Month: February 2014

Hats off to Sony and the team at DraftFCB for this amazing piece of marketing you can see in the video below.

This is the amazing sort of marketing innovation which draws eyes and product recognition.

There are two things that really make this work

1. The placement of the product is being put right in front of the consumers that are more than likely going to purchase it, in a location where many of their consumers actually interact to buy drinks.
2. Packaged in a very innovative manner that not only draws the eyes and piques the interest of the consumer, but also demonstrates the prime functionality and differentiator of what this gadget can do over others.

You might look at this and say, “This is amazing, but it must have cost a fortune, and only a company like Sony could do this!”, and yes I would agree, but innovation and eye catching marketing need not be expensive, it just needs to be creative and purposeful.

I harken back to the experience I had in my marketing days in Microsoft, when we were heading in to the launch of Windows 7. Even for a large organization such as that one, you still had to be frugal about your marketing expenses, and you always look for the biggest bang for buck. We did advertising and your standard things, which cost a lot of money, but it was the “scrappy” things we did that got the recall we were looking for.

There were two things we did, which when I look back, its with fond memories…

Fast Windows, Fast Cars

This was a fairly simple thing we did to align with the research we had done with our user audience, and trying to understand what was more important to our customers in our region of Singapore. While worldwide the message around Windows 7 was on simplicity, we understood that the majority of the Singapore audience saw value in the speed of the operating system even more.

As a fun way to drive recognition and drive connection between speed and Windows 7, we created some large magnets branded Windows 7 with an associated fast message, and asked some of our luckier colleagues with a passion for performance vehicles to take a drive around some of the more busier areas in a cavalcade type parade.  They didn’t speed, or do anything stupid either, and this wasn’t 100s of cars, it was about 10 or so, but the imagery was priceless, and it picked up some great press. For us that was better publicity than any advertising could buy.

Taking it to the streets

The other thing we did, was instead of trying to get customers in to showrooms and IT stores to see Windows 7, we decided to take Windows 7 to the masses. In order to this we worked with a number of our awesome OEM partners at that time to loan us some of their launch machines around Windows 7 and we had some t-shirts made for staff, and sent them out on to Orchard Road in Singapore (this is probably the busiest consumer location in Singapore) to demonstrate Windows 7 live.

This gave us a great opportunity to show people Windows 7 in action to people on the go, we got to wow them with the features, and then asked them to take a picture with the laptop and a Windows 7 sign. It was immense fun, and got a lot of interest.

The Important of Staff Participation in Marketing

The big lesson I got from these types of activities is that the execution of these sorts of “scrappy” campaigns, is that your colleagues love to participate. As marketers we seem a little too close to the coal face in terms of execution and sometimes forget that some of the things we do are actually fun, and people want to support it. So if you can come up with activities that can use additional hands you sometimes don’t need to look further than your own company, they will be happy for the opportunity.

Marketing is fun, innovative and invites the opportunity to take risks, sometimes it doesn’t always pay off, but you learn, refine and get better at it. Then sometimes, you hit the mark, like Sony.