for the operating businesses and brands.  And Chairman Eric Foss released a statement saying “Cineworld is ready and fully able to succeed in this dynamic and constantly changing movie theatre industry,”  – CNN Business.

Isn’t that nice..

According to Shares Magazine; The group also expects the proposed restructuring to ‘transform’ the balance sheet with the release of existing £3.62 billion of indebtedness, the provision of £1.17 billion of new debt financing and execution of a rights offering to raise proceeds of £640 million.

Then the administrators will transfer all assets to wholly owned subsidiary Crown UK Holdco and a newly controlled entity of the lenders will have ownership of that subsidiary.

‘‘..the plan is to allow the business of the group to emerge from the Chapter 11 cases as a continued going concern, but it will not achieve a rescue of Cineworld Group plc itself,’ the company said.

How marvellous..  so the management in charge leave with £28 million, the company Cineworld does not stop trading and makes record profits (Barbie etc),  the lenders take ownership so they can use all trading profits to regain their loans at which point they’ll sell Cineworld to make even more money and small individuals investing their savings lose all.  You may think that reason enough to boycott Cineworld.  But isn’t boycotting a way to protest at how big money treats the public with contempt?  They expect you the public to carry on going to your nearest cinema rather than going a little further to a different cinema because they think you are stupid.  They want to steal from you and then think you will go back and hand them more money to sit in their cinemas.

To boycott Cineworld then seems more a question of are you as stupid as the big money people think you are?  Sitting in your allocated seat handing them money.  Or will you vote with your feet and choose any cinema other than Cineworld and Picturehouse to show them they can’t just make your cinema bankrupt so shareholders lose all their money yet keep the cinemas open so the banks and lenders get billions and think we’re stupid enough to just keep buying their tickets and popcorn…

Disclaimer:  Though we would love to see Cineworld have the negative publicity from taking legal action against a media publicity agency’s article about how they have been seen to treat customers and shareholders with contempt, the views and opinions of this article does not necessarily represent the views of YouCom Media Ltd and the boycott Cineworld message is raised as a question.

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, November 2023, London, ‘Boycott Cineworld.’

The post Boycott Cineworld appeared first on YouCom.

After all, what is so exciting about a new premises where competitive markets mean there’ll be a similar business nearby?

Why should a competitor’s customers go and see your new store?

Take a look at this next video of our brand ambassador Raquel Freestyle. Raquel performs for store openings and product launches with outstanding football trick skills to bring in the crowds.

YouTube Tag: @raquelfreestyle.

For some new store openings, hiring a celebrity such as Raquel Freestyle may not be viable.

Giveaways are traditionally newsworthy items for local media coverage or social media.  You could offer an opening day discount.  Or a free giveaway product.  These will help attract awareness of your event.

You should also make sure all the relevant store details are on the promotion so customers can easily find you.

Add to this good online listings for those searching for that new store. We recommend Google My Business of course, but additionally there are about 20 other online directories where you can list your new store address and which crucially index into Google’s first-page search results.

Zoom in to the above tweet to see we achieved 61 retweets for our own brand (click on it to go to Twitter).

You can see just how much engagement we’re able to generate for our clients and publishers by the use of AIDA, principally from a good photograph.

Anytime you can include a photograph, you should do it. Tweets with visual content get 150% more retweets, 18% more clicks, and 89% more favourites*.

SMM use of influencers are another way to promote a new store opening and they have even better understanding of the powerful effect from a good photograph.

YouCom Media runs a mystery shopper program of over 500 individuals, many of whom write successful blogs and offer influencer services.

It seems obvious but your brand should become involved in the local community to where you’re having the store opening.

There will be lots of local charities and members clubs, all of whom would like to partner for some publicity and all would welcome news of a new business that for example offers their members some sort of local discount.

Write to the local council and perhaps try to secure the services of the local mayor (after all you are providing employment for local people).

Write an editorial for the local newspaper. Take our advertising in the local newspapers.  Most importantly, ensure your business directory listings cover local search keywords.

The hashtag. This is useful for those of us who are getting a little older and need some memory assistance.

But jokes aside, we all need some memory help when we live in a world full of advertising noise. A Tweet with a hashtag is 55% more likely to be retweeted*.

Aim for an easy to use hashtag that is nice and short. Experiment with using humour.

