by Laura Ries
How effective was the bottle advertising? Absolut became the No.1 imported vodka in America and one of the ten best-selling distilled-spirit brands in the world.
Advertising Age selected the Absolut “bottle” campaign as one of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. (No.7.)
If the bottle was the hammer, what was Absolut’s verbal nail? In my opinion, it was Absolut’s high price. Compared to Smirnoff, the leading vodka and the largest-selling spirit brand in America, Absolut was some 70 percent more expensive.
That’s a big price difference for a product which by law must be “colorless, tasteless and odorless.”
But why didn’t Absolut mention its higher price in its advertising? In truth, there’s no easy way to say “more expensive” without sounding gauche.
Furthermore, vodka drinkers will get the high-price message as soon as they buy a bottle of Absolut in a liquor store or order an Absolut martini in a restaurant.
Another thing. Why are so many visual hammers developed by startups and so few developed by large companies?
Where are the visual hammers for big brands like IBM, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Verizon, Intel, Nokia, Toyota, Cisco, Oracle and AT&T?
When a big company owns a visual hammer, it’s usually because it was a legacy hammer created several generations back. The Mercedes Tri-Star. The Rolex watchband. The Campbell’s soup can.
Big companies don’t usually make big marketing decisions without first conducting extensive research. And consumers don’t like anything that’s too different.
“We spent $65,000 on research and it was quite negative,” said Michel Roux, president of the U.S. company that was planning to import Absolut.
“It said the bottle would be lost on the shelf, the name was nothing like vodka and Sweden was not seen as a vodka-producing country.”
As a psychological principle, consumers like “better,” but they don’t like “different.” As a marketing principle, “better” doesn’t work, but “different” does.
If you can’t make the bottle different, maybe you can make the glass the product is served in different.
That’s the strategy employed by Stella Artois when it arrived in the American market back in 1999.
To introduce the new beer brand, Interbrew, the Belgian brewer of Stella Artois, limited distribution to the 20 most-exclusive bars and clubs in Manhattan.
Furthermore, they charged almost 20 percent more for a keg than its Holland competitor did for a keg of Heineken.
That took courage since Stella is the Bud of Belgium, so ordinary fast-food restaurants sell it in plastic cups.
No plastic cups for Stella Artois in the U.S. market. Interbrew provided the bars with its unique, gold-tipped chalice glasses and a lesson in Stella etiquette. Beer was to be served between 36 and 38 degrees F. and the foam must be shaved off with a spoon.
(Actually the Stella glasses were no special deal. In Belgium, every beer has its own unique glass designed to highlight the brand’s special flavor, and Stella Artois is no exception.)
With its chalice hammer, Stella Artois sales took off. The brand was expanded into national distribution and eventually into supermarkets and other retail outlets. Some Stella cans even feature its unique chalice glass.
Today, Stella Artois is one of the top ten imported-beer brands in America.
What’s missing from the Stella story is the verbal nail. Its current position, “Perfection has its price,” adequately describes the brand, but at the cost of memorability and distinction.
That’s a potential problem for Stella Artois, Absolut, Corona and many other brands with strong visual hammers and weak verbal nails.
Because the strength of a hammer is partially based on its shock value, a hammer over time slowly loses some of its marketing effectiveness.
The reverse is true for a verbal nail. Unless you are using one of the seven words you can’t use on network television, it’s hard to find any combination of words that will have the shock value of an arresting visual.
One exception might be French Connection. In 2001, the company began branding its clothes in the United Kingdom as “fcuk.”
Apparently it discovered the acronym when a fax was sent from its Hong Kong store to its United Kingdom outlet entitled “FCHK to FCUK.”
Though the company insists that FCUK was an acronym for French Connection United Kingdom, its similarity to a certain other word caused considerable controversy. French Connection exploited the controversy by producing a popular range of T-shirts with messages such as: “fcuk fashion,” “fcuk football,” “fcuk on the beach.”
Unlike visual hammers, verbal nails actually become more credible as time passes. Initially, consumers are skeptical of claims like “the ultimate driving machine.”
But over time, and with repeated repetitions, the credibility of a verbal claim actually increases.
The first time you heard Nike’s slogan “Just do it,” you probably thought, Huh. What do they mean by that?
But eventually, “Just do it” because more than a tagline. It became a rallying cry for the younger generation. The more people who identify with a slogan, the more powerful that slogan becomes.
Marketers make a major mistake when they copy-test verbal slogans before using them. It doesn’t matter what a consumer’s first reaction is. What matters is how he or she will feel after they have heard the slogan 50 or 100 times.
But how can you know in advance how they might feel? You can’t. But one useful rule of thumb is to make sure the visual is strongly linked to the nail.
Marketing is like woodworking. No matter how good your hammer is, you have to consistently hit your nail in order to make your brand successful.
