DID YOU EVER GET THE FEELING that something about your brand wasn't quite right? It may be time to align your channels or tweak your creative.
Case in point: Home Depot. The firm hoped its catalog would help “enhance, extend and expand” its brand imprint, said Linda Spellman, director of multichannel business for Home Depot, speaking last month at DMA06 in San Francisco.
Not surprisingly, many of the company's retail customers are male. The catalog was a way to go after the desirable affluent female marketplace.
The benefit of Home Depot's strong retail brand identity is that people know they can go to the store or Web site for a $100 table saw. But what many people don't realize is they also can go there to pick up a $1,300 sofa.
In 2004, the catalog debuted with a book featuring an automated paint roller on the cover, a product people typically would associate with the store. Toward the end of that year, Home Depot moved closer to the home furnishings niche it wanted to occupy with a cover depicting a kitchen setting.
The following year, the cover showed a family-oriented bathroom scene (complete with fuzzy bath mat and rubber ducky) and later in the year a fireplace setting was offered.
Then there's Gevalia, which had the same control for its direct mail for 11 years, according to Leona Lindner, marketing director for the Kraft Foods coffee brand.
The creative featured what Lindner jokingly called the “big honking premium,” a free coffeemaker. But as the super-premium coffee market became more competitive, the company realized it needed to make the brand promise “more relevant to the consumer.”
Gevalia knew the brand's attributes were its European heritage, smooth taste and high quality. The control had to be tweaked to highlight that, Lindner said.
The new creative took a “Try it, keep it” approach, with the former referring to the coffee and the latter to the coffeemaker. Photos of cups of coffee were prominently added to the mailing pieces to create an image of the product consumers would get. And a brown-and-gold color palette that seemed warm and rich was utilized in all advertising.
Finally, there's General Motors. When it needed to create a buzz for the Pontiac Solstice sports car and attract a younger, hipper audience, GM issued a limited edition of the first 1,000 vehicles off the assembly line, said Karen Ebben, the automaker's director of CRM modeling and program evaluation.
The car was featured on “The Apprentice,” and a 30-second spot was aired right after the boardroom segment on April 14, 2005. At 2 p.m. the next day, people could go to their dealership to try to buy one of the limited editions.
A Web site was set up where people could get a unique ID number to register for a vehicle. Some 41,000 signed up.
Web traffic was up 255% over normal, 1,500% for a Saturday. The first 1,000 cars were sold in 41 minutes.