A new bakers store opening for example could use #greatbuns or #hashbrowntag (we liked that one). Research to identify local hashtags that are trending now and see if yours can ‘surf that wave’.

Customised, relevant helium balloons are another great instant ‘awareness’ and ‘interest’ part of AIDA advertising when it comes to your store opening.

Brands can often treat their store opening like dipping a toe in the water but should instead view them as a diving board which could really launch a new store location.

A store opening can set the stage for not just your products or service but also the customer base that you’ll be able to build. You need something that can draw people’s attention for instant AIDA.

Someone like Raquel Freestyle attracts the younger audience to your brand despite many companies vying for their attention.

You should also think about placement before your store opening day to build that awareness.

The messaging you use will be of utmost importance and especially the colour and design used.  Contact us for your next store event.

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Glossary:

A.I.D.A – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action [Marketing model]

Data Source:

              * Alexandra Sheehan

Some images sourced from Pixabay incl. alexas_fotos & AirAdPromotions

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Jan 2022, London, ‘Store Opening.’

The post Store Opening appeared first on YouCom.

On platforms like Google Places / Google My Business (GMB), a virtual tour has a direct correlation to sales enquiries making it a ‘direct response’ mechanism.

If you’re a brand who wants more Google reviews per store location, you should start with uploading a (good) virtual tour video to each store’s GMB panel.

To illustrate what we mean, here are some great virtual tours (including the Pyramids), for those of you currently stuck at home or trying to entertain/educate children.

London UK. National Portrait Gallery Virtual Tour

Click on the above image for our links to their virtual tour cameras and walk around the first portrait gallery in the world (1856).

You’ll see English Kings from the Tudor period, from 1485 through the reign of Henry VIII to his successors. Examples of 17th century and 18th century England await you in two separate virtual tours. Queen Victoria’s reign is along a corridor flanked by amazing sculptures of marble heads depicting the portraits behind them. And the Weldon Gallery of King George IV up to the death of King William IV in 1837 with its eerie centrepiece of marble heads forms the final virtual tour.

N.B. move the mouse slowly because they’re ultra-responsive.

Madrid, Spain. Virtual Tour of Man

Click on the above image for our links to virtual tour videos of Man (the Museo Arqueologico Nacional) in Madrid, Spain. Another old museum (1867), MAN displays pieces from the Iberian Peninsula with smaller collections from Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt.

Different to the National Portrait Gallery of London, UK, this museum has created one single tour experience allowing you to walk through the entire museum (or use the scroll bar on the left to ‘jump’ to an exhibit of interest).

It is also advisable to move the mouse slowly for their virtual tour and look for the orange arrows to move ahead.

Paris, France. Virtual Tour of The Louvre

Click on the above image for our links to one of the oldest museums, officially opening in 1793 it was a former royal residence first built in approx. 1300AD.

You can see the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo just like 2.7million other visitors did in 2020. The entire collection is divided into eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; and the Decorative Arts.

This virtual tour is far less sensitive to navigation making it in our opinion more enjoyable to operate. A good example to brands wishing to offer a similar brand promoting customer experience.

New York, USA. Virtual Tour of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Click on the above image for our links to the 1870 fifth avenue collection of art and sculpture.

Unlike our other virtual tour examples, this American museum has created videos of the tours. The objective is the same; to give customers the experience of their services and products before visiting.

From that perspective brands could do likewise. However YouCom has monitored response rates from both versions and would steer brands towards the virtual tour style of the European museums.

These ‘videos’ give a good experience of; Neoclassical architecture; views over the Hudson river; and the fabled Temple of Dendur (15 BC) donated from Egypt to America in 1968.

Berlin, Germany. Virtual Tour of Museum Island

Click on the above image for our links to a series of Museums referred to as ‘Museum Island’. This has been collated by Google’s Arts and Culture project.

After clicking on the above image, click on the menu option ‘Explore’ and discover who was history’s most beautiful woman.

Click further on ‘What is Museum Island Berlin’ to see the many virtual tours. These include the beautiful baroque building of the Bode Museum, designed by Emperor Frederick III’s court architect Ernst von Ihne (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West only wish they could have a staircase and entrance hall as spectacular as this..).

Also incuding The Pergamon Museum that has the legendary Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Click on the white arrows of each virtual tour to move around (the mouse allows you to pan left and right but the arrows let you move forward).

