Hi

This month I look at how you can apply personalisation to your brand, tips on how to gain press coverage for your business, why designing by committee is such a bad idea, ask if you can survive without Alexa, and introduce you to two new Marketing Optimists.

Would you pay £14 for KitKat?

Nestle are banking on the fact that some people will. As I write, you can buy a four finger KitKat for 70p at Sainsburys (other shops are available), so why would you ever want to pay a whopping £14?! The answer is personalisation. KitKat have developed a way for you to choose your very own taste combination, giving you over 1,500 choices! 

So why have Nestle gone down what seems like such a risky route? Covid has, for the time being, killed the high street, so going direct to customers makes a lot of sense. But for an FMCG brand, that’s going to be a tough call to scale, so a way to make it work is to add in loads more value, offering a KitKat the way you want it. 

How to get press coverage 

If you're looking for information on how to get your business coverage in the press, there are loads of books you could read, or you could just speak directly to a journalist at one of the UK's largest regional newspapers. 

As part of our Marketing Sandwich Course webinars, we spoke to Ismail Mulla, business reporter on The Yorkshire Post, about how businesses should approach journalists to gain PR coverage with local press in both print and digital formats. 

Why design by committee is such a bad idea

“I think that’s rubbish,” he said. “I could understand it if they had just swapped red for green. But why on earth have they got that many colours? It’s a load of old bollocks. It’s just a mess.” Gerry Barney, the designer of the original British Rail logo.

This is what happens when you design by committee. 

The government decided to bring back the iconic British Rail logo, which is great because it's a design classic, that just means "railway". However they wanted to talk about its environmental qualities for a campaign. Again, very laudable. But it's clear that when it came to choosing the exact green to use, the committee couldn't decide, and opted to use them all... 

Could you survive without Alexa?

Ok, you don’t have the budget for a Super Bowl ad (around $6,000,000 for 30 seconds), and you can’t afford Hollywood A-listers either. But that’s no reason not to take a look at Amazon’s Super Bowl ad.

Before the ad screened, they built up the anticipation. Amazon made Alexa have a cough if you asked about the Super Bowl result, all the celebs posted unwrapping videos when they got their headsets for the ad, and there was lots of other promotion going on too.

This means that the ad is one of the most watched ever, even more than Apple’s 1984 ad, and was voted the best ad of the Super Bowl. 

You can apply this to your campaigns too, by telling people what you are doing before it happens, telling them when it’s live, and then following up after with a review of what happened.

Oh, and if you do have a Super Bowl type budget, let’s talk!

Meet the new Marketing Optimists

I'm really excited to welcome Annie Green and Georgia Barker-Wright to the team. They bring a wealth of experience in Social Media for B2B and B2C, and I know they are going to add loads of value to the marketing campaigns we create.

I hope you enjoyed this email. If there’s something you think others may find just as handy, I’d love to know. Reply to this email with your suggestions and I’ll add it to my pool of links.

If you'd like help with your marketing, give me a call on 0113 477 1210, or reply to this email.

Richard Michie
CEO - The Marketing Optimist