Domino's latest direct marketing campaign in the Kensington area trashed San Diego streets, walks, driveways and lawns. At least the guys doing this for lawn maintenance understand you need to adequately weight the piece because of our prevalent winds. Here you go - Domino's folly that has pissed off the 'hood:
There are many more examples and I did not go back far enough to get the ones that had blown entirely into the streets.
Way to go Domino's, way to go and win new customers by trashing their neighborhood.
Don't get me wrong, I like AAA and recently needed a tow of about three miles. The pick up was very fast - they got to my car before I did - and the service and tow operator absolutely first rate. So, what was the problem? AAA has contracted out a telephone survey and the voice is absolutely so upbeat and Disneylandishly perky it is offensive. It gets to the point where you want to respond as soon as the next question is started rather than put up with that voice to hear the entire question. In fact, it is so offensive, I actually considered using a different service rather than hear that voice again.
Over at Branding & Marketing they have a short piece on writing press releases. The solution: five paragraphs, the five "Ws" and "how." "Why" and "how" do not belong in the first graph. Get a quote on your bang for the buck. And nowhere to be seen is providing the reader ANY contact information at all. Pity, had me going there for a moment. Otherwise, not bad. Good advice can also be found at (LINK) or at any of dozens of other links. I like the five paragraph advice, though.
BizReport has an article on what pisses off online British shoppers and this is it. What is "philfing?" According to BizReport, it is "purposely hiding what I’m looking for." This also includes such lame tactics as saying "free delivery" and then charging for shipping and handling. I'm wondering how many baskets get abandoned at the checkout because of this in the US.
Perceptions of a products quality based on country of origin strikes yet again in some research. "Fewer students gave Japanese brand Lexus top ratings when they mistakenly thought it was a U.S.-made car," according to Anderson Analytics as reported by BizReport. BizReport also says, "while students love the latest fashion labels and covet the newest
technology, they have no idea of where in the world it originated." No kidding? Perhaps the survey takers should have included some questions on US geography if they wanted to see something really scary.
A couple of weeks ago I ran into a PR "case" that concerned an Indian casino, a band and a radio station. The responses were relatively few. The blog appears to appeal to PR pros, students or interested lay people. Here's the rub, until I responded virtually all of the responses laid the onus of the situation and the correction of it on the Indian casino, yet they were a victim of the situation.
Here's what I am working on:
1. If pros blew the analysis of the situation, then what the hell are they doing in the field and their clients had best be looking for competent counsel.
2. If students blew it, they might deserve some slack, but why hasn't their instruction allowed them the ability to look below the surface (not that they had to look very deep at all).
3. If lay people blew it, what has happened with the Indian casino's image that the general public is so willing to ignore any facts and lay the blame on them? What PR problem are the casinos having with the general public?
Is it the money they make, the economic and political power the Indians have gained? What should the Indian tribes learn from this brief scenario and the response to it that they need to address in terms of their image?
I realize it is a SMALL case with limited response, but it you are into competitive intelligence, these minor glitches should be looked at to see if they are advance weak signals of a far more serious problem.
Some of the places I go to do not have very good phone service, let alone internet connections. Anyway, I got back and had to go through thousands of RSS feeds - but just decided after killing a few hours that dumping the backlog would be more efficient and start over, so the post below is the first from today's batch.
One of the things I was working on was the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure and that has been completed. We have a postmortem meeting next month to figure out where to go from this event. The cycling part here in San Diego has been a small event and it made more money this year than projected. The problem is that the course is heavily used by many other fund raising efforts and has a real tough route for everything over 20 miles. With the surrounding events going on, we are one of four or five entities trying to generate money from the same route and there are only so many riders that will show for the event. We cannot go any later than early May because the temps in the back country can hot well into the 90s (two years ago, the backside was in the high 90s).
There is a feeling that we need to broaden the base for the ride and that means going away from the hard core riders toward a family-oriented ride and the existing route limits that to about 20 miles on open roadways. Not the ideal scenario. I expect a new course to be in use, possibly as early as next year. That new course should enable us to raise more money. More on this a it develops.
MIT's Sloan Management Review published an article showing that sales promotions such as GM's "You pay what employees pay" fail more often than not. They also talk about the Pontiac Solstice/Donald Trump promotion's success because it was not so easily duplicated. Also mentioned as a success (another GM product) was Cadillac's "Five Second FIlm Commercial" competition. The competition "invited site visitors to shoot and upload a five-second film on
any topic. More than 2.5 million consumers visited the page, 2,600 of
whom submitted films." This led to success: "in the four months following the promotion, sales of the Cadillac
V-Series jumped by 25%."
The key to success, is getting the customer to react quickly accroding to authors Betsy Gelb, Demetra Andrews and Son K. Lam. That speed comes from meeting one or more of three motivations: "economic, informational and affective. Economic incentives make a
purchase less expensive in money and/or in time and effort.
Information influences consumers' beliefs about the brand or product
category. The affective approach arouses favorable feelings and
emotions and associates them with the promoted brand."
I get a newsletter from Amy Corr as well as the RSS feeds for Out to Launch, well, Amy launched herself into the ranks of stupidity in a big way and I hope someone in the organization got video of it and put it on YouTube. What was so stupid? Check this bit (I lost the links to the video - but the written words I've bolded/underlined are the offensive stuff):
Two TV ads for San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park promote how close visitors can get to the animals. "Masai" features a group of tribesman who are either pining for pogo sticks, for they're jumping in place, or they're trying to get a better look at something, namely a group of giraffes. Watch the ad here. A herd of wildebeests run into a pond, then abruptly leave, in another ad. Turns out, there's a stranger among them: two guys in a wildebeest costume trying to get a closer, or even just one, look -- how much can the guy in the rear see, anyway? Click here to watch the ad. M&C Saatchi Los Angeles created the campaign and Round2 Communications handled the media buy.
Next time, Amy, before you try to sound funny, why not call the Wild Animal Park or the agency and find out what the behavior is before writing something insensitive to the people portrayed - or go back to school and take National Geographic 101.
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