brandcentric blog

The office products industry is a pretty rough and tumble place to sustain a brand.  Over the past 20 or so years, big box retail private label programs have eroded brand market share across virtually all product categories.  I saw this first hand during my time at Avery Dennison, with some tough store brand competition in the labels, markers and printable photo paper categories really making life difficult for Avery’s brand teams.

What to do?  Double down on brand investment: drive product innovation where appropriate, build sustainable loyalty programs that reward good consumer behavior, and push on the digital marketing lever pretty hard.

Advergaming is a great digital marketing tactic that drives brand engagement.  The key here is to keep it simple.  Brands are not competing with World of Warcraft for game design and complexity, rather providing an outlet for the casual gamer to chew up 10 minutes  of time during a busy workday.  If done right, advergames can go viral rather quickly and reach a pretty broad audience.

Mead office products has done a fantastic job with their recent Five Star Classroom Pilot advergame.  It’s a very simple game that involves launching a paper airplane for distance in a virtual classroom setting.  According to MediaPost, Classroom Pilot drove 10mm unique visitors for an average of 4 minutes per visit — amazing reach and engagement for a relatively small investment.  The agency representing Mead, GoFish, cites $500k to $1.5mm to develop an advergame of this caliber.  Based on my experience, this range is on the very high end and should be much closer to $200k.  On a personal note, while at SoftCoin I worked with Fuel Industries to develop an advergame for Sara Lee, and found them to be one of the most creative and approachable shops in the industry.

This story hits home for me on many fronts:  At SoftCoin, we executed multiple interactive promotions for the Dr Pepper brand over the course of several years.  Dr Pepper Snapple Group has a great group of folks with a lot of passion for their business.  They embrace interactive marketing in a big way.  DPSG is also a DemandTec customer.  And I happen to really like GN’R (my high school rock band covered a few of their tunes!)

This story is a painful, yet important reminder about the power of viral marketing.  Long story short, DPSG ran a wildly attractive, time-bound consumer offer for a free bottle of Dr Pepper due to GN’R releasing their new album, Chinese Democracy.  The registration site apparently couldn’t handle the rush and lots of consumers became upset.  Guns N’ Roses is now threatening a lawsuit against DPSG, arguing that this misstep has damaged the release of their new album.  We’ll see how this sorts out in the coming weeks.

I can’t speculate why the server crashed, or what could have been done differently.   But this saga underscores just how powerful the groundswell of consumers can be with an attractive promotional offer.  Social networks can compress campaign awareness from days to minutes.  Literally overnight, a campaign can “go viral” and take on a life of its own.  Use this reality to your advantage, but wherever possible plan your interactive for massive scale.