The Index »

• They said no good would come of Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury

  March 12, 2012 @ 4:00 pm | by Laura Slattery

  

  Philadelphia and Cadbury…. they go together like chocolate and cheese

  And they were right. Here it is, the union between Kraft’s Philadelphia cream cheese brand and Cadbury milk chocolate, essentially Kraft’s attempt to take on the reigning king of spreads, Nutella. Good luck with that. Toddlers and Nutella are not to be kept apart, and not even the mighty Kraft and the comic talents of Jennifer Saunders, who is fronting its reverse-psychology marketing campaign, can alter that. Surely.

  Chocolate cheesecake lovers will quibble, but they will be wrong. The combination of hazelnut and chocolate is so obviously superior to a cream cheese / milk chocolate mash-up, that I suspect Pietro Ferrero will be turning in his grave at Kraft’s latest product launch. Ferrero, according to the company’s website, “founded” what later became known as Nutella in a backroom of a pastry shop in Alba, Northern Italy, in 1944. It was, surprisingly, an austerity foodstuff. War had made chocolate, among other luxury items, expensive and difficult to obtain, so Ferrero used locally grown hazelnuts to make alternative spreads.  ”Nutella, spread on bread, has become an essential element to the breakfast ritual,” the company claims, not unreasonably. (I prefer it rolled in the folds of pancakes myself.)

  Ferrero, which also makes Tic Tacs, Kinder products and (naturally) Ferrero Rocher, is a privately held company that does okay for itself, though it lost one of its joint chief executives (Pietro Ferrero, grandson of the founder) when he died cycling while working on a corporate social responsibility initiative last year. The acquisition-shy family firm did ponder making a counter-offer for Cadbury, but stepped back, wary of the debt, leaving it to be devoured by Kraft and its spread-ambitions. The first of the ads is genuinely funny thanks to Saunders, but I can see plenty of shoppers simply agreeing with her ad persona’s ”Choccy Philly / don’t be silly” line and failing, like her, to be converted against the odds. And only a fool would bet against the wartime genius that is Nutella.

• News of the World flight of the advertisers can be replicated by any pressure group

  July 8, 2011 @ 6:40 pm | by Laura Slattery

  News International’s surprise decision to close the News of the World has meant the natural life of a consumer campaign was stopped in its tracks. We will now never know whether advertisers’ decision to abandon it this weekend would have led to a more permanent distancing, or was merely a temporary response to a public outrage that may have lost its currency over time.

  The early, speedy success of the campaign has been attributed to the Twitter users who consulted lists of the paper’s major advertisers and tweeted versions of “dear @advertiser, will you be reconsidering your advertising spend with #notw given that we now know they hacked Milly Dowler’s phone”. Registering their feelings was as easy as pressing control + C, control + V. And indeed most advertisers who pulled the plug cited the contact they had received from customers, proving that advertisers’ values don’t exist in abstract, but are like a mirror, reflecting the views of the society in which they operate.

  The News of the World’s flight of the advertisers differs from that of celebrity endorsements gone wrong, where sponsors linked to scandal-afflicted individuals such as Kate Moss and Tiger Woods will more likely cite brand image incompatibility than direct customer contact as the reason for their P45s. In 2009, Associated Newspapers’ Mail Online division removed ads accompanying a column by Jan Moir on the death of Stephen Gately, following a public outcry about her comments, which were judged homophobic. However, the closest comparison comes courtesy of the US television networks.

  Here, the loss of advertisers’ support is a fast-track to cancellation. But it’s not just the Twitterati who can form a fast-mobilising ethics police. As MTV’s recent dropping of the Americanised version of teen drama Skins indicates, Christian lobby groups retain plenty of edge when it comes to orchestrated campaigns to impose (their) principles on the creative industries, via the seemingly easy manipulation of advertising dollars. News of the World campaigners took a stance against illegal activities that any right-thinking person would also deem horribly unethical. But it follows their victories in persuading advertisers may be replicated by any well-supported group hostile to political philosophies or lifestyles, legal or otherwise, with which they disagree.

• That calls for a new advertising slogan…probably

  April 6, 2011 @ 7:30 am | by Laura Slattery

  Carlsberg has ditched its “probably the best lager in the world” slogan after it proved insufficiently definitive to pull in brand-wandering drinkers. It was probably time. The line was originally voiced in 1975 by the actor and alcoholic Orson Welles, whose subsequent death makes it hard to assess his views on this blow to his legacy. In any case, the new slogan – “that calls for a Carlsberg” – sounds to me like tacit acknowledgement of alcohol’s potential misuse as an emotional crutch. Funnily enough, Carlsberg has aimed instead for the subtly different “reward after a hard day’s work” vibe.

