Feeling 57 varieties

This was a consumer reaction to the Heinz Bean Amnesty campaign, quoted by Greg Nugent in his presentation at BOBT. 

His point (from my now rather hazy memory of the presentation) was that brands are fooling around with trivial ‘ideas’, like the beans amnesty, when there are real issues out there that are better, more worthwhile or would be more productive to be associated with.  Things like climate change, food miles & food labelling, waste in packaging, recycling etc.  That the future is about status of a different kind status - environmental credentials. 

I think that’s going to be tough.  For brands, trying to offer more than just a product, trying to find an idea that’s believable and ‘fits’, is not going to be easy, no matter how relevant, important or juicy the topic. 

The aol/discuss campaign would seem on the surface to be a great idea, that highlights important issues, aims to get people involved in the brand and plays to aol’s strengths in security online, especially parental concern. The campaign has been running since the start of 2006, has generated 83 ‘articles’ by 39 authors, in 14 categories on the aol/discuss site.  Yesterday I counted there were 4468 comments, total. The most in response to any one article was 740 comments (the article was “Is the internet a good or a bad thing”).  The average number of comments on an article is 54.  That doesn’t really seem a great response from a major advertising campaign. I’m sure the advertising has moved tracking measures on things like ‘aol is the leader in ensuring my children’s safety online’ and so on, but it’s hardly set the online community alight.

I was trying to work out why that was.  Maybe the site design is uninspiring, the layout is certainly clunky compared to a lot of message-boards, e.g. a similar board called willyoujoin us....

(note the reader recommend feature on the willyoutjoinus board, very web2.0)

...and I can’t help thinking that the aol/discuss format would’ve worked better as a true-blog rather than the message-board/blog hybrid that it is at the moment.  The newsnight blog just feels nicer to navigate than the aol/discuss pages.

 

So, though it's all very well saying brands should be getting on the issue bandwagon, that still leaves a mass of questions about how brands can do this in an engaging and credible way (and get results too).

Comments

[thunk]

I completely agree. all rather misinformed or contrived. The Heinz bean amnesty is a classic example of brand managers being so engrossed in their brands that they're completely unable to anticipate the "so what" reaction.

Pepsi's 'Zero/Max' campaign being a classic example of this too. no-one who doesn't work in marketing has a clue they're having a dig at Coke Zero!

to your other point though, i think this Ben & Jerry's ad is interesting,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfb5DeHDQfo

[Liz]

I was so busy being unimpressed with the Pepsi Max campaign that I totally failed to notice the dig at Coke Zero. Random sample of 6 suits here and none of them got it either. We all see it now though - such as it is.

I like the Ben and Jerry's ad. Not as much as their ice-cream though! Cherry Garcia...mmmm.

[Greg]

Sometimes when you look at some of the vertical brand extensions and wonder did they really ask the customers if they wanted it