JWT’s AnxietyIndex is designed as a place to discuss how brands and consumers are responding to the global recession. With daily content updates, AnxietyIndex.com includes contributions from around JWT’s network, offering a truly global perspective.
A sore throat and high fever were never so much a cause for concern as they are now, thanks to the swine flu pandemic. Each day, the Indian media report new deaths caused by the flu. And each day, the media also reports precautions and the names of hospitals one must go to if experiencing certain symptoms. There is a lot of panic, especially in households where a family member has come down with an infection that may or may not be swine flu. The only hospitals that currently test and treat potential swine flu patients are government-run, notorious for their poor infrastructure and slow service.
The players that seem to be profiting from this whole malady are pharma companies (those given the go-ahead to make Tamiflu) and manufacturers of face masks and hand sanitizers, which are selling their wares at a premium. Some manufacturers of surface cleaning liquids and tissues also seem to be doing well.
One supermarket in Mumbai had a swift response to the health advisory to keep hands clean, filling a wall near the store’s entrance with antiseptic liquid hand wash. The product is normally found deep in the store’s interior, while the front space is typically reserved for soft drinks, chocolates and large packs with special deals.
What other small yet timely and meaningful actions can brands support or initiate? How can they further help customers take positive preventive steps in the face of anxiety? This is a unique space for FMCG brands and retailers in particular, which can be vital channels for small, positive actions that can help consumers combat their anxiety.
Last month, we noted that Sears Holding Corp. had opened a “Christmas Lane” online shop at Sears.com and Kmart.com in a bid to get some early holiday dollars out of consumers. Now the company has launched a Christmas Club Card for both stores: It’s a savings plan whereby shoppers put money into the card and receive a 3 percent reward (up to $100), based on the balance on Nov. 14.
Not surprisingly, a survey commissioned by Sears Holding Corp. found that a majority of American consumers (58 percent) say they are more concerned than last year about how to pay for their holiday shopping and that they are planning to do things differently this year when it comes to holiday shopping (72 percent); of these, 57 percent plan to spend less on gifts, 53 percent intend to shop at more affordable stores and 49 percent say they will plan and set a shopping budget ahead of time.
The card seems like a good way to assuage the anxiety revealed in this survey and lock participants into a certain amount of shopping at Sears-owned stores. It also puts the retailer into a hand-holding role, helping consumers navigate the recession. As with layaway—a program that Sears revived last year and that Kmart started promoting more heavily—it harks back to the days when institutions helped shoppers budget (at one time, banks offered Christmas Club Cards in which customers could invest a portion of their paycheck).
Earlier this month, Best Buy accidentally put a $3,999 52-inch TV for sale on its Web site for $9.99. Oops! By midday, a Best Buy rep had posted an apology, calling the glitch an embarrassing error; the offer was canceled, and customers who’d bought the bargain TV got their money back. By contrast, in a similar incident last June, Dell Taiwan also refused to fill orders after a pricing glitch, but those who’d attempted to take advantage of it were compensated with discount coupons.
By brushing off the mistake, Best Buy missed an opportunity to spin an error into a brand-building activity, at a time when the company faces tough competition from online rivals and consumers are putting off big-ticket purchase. In his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson argues for the rise of free as a business model—the model is based on cross-subsidy, with consumers encouraged to pay for a product via give-aways (e.g., a free video game with the purchase of a gaming system). While it may have been impossible for Best Buy to ship thousands of TVs for $9.99, the company could have compensated shoppers in a way that played off the radical price while creating an incentive to encourage people to buy something else.
A new HSBC commercial, “Pangea,” developed by JWT Mexico and JWT Brazil, is at once a metaphor for the world and a strong brand proposal at a time of crisis.
Today’s world is a new form of pangea (”a hypothetical continent including all the landmass of the earth prior to the Triassic period”): Globalization made the world become one, and the crisis makes this very clear, in that it’s happening everywhere, and everyone can relate to it.
Pangea is also a clear statement of overcoming: being together as a way to strengthen, to face adversity and to feel safe. The message carries a deep understanding that in hard times a basic instinct of bonding emerges: “There are times when it is better to stay together. More than a hundred million customers all over the world know it. That’s why they are all in the same place. Diversity is our strength.”
Pangea is both the problem and the solution. HSBC offers this powerful message to dramatize its brand values of strength and diversity on a global scale. Big brands need strong ideas to make a crisis become an opportunity.
In a recent promotion for summer drinks, McDonald’s in China turned a simple buy-one-get-one-free offer into a resonant campaign that enhanced the value of the brand rather than take away from it (see commercial here). This was done by laddering the promotion to a higher-order benefit: quality time spent face-to-face with friends.
The campaign leveraged the insight that youth tend to spend more time online than socializing with friends outside the home. Hence the strategy was to encourage youth to meet their closest friends more often, at McDonald’s. The creative idea is that even though one may have hundreds of friends online, only a few of those are close buddies, and more time should be spent with them offline.
As we noted in our first issue of the AnxietyIndex Quarterly, “The Genericizing of Brands,” price and value messaging must be approached in a branded way. When offering consumers more value, smart advertisers make sure the offer works harder than a promotion, something that McDonald’s has pulled off with this campaign.
