My “Next please” part of this blog is dedicated to new ideas – products or services I think the market is calling out for. A couple of years ago I said it was finally time for hotels to offer a new service, and prevent arguments between tourists from different nations.
Well, well. What’s happened now?
There is a chain of hotels that really does clear away towels from the swimming pool in the morning. It has clearly understood customer needs.
Having now seen this pool “service” in action, it was interesting to see some cultural differences in reactions.
The Germans stuck to the rule. Without exception. I didn’t see any of them lay out towels in the morning. The Dutch and English? Most were obedient, but I saw two groups consistently ignoring the signs and doing the typical “see if I care” thing – after all, rules are they to be broken…
Anyway, since the classic English advertising campaign, and many spoofs, a German channel has now done a “revenge of the Germans” sketch. The sun bed battle continues, they’re fighting by the pool, they’re fighting by the beach. Will they ever surrender… ?
A number of posts on this blog have demonstrated how loud the voice of customers is now becoming – especially with the internet here as a mouthpiece.
Some try to use it to their benefit – eg, Mattel and Marmite. Others have been attacked by the loud voice. BP suffered the first major oil spill since Web 2.0 and immediately became the www tar baby of millions of actual and potential customers – who doubtless would have done nothing to voice their anger if the internet hadn’t provided them with a virtual megaphone.
Old left, new (rejected logo) right
My latest story is about gap, the clothing company, that recently decided to update its logo. It wanted to move on from the dark blue background to a smaller square, graduated, behind the p.
Looks harmless really. But no. Gap took the plunge and was immediately bombarded by its customers and told to go back to the old logo. A similar thing happened to the city of Stuttgart with its proposed new logo.
So who owns a brand these days? The marketing departments or the people who buy the brand?
Having seen this latest brand, which is targeted at young alcopop consumers and tries to position itself as a trendy tipple with an English touch, I might have to take back my original criticism of Nestlé and its “bum-bum” clanger.
Bum pocket drink?!?
Bum-bum ice cream never tried pretending it’s English. It’s a thoroughbred German brand targeted at kids. The packaging doesn’t use English buzzwords to sound cool.
This latest 37% vodka “pocket drink” tells you it’s “ready to drink”. So if it’s so much into English, despite being in Germany, why not check what the main word on the pack can actually mean to English speakers?
What do you do if a competitor copies your brand name? Normally: blast them out of the water. But check your facts first.
Beer from here, and there.
The German brand Löwenbräu will be familiar to beer drinkers in many countries of the world. In Germany there are two Löwenbräu’s, however. So which one is the rightful brand owner? The answer is both. The original, founded in 1383 was well established when the regional brand pictured here was introduced nearly 500 years later. But in those days there was no way to protect brands.
Over the years, the new, alternative Löwenbräu became established as a brand in its own right. So if the big international tried to blast this one out of the water, it would not be able to. It’s been around since time immemorial, it is not copying anyone, it’s here to stay.
This is the case in many countries. Brands have been running in parallel for years and do not need special protection. Unless somebody copies the logo, specific design elements, etc.
Anyone involved in advertising and creative development will tell you that it can be a painful process getting any aspect of a campaign right. From the initial creative strategy to messaging, execution, layouts, branding and, not least, wording.
Being involved in writing advertising copy nearly every day now, I know many of the English pitfalls in wording. But only from an English angle. I’ve never thought about the difficulties of German.
Does your protector stink?
I thank Clemens for pointing out a nasty verbal bear trap in German advertising. Because you can stick so many words together in German to make longer, more interesting words (a linguistic side to creativity unique to German?), you can sometimes unknowingly create the sort of morphological monstrosity his son found on this poster.
It’s difficult to explain this total goof if you don’t know German, but I’ll try. The bank is trying to say “Protector instinct”. But, taking into account the feminine form of German words (like turning the “male” English word actor into a “female” version, actress), the copywriter working on this ad created one long and ugly word that says “Protector(ess) stinks“.
As we know from studies into selective perception, people looking at this poster will see what they want to see – stinks (stinkt) at the end of the word. The rest they’ll piece together, even if it’s backwards.
Who approved this ad?! Did nobody inside the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken organisation spot this woeful wunderword?
This latest marketing mishap is, frankly, embarrassing. The company concerned sells posters for retail outlets. It’s a clever idea. If you’re a small bakery and need a poster, log in to plakatshop.de and order one online.
apostrophe catastrophe
As a bakery I visited did. Only I don’t think they spotted the typo. Any student of German will tell you, it’s spelt “Gibt’s” not “Gibts”.
Considering this poster was in a town with many elderly and well off (and I assume well educated) tourist visitors, I’m surprised pedants like me haven’t gone into the bakery to tell them their poster is wrong.
I’m also surprised the bakery hasn’t got back to plakatshop to ask for a replacement.
However, you’ll be pleased to know it’s been removed from the poster seller’s website.
But in the meantime, as their name and url are displayed at the bottom of the poster, it’s there for all to see – and judging by the area of Germany I was visiting, where time tends to stand still, I guess this self-proclamation of “We sell posters, but bad ones”, could be on display for years to come.
If someone else comes to the bakery and asks for a recommendation, or even asks where they get their posters from, I think this could be some poor word-of-mouth marketing.
In the summer I saw this excellent example of conative marketing (the Action part of AIDA) that instantly reminded me of a previous promotion by a toy manufacturer in doctors’ waiting rooms.
The panel has flip-over cards with pictures of the Ravensburger amusement park near Lake Constance. It was fitted in the lounge on a Lake Constance ferry. It’s a static version of Memory, a popular German kids’ game also made by Ravensburger in which you have to flip cards and find pairs (and turn them back over again if it’s not a pair).
This promotion succeeds on a number of levels, so it gets a strong thumbs up from me
1) It helps adults keep kids occupied
2) It introduces kids to Ravensburger’s Memory game
3) It features pictures of the amusement park, a neat cross-promotion for Ravensburger
4) It’s “edutainment”
5) It reminds parents that the amusement park isn’t far away as a potential day trip
In so doing, effectively this form of Action can actually sometimes do the Awareness, Interest and Desire at the same time. It’s probably expensive to fit and of course impossible to evaluate (how can you assess the effect on the bottom line or sale uplift?).
The only negative: there was only one on the boat, so kids were fighting for turns! And I can imagine it would be difficult to justify the budget for this instrument in marketing meetings, given that you can’t prove it works (a major problem if your company is too heavily influenced by its accountants).
So let me confirm for Ravensburger that it does work – and it lodged itself strongly in my memory.
The German civil engineering giant STRABAG describes itself as Germany’s number one road builder with a tradition going back 80 years. That may be so, but when I’m walking to the tram in Stuttgart and see one of their signs, am I, a man on the street, interested in who they are or what they do?
The reason I ask: I recently saw this sign erected by a STRABAG subsidiary. It was in front of a tram (U-Bahn) stop in a suburb of Stuttgart. It proudly proclaims that they sponsor the Tyrolean Festival.
In a B2B market – where I have zero influence over who mends Stuttgart’s already efficient U-Bahn network, and I think no further than the price of a ticket and when the trains arrive – is this advertising going to do anything for me? Or is it just showing that they care about (Austrian) culture?
Why are they telling me about a festival sponsorship deal in Austria? Or am I not the target audience for this song and dance expenditure? Or are they just proud that Strabag bagged the business in Stuttgart?
This is not a criticism of German retailers, but shopping in some countries is made soooo easy compared to here, where some shops feel to me like they got stuck in a rut in the 1980s.
I’ll take an example from France where I dropped into a colossal outlet last summer to stock up with local wine. As expected, I was overwhelmed by the selection. But my choice was made much easier not only by the wine labels, which clearly showed how dry or sweet individual wines are. The signs were colour-coded to show which wines went well with what.
Basically, the shop thought with and for the customer. Nice. Unlike some outlets in sleepy Stuttgart, which sometimes make you feel like an intruder, getting in the way of staff trying to stack shelves.
There was an interesting linguistic mishap in the French outlet though. I think they were trying to sell me snacks, but no, it clearly said on the sign: SNAKING. Hmm, bring on that fried serpent…
If you’ve been following previous posts on the failed attempt to update the Stuttgart logo (last week, week before), you might be interested to see some of the counter-suggestions after Kessel.tv sent out an open invitation to come up with something better.
As a Brit and now established expat in the Swabian metropolis, my vote definitely goes to this logo:
Not only does it embody the geographical situation of the city – which is a definite plus for tourists – it marries modernity (symbolised by Germany’s first television tower, also a symbol of communication) with tradition (the vineyards), in a symbol full of movement. The font in the logo is also rounded and friendly.
Another plus with this logo: not too many colours (important when thinking about printing costs). A definite minus, however: it would need compacting and refining as it’s a bit wide perhaps.
Anyway, see what you think. For other alternatives, go to the kessel website.
