Excess Baggage: An Insecurity Issue?
Why do promotion marketers tend to needlessly complicate perfectly simple ideas?
Is it a character disorder tracing to early environmental trauma? Perhaps our advertising roots leave us feeling insecure. Ad people take creative pride in “white space,” “less is more,” and “telegraphic.” We promotion people often gild those minimalist lilies in the name of creativity. Affixing profound-sounding monikers to our actions, we present them as “overlays” or “spins” or “visualizations” or the like. Does this bolster our self-perception of having more socially redeeming value than mere hucksters of the free offer? Who knows, but it’s fun to speculate.
Buckeye perfection . . . almost
Air Crisps had a simply great promotion idea: give free Coke to stimulate purchase of their salty snack brand. That is a near-perfect match to consumer usage, with potential to sell lots of packages. It is not the stuff, however, that wins creative awards. So let’s muck it up with a spin – how about “Forever Summer” as a creative theme? Let’s give it an overlay – how about a trip-to-Australia sweepstakes? Now we can integrate that information via a sunglasses graphic as package visualization, and we have a promotion worth writing home about. Bloody truth is, the specs are a stopper, but excess information unfocuses a crisp idea.
DOVE TALE
On the other hand, when your promotion is a tad frail, a little gilding might be a good idea – not all lilies arrive at peak perfection. The recent Dove Bar offering of a gold-encrusted travel savings book communicated via gold-brushed headline and a bullet announcing “Over $500 in savings!” seems unworthy of the plating. Aren’t consumers perceptive enough to know that serious savings are an unrealistic expectation from an investment in three ice cream bars? Won’t they be tempted to dismiss the offering as yet another in the flood of pseudo-savings books? In this circumstance a travel sweeps overlay might have added a modicum of acceptable value to the event.
AND THE WINNER IS. . .
Haagen-Dazs. For the past several months, the ice cream brand has packed a little passport under every lid. Consumers who mail in four of these passports receive a certificate for a free pint. A relevant promotion for heavy users (no pun intended), who account for the bulk (pun intended) of category sales. Oh, and, by the way, when these super-scoopers claim their free pint they are automatically entered into a little sweepstakes for a trip to somewhere indulgent (destination not particularly important). It’s a sweetener atop a solid offer, one that doesn’t melt down the message.
And that’s the truth.