The Stella glass is a great hammer, but it has little connection with the nail, “Perfection has its price.”
Sure, you can get the connection if you think about it. Expensive glass equals expensive beer which is the price you pay for perfection.
But to work, the connection has to be instantaneous, with no time left for thinking. To work, the Stella verbal needs to use the word “glass” or something similar in its verbal nail.
Notice the difference between the Stella Artois glass and the Evian “mountains.” The mountains are more than a nice visual to decorate the label. The mountains are the hammer and the “Natural spring water from the French Alps” is the nail.
It’s the combination of the two, the mountain hammer and the French Alps nail, that has made Evian the world’s best-selling expensive water.
One of the most unusual packaging hammers is the swing-top cap on Grolsch Premium Pilsner which looks both expensive and also obsolete. Yet it’s one of the reasons why Grolsch is the 21st largest producer of beer in the world and second only to Heineken in Holland, its home country. Like the Jack Daniel’s bottle, the Grolsch swing-top cap connotes authenticity and old-fashioned quality.
Too bad Grolsch doesn’t nail a verbal idea along with its swing-top hammer.
Still, Grolsch was bought by SABMiller back in 2007 for $1.2 billion. Not bad for an old-fashioned beer brand.
An old-fashioned packaging concept that has created a stir in the distilled-spirits business is the dripping red-wax seal on Maker’s Mark bourbon.
Not only is the redwax seal distinctive, it’s also a legal trademark for the brand. The dripping red wax is the hammer, but what’s the verbal nail?
It’s the name, Maker’s Mark, which communicates the idea that its bourbon is handcrafted by artisans.
Marker’s Mark has experienced 31 years of double-digit growth and claims a 70-percent market share in the fine-bourbon category.
Another packaging visual hammer is wrapping the brand in paper bound by gold tape.
That’s what Lea & Perrins did with its Worcestershire sauce brand which has a reported 97-percent share.
What’s the nail? It’s the word “original” on the package which together with the brand’s dominan
t market share reinforces the position of Lea & Perrins as the leader in the category.
When a brand has such an elevated market share, it is almost immune to competition.
(What’s true in Worcestershire sauce is also true in personal-computer operating systems. For decades, Windows has had a 90-percent market share.)
Pom Wonderful is doing the same thing with pomegranate juice. With a shape unlike any other ever seen, the Pom Wonderful bottle is truly unique and different.
One particularly effective billboard for the Pom Wonderful brand has the bottle dressed with a superhero’s cape.
The verbal nail: “The antioxidant superpower.”
That sounds like a slogan that could last a lifetime.
CHAPTER 7
ACTION
MORE EFFECTIVE THAN STILLS.
There’s no question that visual hammers involving action, movement or demonstration are more effective than static hammers, or still pictures.
And the advertising medium that can best handle “action” is television.
That’s one reason why television has continued to prosper while print and radio have declined. In 2010, for example, more money was spent on TV advertising than on newspapers, magazines and radio advertising combined.
Dove soap, for example, is one-fourth moisturizing lotion. Years ago, a typical print ad tried to exploit this feature with a photo of a woman in a bathtub and the slogan “Dove creams your skin while you wash.”
But it was television that built the Dove brand into the market leader, with its current 24-percent share of the bar-soap market.
And what visual hammered the Dove brand into consumers’ minds? The action of a hand pouring moisturizing lotion into a bar of Dove soap.
Utterly simple, incredibly effective.
What’s the difference between saying “one-fourth moisturizing lotion” and demonstrating it?
Nothing. Both the verbal and the visual communicate exactly the same idea. The difference is memorability.
The average person reads or hears about 42,000 words every day.
How many of those 42,000 words do most people remember? Very few. Furthermore, they don’t necessarily believe many of the words they do hear or read.
A television visual demonstration, especially one that contains an element of shock, is not only memorable, it’s believable.
A visual “shock” isn’t necessarily something as dramatic as parting the Red Sea. Television, for example, is an intimate medium. Johnny Carson used to get a big laugh by raising his eyebrows. And today Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert can do the same thing.
As TV moves to high definition and the sets get bigger and bigger, the potential for subtlety increases.
A visual “shock” can also be achieved by the juxtapositioning of elements. Pouring a cup of moisturizing lotion into a bar of soap creates visual tension or shock.
Is a Mini Cooper a shocking vehicle? Not really, it’s just another small car. Is a Ford Excursion a shocking vehicle? Not really, it’s just another big sport-utility vehicle.
In 2002, when BMW introduced the Mini Cooper in the American market, it put a number of Minis on top of Ford Excursions and drove them around city roads and streets.
Headline: “What are you doing for fun this weekend?”
Another example of juxtapositioning is Tropicana’s “straw in the orange.” Neither a straw nor an orange is visually shocking, but the combination is.
It’s especially so on TV where the viewer can see a person sticking a straw into an orange and then drinking from it.
