Devil's Advocate

The 50p-per-unit-of-alcohol Bill has hit the headlines this week, but if you follow this page you’ll know I’ve been opining for some time that anything less than £1 is unlikely to do any serious damage.

Then today I read about the guy getting attacked by a rattlesnake in a Walmart store.  Apparently the customer was trying to buy compost for his marijuana plants.

Maybe price isn’t the only available deterrent?  Perhaps if they want snake bite… give them snake bite?

You’ve probably heard of ‘The West Lothian Question’, but how about this one: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?”  It’s causing quite a stushie at the moment, since – as any marketer knows – it’s a leading question.

But it’s what the SNP proposes to ask the Scottish people in 2014.  A House of Commons Scottish Affairs Select Committee has noticed the semantic idiosyncrasy, and amusingly has produced a report entitled “Do you agree this is a biased question?”

The Scotsman newspaper has pre-tested different versions of the question, with the finding that as much as an 8% advantage (in favour of independence) can be achieved by crafty wording – potentially enough to swing the vote.

I can’t imagine any marketer worth their salt tolerating a leading question in a key piece of research.  All it does is store up problems that will come back to haunt the brand in future.  Surely no political party would want such a skeleton rattling in its closet?

As I sit eating my lunch in Tesco, logged on via Tesco wifi, reading a newspaper with a 4-page Tesco advertising overwap, I can’t help feeling this post is going to be about… well, Tesco?

Actually there’s a non-Tesco piece in the paper that most caught my eye – it reports a US research study that showed kids who could identify de-branded fast food ads were twice as likely to be overweight.  Advertising works?  Duh.

Somewhat outgunned, inside the paper is a rival Morrisons ad – a mere DPS.  Trumpeting its ‘Great Bargains for Great Britain’ it leads with a page devoted exclusively to Miller Genuine Draft (Milwaukee, USA) and Magners Irish Cider.  Let’s stop at ‘Great Bargains’, shall we?

But, back to Tesco.  Their big splash is all about the relaunched basics range – and sure enough the ‘Everyday Value’ banners and hanging boards have got me surrounded.  ‘Great quality, same low prices’.

You can’t argue with Tesco’s timing (don’t they say unemployment always lags a recession?), but I am surprised that, of the 70-odd products featured in the ads, none of them are priced.  Isn’t this missing a trick?  If they really are cheap (surely the core proposition?), potential new consumers might like to know.  Every little helps… but how little?

I noticed Tesco are advertising a free £30 gift card if you take out their pet insurance.  It being the deadly labradoodle’s renewal this month I thought I should compare premiums, excesses, exclusions, and whatnot.  Though it’s difficult to keep the will to live.

However, I was jolted into wakefulness by one rather astounding fact.  Buried deep in the labyrinthine tunnels of the website is the statement that the policy does not extend to wolves.  Doggone!  If that isn’t just the attention-getting, thought-provoking nugget for a howling great headline, I don’t know what is.

I once read that a third of the wolf’s natural diet is made up of elk dung (which explains a lot about my dog’s behaviour, given that wolf and dog are apparently 100% genetically identical).  I’ve spent many years trying to make insurance sound interesting (with little success), but I really think Tesco could be onto a winner.  They just need to re-jig their communication priorities.

The longer I work in marketing the more I’m convinced it’s a simple business.  For instance, at dawn when I open the shutters I can tell what lies in store for the pandas.  Today the sun was shining and the zoo – which is 25 yards away – besieged.  Ker-ching (a putative name for the eventual offspring of Tian Tian and Yang Guang?).

Conversely, not even all the A&P tea in China stands a chance when it finds itself pitted against a leaden sky.  Corstorphine is like a ghost town; the Weegies head for the mall.

Later in the gym I was watching telly with the sound off.  There was an item showing people panic-buying stamps.  Groan – if it’s not petrol it’s postage.  What basic levers shift consumer behaviour!

Pedalling furiously away, I was wondering what I might call a training session about keeping it simple: it’s easy to get sucked into complex communications these days, what with so many channels and touchpoints to cover off.