  

  The purveyors of beer boldly predicted yesterday that as a result of the new branding, the company will double its profits by 2015. If it achieves that, it will call for champagne. Meanwhile, in the interest of commercial nostalgia, here are five more advertising slogans that are no longer with us, but continue to scar our memories like cultural chicken pox:

  1. Someone you love would love some, Mum: Jacob’s “Kimberley, Mikado and Coconut Cream” slogan has not entirely gone away, but it has mutated into “someone you love would love some fun”. The “fun” in question is on display in Jacob’s loathsome new television ad, which dedicates itself to finding the hitherto undiscovered links between biscuits and corsetry. It’s a feast of audiovisual grimness made in the style of a Gwen Stefani music video from hell. Maybe that’s the point.

  2. A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play: This jingle, used between 1959 and 1995, fails the pesky “nutritional claims” section of modern advertising rules on the basis that a Mars a day doesn’t literally help you work, rest and play. Mars did revive it a few years ago, but omitted the awkwardly untrue “a Mars a day helps you” bit. Its more recent slogans include the 2002 effort “pleasure you can’t measure” – which acts as a kind of corporate riposte to those confectionery customers who get upset about the bars’ shrinking size.

  3. The future’s bright, the future’s Orange: UK telecoms company Orange “retired” this irksome (in other words, massively successful) slogan four years ago, presumably on the basis that the future is now. Lately, Orange’s sponsorship of the Baftas has been accompanied by numerous expensive cinema ads featuring all manner of Hollywood talent, plus Jack Black. Its television spots have also curiously tapped into smartphone trends while simultaneously feeding paranoia that people who use social media are socially inept.

  4. Campaign for Real Beauty: Dove is shimmying away from its “Real Beauty” line, according to Marketing Week, which makes me feel warm inside, as I always found its soap-sponsored image politics to be ever so slightly patronising. It was okay to have hips or freckles, Dove informed us - as long as you just so happened to be amazingly photogenic. Anyhow, the “real” women have reportedly been abandoned in favour of a campaign dubbed “Body Language”, which I fear has probably nothing to do with the Kylie Minogue album of the same name.

  5. Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate / Tastes like chocolate never tasted before: And indeed never would be tasted, should your Flake live up to this slogan and disintegrate into the bubble bath before it could actually reach your mouth. Cadbury periodically kills off the suggestive “Flake girl” and tries something more pretentioussophisticated, but this is one of those lines that’s liable to come and go for the sake of the easy publicity. This time, they’ll probably just wait until everyone has forgotten about the whole Joss Stone thing.

• The boomer bulge and the business of ageing

  March 9, 2011 @ 4:54 pm | by Laura Slattery

  Please tick the box: Are you 35 to 39? 40-44? 45-49? 50-64? Or 65-plus? It’s an oddity of surveys and application forms that the categories often imply your tastes undergo distinguishable shifts with every event birthday, but only up until you hit 50 – or 65, if you’re lucky – and then you’re suddenly lumped into a homogeneous consumer mass.

  Apart from giving rise to cringeworthy stereotypes, for a vast number of product and service providers, this blunt approach to the over 50s is commercially crazy. However, as David Sinclair from the UK’s International Longevity Centre told the Business of Ageing conference in Dublin today, there are a dispiriting number of companies who don’t think the so-called “grey market” has anything to do with them at all.

  Despite the fact that disposable household income in the UK peaks in the 50-64 age bracket, the response from retailers is often “that’s not our demographic”, Sinclair noted. “I think there is a huge amount of denial here on the part of business,” he said, as evidenced by the fact that the dominant advertised image of consumption is often a high-heeled woman in her 30s, beaming as she swings her shopping bags.

  Incidentally, the Business of Ageing conference packs contained flyers for (among others) Flora Pro-Activ, RTÉ Lyric FM and an Emergency Response GPS bracelet – three companies who are clearly not in denial about their core demographic.

  In September, Kilkenny will host Greystock, which the organisers say will be Ireland’s first ever festival for the 50-plus generation. But market segmentation research on the varying interests and needs of the over 50s has yet to be conducted in depth in Ireland. As far as the UK goes, Dick Stroud, author of The 50-Plus Market, places less than 30 per cent of over 50s in what he calls the “charmed generation”. This is a high socio-economic group that tends to be in their late 60s and early 70s and in good health. But that doesn’t mean that people in their 50s now – who are more likely to be part of the “anxious generation” – will become happier in a decade.

  “This charmed group will move through and eventually disappear and the next group that comes through probably won’t have anything like the same wealth,” says Stroud. Similarly, George Magnus, senior economic adviser at UBS International Investment Bank, compared marketers’ attempts to capture the “grey market”  to a snake eating its prey: “It’s a bulge, and now it’s a bulge that’s moving into retirement.”

  The first baby boomers – the generation born in the post-war population spike – reach the traditional retirement age of 65 in 2011. It’s the generation that won’t take too kindly to what’s perceived as ageism at companies such as Interflora, which last year attracted criticism for bringing out a “happy birthday” range of balloon bouquets that stopped at 60. “Someone designed the product and didn’t think,” sighed Sinclair. Soon, they won’t be able to afford not to.