The strategy makes some sense.  It’s easier to convince someone to try an alternative than to create an entire new use for a product.  One detail that seems lost is the actual occasion.  5 hour is positioned against home brewed coffee, and is offered as quicker and easier.  This lacks some believability as there are both instant coffee products like Starbucks via that are nearly as easy and taste pretty good.  Also if we have the ability to plan, many coffee makers have timers.

The missed opportunity seems to be to position 5 hour energy against cafe coffee.   Even the fastest barista can build up a consderable backlog in the morning rush, and the product is pretty expensive.  Given the economic climate, a product that’s faster and cheaper than an alternative might have better results than one that’s just faster.

However, what do you think?  Is 5 hour on track with their marketing or could they do a better job.

There are some principles we can draw on those that are successful and some things we can learn from those that aren’t.

A brand like Coke, Budweiser, Audi helps define a lifestyle.  Most of these brands have fan pages in the tens of thousands, whether they are unofficial or official.  The jean brand Seven for all mankind has a following of over 4000 despite never posting a single thing.  In this regard, the use of becoming a fan is not to subscribe to information, but to express elements of your own personality.  To illustrate this, you can look at the great number of quirky groups that have formed around things like the “cool side of the pillow” or “joe the plumber”  People join these as a subtle way to self express.

The second way a brand can use social media is to be more informative.  This can be more time intensive, but if your brand doesn’t have the cachet of cool, it’s your best route.  Telling people how to use your product better, or offering scheduling is key here.  Movies and TV shows do this very well, but even brands and companies that few talk about can do well here.  Imagine something like being told how to date better by match.com

The final way is the seemingly unrelated but sponsored element.  Toyota created a free virtual gift that could be distributed to your friends, as a very soft way to provide value.

The bad category would come from many of the biggest brands.  Fancy feast, nor any other pet food that I could think of, have significant followings on facebook.  After working in that industry, I know that many people define themselves by the brand of cat food they serve their pet.  It seems like they should work harder there.  Of course, they also tried to launch a pet-centric network called petside, so that may have distracted them a bit.

The short answer is that going social is all about providing value in a social context.  It has to provide information, allow self expression or be altruistic.  It can’t be pushy the same way that conventional marketing can become. It’s a different idiom, but there are plenty of brands that can fill that role.

Product placement is one of the most obvious ones.  It’s one of the rules of the Top Chef drinking game, and that rule alone would have you pretty buzzed by the end.  I will give them credit for keeping most of the placements relevant to the “story” A few things like the phone placements this season were a bit forced, but in general they work.  A stove or wine brand makes perfect sense in a show about cooking.

Top Chef also does a great job of providing challenge sponsorship opportunities.  Creating a frozen dinner (Bertolli) or low calorie treat (Dr. Pepper) makes sense for the brands in the past that have done it.   The Glad family of products sponsors the overall pride and gets more than frequent mentions as a result.

Even those placing traditional ads might get a bit better off in the show.  They use frequent mini-sodes that bring fans back into the show if they tune out or try to skip past via Tivo.  I haven’t touched the mobile content or website integration, which further extend the show in advertiser friendly methods.

I don’t have the data that proves or disproves the effectiveness of their tactics.  What I can say is that the same sponsors have appeared season after season.  To me, that’s pretty good evidence that something is working.

There is a real lesson that any marketer can use.  Engagement is key to effectiveness.  If you find a place to promote your product that is relevant, it’s likely that you’ll do better.  Placement matters for you and your brand.  Scattershot placements are far less valuable than relevant ones.

The ad was rejected by Yahoo.

Why?

It lacked a disclaimer on the word “Free.”  That’s right.  They expected that the word could only be used with some sort of catch.

I tried to explain that we are truly free and get a sample disclaimer.  How can you disclaim something that’s true?

I’m leaning toward using “internet connection required” for our online ad.

Why would a brand this strong risk reintroducing itself as “G”?  Why would it change its formula to include vitamins?  Why would it retool its entire line to feature odd text like “bring it” and ditch almost all graphics?

The answer in short is that it is now reacting to an emerging competitor, vitamin water.  While I don’t have data to support this, I have to imagine that the distribution force of Coke combined with their brand endorsements have started to take significant market share.

Gatorade is now starting to look and act a lot like their #2 competitor, and that might be a really bad move.

Moves like this are the “rock and a hard place” for brands.  If they do nothing, vitaminwater will continue to steal their share.  If they change, they lose much of the advantage they held with their brand heritage.  The normal strategy here is to innovate, but line extensions like Propel and G2 seem only moderately well adopted.

I do think the Gatorade team has done one very significant innovation they have failed to leverage, at least to my knowledge.  They launched a line for performance athletes called Gatorade Elite.  Done right, this could be a “halo” that could further their reputation as the experts in serving athletes.  Done wrong, it will collect dust on the shelves at Gold’s Gym.  I’m far from the target here, so I don’t know much about distribution.  In fact the first I had heard about it was in researching this post.

We all wanted to be like mike, so why not take that to the next level with Gatorade Elite?