Amsterdam, Holland Virtual Tour of The Rijksmuseum

Click on the above image for our links to The Rijksmuseum that houses many beautiful pieces by Vermeer as well as the famous Night Watch, painted by Rembrandt in 1642.

The Night Watch painting when viewed in-person mysteriously draws you in and the hand of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (dressed in black, with a red sash) appears to be 3D in what must be the first example of such techniques (you feel you could shake hands!).

Take their virtual tour to see if it has the same effect for you ‘on-screen’.

Giza, Egypt. Virtual Tour of The Pyramids

Click on the above image for our links to the most impressive museum of all. The last remaining ancient wonder of the world has been captured by Google with their Google Maps technology but the result really is a life experience.

When taking the tour, imagine how capturing just a little of what you feel viewing it could transform the awareness of your brand. Contact our Direct Response team to learn more.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

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Required reference:
YouCom Media News, Dec 2021, London, ‘Virtual Tour.’

The post Virtual Tour appeared first on YouCom.

A persona is a tool used by advertising media agencies like YouCom Media, to characterise customers into segments by creating a fictional person.  Brands will have approximately five personas created for them and then they or their agency can assess whether their website journey or other communications would be likely to meet that persona’s needs.

Personas need information.  ‘Jane Doe from I don’t know’ won’t be at all helpful to you.  Essential data for a persona includes: Name, gender, age, job title, location, dependants.  Expanded data sets will also include: Details about their job role, salary, education, family, goals, values, fears.  Example: Jane Collins, 40, Business Analyst, Manchester, single mum.

Of the five personas you create, there should be one that supersedes all others.  If that persona is satisfied, then the others are likely to be satisfied.

Each persona will reflect a different scenario.  This will help the brand ensure their website caters to people who seek information, or people who are a new customer seeking to purchase etc.

The primary persona and a secondary persona are the most likely to be the brand’s customer type.  They will drive the most revenue and therefore all communication channels need to be most suited to those personas.

The others are less common custom but which if the website is tailored to them could gain the brand additional revenue streams and can often help marketing managers / agencies to think outside the box.

To begin it is best to start with ‘some’ data.  Run your website analytics tool and see which ‘locations’ your visitors came from.  What keywords did they use to find the site?  How many pages did they look at before they left your site?  This is key strong data for creating personas.

The early persona profiling can also gain good insight from social media listening to find out what potential customers are saying about your brand online.  As well as customer surveys, to hear from the customers themselves about their values and fears, key decision-making drivers.

The agency and marketing manager can design personas quite well, but why not gather a wider team.  Announce what you’re doing and ask for one volunteer from marketing, customer service, R&D, HR and others.  Anyone who interacts with customers and customer data should be involved in sharing their perspective on what makes your customer personas.

Using those key personas your team can then develop the factors that will achieve success, perceived barriers, decision-making criteria and their buyer journey for each segment.  The brands user experience team and website developers will take over from there.

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Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Nov 2019, London, ‘Personas Success.’

The post Personas Success appeared first on YouCom.

Or do you run a slow long campaign (a ‘drip’ strategy) where your advertising is going out less frequently but for longer?

Certainly, a new brand or new product, a re-launched brand/product, or a new concept, something outside the status quo, will need a high frequency burst campaign to reach the most amount of people and get sales up to recoup investment plus build market share.

A brand already well positioned with their target audience only needs relatively low levels of awareness to reinforce the brand (PG Tips is a good example).

The drip strategy is good for firms with less seasonality such as staple food brands like Birds Eye Peas or Jacket Potatoes.  The all-year-rounder brand.  While, as discussed, technology will suit a burst campaign because it looks to recruit as many new users as possible before it’s either replaced or ‘benchmarked’ (ideas stolen & copied) by competitors.

So, whereas a traditional app download campaign works cost-effectively for established brands, new app ideas require a burst of activity to create a large number of downloads, fast.

,

This burst approach builds the user-base, but also impacts on the app rank in the download charts. Gaining that top spot in the download charts will lead to organic downloads of their own.

This is similar to how we use PPC to boost SEO.  We prefer SEO (it costs us a lot less money!) but PPC is needed to get the brand reach.  Some apps will require a burst campaign that is scheduled with events and the seasonality of certain categories.

Therefore, if you have a Daddy Christmas app, it’s no good paying for drip marketing in July.  It would have greater ROI if advertised on the lead up to Christmas.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) as one more channel in the marketing mix can work with burst marketing strategies but it does perform rather well with drip marketing.  You can schedule social media posts in advance and specify the frequency.

