The retirement industry isn’t the most glamorous, but with our ageing population and the ‘pig in the python’ that is the baby boomer generation, there’s plenty of brass to be found in the muck. Typically, the big sell is all about the facilities on offer. But Summerset Group, which listed on the stock exchange in November, has taken a slightly different approach with its first national marketing campaign and is buttering up its residents instead.
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Social media means friends appear to have turned into a commodity to be crowed about these days. And, thanks to an original 1974 Volkswagen Kombi van, Fly Buys managed to increase its Facebook fan base ten-fold in December, with a total of 55,000 likes in three weeks (up from 5,500) through its ‘Dream Machine’ promotion, a finalist in the 2012 CAANZ Media Awards.
Last year outdoor apparel brand Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and other papers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the days around Thanksgiving that get the tills ringing loudest for US retailers—with the bold headline ‘DON’T BUY THIS JACKET’. Urging consumers to buy only after making a considered choice was obviously a risky move, but despite this, its sales were still up 28 percent on Cyber Monday. And, according to chief executive Casey Sheahan, who was speaking at the Better By Design CEO summit in Auckland today, this bold attitude permeates the brand.
Moa recently caused a bit of a hubbub in the brewing community after pinning its craft beer manifesto to the wall. And it soon might be creating hubbubs in America after securing some big US distribution deals.
One of the perennial bug-bears of the marketing industry is the fact that it’s often seen by the bean counters as a cost to be cut in times of economic hardship, rather than an investment that will pay off when things pick up. And, according to the research of a top marketing professor who’ll be speaking in Hamilton on Friday March 30 as part of the Excellence in Practice seminar series offered by Corporate and Executive Education at Waikato Management School, billions of dollars of shareholder value are destroyed each year by companies that tie their marketing budgets to the business cycle.
After BNZ’s parent bank NAB recently shoulder-tapped Clemenger Group and asked Colenso BBDO to hop into bed with BNZ, Westpac was pushed out onto the floor and swiftly put its account up for pitch. At present, the Clemenger-owned .99, which recently had to show around 15 staff the door after the loss of Air New Zealand and Vodafone to DraftFCB, is Westpac’s retail agency but this new regional alignment and other agency changes for BNZ means it might be pretty tough to keep it that way.
It’s been a tough old time in the building biz of late. Homes have been leaking, consents have been dropping and the Christchurch rebuild is taking longer than expected to kick into action. But there is some optimism afoot this year and PlaceMakers is aiming to assert its position as the go-to trade supplier in New Zealand with its first brand campaign for a few years and a major sponsorship of the Super Rugby competition.
DraftFCB was told it had won the Vodafone account on Friday afternoon. And as if that wasn’t enough good news for one day, it also won the Grand Prix at the RSVP and Nexus Awards that night for the Electricity Authority’s What’s My Number? campaign.
The country’s packaging heroes and villains have been unmasked once again thanks to the Unpackit awards, with the folks from Wanaka Wastebusters whittling down 200 nominations to the eight best and worst examples of packaging in New Zealand.
15-29 year olds make up 25 percent of New Zealand’s total visitors. And while they may not spend as much as the older folk, they stay here for a longer and are an important chunk of revenue for the industry. Due to a combination of new, exciting and probably cheaper destinations coming into fashion and a lack of activity directed at the youth market over the years, New Zealand has fallen off the radar slightly for this demographic, but Stories Beat Stuff, a digital campaign launched by Contagion last year that asks potential travellers to give something up in exchange for a trip to New Zealand, is helping to change that.
All around the world, things go a little bit green on St Patrick’s Day as token Irishfolk embrace the festivities and set about downing 13 million pints of Guinness. And, as part of a global effort to make March 17 officially the friendliest day of the year, Lion and Zephyr have put Guinness back on TV for the first time in 12 years with a campaign featuring very funny Irish comedian Jimeoin.
It’s pretty tough going in the retail sector at the moment. And, as the digital wave keeps breaking, it’s increasingly important to try and keep up with the play. And, thanks to Westfield, local retailers will be able to get their heads around some of the issues affecting the sector at the inaugural Retail Brain Food for Breakfast Seminar in Auckland next month.
The ’80s were a wonderous time. Big hair, big lunches, big phones. But back in 1987, wine was in and beer was out, so it was also a time of pain and suffering for many bemulleted, beer-loving Kiwi males. And the latest historical campaign celebrating DB Export Dry’s 25th anniversary aims to bring the brown stuff back into fashion by poking fun at wine.
Hudson has released its latest salary and employment insights document for 2012. And, with modest optimistic hiring intentions across the sales, marketing and communications (SMC) profession in both Australia and New Zealand, it’s picking plenty of competition in the quest for talent this year.
Consumers generally aren’t too enamoured with large corporate entities, even less so in this climate of occupation. And Telecom, with its monopolistic heritage and less than enviable recent track record, is looking for all the love it can get. So, in an effort to show that it isn’t just a faceless corporation and really does care about its customers, its direct agency Rapp Tribal came up with a creative way for the employees of one of the country’s biggest companies to show their thanks.