In the end, the ad wasn’t very good, but they had more than made up for it in buzz.  They’ve repeated the stunt for several years, by always trying to push the letter of the law to the limit.

The latest in the string of “PRstunt-erists” is a dating website that promotes affairs and cheating.  Darren Rovell of CNBC was kind enough to provide them with a blog post about how their ad for the Super Bowl Program was denined.

Darren, when you post links to the site, the PRstunt-erists win.  They could have gotten maybe 100,000 people to notice their ad, and your coverage might generate 10x that.

Personally, I stand behind the NFL and their decison to deny the ad.  In fact to atone, I think they should offer a free ad in the program to the dating site that is the polar opposite.  One that is not for married people and is free – the free dating site downtoearth.com.

I’d put it this way.  It’s a transactional matter and little else.  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  It is my supposition and philosophy that the best interactive marketing is a relationship and a conversation.  Listen, respond, improve, grow.  Business is sustainable, get rich quick schemes are not.

Within a couple of days, I’ve seen two more comments on this in various forms within my industry.  First Dave Evans posts about Comment Cowards, and then Marcus Frind commented on my personal blog about a bot which targets his userbase with spam. It’s pretty clear that there is no compunction about using these poor “marketing” tactics.

This matters very much for mainstream marketers because it adds noise to an already cluttered landscape of messages.  Legitimate comments add to the discussion and build community.  Spam erodes it and tears it down.  There’s an ethic to online marketing that’s very important.  The Internet isn’t anonymous.  Assume that your tactic will be on the front page of google search results with your name tied to it.  If you wouldn’t or can’t defend it, don’t do it.  It might seem cheap, but it won’t be in the long run.  It can get viral in a negative way.

I’m still a bit torn about the effectiveness of the tactic.  On the positive hand, the show sponsor idea felt a bit like the old days of TV.  With the characters making product pitches, there was a feeling of continuity.  It certainly couldn’t be tivoed or skipped too easily. It will work just fine if distributed online.  The products were pretty omnipresent throughout the show, if only as backgrounds.  Frankly, a location of a supermarket makes consumer packaged goods easy to display.

On the negative hand, the product pitches felt completely inserted into the show.  Twice the characters found a sudden and extraneous need to use a product.  The pitch was all about the product and only that product.  It felt completely inserted.

I was also confused for a while about which brand sponsored the program. The pitches were pretty generic.  The lotion segment could have been any lotion, and the same was true of the mayo.  Compounding this was a lack of distinctive packaging for the brand sponsors, since the weren’t shown that close up.  To me, the Vaseline for men lotion bottle closely resembles the Nivea for Men bottle. In addition, mayo jars pretty much all look identical, so Hellmann’s could have been Kraft.

The two bottles

Nivea Packaging

I tend to lean towards this as a failed experiment, but it’s still one to watch.

Unfortunately, many people are very wrong on the quality issue.  Check out this release from JD power on vehicle dependability, and look at the brands that are above average.  Lexus tops the list, but Mercury, Cadillac, Buick and Lincoln are all in the top 10, and all are above Honda. Ford is just above average.  I’ll admit that Chrysler still has issues, but compare that to Volkswagen or Volvo which seem to hold high esteem in many people’s mind.  What has gone wrong is at the root of branding.

Brands aren’t the most recent message a consumer absorbs about a product.  It’s the collective experiences a consumer has with a brand over.  If I say a word like newspaper, you’ll bring up not only the definition, but all of the parts of the experience.  You may remember stories, ads, a product that you can take with you to the restroom, or even delivering them.  You might also think of outdated media, bias, clippings you’ve made, obituaries or other personal encounters.  It makes what we define as a newspaper have a rich context, and it isn’t just shaped by the billboard you see on your way home.

The hard part is that negative experiences can be hard to erase.  This New York Times article references quality problems encountered with Oldsmobile in the 70′s. The companies have moved a long way since then, and Oldsmobile doesn’t even exist as a brand.  The attribution of poor quality is made to “American automakers” more than a specific car, era, or brand.  Even thought this attribution is logically no longer relevant, it still shapes the authors opinions, as I’m sure it does for many consumers.  I’ll personally admit that I haven’t owned an American car since the 1995 Dodge Neon that I bought just before finishing college.  That car self destructed well before 100,000 miles, and jaded my own opinion of the domestics.

This should be a reminder to all brand owners.  Even a momentary slip on your brand’s promise can cause you to lose a customer forever.  It’s hard to get consumers to resample a product after a dissatisfactory experience.  It might even be harder than acquiring a new customer.

It’s important to remember that as a business owner, you are a part of the representation of your brand.  There are restaurants that I no longer frequent because the owners were rude or arrogant to others even outside of the restaurant.  I’m sure that there are plenty of examples that anyone else can think of where a senior business person’s personal behavior affected your opinion of their products.

My simple rule of thumb is to assume that whatever you do gets published to the Yahoo homepage.  I used to use the newspaper, but they seem to lack the cultural relevance anymore.  That goes for everything from business deals to personal attitudes.  Consumers want to have a real relationship with their brands.  Make sure management behavior isn’t a reason they could choose to leave.  Living your brand is an important axiom.