Brands Text
Dogs, cats, brands
By Adam Jones
Michael Skapinker says in his latest column that the visit of Nicolas Sarkozy to the UK has been a marketing coup for Emirates. The airline's name adorns Arsenal's football stadium, used as one of the venues for the Franco-British love-in last week. This meant that Emirates, which paid more than £100m for the "naming rights" to the ground, was frequently mentioned in the press.
The thinking behind naming rights is that people encounter the brand in a positive context, creating a rosy glow of familiarity that translates into higher sales. But are the purchasing patterns of consumers really influenced by the things that they see as they go about their daily lives?
They can be, according to new research by Jonah Berger, an assistant professor at Wharton business school, and Grainne Fitzsimons, of Canada's University of Waterloo. However, I'm not convinced that their findings add much to the marketer's arsenal.
The two academics investigated whether environmental cues had an impact on consumer behaviour after Mars, the chocolate bar maker, noticed an unusual increase in sales of Mars bars in summer 1997, when Nasa landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on the surface of Mars.
The professors say their experiments have shown that exposure to certain colours and objects can prime people to be receptive to associated products, to the extent that awareness of Reese's candy was heightened shortly before October 31 because its packaging is orange – and orange pumpkins are everywhere in the run-up to Halloween. They even claim that the presence of dogs on the street can make people more receptive to Puma sportswear, even though Puma has a big-cat logo. In their opinion, the traditional association between cats and dogs means that there is a convoluted "see dog, hanker after cat-shoes" dynamic at play.
To make products more appealing, they suggest that advertising could contain cues that are commonly found within the target consumer's environment – palm trees for the US west coast audience, mittens for a Minnesota car dealership, etc.
I'm sceptical. For a start, the allure of many brands is based on images that transcend the shopper's day-to-day experience rather than echoing it. In a famous ad campaign in the UK, Bacardi showed footage of a Caribbean paradise alongside ironic captions such as "the Dog & Duck". They didn't show footage of vitamin D-deficient Brits getting hammered at their local. It might be the case that some bovine consumers would buy more spinach if supermarkets were carpeted in Astroturf but this sounds like a prop for the most commoditised products only. Any decent brand relies on a more complex interaction with its audience. After all, Dove, the soap maker, started using overweight women as models in order to show its understanding of the love-hate relationship many people have with their bodies.
It wasn't trying to cash in on the obesity epidemic by saying "look, we're fat too".
From The Financial Times
Author: Philip Harmer