Many brands also use the drip strategies to close a sale.  For instance, the shopping carts online that get abandoned can be followed up with drip messaging.

Persistent burst follow-up messaging will deter the sale, but drip marketing offers the ability to remain in the buyer’s mind and prompt a call-to-buy action, without risking the relationship.

There is a third strategy less well known.  This is known as pulsing.

Pulsing combines the two strategies of drip and burst.  This spreads advertising out over a period with some days on and some days off.

So instead of a burst of advertising, or a regular low-level frequency of advertising, there is a small burst and then an absence, then a small burst again.

As expected it can be quite expensive.  However, when run in sync with good modelling it can result in better ROI.  For instance, say you have a radio campaign that generates post-campaign sales for the next three weeks.  Should you have had a burst campaign planned, you would now move to a pulse strategy of repeating the campaign every three weeks.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

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Glossary:

SMM – Social Media Marketing

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Oct 2019, London, ‘Drip or Burst?’

The post Drip or Burst? appeared first on YouCom.

Marks & Spencer’s once had a property portfolio of £1.2bn where 96 percent were freehold assets.  Inevitably when a new CEO takes over and seeks a quick fix to problems of poor sales, they consider selling assets, so it was no surprise when in 2016 M&S sold 76 stores to a private equity firm for half a billion pounds.

However, a clear example where such brands are not just focused on retail marketing but also property marketing.

Each brand location is therefore a long-term financial commitment that will either become a balance sheet asset or liability.

Store location is however, an important part of the marketing mix.  New store openings often assigned to the brand’s marketing agency to build PR around and ultimately increase footfall to a self-sustainable level to recover investment.  But everything begins with brand location assessment.

Each brand has its own factors on a check list developed over time spent understanding their business.  Trade area mapping is performed to assess demand.  A good agency will employ mathematical modelling techniques, multiple regression analysis and spatial interaction models.

Basic checklist factoring can be used in nearly all cases without such assistance however.

Brand location checklist factors often already used by media agencies include: Local population size for customer base; Age profile; household size of local populace; income levels; disposable income; home ownership levels; life-style measures; cultural and ethnic groupings (are they more disposed to your brand or less?); general economic stability; occupation classifications; ‘Pedestrian flow’; Pedestrian entry routes to the location; What is the public transport like?  What types of public transport are there?

Other factors include; Car ownership levels in the area and in the increased store radius that car travel facilitates; Will the location allow for your own parking?  If you build a carpark on the location, will the reduced square footage of land used for the store recover the investment for the land effectively ‘lost’ to parking cars? ‘Signage’, what is the visibility like for that brand location?

And now the interesting part of retail location marketing – What are the competitors doing in that area?  Are there anchor stores?  Is there cumulative attraction? What turnover do you estimate gaining and how long before you break-even?  What is the saturation index?

Other aspects include cost control; How does the purchase price compare to your plans? What are the leasing terms? Are there any building restrictions? Have the building costs been factored into the break-even analysis? What does your marketing agency plan for building your footfall up from zero to the required annual amount the brand needs to meet investment targets?

As you can see, there are many factors on a brand’s checklist that make expansion less than straight-forward.  It’s important that all business partners are aligned and not just specialists in their niche field.

An agency aware of what’s involved with brand location analysis will understand how they fit into the overall picture.

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Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Sept 2019, London, ‘Brand Location.’

The post Brand Location appeared first on YouCom.

Yarn Bombing is one form of Guerrilla Marketing. In short it is where pre-crocheted squares or other large segments of material are suddenly sewn together with a few quick inter-linking stitches to form a colourful change of an ordinary everyday outdoor object (shown above a tree).

Guerrilla marketing uses a series of techniques to establish direct contact with customers. If the goal is to create an emotional reaction in potential customers (which it is) then Yarn Bombing ticks all the boxes.

The ultimate goal of advertising is to get others to remember products, services or brands in a different way than they are accustomed to (because that cuts through the advertising noise). Yarn Bombing such as that shown outside the museum of Comic Art in Frankfurt, Germany on a previously unambiguous sculpture of a moose*, certainly achieves memorability.