The U.S. government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program, which ends today, was a bona fide hit. The program encouraged Americans to trade in their gas-guzzling and un-ecological clunkers for thousands off the price of a brand new (and much more economic) vehicle. If you believe the press, this has been enough to turn Detroit around. In fact, GM and Ford just announced additional factory shifts to keep up with the demand this program has stimulated.
This got me thinking—what else could consumers, government and industry do to re-engineer America’s aging private infrastructure? How about replacing the millions of leaky roofs across America, for a start? Or trading in the legions of inefficient air conditioners and boilers for energy-efficient models? Let’s not forget the broken-down BBQ that’s in every second backyard; they could use some love too. While we’re at it, maybe we should target the nation’s energy-hungry washing machines and dryers, or even the stock of aging pool filters.
Come to think of it, why stop at things that are broken or neglected? How about a program to get everyone to install water filters and rainwater tanks in their homes?
Before year’s end, we could probably renew most of what’s broken and inefficient in our lives and put many thousands of trades-people back to work. But most important, this could accomplish the seemingly impossible: getting millions of Americans back into the habit of shopping.
Volkswagen UK is the latest marketer to take the glass-half-full approach to the recession, turning a commercial for its Passat into a campy musical number. In the number (er, TV spot), a newly unemployed, down-on-his-luck gent sings about “Positive Thinking” as he confronts news of plummeting stocks, empty storefronts, everything-must-go sales and the like.
The end line arrives after the protagonist hops in his Passat and drives away: “One thing you can be sure of.”
In a world of uncertainty, people want some certainty. VW taps into that truth subtly and smartly. On the Web site, the Passat is described as “a car you can depend on,” its details “reassuring reliable.” These aren’t normally the sexiest descriptors, but then, these aren’t normal times.
A major campaign is promoting the notion that higher consumption can help to overcome the recession—and many Slovaks are buying it. Developed by the Club of Slovak Advertising Agencies, the Art Directors Club, the Association of Media Agencies and others, “Fighters Against the Recession” is a non-commercial campaign aimed at spurring the Slovakian economy.
Appearing on the Web, social media networks (like Facebook), and TV, as well as print, the ads feature ordinary people buying goods from different product categories. The message: consumption (not production) is driving the economy.
Not everyone is embracing this idea. Four agencies have in fact seceded from the Club of Slovak Advertising Agencies in protest. They argue that the campaign encourages redundant and uncontrolled consumption—precisely the source of the current economic crisis. They consider the campaign reckless and dangerous.
After more than a year of the economic recession, what connotation does “consumption” have? There has been considerable talk about shifts from “I” and consumer-oriented culture to “we” and family-oriented society. Has this change somehow been reversed? What lesson will we—consumers and companies alike—take from the recession?
For decades, the popular perception of diesel vehicles was decidedly unpopular: They were noisy, smoke-spewing polluters.
But in a new campaign, Audi is championing its TDI “clean diesel” engine, promising cars that are not only sporty and luxurious but also require fewer stops at the pump—a boon to both environmental- and budget-conscious consumers. (Diesel cars use up to 40 percent less fuel than traditional vehicles.)
Audi’s ads are slick but grounded in history; they don’t shirk diesel’s reputation, but rather redefine it. Even the campaign’s slogan, “Diesel: It’s no longer a dirty word,” nods to the fuel’s murky past.
Sales of clean-diesel cars have nearly doubled since 2000, and projections have them increasing threefold by 2015.
As consumers watch day-to-day expenses—but still prioritize cutting-edge technology and environmental conservation—Audi has adeptly tied its brand to a burgeoning movement.
Product placement, long a controversial yet accepted practice, is effectively a way for brands to “hack” an entertainment property. Thus far, most of this hacking has been relatively unobtrusive, infiltrating television or movies where there’s a natural fit in the story line.
But now the rules seem to be easing, with the recession making “everything at least discussable,” Peter Tortorici, the president of WPP Group’s Group M Entertainment, recently told The Boston Globe. The article went on to name some of the more blatant product placements from the past year, among them, the star turn vitaminwater took in one episode of the CW series Gossip Girl.
As long as the brand doesn’t detract from the show, it has the opportunity to positively place itself in the minds of the audience, even creating valuable moments that are directly tied with the brand. One classic example: When Gatorade couldn’t put its logo on the football field, it made sure its product was always on the sidelines in labeled coolers. Thus resulting in the iconic image of a cooler being dumped over the winning coach’s head, a crowd favorite.
A sore throat and high fever were never so much a cause for concern as they are now, thanks to the swine flu pandemic. Each day, the Indian media report new deaths caused by the flu. And each day, the media also reports precautions and the names of hospitals one must go to if experiencing certain symptoms. There is a lot of panic, especially in households where a family member has come down with an infection that may or may not be swine flu. The only hospitals that currently test and treat potential swine flu patients are government-run, notorious for their poor infrastructure and slow service.
Last month, we noted that Sears Holding Corp. had opened a “