The answer came in the next piece, about the Royal Observatory.  I was just getting interested, when the voice-recognition subtitles obviously crashed in the face of a Scots accent and stated that Edinburgh astronomers are leading the field in “excess lollop planets”.  Perfect – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

This morning’s ban on the display of tobacco products in English supermarkets got me wondering whether the ‘T’ of CTN is destined to disappear. Surely hiding the goods is only one small step from giving up on selling them at all?

I know there’s a period of grace, but it makes you wonder if there’s any future for the humble corner store. I mean, it’s not as if the other two pillars (the ‘C’ and the ‘N’) are exactly on firm ground.

Between them, Brussels, the FSA and Ofcom are keeping up a relentless onslaught on HFSS foods, a category into which pretty much all confectionery falls (so that’s the ‘C’ surely doomed); meanwhile the Leveson Inquiry has gone beyond the call of duty to make sure we all know just how much poison the press peddles: the writing on the wall for ‘N’ for news?

So, while in the short term marketers watch with interest to see the expected negative impact of zero merchandising, maybe the long term will see a total collapse of the sector as the point of zero tolerance approaches.

As a copywriter I’m of the view that the best copy goes unnoticed; it’s like an invisible oil that lubricates the cogs of a proposition, and gets the reader to the idea as smoothly as possible.  The more jerks, jolts and bumps along the way, the more potential buyers fall off the sales wagon.  One such bump is the misplaced grocer’s apostrophe, known as such for its (not it’s) regular appearance in the High St, where it infiltrates the likes of apple’s, banana’s and carrot’s.

Personally, I find it quite endearing in such an environment – in a world of mass-produced POS materials, the honest grocer’s apostrophe surely adds something in authenticity.  It’s only when the marketer should know better, that I feel like getting out the Tipp-Ex I always carry with me.  As you can see from these pics, there’s plenty to get one’s teeth into.

I wonder if this is a peculiarly British preoccupation; only on these isles could there co-exist The Apostrophe Protection Society alongside the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe.

Thirty years ago, when I was an Area Sales Manager for Kimberly-Clark, the company launched a range of Kleenex cosmetic wipes.  In the salesforce we were really excited about these new products.  They promptly bombed, and when I moved into marketing I took with me this simple lesson: brand extensions are like members of a professional football team – you might get away with playing them out of position, but at your own peril try them in a different sport, like rugby or cricket.

Thirty years later, I see they’re having another go.  Given that people’s make up (no pun intended) can’t change – at least, not in under about a million years – I wonder what else has?  The only thing left, that I can think of, is the competition.  But I imagine they’ve got stronger and more entrenched.  Oh dear.  Stick to softening the blow?

I was standing waiting in the secure airside cattle-queue zone at the airport on Sunday when I noticed this sign.  It states, among other prohibitions: “No dogs except guide dogs and dogs travelling with passengers.”

The thing that concerned me was that the sign (notably the doggy-info-bit) was placed at about chest-height to a typical human.  Easy, therefore, for me to read – but what about the unaccompanied dogs at which it appears to be targeted?

Levels of canine literacy might well be on the up (I don’t know), but not so the height and thus the eye-level of the average dog, which I understand is closer to fourteen inches.

I was amused this week by the idea of the Bakers ad aimed directly at Emmerdale-watching couch potato canines, although it did make me wonder if this really were the optimum strategy.  One challenge marketers face is that they rarely number among the audience they aim to target.  As a loyal Bakers consumer myself, I would say that the packaging is a far more potent medium, especially bearing in mind that dogs are allowed to shop in chains such as Pets at Home.  Now we all know about the potency of pester power, and I think most humans will find their four-legged charges fairly persuasive once they get their teeth into a good offer.  Bakers make a rabbit-flavoured line – why not a free banded bunny to go with it?  I know my dog couldn’t resist.  (Even a dog-eared tennis ball would do the trick).  Yes – I think they’d be better off with a promotional marketing strategy.  Ads are for those cool cats.