In 2013 Toyota commissioned the Yarn Bombing group known as Knit the City to create an outdoor advertising and guerrilla marketing piece.  As Toyota are the sixth largest company in the world (by revenue as of late 2018), Yarn Bombing is no longer the province of ‘risk-taking young brands’ but should be considered by all marketing managers.

Knit the City is a group of “graffiti knitting and crochet” street artists founded in London, UK in 2009 and consist of four members known as Deadly Knitshade, The Fastener, Shorn-a the Dead and Lady Loop (which we think is fantastically funny and suits the light-heartedness of this medium).

Miller Lite are another international brand known to have used Yarn Bombing in their marketing campaigns.

Above the Jan Karski bench in New York, USA is a yarn bombing piece that achieved notoriety (though we presume Jan Karski or anyone else wasn’t sitting there at the time of the yarn bombing..).

Yarn Bombing has spread worldwide showing wide-spread appeal which means it becomes a useful platform for a clever brand and one can imagine the above installation** in Alicante, Spain depicting Pepsi for instance (Pepsi being said to be seen as more young and edgy than Coca-Cola).

When you consider that some yarn bombing installations don’t last more than a few hours (once can imagine the owner of the car in Alicante removed it before he/she went to work in the morning), its obvious careful planning is required.

YouCom Media plan and execute advertising strategies based on meticulous planning and focus group testing ensuring your brand is croch(yay) rather than (k)not.

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Data source:

* By Superbass – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

** By Joanbanjo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Aug 2019, London, ‘Yarn Bombing.’

The post Yarn Bombing appeared first on YouCom.

Sales promotion is a ‘below-the-line’ activity used with customers, distributors and suppliers as well as with the company’s own staff/salesforce.

Promotions can be used for both services and products in consumer and business-to-business markets.  The UK promotion marketing industry grew by an average 10 percent per year in recent times.

The main categories are;

• Consumer: gifts, giveaways, prizes, point-of-sale items, competitions, tokens, gift cards, free products (buy 9 coffees, get the 10^th free).
• Trade Promotions: point-of-sale, special terms of business, free pens/diaries etc, competitions, free products for their sales force to sell more of your products or promote them more
• Salesforce: Incentives, motivational programs etc

Consumer sales promotions mostly affect the latter stages of the buying process (competitions, point-of-sale, free gifts, coupons, free samples, display promotions).  These types of promotion marketing triggers action such as purchase or increased brand use/loyalty.

Opposite to promotions, advertising tends to affect the early stages of the buying process like awareness, interest and desire to buy a particular brand.

So, of the A.I.D.A. marketing model;

Advertising = Awareness, Interest & Desire (AID)

Promotion = Action (A)

A good marketing strategy will integrate promotions into other marketing communication tools, such as packaging, point-of-sale, merchandising, sponsorship, PR, advertising and sales.  Those promotions supported by media will do better than those without support.

Even a great sales promotion will fail if nobody knows about it…

Some promotions add value to the image of the product.  Those promotions have a free gift that is somehow related to the properties of the brand.

Franchise building promotions are the opposite to pricing or discount promotions which dilute the brand value.  Franchise promotions build brand loyalty against competitors.

Discount promotions build short-term sales but risk losing customers to rivals if their pricing beats yours i.e. low loyalty value.

The objectives of a good promotion marketing will be to;

• Increase sales by rewarding customers; engage customers into loyalty schemes where they have to collect points and so are less likely to switch to a competitor; increase repurchase rates; trigger an impulse purchase from new customers; introduce a new product line; achieve brand repositioning; or remove seasonality from previously seasonal products.
• Create new sales leads
• Move slow moving or excess stock
• Block a competitor (if a brand offers good promotions at a time when they know a rival needs to shift stock they will cause a stock pile-up and damage their rival
• Build a database of customer information for future direct mail activity.

There is much more to promotional marketing which we will continue with in future news articles.  Key points to remember are that sales promotions can be used for short-term sales objectives to shift stock etc or to build longer-term loyalty such as the Tesco reward card.

But all agree that promotions must integrate into the other elements of the marketing mix.  Speak with your Account Services team for more information.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

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Glossary:

A.I.D.A. – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, July 2019, London, ‘Promotion Marketing.’

The post Promotion Marketing appeared first on YouCom.

To overcome this, brands have been using social media to pull consumers toward their products. But when it comes to trust, many people prefer to turn to their friends rather than communicate with brands.

This presents a challenge for brands because they do not control the sentiment being expressed online which will then be used by consumers to make purchasing decisions.

