Cadbury’s Parody

Since I feel so strongly about the weakness of Cadbury’s campaign, I have made an amazing parody of it.

Appropriate Advertising

So today I was in university and Cadbury’s were there, doing some promotion for their recent Spots v Stripes campaign. This is the TV ad:

It’s by Fallon, and the idea is to get everyone to pick a side, and compete in games to win prizes.

I can imagine how the meeting went when they came up with this idea; they’re sponsoring the Olympic Games (since all athletes are gorging on chocolate 24/7 I am sure) and they wanted to get people ‘involved’ with the brand and to ‘interact’ with branded content.

Here is the thing which I don’t think they have realised; people don’t care about spots v stripes. They buy chocolate to eat, often on the spur of the moment, they don’t think really hard about it. It brings to mind this letter I saw a little while ago (click to enlarge);

This kind of campaign is designed to get people involved, is this really appropriate for a FMCG? I really do not think so, at university today, there were few people who signed up, and those who did were just looking for free chocolate (and considering what I have seen students do for free food, this was undertaken with surprisingly little enthusiasm), not really about forming a meaningful allegiance to a team.

Petty and Cacioppo’s 1979 Elaboration Likelihood Model may explain this further:

“The elaboration likelihood model (ELM)… states that

involved  consumers process information through a

direct route in which messages cues are more likely

to be processed, whereas uninvolved consumers use

a more peripheral route in which non-message cues

are more likely to be processed” (Assael, 1993:235)

Chocolate is not something that consumers are going to process advertising for centrally, this is why generally advertising in this sector aims to play on emotions, such as Flake (another Cadbury’s product) plays on lust, romance and seduction.

Compare this with my favourite advert of the week (strangely enough, also by Fallon):

This advert works because of the emotions that people want to feel when driving; like they are taming a beast. A car is something that one would process centrally according to the ELM model of advertising, however, a TV ad probably is not going to get across all of the technical information that a consumer wants to know about the car. It could pique a person’s interest in a product, and encourage them to consider it in their choices, which is central processing.Plus, snakes are cool.

Overall, I think that the type of product which is being advertised really needs to be considered when it comes to the level of interactivity asked of the audience.

Considering Flow

This week, we were introduced into the concept of flow.

This is a theory, devised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced MEE-hye CHEEK-sent-mə-HYE-ee, try saying that five times fast, try saying it at all in fact), which is defined as:

The process of optimal experience - Csikszentmihalyi (1997)

The experience of flow can be described as ‘feeling so involved in what you are doing, you do not feel separate from what you are doing’. Other feelings associated are; time distortion, the feeling that time has stopped or not realising how much time has passed whilst one is experiencing flow; merging of action and awareness, the feeling of being at one with your task; focused concentration; sense of control; loss of self- consciousness; an autotelic experience, doing something for it’s own sake.

So, when do we experience flow?

I am sure that some of you will recognise this feeling, I know I automatically knew it was something which I felt when reading a book. Well, a good book. People experience flow doing all kinds of tasks, such as driving, rock climbing or even searching online. There are three main antecedents to flow; clear goals, immediate feedback and a matching of skills and challenges.

The theory of flow brings two things to mind.

The first:

I have been reliably informed by a friend of mine that the ‘Life Flows Better With Visa’ campaign was based on the concept of flow. You can see in the ad that the characteristics of the flow construct are present. Plus this links nicely to last week’s post about the intangibility of money, don’t you think?

The second is how to exploit this in a marketing perspective. Online has great potential for flow, there are a vast array of tasks for any given individual to take up, matching to any level of skill. Why is it then that there are so many adverts which break a person’s concentration and therefore prevent the an individual from experiencing flow? Surely advertising should be more integrated into the online experience? How can we integrate it to the online experience?

Intangibility of money

This is something that I have been thinking about a lot in the past week.

I started thinking about it in a seminar, where we were asked to take an everyday task, and dissect how technology has changed it, and how it was different before technology.

Danny and I chose banking, and we were talking about how banking has changed, how you can have next to no contact with a person or cash.

This lead us to realise that money is now twice removed from reality, as even cash is a representation of money, and now we don’t even see that. So we concluded that money is now very intangible for the consumer, there is no balancing of ledgers, or handling of cash.

We then started thinking about the context of this removal of reality of money, the credit crunch, has technology meant that money is less tangible? If it has, could this be part of the reason why people have signed up for credit, loans and mortgages they cannot afford to pay back? This might be one of the influencing factors for why we are now facing financial crisis.

Perhaps the most important question we should be asking is, how to make money tangible again? This would have to be done in a way which would not inconvenience the consumer, or it would be a step in the wrong direction, as all of the ways which technology is involved in banking aims to make it easier.

My first idea would be to have a system whereby when something is paid for, a person somehow gets a balance update, possibly a text message. If you have any ideas, feel free to comment.

Eye Tracking

Today Danny (my housemate) and I went to University, on our day off, whilst I was extremely hungover.

“But why?” I hear you cry, to check out some eye tracking software, that is why.

We rocked up to find Mike Molesworth inhaling a sandwich (ham, salad and mayonnaise on white by the look of it) and rushing to grab Richard Scullion, what (or should I say who) we didn’t find were any other students.

The eye tracking technology is pretty amazing, and can measure where exactly your eyes are looking, and shows the data as a ‘heat map’. The results were interesting, and something which seemed to be a theme was models and celebrities faces attracting attention.

There are so many applications for this technology, both for commercial and research purposes, and something which struck me was the possible use of this data for my dissertation.

For my dissertation I am planning on investigating how to get consumers to pay for online content, which they can get for free. Does how attractive the interface which the consumer interacts with is perceived, affect the likelihood that they will use it as opposed to another site, even if they have to pay?

On the other hand, something which came out of the discussion surrounding the technology, was the interpretation of results. For example, just because a person finds a page aesthetically appealing, are they more likely to buy something from it? I know there are some websites which I hate the layout of (I am looking at you ASOS), however, as my housemates will know I still shop there REGULARLY (read: too often).

Overall, it was really useful to know how the technology works, and it’s limitations, for the future (especially as I envisage mine in adland)