Barfoot & Thompson, New Zealand’s largest privately owned real estate company, has appointed Big Communications as its advertising and direct marketing agency, taking over from Voice.
Larrie Moore, the founding marketing director for 2degrees, has quit the mobile operator.
Nothing says I love you like a massive sign outside a mall. And, to tap into the romantic spirit of the day, Westfield has once again let New Zealanders publicly declare their affection on 12 billboards around the country as part of its second Truly, Madly, Hugely campaign.
New Zealanders, with our unusual combination of immense pride and nagging self-doubt, like to be liked (“How are you enjoying your trip? Are you enjoying your trip? You’re enjoying your trip, aren’t you?”). But, just as Aucklanders have certain preconceptions of, say, Invercargill, many Australians couldn’t think of anything worse than visiting their Tasman neighbours. So, as part of a campaign launching today in Australia, Air New Zealand and its Aussie agency Host Sydney attempted to show a bunch of ‘Kiwi Sceptics’ what they were missing out on by tricking them into a trip to the other lucky country.
Gone are the days when homebrew was a byword for, as your dad might say, bloody undrinkable horse piss. Craft beer is one the major growth areas of the booze market and there are now plenty of interesting brews being concocted in garages, laundries, hot water cupboards, man caves and, of course, breweries all around the country. To tap into the growing number of refined palates, Ian Williams and Anders Warn spent five years developing the world’s first personal brewery, WilliamsWarn, and the design and brand work by Studio Alexander has matched the quality of the product by taking gold in the international Graphis 100 Best in Design awards.
Tait Communications is one of New Zealand’s best under-the-radar business success stories and is a great example of a local tech company finding its niche and selling its wares in the international market. And, in an effort to better reflect the company’s transformation into a “world-leading solutions provider” rather than just a radio manufacturer, Designworks Wellington has given it a spiffy new visual identity, slogan and website.
Lemonade Design is by no means a newbie to the design game with several prominent clients including Eden Park, Jucy Rentals and Burger Fuel on the roster. And now the agency has turned its hand to new premium ice cream brand Holy Moly.
As brands try to rise above the rabble and somehow etch themselves into the minds of consumers in a positive fashion, experiential marketing—and the associated brand generosity—is becoming much more prevalent. And, as the multi-faceted Great Pascall Road Trip campaign shows, these experiential elements are increasingly becoming the glue that helps bind major promotions together.
When local tech start-up (and winner of the supreme honour at the New Zealand Innovator’s Awards) Vend HQ launched www.welovepos.com, a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology and design, it purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register named Steve with one purpose in mind: trashing him. So they went to the customers and asked them whether he should meet his maker via firing squad, hammers, dynamite, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building. Then, as the votes started coming in, they thought, why not all of the above?
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are big days for retailers in the States—and, judging by some of the figures this year, the discounts offered up by all and sundry certainly got consumers to prise open their wallets. In times of economic stagnancy, the level of consumption is often used as a barometer for recovery. But, as this fairly brave print ad for Patagonia that ran in the New York Times shows, maybe less consumption is a good thing. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of cheeky reverse psychology in action.
Rico, the furry, double entendre-loving puppet, was a polarising mascot for Air New Zealand. Some felt his lewd conduct was ‘off’brand’ and a bad look for a premium airline that had lost its marketing way. Others felt it wasn’t aimed at New Zealanders and was a smart, fun way of gaining a heap of international attention via the airline’s social media channels. He was cerainly one of the most talked-about marketing things of the year, but now, in typically dramatic fashion—and with a smart digital tie-in to the boardgame Cluedo—Rico has been killed off.
There was a bit of a storm in a beer mug back in July when DB was given the rights to use the generic term Radler as a brand name. Corporate bullying, some indie brewers cried. Cutting off your nose to spite your face and making consumers dislike you for no good reason, others shrieked. Mwahahahah, DB laughed. So when The Boundary Road Brewery launched its Lawn Ranger brew recently it claimed it was ‘Radler-style’ and put up a cheeky billboard saying ‘Fine, we won’t call it Radler then’. Now DB has set its lawyers Simpson Grierson on the case, saying the term ‘radler style’ is off limits and telling BRB to lay off the allusions.
For the first time in IBM’s C-suite surveys, chief marketing officers were included in the mix. And the results show many of them feel unprepared to deal with the volume and complexity of information available through social platforms.
The Marketing Association’s 2011 “Marketing Today” Conference held at The Langham Auckland began with an apt quote from William Gibson. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” And, as well as an update on all on traditional the marketing concepts like market research, direct marketing, brand management, the conference also provided fresh insight into ‘new-age’ marketing concepts like closer integration of marketing with IT, gamification and social media marketing.
Parallel importing. That’s been legal in New Zealand for ages, hasn’t it? Well, yes and no. If we’re talking about branded goods and not music, films or software, then parallel importing has been legal here since 2003 and it’s allowed traders to import genuine goods bearing a trade mark (think L’Oreal perfume or Sony cameras) that are sourced from an overseas supplier rather than the authorised distributor in New Zealand. So what legal weapons are available to local businesses whose investment is being put at risk by cheap imports?