With the trained eye, the marketeer will often look at a campaign and at a glance spot things that just don’t stack up or match the target group. On a recent car journey my passenger looked at this campaign and was able to instantly reel off a number of things on this poster that, with good prompting, would quickly be criticised in qualitative market research, most effectively in a focus group.

The issues she raised, and I agree with:

- is this mum not a bit young looking to have a kid of this age?
- would a boy of this age want to spend time sitting around with his mum in the kitchen?
- what’s he doing sitting on the work surface? Most mums would have issues with this, for hygiene and safety reasons
- if a busy mum has 15 minutes, won’t she be doing something more constructive than mucking around with her son sitting on a work surface?
- what are those clean, unused potatoes doing there – surely the oven chips came from a plastic bag?
- it’s May, where do those sunflowers come from?

Well, maybe McCain want mums to spend those valuable 15 minutes to go online and submit an entry to the competition. Question posed online: what would YOU do with those 15 minutes while you wait for the chips? Out of curiosity I browsed the 100s of entries.

I don’t remember anyone saying they’d spend the time with Fritz. The most votes I saw was for one mum who wrote “make a dessert for Fritz while the chips are cooking”. Haha. My passenger was right.

Oh dear. Looks like mums aren’t into this campaign, which was designed to make them invest more time in children…

And why are McCain running this campaign? For CSR reasons, or social media reasons? Who knows.

Unilever brand Du Darfst (indirectly linked to the UK brand Too Good to be True), seems to have changed its mind about a somewhat daring TV campaign. The original version encouraged women to stop strict slimming regimes, with the somewhat shocking tagline ‘fuck the diet’. Luckily I caught the ad and took a picture of it.

I’d been planning to feature it more prominently, but before I knew it they’d edited the ad and replaced the tagline with ‘Diät – Ohne Mich!’ (‘Diet – without me’). I wonder if pressure on Facebook had anything to do with it. Or people complaining about the foul language on TV. Posts on Facebook range from “Nothing wrong with using the F word” to “Thanks for changing the TV ad” and “The new slogan is worse – boring or what?”

Well I’m sure Du Darfst had some long meetings about it, or somebody got a ticking off. But maybe also it’s good publicity.

Personally I wonder why they have to be so crude just to grab attention. Or are they trying to say something about the attitude of their target group?

It would be banned in the UK for being rude, but obviously here you can get away with it, like this insurance company did: Shit happens.

No turbo toddlers

Sometimes finding new product ideas or innovative ways to update the marketing mix comes not from interviews, customer surveys or experimental methods, but just watching – watching customers.

This is called observational research. It’s valuable because you get ideas by simply watching products in use, or customers using services, ie during the ‘brand experience’. Sometimes the idea simply springs up without having to prompt the respondents.

For example: follow parents on a day out in the woods with a kid on a Bobby Car and you may experience their own frustration with the wheel noise, plus other people’s disapproving looks, and as I discovered, even a sign forbidding access to this ubiquitous toddler push-car.

Now, there’s an idea. Quiet wheels!

Done. And now Bobby Cars with ‘whisper wheels’ really do exist. Alternatively, parents of kids with a driving ban can even retrofit whisper wheels, now available through various channels on and offline.

The case study winners from WO59 were going full whack for energy chocolate with a concept called Flying Knight. It offered a 2-in-1 USP, the “have a break, have a Kitkat” concept combined with the right ingredients to add a skip to your walk and keep you awake after a late night out.

But the knight in the name was not a rhyme with night. It was a German-English word play I missed originally, until they explained the neat twist. Red Bull gives you wings – thus “Flying” in the brand name. And the main competitor they wanted to attack here was Ritter Sport – so they called it Knight in English.

Of course this would go over the heads of a native speaker of English, but the German jury got the idea and the idea was a winner.

Apple offers students and university staff special discounts on products. It may seem unfair to other buyers, but it’s accepted practice.

This is quite common in some markets: although the product is the same, people accept that other customers get a better deal. But it’s more usual in service industries. So museums or shows will offer discounts to certain groups of people. You can even occupy the same seat on an aeroplane for a lower price, just because you’re under a certain age.

But this form of price differentiation has to be accepted, or else you’ll upset many, many customers.

Why do Apple offer such attractive discounts to students? Because they know that one day these students will come back again for more, and more, and hopefully more and more – ie, they’ll become loyal. If Apple can grab enough such customers, they’ll shove Microsoft off its dominant pedestal. So although this eats into Apple’s margin, in the long term it could pay off.

The picture in this post has been doing the rounds in Facebook and forums. What it also shows is that having an Apple also gives you certain street cred. If you don’t use Apple, you become the butt of other students’ jokes.

A fitting slogan?

A couple of months ago I came across a campaign for a regional gym brand with a more than suggestive slogan: Fit mich. At the time I decided not to post it, as I try to focus more on the international angle on marketing stories in Germany. To explain to non-native speakers what the intended take-out of this poster was (in case you can’t guess): it’s a double-entendre in German, as “fit mich” is extremely easily misheard as “fick mich” (ie, f*** me).