You can’t get juice out of an orange by sucking on a straw, you might be thinking. True, but a visual can have emotional power whether it’s true or not. The viewer thinks, Tropicana contains the juice of whole oranges because it’s “not from concentrate.”
Just as shocking is the brand’s market share. Although Tropicana’s “not from concentrate” brand is premium priced, its market share is about 30 percent.
Recently, however, Tropicana decided to drop the “straw in the orange” visual hammer on its packaging and focus on a verbal approach.
Along with its new approach came a new package design without the straw. The new campaign was based on the word “squeeze.”
The president of Tropicana North America, as reported in The New York Times, explained the concept: “The whole idea of squeeze is to play up the functional benefit of orange juice in providing fruit for people’s daily diets and the emotional connection people have with Tropicana.”
“Squeeze” added the chairman of Tropicana’s advertising agency, “is the process by which we get our product and the hug.”
“There was this notion of owning a simple word that would communicate the love, the care, in the Obama moment we’re all going through,” added the chairman.
This is typical left-brain verbal thinking, totally focused on the rational power of words to incite emotion instead of the inherently-emotional power of visuals.
What visual would you use to illustrate the word “squeeze?” A consumer hugging an orange? I think not.
As most people know, consumer reaction to the new Tropicana campaign was swift and vicious.
I’ve never seen such an outpouring of negative comments. In two months, sales dropped 20 percent.
The negative reaction was so swift and dramatic that Tropicana dropped the new packaging and brought back the “straw in the orange.”
Actually, Tropicana came up with two visual hammers. The straw in the orange and a zipper that symbolically opens on the carton to allow 16 fresh-picked oranges to jump inside the Tropicana package.
Both are nice visuals, but are two hammers better than one? I think not. They just create visual confusion.
Another emotionally-potent visual hammer is the yellow pages logo with the verbal nail “let your fingers do the walking.” Again, the walking fingers were particularly effective on television, although most of the usage of the symbol was in print.
Today, of course, Google has just about killed the market for yellow-page advertising as more and more consumers use their fingers to do their searching online rather than on yellow pages.
Google built its brand with a clean white page and a search box. Nothing fancy and always the same.
But a few days of the year, Google changes its logotype to celebrate special occasions, like the Fourth of July.
The images used to be static, but recently Google has been using subtle “action” within some holiday logos to dramatize those special occasions.
This “action” idea would probably never occur to the business executives who are highly verbal. They think in words, not pictures. They assume the two are interchangeable.
To communicate the essence of a visual, one just needs to verbalize it.
Not true. A visual activates the right side of your brain, the emotional side. A verbal activates the left side of your brain, the rational side.
Aleve has developed a great hammer (one bottle of Aleve equals four bottles of Tylenol Extra) and a great nail (If you could take fewer pills, why wouldn’t you?) But they are using the nail primarily in print.
On television, Aleve uses “slice of life” commercials where users talk about the benefits of Aleve instead of demonstrating them with a powerful visual hammer.
Seeing two Aleve pills compared to eight Tylenol pills effectively demonstrates the difference, perhaps even more so than does the bottle comparison. The more specific you can be the better. “Just 2 Aleve have the strength to relieve pain all day.”
Perhaps no series of television commercials have demonstrated the power of a visual hammer like the Marlboro commercials in the 1960s.
All cowboys, all horses, all action, few words.
The Marlboro music, the theme from the motion picture the Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, also contributed to the emotional effectiveness of the spots.
Music doesn’t lie dormant, frozen in time, like the words on a
page. Music is aural action. It’s always moving, going someplace. At times in a hurry, at times at a languid pace. But always in motion.
It’s the difference between a sheet of music and music itself.
The 1971 ban on televised tobacco advertising put an end to the Marlboro commercials.
But today they are still worth studying to understand the emotional effectiveness of a television visual hammer augmented with a musical theme.
CHAPTER 8
FOUNDER
NATURAL-BORN HAMMERS.
We live in a celebrity-obsessed world. The media is fascinated with the lives of the rich and famous. Even ordinary people can become celebrities as long as they are infamous.
The most successful magazine in America is not a news magazine, a sports magazine or a financial magazine.
It’s a celebrity magazine, People, which carries more advertising pages than any other magazine.
Don’t blame the media. It’s the consumers who buy the fan magazines and flock to the television shows like Celebrity Apprentice, Jersey Shore or Keeping up the Kardashians that should get the credit or the blame for our obsession with celebrities.
Even business tycoons are getting their share of publicity. It’s surprising how many corporate CEOs are getting to be just as famous as their companies.
Michael Dell of Dell, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Richard Branson of Virgin, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jeff Immelt of General Electric, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. And, of course, Donald Trump.
If you want to make your company famous, we often advise our clients, then you also have to make your chief executive famous too.
