I’ve recently noticed some interesting ads, focused on brand loyalty and awareness:
- Tide’s Loads of Hope. In a nutshell, Proctor & Gamble outfitted a truck with washers and dryers, and they deploy into areas affected by natural disasters, and people line up to do their laundry:
What an awesome idea. Think about it. If you were one of those people, wouldn’t you become life-time Tide customer?
- AT&T is undertaking an initiative to replace it’s vehicle fleet, with energy-efficient, American-made vehicles.
- Wal-Mart is trying to repair its reputation of being an aggressively employee-unfriendly place to work. Part of its lower-price strategy over the years has translated into horrible public relations. A new CEO is trying to fix that. A recent advertisement pledges that Wal-Mart “won’t be 100% satisfied until every American has quality, affordable health coverage”.
In Marketing 101, we learned that these are examples of institutional advertising, intended to build awareness and generate goodwill, not to promote a particular product. Which brings us to Lars, the animated avatar from Lawson.
Lars is cute and the videos are obviously well-produced. But the message just isn’t compelling. Lawson should be using this opportunity to tie their products into some meaningful community service; saving cats just seems so irrelevant. Given our economic situation and all that we face, how about tackling a serious problem, like expanding into electronic health records (EHR), or tracking your carbon emissions? Sure, it’s cool to have a mascot/avatar, but it needs to be more than just a cartoon.
