Not sure if it will sell more chocolate blocks, but it’s hilarious and has already gone viral.
Update: Marketing wiz – Ben Rowe, gives an accurate reality check on this campaign and viral marketing in general here.
Category: Selling
Voice overs
There is nothing worse than an advertising voice over. (yes advertisers, we recognize it)
Here’s what it says to the audience:
We don’t care who you are
We don’t care where you’re from
We don’t respect your culture
We think we can stooge you
We think you won’t know the difference
We think all our customers are the same
We talk to you, not with you
To me it makes no sense to be stingy on making a TVC worth $500k when you’re spending over $5m on media. It’s a false economy, especially when the media doesn’t work and it turns off the potential audience you’re trying to persuade.
Tomorrow’s hero brands
I’m not about to define a brand, I’d be wasting your time as there are plenty of marketing books to do that. I am about to talk about some qualities that many brands used to have, and more importantly the features that tomorrow’s hero brands do have.
function first
reliable consistency
thin product range
you’ll travel to buy it
limited distribution
you found out about it by recommendation
limited if any advertising expenditure
no external branding
you don’t care if people don’t know your using it
often founder defined
An example for me personally is Herringbone shirts. A Sydney based shirt company. Their specialty is shirts. 
They’re expensive, but the quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten. Only those who have one would know you’re wearing it. We know the cut, the feel, the fabric and they just sit like quality garments should.
A lot of global brands once fit the above description. Then due to the brand’s own success they simply became ‘corporations’. Once this happens, the rot sets in. They go public, product ranges get expanded, the founder loses control or sells out (as they deserve to), production is outsourced, quality is compromised, distribution is expanded, branding becomes overt and crass, sales targets must be met, prices get cut, customer basses expand, the product adapts to the larger vanilla consumer…. – rinse and repeat. Until their core consumer moves on.
Outrageous commercial success often predicates a brand’s inevitable decline because it is hard to retain the focus that drove the success in the first instance.
What is your – yesterday’s hero brand?
What is your – tomorrow’s hero brand?
Quirky fact 4.0
Warren Buffet’s first money making venture was selling Coca Cola he bought from a grocery store. Under the age of 10, he bought a 6 pack, broke them up and sold them at a profit, other kids in his neighborhood were playing jacks and hopscotch.
He’s now the biggest shareholder in Coca Cola.
Start small – think big.
When the conversation allows…
Ask yourself this: Do you bring up your start up when you get the chance? Every time someone asks you what you’re doing? When you met someone at a party?
If not, why not?
I’m not suggesting you never shut up about it, or bore people with your start up. What I am suggesting is that you bring it up when the theme of the conversation allows. When you get a chance to sell your dream, do it.
Fear of knowledge
Probably the worst phobia entrepreneurs can suffer from is ‘fear of knowledge’
Epistemophobia, as it is clinically known sounds so ridiculous it’s hard to believe it exists. It does, and we all suffer from it to varying degrees. Sometimes we simply don’t want to change our world view.
As entrepreneurs we quickly learn that introducing something new to the world requires our audience to overcome their ‘fear of knowledge’. When people are comfortable in what they believe, they’d rather not know there’s a better way to do things, or a more logical thought pattern to embrace. Think about the PC and the years it took for it to penetrate households.
Like consumers, we entreopreneurs don’t like to acquire knowledge that contradicts our goals, methods or ambitions either. The trick is knowing whose turn it is to ignore the fear of knowledge; ours or the consumers.
Step up, step down
We’ve all dealt with people from different walks of life. The truth is we know what social sphere we’ve been born into. Life as employees isn’t really that challenging socially, simply because on average we spend time with people with similar qualifications, similar life experience, similar financial status and similar backgrounds.
Entrepreneurship can spin this upside down. We need to be able to deal with people from all walks of life. From venture capitalists and bankers who speak with a plum in their throat, to tradesman, factory floor workers and truck drivers who may be more interested in the latest dirty joke or football finals. – Of course the clichés used here are to stress a point.
We need the ability to step up and step down. It’s not about us. We ought to wear what they wear and talk how they talk. In accounting it’s known as the matching principal. In start up land it just makes good sense.