Advertising Makes You Buy Things You Dont Want or Need

Company / Organisation | Executive Summary of Marketing Campaign | Wants or Needs? | Figure No’s:| Result| Reference| Halifax – ‘Taking on the high street banks by communicating like a high street retailer’. | Halifax transformed from ‘being a building society’ to an aggressive competitor of the big four banks in just 12 months. Halifax believed that focusing their company as a ‘human’ organisation was a powerful platform. From this they combined ‘human’ and ‘value’ as key points. They branded their service as ‘Extra Value.
Extra Friendly’. | No one wanted to use Halifax’s current accounts as they weren’t a recognised bank, and seemed risky for consumers to invest in. What Halifax bank had to offer wasn’t actually that much better than any of the other major banks. | | * 150% increase in Sales * 43% increase in profit per current account customer| Marco Rimmi, Advertising Works 12, (World Advertising Research Centre, Oxfordshire, 2003)| Skoda – ‘It’s a Skoda. Honest’: the profitable return on brave communication. ‘Skoda Jokes’ were so entwined in British Culture that, despite the brands acquisition by VW in 1992, radical product improvements had continued to fall on deaf ears. In other words people were aware of the improvements and consequently didn’t buy. The repositioning that accompanied the launch of the Fabia in March 2000 challenged Skoda’s prejudice. | We can eliminate most variables that would give consumers a reason to buy the car – meaning that it was advertising that made people buy the car (not other factors). * Price: ‘Byers’ report, showed a sharp deflation in the car market price.
Skoda were an exception – the average price for a Skoda was 60% higher than 97. * Distribution: No changes in numbers, share or quality. * Fleet Marketing: * Product:| | * 64% increase in Sales * The marketing expenditure was ? 14m, and it was estimated to have returned ? 37m of profits. | Marco Rimmi, Advertising Works 12, (World Advertising Research Centre, Oxfordshire, 2003)| Bakers Complete – ‘From underdog to top dog’| As a complete dry dog Food specialist, Bakers strategy was to steal market share from ‘canned dog foods’.

In 1995 Bakers complete was relaunched with revised packaging, a revised formula and a new communication campaign. The target was housewives aged 25 -45, with children. The agency built on the emotional nature of the owner/dog relationship. The agency targeted ‘best friend’ with a campaign based on Pippin the brand ‘spokesdog’. | Research showed that many Dog owners actually felt that dry dog food was not as good as canned meat. Despite this sales actually rose (successful advertising).
Not only were Bakers complete competing against canned food business’s but Dry Dog food producers too. So nobody ‘needed’ to buy Bakers food because they had many alternative buys. | | * 62. 5% increase in sales value * Sales Doubled after Two Years. The brand had continued to show strong growth ever since. | Marco Rimmi, Advertising Works 12, (World Advertising Research Centre, Oxfordshire, 2003)| Benadryl – ‘How the soft sell sold harder’ | At the launch, allergy brand Benadryl had the product advantage of being fast acting then its competitors.
Advertising was developed to explain this advantage. After a successful launch the brand suddenly started to decline and growth was negative. Competitors had come into the market with competitive speed claims and similar creative treatments. The decision was taken to launch a variant with a completely different creative treatment. The advertising idea was to ‘criminalise’ the causes of hayfever. | Obviously people who suffer from Hayfever Need treatment to control or prevent the symptoms.
However nobody needed or necessarily wanted to buy Benadryl once other businesses began to sell the same product. As there was no product advantage in the market Benadryl’s success was down to their successful marketing campaign. | | * Both tracking data and qualitative data point to the level of consumer involvement in the tone of the advertising or driving the successful sales results * For every ? 1 spent, there was ? 4. 8 in sales returned| Marco Rimmi, Advertising Works 12, (World Advertising Research Centre, Oxfordshire, 2003)| | | | | * | |