Luxury Marketing: Austere Times Call for Disarming Strategies

Even if the harsh realities of this year's economy have not touched us personally, we have not been unaffected by them.

As has been widely reported, the luxury market has taken a hammering. This year has seen a widespread climate of disapproval emerge in our culture. Mere ownership and display of luxury goods has become synonymous with an almost ostentatious flaunting, seen as reflecting a callous insensitivity to the hard times befalling so many others. There has been widespread rush to judgment, in much the same way that greets a Hummer on the roads albeit for different reasons; its existence has become an embodiment for a disregard for environmental concern..and almost a shameless pride in it.

One smart strategy is not to deny the criticism but to tackle it head-on. It is, after all, a hurdle that prevents people being comfortable buying, however much they might want (and secretly covet) the prize and long to own it.

Hats off to Porsche for adopting this approach. Anticipating criticism is captured elegantly in the headline with a tone that far from seeming defensive sounds pragmatic, evoking a feeling of being confidently prepared. An accomplishment in itself.



















The key to success? Leverage the equity that give luxury makers rooted in substance (rather than overly dependent on style) a powerful neutralizing effect: Performance.

Performance is that wonderful quality whose existence is inherently self-justifying. It represents tangible proof for what one has paid more. It is born of advanced engineering and design - noble characteristics indeed - which enables assertions to or inferences about privilege to be assiduously avoided. Porsche has even suggested that the efficiency dimension of performance represents greater environment responsibility, the idea of 'doing more with less'.

Arming the audience with ammunition in the form of knowledge serves to disarm the critics. This is the final part of this erudition -- recognition of what is so overlooked by marketers in cultivating people's relationships through brands: storytelling.


















Give people things that help them to tell their stories. If we can tell a story we have a claim to having a reason. An assertion to belonging. Storytelling is a basic human need, one that helps us feel connected to others and perhaps more importantly, to ourselves:

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives"

Reynolds Price

Lax grammar sends the opposite message

In LA this week, returning a rental car to the airport I passed a white truck. Its sides were emblazoned with the company's name, which was intended to describe the business it is in:










Nothing may seem wrong but something is seriously awry.

The company is in the business of transporting perishable items, one presumes for the restaurant or hotel trade, and perhaps even hospitals. Careless grammar, however, suggests that fragility and decay are what befall the logistics themselves that the company manages. Not likely to inspire much confidence in the service, needless to say.

The fix is simple: Perishables Logistics.

One imagines that the company has no idea it is sending the opposite message to the one it intends, all because it misses the letter 's'.

Message perfectly fits the medium: Part One

There is something inherently alternative about wildpostings. The term “guerrilla’ is applied to this medium after all.

So it made our OFD culture spotter smile to see this communication recently during the Olympics.

















It features a man hurling an incendiary device at some unknown destination, housed in what very much looks like a coke bottle. The sporting apparel he wears bears the Nike logo suggests he’s an athlete, one which resemblance discus throwing from a distance.

Nike is known for its guerrilla marketing at sports events whose sponsorship it is locked out of. But this must sure be parody, a brand hijacking one presumes.

Winner of the John Fenton Award for Audacious Marketing

OFD is proud to announce a new annual award that recognizes audacity in marketing practice.

Named after John Fenton, the legendary English salesman who is able to craft the most compelling pitch in the sale of the almost unthinkable (sand to Arabs, ice to Eskimos) the 2008 award goes to Red Envelope.

What garnered the 2008 accolade is its promotion of love notes embossed on collar stays, those thin rectangular, removable strips that fit in the underside of shirt collars in order to keep them straight and firm.















It is a stroke of inspiration to identify this unused piece of real estate. It is a stroke of genius to create utility and value for space that overcomes the medium’s biggest challenge – it remains permanently out of sight.

Red Envelope does it by using the affection-expressive ritual of Valentines Day. This is a context in which the value in sharing personal sentiments is only heightened by being hidden from others. It succeeds in transforming what was a purely functional accessory into a medium of communication that carries meaning.

The spin that the salesmanship takes is an interesting one:

“Why settle for tucking love notes in his briefcase when you can deliver a message of love from much closer range?”

If it’s proximity one is going for, one wonders why Red Envelope does not also promote love notes on underwear. This would seem an ideal opportunity to create a line of merchandising targeting women: “I wish I was here” for example on a thong would give a girl a lift to wear all day. Women do after all intimately understand the psychology of wearing something no one else knows about: the entire lingerie category is grounded in this principle.

Our advice for Red Envelope: make the love notes customizable. This is the age of consumer sovereignty and personalization. The raciest of the pre-defined messages – ‘That tie will be useful’ - is really too tame in today’s age.

Advertising disabilities with darkness

Among other things, Mae West is famous for a shrewd observation: "It is better to be looked over than over-looked". She was commenting on the matter of women being the subject of unsolicited attention, but the context today might equally be marketing communications and a similar challenge to capture unsolicited attention.

It is the starting point of most agencies working on behalf of clients today to bring heightened attention to a specific cause. This is a time of marketing abundance and a barrage of communications daily that dulls the senses. It makes the first challenge the need to break through the barrier of indifference and be registered. If the advertiser is fortunate, the message will also be read and processed in its entirety rather than being partially processed and abandoned.

This is not to suggest that shock tactics are always a good idea and should be justified. It is merely to provide the perspective that it can be needed in order to gain traction in the first instance.

The campaign in question certainly does that. Which is better however: a less controversial approach that doesn't get noticed as much, or one that is polarizing and inspires greater involvement? The number of responses to the original article is a testament to the latter. There is a rubric in advertising that states that effective communications that engages, moves and persuades will never appeal to the everyone: an authentic point of view will by definition be polarizing. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty of which a principle OFDer was one author is an example: there are plenty of women who reject this vision and accessibility of beauty, but a core and zealous group that does not.

Like good art, good advertising will provoke a response, which inevitably will be favorable among some and unfavorable among others.

The above duly noted, the campaign does cross the line into poor taste in our view at OFD. Positioning disabilities as 'taking a person hostage' is true in a conceptual sense - but not compelling when expressed in a literal sense. Positioning any person as a victim is not a constructive way to frame the issue. Moreover, the dark overtones of this strategy are likely to alienate more that win people over. Top marks for creativity, but miss-applied in our book. A good idea to drop this approach and pursue another.

Bacon Marketing: sell the sizzle not the steak

What's true for cows is true for pigs.
A recent study by British scientists at Leeds University spent over 1000 hours exploring an extensive variety of permutations across the different elements that make up the humble bacon buttie (sandwich). The results found that texture and sound are just if not more important than taste and smell.

It suggests a corollary of the time-honored maxim for marketing beef: selling the 'sizzle' is more evocative and effective that the steak.

The research - sponsored by the Danish Bacon and Food Institute - has cracked the code on how to prepare the perfect bacon buttie:

Ideally, 0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise. The formula uses these values: N = force in newtons; fb is the function of the bacon type; fc is the function of the condiment or filling effect; Ts is the serving temperature; tc is cooking time; ta is the time taken to insert the condiment or filling; cm is the cooking method and C represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon.

For bacon lovers everywhere, the holy grail is:

N = C + {fb(cm) x fb(tc)} + fb(Ts) + fc x ta