When consumers give their opinion on a brand or past purchasing decision by leaving a review, we see a demonstration of the power of the crowd. Enabled by technology and information overload, consumers can decide how engaged they want to be across the different points on their path to purchase.

This has changed the traditional customer journey and helped to create a cycle where one consumer’s experience feeds into another consumer’s decision process for whether to buy a product or a service. Review marketing then becomes quite important to a brand.

Quantity of online reviews is another important aspect of review marketing. Most consumers need to read on average four reviews, but this number can extend to 20 depending on the customer type (demographics etc).

As well as quantity, the quality of the feedback is a major element to review marketing.  Some consumers will simply write “Great!” or write nothing at all and simply leave a star rating.  That is a waste because a positive review has no keywords and a negative review doesn’t explain to other customers why your brand was rated so badly.

The way to gain high-quality reviews is simply to increase the quantity (numbers will win out).

The initial enquiry stage of the customer life cycle is now dependent on how brands manage online sentiment in order to progress to become a lead and ultimately a customer (review marketing).

This is the power of the online review and why every brand needs a review strategy. Our Direct Response team manage business directory advertising (think Yelp) which is heavily review focused.  They are specialists in review marketing. It is no longer acceptable to only push brand messaging to consumers via above-the-line advertising. The age of the 5 gold stars review is here.

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Data source:

Deloitte Consumer Review

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Dec 2018, London, ‘Review Marketing.’

The post Review Marketing appeared first on YouCom.

Brand association is also achievable with packaging design.  The square foil wrappers of Durex condoms for example make you associate the packaging with sex.

When the retail shelf is full of similar products, packaging can connect to other strong drivers for the purchasing decision achieving more by association than an above the line advertising campaign alone.

Good packaging can create competitive advantage by emphasising the brand, the brand’s USP’s, or increasing the life of the product.

In terms of advertising reach, the packaging of a brand will penetrate into the consumer’s home and remain in the consciousness for however long until it’s consumed or completes its lifecycle.

Packaging must actually cover several areas of the advertising communication function.  It has to focus heavily on A.I.D.A. by gaining the attention of the consumer in an often crowded environment with other similar products vying to be seen and bought.

Packaging must also then persuade the consumer that it’s advertising will match the contents (effectively explaining why it should be picked up and purchased).

Some brands struggle with this concept and opt for a nice easy transparent window where the consumer can see the contents.

Of course brands can also find that difficult which is why when you think about it, the stickers on the transparent packet of meat in the supermarket (sirloin steaks for example) is always covering the less attractive area of the meat (a strip of fat or gristle for example).

Packaging can connect other benefits to the brand product such as recipes for its use.  They form a reason to buy that product over similar.

Another aspect to incorporate (just when brands thought it was challenging enough to communicate their messaging on such a tiny space), is the ever-increasing demand for information from the modern consumer linked as it is with regulations from government (nutritional information, health warnings, source of origin, full ingredients etc).

Packaging must also say whether it is recyclable and how.  Packaging design can create the USP necessary to gain mass awareness similar to advertising, by improving functionality.

For example don’t packets of tea still contain tea dust..?  Packs of sugar still leak, well, sugar..?

Think of that bottle of olive oil that drips down the side of the bottle after pouring..?  Imagine how many units that first manufacturer sold who created the packaging of a second lip inside the bottle which eradicates drips?

Coca-Cola designed their glass bottle in such a way that it is instantly recognisable, even in the dark.  With the sense of touch alone, we can distinguish a bottle of coke.

Some of their adverts don’t even say anything, they just show a bottle.  The advertising is just showing you what the packaging looks like (quite amusing).  Certainly on the shelf then that image is easily seen.

Packaging has to keep its contents safe.  Consumers don’t want to get home with chocolates for a loved one that are all jumbled up or melted.

So, you need a careful box with hollows for each chocolate’s shape.  The Happy Egg company has to keep the eggs from being broken long before they can advertise why their eggs are happy and the competitors aren’t.

Once that is mastered, packaging can get down to the job of communicating brand messaging.  While packaging often has no home in the media budget, if you don’t ask your agency to produce effective packaging communications, you will waste millions of budget on above-the-line advertising just to get the same level of sales.

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Glossary:

USP – Unique Selling Point

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Nov 2018, London, ‘Packaging Sex.’

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