Posts tagged ‘promotional marketing’
The Good Shopping Show
I popped down the motorway to the Good Food Show in Birmingham on Wednesday on a bit of a spying mission to see which brands were putting serious money into the event.
The surprising thing was how few of the big brands had turned up. Nescafe Collections had some great experiential activity going on (and a very slick team delivering it) and Carte D’or and Muller were giving away free ice cream and yoghurt respectively like there was no tomorrow.
But apart from that it was like the World’s Biggest Farmers Market, with regional producers flogging product like there was no such word as recession. Some punters had even brought large wheelie suitcases with them to cart their purchases around. The only real brands that were doing well out of the shopathon were ones like Rachel’s Organic, who were doing a roaring trade in four-yogurts-and-a-little-coolbag for £6.
Red marks go to Country Life for having the most annoying sampling team I’ve ever met and Black Magic (the retro chocs) for spending (what was presumably a lot of) money on a branded seating area for sampling and then failing to actually brand it beyond a single cardboard standee. Also to swimmer Sharron Davies who was on the Bernard Matthews stand being ignored by everyone and looking bored.
I don’t think we’ll be recommending to our clients that they buy into the Good Food Show next year. Unless we can find a way of rebranding them as regional producers and knocking up some mini coolbags…
What not to say if you’re a promotional field marketing type lady:
Promotional Totty:
“Can I talk to you?”
Me:
“Erm…no.”
Dear McVities Brand Manager, you’re wasting money
(this is one for the Integrated Planners / ISP members out there)
I popped into my local Sommerfield today to pick up some stuff for lunch. And I saw a great example of why in-store marketing (when its actually done in-store by a store’s prefered supplier) doesn’t work.
Properly done, with an engaging creative theme and executed by trained and experienced staff, sampling activity at store level can be really effective in both driving sales on the day and turning triallists into loyal customers.
But some pissed off looking girl wondering round the store with a plate of broken biscuits “d’ya wanna try one?” is hardly going to produce a sales uplift.
The McVities stand was dirty (and mostly deserted), two products aimed at different occasions and target audiences were being promoted (new healthyish Yog Fruit digestives and indulgent chocolate caramel digestives) and I saw the Sommerfield staff nicking biscuits off the plates when they thought no-one was looking.
The promotions girl was also diligently breaking every choccy caramel digestive into two or three pieces for sampling, creating an impressive plate of carameley melted chocolate mess. As an encore, she wiped the stand top clean of crumbs with the palm of her hands in their ‘food hygiene’ gloves then went straight back to the onerous task of breaking biscuits.
(“we’re busy breaking biscuits, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do”)
According to my colleagues in the Promotional Marketing/Sales Promotion team, when you take into account staff costs, product, leaflets etc, today’s efforts will have cost McVities about £400 . Multiply that by the three hundred stores its probably running in and you’ve just wasted £120,000.