Some good friends of mine recently pointed out this word-play coming up again in advertising here in Germany, only this time probably not intentionally.

Maybelline New York, owned by L’Oréal, has a product range called Fit Me, and like many international lifestyle brands, it’s decided to keep its image and brand name uniform all around the world. I’m sure the marketing people in Germany were aware of the unfortunate sound of Fit Me, and may well have begged to make an exception in Germany (I would have!). But as this would have meant changing not just the ads, but also complete ranges of product packaging, they were never likely to win the argument.

Anyway, if you hear the name ringing out time and again in advertising, there comes a point where it simply sounds terrible. I’ve yet to see the German ad, but every time I replay this US ad and put my German hat on, it really does sound like fick me. And my friend winces every time she sees the ad on German TV. Probably a fitting response, for a bit of a misfit slogan.

Try to watch this ad and pretend that the woman is NOT saying “fick me” in the first close-up after 3 seconds…

I seem to be an intensive poster on posters recently. Maybe a good idea, in case they get banned like in one city in South America.

Here an example of two posters I spied in Berlin, again using QR codes, but this time much more sensibly.

The reason I say this is that they both focus on getting the big message across, and then give the follow up info or interactive options as a call to action to finish the ad off. Rather than make the entire core message a call to action without image, info, nuffin. Which is where this poster went wrong.

But critical, as I often am, I must gripe about one thing.

It looks like the Berlin ITB trade fair forked out good money on a model and graphical designer. It’s a standard poster, standard layout. Everything looks fine.

But they could at least have thought about what the poster would look like when 2 metres high.

I took a close look. After all, I stood in front of this poster in subzero temperatures for 10 minutes so I need to get close to something.

Take a look at the eye.

A close-up clearly shows the flash umbrella in the studio, plus the light board held underneath her chin to highlight the facial contours.

The agency’s at fault for this. They should fuzz the reflection in her eyes, a quick digital fix – 30 seconds that might, just might, help remove yet another streetside distraction.

Aye, the devil’s in the detail.

Think about it. Maybe I'm rude

Last year I stumbled across a German book showing what I thought is a naughty gesture. I’ve been told by many Germans that you can be fined thousands for tapping your head at someone, especially an official. It’s called “showing the bird”. An innocent Brit could unknowingly get themselves in deep water with this gesture in Germany. In the UK, depending on context, yes, it can also be a signal that “you’re a nutter”, but this definitely wouldn’t land you a nasty fine. On other occasions it can simply mean “think, silly”.

Well I decided to write to the people who publish this book to see what they think the boy on the front cover of this book is saying. Surely they’re not encouraging children to make a gesture that features on official lists of German fines!

They cleary see nothing wrong with the picture, they don’t feel they’re teaching young school kids to be rude. Their response:

Die Absicht lag darin, dass der Junge den anderen zum Nachdenken animieren möchte, da dieser mit dem Kissen einen schwangeren Bauch nachahmt.

So they told me their illustrator was only telling the other boy to think. If you’re German and reading this, do you buy their explanation?

I’ve criticised the use of QR codes on posters before, and have to do it again.

This ad is from the sunny island of Ibiza. It’s for a restaurant, apparently: Foster’s Hollywood (already challenging enough for me – the brand name sounds like Crocodile Dundee stuck on Sunset Boulevard).

Anyway, what do I do when I see this ad? Stop and scan it, or think, what’s that plonky QR code doing in the middle of a swirl of fire?

Both options are possible. But as most people just walk past posters, very few will, in my humble opinion, stop to scan in the code. All the rest will simply walk on by and thus your money on that poster campaign has just gone up in flames.

So the other 99.99% of potential customers will get to know (or just as importantly get to feel) nothing, nada, about the brand, the services, the product. And almost nobody will notice that carefully hidden logo (bottom right, in case you didn’t notice it either).

Fail? Well it certainly doesn’t light my fuego. Do I sense someone trying to be trendy and just slapping a QR code on a poster because it’s all the rage?

Not Mercedes mobility

Fine in German. But please don’t produce new materials in English with the word translated directly into “MOBILITY”. No. In German it may be ok to talk about the future of “mobility” to mean “how we’ll get about”.

But search the English-speaking world and you’ll notice the word that some Germans are using in their direct translations, here in the cradle of the automobile, is dragging cars and the concept of travel to the grave of “mobility”.

In the UK we have things like the website on the right promoting “mobility”. Which I think is far from the messaging the German car companies are trying to convey.

Source: Ford website screenshot

Ford in the UK works with a mobility programme, Motability, “a national charity helping disabled people, their families and carers become mobile”.

And even Mercedes uses mobility in a different sense in the US, ie the original sense, for people with “special transportation needs (who) require mobility equipment”.

The city of Stuttgart, which has toyed with various marketing campaigns in the past, is now promoting mobility in a wider sense of modern travel infrastructure, which I feel just slightly more comfortable with. But I still think of zimmerframes and electric wheelchairs when I hear the word.

I do wonder if some managers here have got hold of the wrong end of the stick on this word – maybe even the walking stick.