Subject: Promoting "Passion Categories"

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 09:10:01 -0500

April 5, 2005 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
Branding: Promoting "Passion Categories"
Promotional Marketing: Riding the Tide
Direct Marketing: Bridging the Creative-Production Divide
TV: Nielsen Outlines '05 Monitoring Plans
TV: Auto Marketer Says, "Clean Up Your Clutter"
Multichannel: Lego Builds Brand Brick by Brick
Let's Get Personal

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This Week's Stories
Branding: Promoting "Passion Categories"
By Andrew Grossman
Victoria Lowell believes that selling lipstick is a lot like promoting television shows about dogs, diseases, or dieting.

The newly named senior vice president of marketing for three of Discovery Communications' cable networks says many of the ideas she employed at Procter & Gamble promoting Cover Girl Cosmetics are equally applicable to her portfolio of Animal Planet, FitTV, and Discovery Health: They all belong to "passion categories" in which the public feels an emotional bond with the products.

Lowell links cosmetics and certain niche TV channels with categories such as food, travel, cars, and fashion. Certain strategies work better for these types of products for which users carry a heavier association than "general entertainment" networks and commodity-type goods such as paper towels or gasoline.

"The key to networks is differentiation," she says. "Even if you look at consumer packaged goods, mascara is mascara is mascara. It can be very difficult to differentiate between Cover Girl and Revlon."

At Cover Girl, Lowell led the relaunch of the brand five years ago. Its "Easy. Breezy. Beautiful" campaign accompanied a complete overhaul of its products, merchandising, and packaging. At Discovery Health she has followed that up with marketing and ad campaigns for the National Body Challenge and took a page from her Cover Girl strategies by positioning the network as "Real Life. Medicine. Miracles."

Events and grassroots marketing are a critical component of campaigns for such "passion" categories, according to Lowell. "It's not only reaching out more effectively through mass media," she says. "It's event-oriented things, online content, the ability for people to interact directly with the brands and be able to touch us. It's all about total connection with the consumer."

At Discovery Health that has translated into tying itself closely to the American Heart Association, the March of Dimes, and other "affinity" groups. As in cosmetics, "you try to create an overall position for the network that consumers can relate to and feel good about so that you'll be top of mind in their selection set," Lowell says.

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Promotional Marketing: Riding the Tide
By Kathleen M. Joyce
PROMO
A rising tide may lift all boats, but when it comes to the growth of the promotional marketing industry, not all boats rose as quickly or as high as others this past year.

For the third consecutive year, PROMO's Industry Trends Report tracked an increase in promotional marketing spending among brand marketers, coming in at 8.9% for 2004. In fact, only once in 13 years has promotion failed to show growth (it dropped 3.7% in 2001 in the depths of the recession). In those 13 years, promotion has logged better growth than the U.S. GDP.

Promotional spending was concentrated in many of the same areas that rode high last year: event marketing, premiums and incentives, and direct. Internet and other interactive tools gained significant momentum over the year, with promotional expenditures rising 25%, to $2.4 billion in 2004. But spending on games, contests, and sweepstakes was flat at $1.8 billion, and licensing expenditures rose just 1%, to $5.9 billion.

For the complete results of PROMO's Industry Trends Report, including spending by tactic, visit PROMO.

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Direct Marketing: Bridging the Creative-Production Divide
By Beth Negus Viveiros
DIRECT
At times, creative and production professionals probably feel as if they're from separate universes, divided by a common language of specs, deadlines, and mail dates.

"In the agency world, creatives are trying to provide the best possible product or campaign for the client," says John Brahm, president of Elmhurst, IL-based agency Williams Kincaid Group. "Not that production doesn't agree with that, but the motivation tends to be a little different. We're trying to figure out ways to get the package opened and responded to. In the production world, the end result is as important, but their real objective is [that] somebody has created something and they have to produce it."

The key to making the relationship work is good communication. Greg Waite, president of production services for Bloomingdale, IL-based Diamond, notes that creatives don't always check with production to see what's feasible.

"They'll design a piece that doesn't necessarily meet postal specs or doesn't work quite right with the machines we have," he says. "A piece comes in, and we're expected to mail it in the normal turnaround, but it doesn't run well on our machines because they designed it funny."

Elements of good communication include weekly status meetings, frequent quality checks, and the appointment of a primary point person. For examples, visit DIRECT.

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TV: Nielsen Outlines '05 Monitoring Plans
By Andrew Grossman
Talk may be cheap, but building a device that can give more-accurate information on just who is watching their television by detecting people's voices would be worth a lot to marketers.

