Alex Woodruff Biz Buzz

We all know cigarette advertising will be banned in Germany some time. It’s already happened elsewhere and European law will take eventually precedence. So it’s interesting watching the industry limber up with many parallels to what happened in the UK. The first major move there was to forbid ads that show a person holding a [...]

Sometimes when you see stark contrasts you realise how unbelievable it is that legislation wasn’t changed earlier. This ad is shocking to modern eyes. And normally it’s the old generation that is shocked by what the following generation is up to. And as for this one, and the whole concept of passive smoking…

[WARNING: this post contains shocking images - do not scroll down if you are squeamish] In 2001 I brought back a picture from England of a pack of cigarettes with what for German smokers was a HUGE warning on it. It was, it was a third of the front of the pack (unlike the German [...]

Kotler cites Mattel, US owner of the world’s leading doll, as an excellent example of a “marketing environment watcher”. Apparently the average American girl owns 8 Barbie’s in their lifetime. Mattel has positioned the brand benefit as “playing at being a grown up”. Source: screenshot To update their range, Mattel constantly comes out with new [...]

When Knut, the baby polar bear in Berlin zoo, entered the scene in 2007, the zoo owners really knew how to catch the headlines. The cuddly ball of white fluff quickly became an international star making headlines in every corner of the globe. Excellent PR, and the visitors flooded in adding welcome revenue. In the [...]

In assessing the impact on the marketing environment made by technology change, Kotler describes a somewhat unexpected chain of trends, products and markets created by the invention of the condom and contraceptive pill. In fact some claim contraception was one of the most influential inventions on mankind in the whole of the 20th century. The [...]

If you know German advertising, you’ll be familiar with the long-running campaign for the coffee brand Melitta. The slogan “Melitta macht Kaffee zum Genuss” (literally “Melitta makes coffee an indulgence”) has little to do with the content of the TV ads though. For years it’s shown a young father with his son, who regularly shirks [...]

If you’re a product manager on tomato ketchup, it’s hard to imagine that you’d need to watch the marketing environment at all closely in the area of “legal and political developments”. But you do. As Heinz discovered in the early 90s. At the time product managers spent a major amount of time involved with “P [...]

According to a Local Government Association report released in October 2007, up to 40% of packaging used by leading UK supermarkets cannot be recycled. This includes leading names like Marks & Spencer (the worst offender) but also a big German retailer: Lidl, rapped for the worst wrapping on a “standard basket of 29 goods”. I [...]

The classic PEST model is often adapted to include new aspects of the marketing environment such as Environmental or Demographic not separated out in the old theory. Here’s a nice example of a German company spotting a demographic or social trend and using it to arouse interest. It’s from a series of posters describing what [...]