Playing Your Believes

Marketers can sometimes create a powerful influence over customers by taking advantage of their believes and practiced rituals.

So if I want to sell you a bottle of juice and convince you that it is good for your blood pressure, bones, aging skin, hair, and the bonus, it helps you lose weight! Then, this is how it gonna be:

• Give it a strange name, and preferably a name of something real, rare, and its benefits have never been scientifically proven. So try a fruit name from South America!
• It should be pricy; you know, scarce stuff cost!
• It should not be available everywhere. Choose only some big stores as your distribution outlets; or better yet, try phone and home visiting marketing techniques!
• Now the big trick! To convince people that a singe kind of unknown drink can virtually solve all their health problems, they better perceive it as some kind of medicine! So regardless of the fact that you are selling it as 100% natural juice, you better convince them that they need to take it in dosages. You know, small spoon before breakfast, and one after sleep, I mean before sleep! That would emphasis the image of a medicine, wouldn’t it?
• Give them an extended period of time to start noticing changes. Again, to start noticing!  Something like a month could be good! And hey, if it did not work, they must have done something wrong, maybe did not commit to the precise dosages or times of taking the medicine, I mean the juice!

p.s. this post is based on a true story!

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What were they thinking?

From my iPhone

This question is directed to the producers of the light snacks known as “Loozeen”. To the marketers of Western Bakeries Co. the subsidiary of the Saudi giant company “Almarai.” Seriously guys, what were you thinking choosing this image for your campaign? What is the brand message that you were trying to deliver?

The campaign has been launched a couple of days ago and it is meant to raise the awareness of the fact that “Loozeen” has added more stuffing into its products. You know, more cheese, more chocolate etc. The execution of the idea, assuming that there is an idea to begin with!, is one of the poorest campaign that I have ever seen in the Saudi market. And these are the reasons:

• There is no apparent relation between the campaign and the message they wanted to deliver. So you have more cheese in your snacks; how that is related to the homeless looking guy featured on your ads everywhere!!!
• Even if we forced ourselves to accept whatever message they were trying to deliver, the picture is poorly taken and has no appealing, no personality, no innovation, and no artistic touch.
• Now please explain this to me; this is a food related product, right? So why the picture is soooooooo disgusting? What kind of a mental association were they trying to leave on their customers’ minds? And how is that freaky looking homeless has been chosen to represent and carry a message of a food brand anyway?

What is really striking is that “Loozeen” has a quite good position in the market already. I can even go further and claim that they do not have a serious competitor in this particular category of the market. Moreover, their earliest campaign with the tagline of ‘have a snack … have Loozeen’ was so successful to the point that you would hear people say it whenever the idea of having a snack comes across their minds! That’s definitely a huge and extraordinary brand positioning success. So why ruining all that with this poorly executed campaign?

Finally, my ‘free spirit statement,’ although I have a brother-in-law working in Western Bakeries, he had not influenced this post in anyway possible, and I really hope that he will not get mad at me if he ever read this post 🙂

What do you think? And you could start by stating the first thing that came to your mind when you saw the ad picture?

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