Nielsen Media Research will begin fielding tests this summer of a passive voice-monitoring system designed to supplements its other technologies for measuring viewership. Paul Donato, senior vice president/chief research officer for Nielsen Media Research, says the device -- which he estimated has 95% accuracy at this point -- could better detect who was in the room with the television set. Donato outlined Nielsen's plans for improving its sample monitoring to an audience composed largely of local television executives at the Television Bureau of Advertising's annual conference in New York on March 31.

Local stations are not always eager for Nielsen to introduce more-precise measuring methods, because they tend to increase the perceived viewership of competing cable networks. Donato noted that making too many measurement changes too fast would lead to "chaos in the industry" because of the seismic changes in the ratings themselves that could ensue.

Another cutting-edge development, using infrared radio frequencies to detect what room people were in when watching television, is designed to be more of a "validation technique" of existing methods, Donato said. He said testing on this "local tags" technology would also begin in the summer.

Donato called a third method more of a long shot: another validation measure that uses infrared technology to determine if people are in the line of sight of their sets.

He said Nielsen would continue to roll out the Local People Meter (LPM) technology that proved controversial in New York and Los Angeles last year when some minority groups argued that it undercounted Hispanic and African American audiences. But others, including some prominent minority figures, backed the LPMs, saying that they proved more accurate than the current system of measuring local demographic viewing data through the use of people filling out diaries. By the end of next year, Donato said, Nielsen will have installed LPMs in 10 markets covering 30% of the population.

Concurrent with those efforts are attempts to improve minority participation in Nielsen sampling through more-aggressive recruitment -- partly by improving incentives for taking part -- and giving more personal coaching to people. But marketers trying to gauge who is watching their television ads in smaller markets will continue to face difficulties because they cannot afford to install new technologies to replace the diary method, which is considered relatively inaccurate.

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TV: Auto Marketer Says, "Clean Up Your Clutter"
By Andrew Grossman
Clutter is bad enough in closets, but it could be downright destructive for automobile marketers who are buying ads on local television stations, where car spots tend to stack up in the last two weeks of the month, according to a top Toyota sales executive.

"Is this the best way to deliver our message and stand out?" Steve Sturm, vice president of North America planning for Toyota Motor Sales, asked the 1,000 or so attendees of the March 31 Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) annual conference at New York's Jacob Javits Center. The TVB represents local stations, especially in the ad community.

Sturm was disturbed over one New York station's need to air 10 car ads within an 18-spot span in February, largely because 80% of automobile spots generally run in the latter half of the month. (He did not address why car companies prefer to advertise at the end of the month.) Advertisers would rather have category exclusivity within each commercial "pod" on television, but Sturm noted that some competing commercials are even running adjacent to each other at times due to the clutter.

Local stations' reliance on car makers is so apparent that the TVB always runs its conference in the hall next to the Auto Show at the convention center. But Sturm warned that auto dealers and manufacturers may pare back their local advertising if the clutter problem is not resolved. He urged stations to become more creative in their marketing efforts by incorporating products into the shows themselves and to stop relying so much on the 15- and 30-second spots for their business.
For example, Toyota had used the syndicated series "Blind Date" and the NBC reality show "The Contender" to promote its products. In "Blind Date," the usually hapless couples tool around in Toyotas; in the fourth episode of "The Contender," contestants had to push a 5,000-lb. Tundra pickup truck.

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Multichannel: Lego Builds Brand Brick by Brick
By Margery Weinstein
CATALOG AGE
Staying true to its mission of providing creative toys for children while continuing to expand its number of customer touch points has been integral to the success of Lego, Steve Hawco, vice president, direct marketing and e-commerce, told attendees at the New England Mail Order Association's spring conference last month.

The company uses its multichannel approach to get to know its customers better, said Hawco. "Children are our role models," he said. The Lego Website has recorded 4.3 million unique visitors a month, while its 25 stores boast of 100 million visitors a year. In addition to its Shop at Home catalog, the company stays in touch with customers through Lego Club, a loyalty/promotional club that is self-selected online or through the catalog by the child.

A key benefit of the club is the bimonthly "Lego" magazine, said Hawco. The company has received photos of children's bedrooms with old copies of the magazine and catalog serving as wallpaper. Ninety-two percent of club magazine recipients say that they talk about the content with friends, sharing the publication with an additional 3.5 contacts. "What great word-of-mouth endorsements," Hawco enthused.

To read more of Lego's marketing efforts, visit CATALOG AGE.

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