Capitalizing on the Super Bowl of Retail
Thanksgiving weekend has its merits: a day off from work, inordinate amounts of food and Black Friday. In preparation for Black Friday, compulsive shoppers across the nation write out a “wish list” and gear up for the best shopping day of the year.
In the world of advertising and marketing, we spend countless hours brainstorming ways to get our products on that list. After all, Black Friday is the Super Bowl of retail. Last year, Americans spent a record $52 billion dollars total and an average of almost $400 per shopper. With these numbers, it’s no wonder advertisers spend a pretty penny on advertising during the holiday season.
No matter how simple or grandiose your plan for Black Friday advertising may be, it all comes back down to the basics. In 1986, Petty and Cacioppo laid out the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), to describe how people process persuasive messages and act on them. At its very core, ELM defines the relationship between advertisers/marketers and consumers.
The central route of ELM describes a consumer who makes decisions based on a logical thought process. Our method of persuasion for central-route thinkers would take the form of a product demonstration, a list of product qualities or factual evidence of the product claim(s). This KitchenAid video is a great example of a rational message as it explicitly lists the benefits of owning the product.
The peripheral route of ELM is for those consumers who buy for emotional reasons. My favorite example of this comes from the Incredible India campaign in a video that speaks directly to your emotions – especially if you love to travel.
Of course, the world isn’t black and white. Some of the best techniques (and most effective) are a combination of both routes. Samsung hit the nail on the head with this recent Galaxy S III commerical that combines the logical point of view by discussing product features with the emotional point of view in regards to overzealous iPhone users.
As the sellers of these persuasions, it is important to consider ELM when brainstorming messaging ideas for a product, especially during the holidays. For every consumer out there, Black Friday won’t go by without an ad that will appeal to them, whether rational or emotional or a combination of both.
That leaves one question for all you compulsive shoppers out there: for the items that are on your Black Friday list this year, which ads were the most effective and why?
Fuel-Injected, Dual-Exhaust, Turbocharged Destination Marketing
Many of my colleagues at Brandware have fossil fuel in their veins. Collective expertise includes brands like Mercedes, General Motors, Saab, Lotus, Bentley, Pirelli , Vespa, Porsche and so on. So, what does this have to do with destination marketing?
Everything, actually. Which industry launches more new products each year? Instills more brand passion and loyalty? Infuses their products with emotional attributes? And which industry puts the drive into drive markets?
Brandware Wins Award for Creative Excellence
We are passionate about the many benefits of Dry Ice – and that passion was recently acknowledged with an award. We’ve won a national Communicator Award for creative excellence for a consumer brochure we wrote, designed and produced for our client Penguin Brand Dry Ice. The “Everyday Uses” brochure won in the Brochure: Business-to-Consumer category. Winners of the 18th Annual Communicator Awards are selected by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, a 550+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media. With thousands of entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence for communications professionals.
Five Things I’ve Learned At SXSW (So Far)
It’s Monday at SXSW and I’m tanking up on coffee before Day 4 of the interactive track begins. As long as I’m here – I thought I’d take a break from listening to others talk and offer up a few learnings – not necessarily of the academic variety.
If you want exhaustive coverage of every session, just follow #sxsw. No one actually looks at the presenters (too busy texting, tweeting, blogging, vlogging, typing, Facebooking, etcetera-ing), so you’ll most likely find a complete record of every thought, fastidiously documented online.
“In Case You Missed It” – January 28, 2011
Every week we scour over 150 blogs keeping up with the rapidly evolving world of social and digital media. Because we realize that not everyone can be that obsessive, we have condensed the best into a weekly digest:
