Hidden Marketing Champs: Cillit Bang - The Postmodern Dirt-Blaster.

Cillit Bang was launched in Europe 2004 as a late entrant in a tough sector with established super brands like Mr. Muscle, Vanish or Frosch. Today it’s an established challenger brand in the household cleaning market with a continuosly rising market share and profit margins of over 25%.

So what did Bart Brecht, head of Reckitt-Benckiser (the company behind Cillit Bang) and his marketing department do right when they built this brand?

#1: The Name 

"Who in the world would call this product by such a stupid name?" wrote one blogger. "It must be a joke. Imagine going into a supermarket and asking for Cillit Bang!"

That might be right – but as an emerging challenger an outstanding weird name seems to be a great way to make you're remembered – especially when the top brands of your segment are known as „Mr. Muscle“ or "The General".

 #2: The Target Group 

Cillit Bang is a brand that was obviously created for a rising minority of cleaning product buyers: men. Thats why you will almost exclusively see men in all advertising efforts. And you won't see any countryhouse or super-clean family mansion but shared apartments and male single households - that's Cillit Bang’s brand world.
 
You see: while the competitionen was still aiming at the traditional family models Cillit Bang found an uncontested, easy to focus and yet still huge group to target.

 

#3: The Proposition 

The Cillit Bang brand colours might be pink and flashy (remember: there are still some established category rules that were learned by the consumers for years. This means you have to deal with them as a brand - somehow) – but the whole brand screams „MAXIMUM EFFECT! POWER! FUNCTIONALITY“. Cilit bang is the "Ultimate Cleaning Tool!"

One could say the brand promise is somehow very 90ies-ish: Cillit Bang would not talk about sustainability or sea-breeze scents – but it’s so damn powerful that you could even imagine its formula is barely legal or in some kind of chemical grey zone.

From my own perspective I can tell you: this message is certainly reaching the target-group that has basically two requirement for cleaning products: They should help end the job quickly and ‚destroy’ even the biggest challenges - if it reminds me of of some kind of 'magical chemical reaction' ("Bang") even better.

 

#4: The TV-Spots

In UK the agency JWT created some great spots that first seem to be a bit dull – on the second view they are genius – especially thinking abut all the small details of execution - and have clearly done amazing work at establishing the brand.

In a very postmodern way JWT sends the core-message („AMAZING POWER“) by exploiting dozens of category- and stereotypes like the fictional testimonial salesman Barry Scott, the artificial shelves packed with Cillit Bang Products in the background or the infamous product desmonstations.

In Germany Cillit Bang took a further step this year and created an even more post-modern way of presenting its product: integrating and re-modelling all clichès you could probably think of. Including two testimonials that could also be actors from a ‚Hangover’ movie and lines like „You recreated my bathroom, dude?!?!?!“

#5 The PR

 2009 Cillit Bang gained even greater notoriety when it was revealed that its combination of sulfamic acid and phosphoric acid was so powerful a cleaning agent that it had been used to clean plutonium residue from a nuclear power station in UK.

That’s not only the best „Reason to Believe“ you can think of – this is also the material memes are made of.

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2015’s Best Strategic Marketing Campaigns II

This is the second part of my WARC Top 10 classification. Here they come: #6 to #10.

#6: ABTO - Bentley Burial (Leo Burnett Brazil):

This campaign is basically a big PR-stunt with a twist – based on a smart strategic idea.

One day an excentric Brazilian millionaire announces on Facebook that he would bury his 1 Mio. Dollar Bentley  as a reference to the egyptian culture so he could drive it after his death. Sounds werid, right? Sounds like a good story! And the reactions were as intended: the public and serveral TV-stations responded heavily and the story became a real scandal. On burial-day dozens of journalists were heading to the millionaire’s mansion.

Suddenly the campaign twist: The whole event is just a metaphoric demonstration about the decadence of burying healthy organs instead of giving them those who would need them. Well, point made - public interest generated and leveraged.

#7: Smart TXTBKS (DDB Philippines):

The second case in the WARC top ten that is about using basic mobile phones to improve  life quality (remember the ‚Khajura Tesan’ case last week?)

In the Philippines school kids suffer from the weight of the various school books they have to carry everyday. As the quick win ‚E-reader’ is not affordable for the majority of families, a mobile provider starts to develop learning materials so small they can be put on sim-cards.

#8: Mercedes-Benz - #YouDrive (BBDO UK): 

This is about the old story of ‚making a rather conservative brand cool’ – but the campaign strategy and execution is pretty genius.
Mercedes-Benz ran a high-quality action-movie campaign – with the audience able to decide about the story’s direction using certain twitter-hashtags.

#9: Hornbach - The Hornbach Hammer (Heimat Berlin)

Hornbach – a DIY retailer – made a product the hero of a whole campaign and mixed it with excellent story-telling, a unique tonality and strong execution.
The ‚Hornbach Hammer’ was a limited tool made of an old Russian tank, which story was told by degrees starting with social media. When the product was launched, all 7000  units were sold after 5 minutes.

#10: Virgin Mobile  - Fair Go Bro (Havas Australia) 

The mobile challenger brand Virgin Mobile found the perfect testimonial to present its ‚the fair underdog’ positioning.

They made a campaign with Doug Pitt – Brad Pitt’s rather unknown brother, who is like an „average-joe version“ of his brother (but still obviously a look-alike).
This magic story was able to communicate the brand’s proposition – and overshine the competition that was spending multiple times the budget.

Read the first part with Place 1-5: http://theyoungplanner.blogspot.de/2015/08/2015s-best-strategic-marketing.html

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Inconvenient Marketing Truths: People don’t "share" anymore

It’s one of the big things in marketing right now: briefing agencies to create 'virals'.
The idea: One little investment - put the piece on your company’s YouTube channel, spend some seeding-euros and there we go - if the agency has done it's job the content will spread like crazy, for free. Cause that's what people use to do: See something - like it - share it. Theoretically.

Practically there is more and more evidence that people actually share video-content a lot less than expected:

While marketers frequently make much play of how often content is shared, research suggests that average share rate for videos is 24-to-one, i.e. typically 24 people will have to view a piece of content to achieve a single share. (Adnews 2015)

At least there seems to be a small exception according to the article. Certain types of creative can lift sharing rate, particularly very emotional content. Suprisingly it's not about babies, cats and dogs

– those elements did not impact the shareablity of the creative.

How does this affect marketing? First: Don't expect too much from your next video. Second: It seems like Distribution is king - content is queen. Even if someone enjoyed your stuff, he won't share it most likely. To achieve maximal effects you need to maximize the pure views.

Read the full article on Adnews: http://www.adnews.com.au/news/distribution-is-king-and-content-is-queen

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Inconvenient Marketing Truths: The hidden costs of promotion

This may be shocking for a lot of marketeers out there - but according to the Boston Consulting Group most promotion activities tend to cause losses on the bottom line if you integrate medium-term metrics like the pull-forward effect.

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Strategy, Communication-Strategy, Communication-Concept? - That's the difference!

I did not study Marketing, Marketing-Communication, Advertising and so on, but Psychology and Sociology - which does really help in my daily life as a Strategic Planner.

On the other hand I've never learned all this marketing-vocabulary you will face when you're  muddling through the client briefiing

Today I tried to organize all the different "disciplines of strategy" and how they relate to each other. This will definetely get pinned somewhere next to my desk. 

My attempt to structure all these marketing terms.

The journey of Apple's iPod, seen through the "Diffusion of Innovations-Model"-glasses.

I've worked with the Diffusion of Innovations Model of Everett Rogers lately, but I have the feeling that a relation to actual sales-numbers is quite rare. That's why I want to share this graph with you that features numbers of Apple's iPod.

In fact the iPod is also my personal example about the importance of early adopters. I still remember this moment in 2005 when a friend of mine brought his very early iPod to university at a time where it started to be issued by several german fuilletons and trendy tech-blogs. In fact no 'real person' had ever seen an iPod back these days in Germany.

After the lecture a bulk of people gathered around him and a few even ask if they could try the typical touch-ring. It was crazy - and even if I had no interest in advertising at this time, it really felt like a magic-marketing-moment.

Personally I had my first iPod two years later - totally mainstream.  Though it was my first apple product and it's still flying around somewhere.

Kind regards from China - blogging is kind of hard here as this service is blocked most of the times.
But an interview with Leo Burnett Shanghai's Head of Planning about Chinese advertising will hopefully be seen here soon.

Jonathan, Shanghai Follow @TheYoungPlanner

The relation between Big Data and Strategic Planning

Big Buzz for Big Data

According to Gartner's famous Hype Cycle, Big Data (also dramatized as BIG DATA) is one of world's most buzzed terms these days and has not even reached its peak yet.

McKinsey sees a market potential of 50 billion dollars in 2017 - including a nice piece of this sweet data-cake for Germany, where the topic reached the administrative top level this year. Ogilvy for instance recently created the position Chef Strategy Officer to integrate realtime data analysis in the existing structures.

Big Data is reaching the strategy departments

Hence it's no wonder more and more German advertising agencies are flirting with the idea of securing their pieces - even if it might be realatively tiny ones. 

That's a logical move: If you believe present discussions, the traditional creative-output centred business model of most full-service agencies has reached an impasse. Selling campaigns is not the most rewarding job at this moment, but improving the percentage of strategic consultance could be an answer. Especially if it's driven by numbers.

The problem: Hopes and dreams are enormous, but It seems like neither the agencies nor the clients actually really know what Big Data means or implicates - and this is definetely an important requirement if you want to estimate potentials and derive appropriate options.

 Big Data causes confusion among clients and agencies.

Entering a blurry category

Okay, let's place a first step on this unsteady ground!

Googling the term "Big Data" starts a true odyssee. On the one hand there are dozens of terminology-driven tech-blogs (typical content: "The best way to set up a data warehouse is ...!"), on the other hand we find the same amount of best-case-flooding marketing-sites (typical content: "Obama improved the efficiency of his TV-Spots by 14% using Big Data").

Both make Big Data what I would call a blurry- or fuzzy category. After some hours of desk-research you get a schematic idea about the topic, but you would still fail to explain it in simple words to your parents.

The central learning: Big Data is an old principle in new shoes (maybe rocket boots)

This happens for one main reason: Unlike most of game-changing developments, Big Data doesn't come all of a sudden. It's not even a radical new invention. It's the 21st century follow-up of a basic principle: If you want to make good decisions, you need a good information base.

More concrete: Due to technological process, we're currently facing enormous growth in our possiblities to collect, save and compute an adequate sum of valuable information.

In this reading, several industries already started to utilize Big Data long years ago. Retailers - for instance - use the mechanism of Big Data since the invention of the barcode to make good decisions in case of ordering and logistic.

Big Data means that more and more enterprises - beside retailers or internet companies - will have an easy access to a more sophisticated and enormous amount of data. In some cases even a good frequented web- or facebook-page can provide a significant magnitude and so grant precious hints.

Before I got an Idea what the Big Data phenomen is all about I had to detour.

Maximizing three steps of decision making

Let's rush over this rough model of data-driven decision-making:

1) Collect: According to experts the global data volume will be 8 Zetabytes in 2015, a number  already so high that our brain fails to understand this incredible volume.

2) Save: Without methodical records, this high volume of data would be very useless. Falling prices for data-storages make it possible to save every single action that's finding its way to the net.

3) Combine and Condense: There are two main problems if you collect an incredible amount of data. First you will most likely own a big variety (transactional data, video-files, structured and unstructured texts, etc.), second you won't be able to scan and analyze everything on your own.

That's maybe the most central and fascinating point of the game. The technical progress of the last years even solved both constrictions. Now we have the software and power to actually really utilize a ton of different data and create huge connected databases.

Sounds futuristic, right? I will give an example.

IBM's Watson: When the Big Magic happens

I can clearly remember the news two years ago after an IBM super-computer called Watson had beaten some American Jeopardy champions. Everybody was impressived by the technical possbilities, even if no one had an idea about the magic behind this technology at this point of time.

Watson was equipped with several huge databases including complete Wikipedia (Collect, Save), but he was first and foremost able to transfer the human-made, often ambigouos and unstructured speech of Jeopardy into computable, structured data-sets (Combine) and find the correct answer in his packed data storage using his algorithms (Condense).

Super-computer Watson can transform unstructured into structured data and so leverage and connect different data-bases.

Let's talk about Bounty-Muffins 

Some weeks ago I talked to a developer of Germany's leading producer of Big Data sofware and asked him if their tools would have any chance of being viable in 2014.

He was amused: "Man, this software is allready really working for some companies. It's not science fiction any more!"

His company was consulting a chocolate manufacturer looking for promising product-extensions using a software tool comparable to IBM's Watson. After harvesting gigabytes of data from several cooking-forums, blogs and social media platforms, they found a correlation between the positive notions of Bounty and baking muffins for german women with an age between 32 and 39. This Insight led to a product-cooperation supported by a targeted Facebook campaign.

"That's the future of advertising!", he stated and I'm quite sure that some marketing departments would agree. "It's efficient and measurable, maybe the big answer for the problems advertising has been facing the last years."

To be honest: This wasn't the message I was looking for. Should Big Data be the end of strategy as we know it instead of a perspective? Will Watson or one of his upcoming brothers easily print a Creative Brief in seconds and upcoming campaigns be inspired by correlations found in huge data sets?

Stanley Kunbrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: Super-computer Hal 9000 can only fake real emotions.

Algorithms only tell the boring part of the story

I think the answer (or let's call it: relief) can be found in different perceptions of the word Insight.

Let's see what Big Data software engineers use this term for:

• Buying a light blue bedside carpet is correlated with being pregnant with a boy. 
• German high schoolers are buying twice as much chewing gum in February than in July.
• Bounty and muffins are a good match.
  

Can you imagine that these perceptions lead to any inspiring campaign-idea? - I highly doubt that. Our creatives would flip me the bird if I would present it to them.

Let's contrast what a strategic planner would rather call a real insight:

• A cultural code connects baby boys and the colour light blue. Buying a bedside carpet could be a personal tool for the parents to mark this caesura and prepare their home for a exciting and unfamiliar new phase of life.
• There must be an important event in February. Isn't chewing gum a classical tool to focus and gain concentration? The high purchasement volume could probably be linked to the school leaving examinations in February then.
• I'm not that sure about the bounty-muffins - maybe it's related to the taste of a special sweet these women used to love in their childhood.
  
  

These small sketches demonstrate a way of thinking that goes beyond correlation and I'm relatively sure that it should be one central asset of a good strategist.

Data-crunching can't replace this intuitive perspective. One could say that just because there is so much data in the new information society, intution becomes increasingly valuable!

See this amazing statement of Greg Satell relating to David Ogilvy:

The Big End

We see: Big Data and our way of thinking can be combined to a powerful asset. Utilizing big amounts of high quality and often non-reactive data like never before (for a rising number of clients) could  bring strategic planning to a new level and inspire great campaigns with unconventional insights. In addition there could be opportunities for new data-refinement services: According to McKinsey, only 0.5% of collected data has been utilized yet.

Another good news: We don't have to be scared by the idea of becoming obsolete. Mechanical micro-targeted advertising could be a nice way of improving online banner-ads, but they will never replace idea- and insight-driven campaigns.

Some questions still have to be to be answered though:

• Will agencies get access to the client's data storages?
• Will agencies be able to afford the needed software?
• Will the strategy- need to co-op with the it-department or will we be able to use user-friendly interfaces?

Thanks for reading! Let's see what the future will bring for our exciting profession ;-)

Kind regards,

Jonathan, Berlin.



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