Gorilla Marketing

Cartoon courtesy of shorelines art

Salmonella contamination cost Cadbury Trebor-Bassett over £30 million in sales and a £1m fine. Last year the company tried to enter the chewing gum market but the company's marketing campaign fell flat when over 500 complaints of racism were received from its TV advertisement.

Since then Cadbury's has had success with it's gorilla advert which features a man in a gorilla suit playing the drums along to Phil Collins 'In the air tonight'. The ad was an attempt to rejuvenate Dairy Milk and to attract a younger market. The ad became an instant internet hit with over 2 million viewings on You tube. Interest in the ad continued with speculation in the press and in blogs as to whether it was actually Phil Collins in the costume.

Following on from the gorilla, Cadburys launched an ad that featured big trucks racing on an airport runway to Queens 'Don't stop me now'. The second ad has not been as well received, but nevertheless Dairy Milk sales are growing again.

Some Cadbury facts

When it was launched in 1905 Cadbury had various ideas for names for Dairy Milk including Jersey, Highland Milk and Dairy Maid.

The slogan ' a glass and half of full cream milk was launched in 1928

Fruit and nut appeared in 1928 and Whole nut in 1932

The cocoa beans used in Cadbury products all come from Ghana. All the milk is sourced in the UK

The Cadbury logo was based on the signature of William Cadbury the son of Cadbury's founder Richard Cadbury

More than 250 million bars of Dairy Milk are made every year and are sold in 33 countries

The largest moulded chocolate bar in the world was made by Cadbury in 1990. It weighed 143 lbs the equivalent of 1,300 bars

The Dairy Milk gorilla advert first appeared in September 2007

Source The Marketer May 2008

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Business survivors

Heard the joke about the skip with a sun roof - it's a Skoda? In the early days of motoring Skoda was synonymous with racing cars and was frequently seen on the podium at the Monte Carlo Rally. However Skoda found that being behind the iron curtain restricted by markets and finance. Outdated technology could not compete with western companies on styling performance or quality. By the mid 1980's Skoda was producing characterless rear engine cars that were the butt of many jokes. Sales declined to 170,000 in 1990. Following the collapse of communism in Europe and the decline in the Czech economy Skoda chief executive Detlef Witting reassessed the company and saw the need for top quality vehicles at affordable prices.

The company then set about rebranding to fulfil this new idea. A take over by Volkswagen in 1991 produced a vehicle that fulfilled the new concept. Skoda now comes second in customer satisfaction surveys in the UK and revenues for the company were $5.3 billion in 2006.

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Remember Rachel Elnaugh from the early days of The Dragons Den? Three years ago her company Red Letter days which had generated a turnover of £100 million folded. Not only that but she was faced with claims by the Daily Mail that she was a 'red letter monster' and a 'tyrannical boss'.

Rachel Elnaugh recovered and is now a business consultant and public speaker juggling care of her five children with her new career. Talking about the time her business went into administration and reporters were camped on her doorstep she said 'I started to get loads of letters of support and lots of people saying I read about what's happened but here's an opportunity would you be interested in doing this, or coming into this business. So actually I was surrounded by opportunity and one of the interesting things that came out of it was the offer to write my book which had always been one of my ambitions.'

On the failure of her business she said ' the thing is, what is failure really? Every day in business you have a failure. You go and pitch your business and they come back and say no. Is that failure? Or is that a learning experience?' Her first book Business nightmares has just been published.

Source Start your Business

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KISS

 The is a business acronym Keep It Simple Stupid works well for all aspects of a business. Take for example web sites. When enquiries and sales fall away the temptation is to add more content to a site.

Instead deconstruct your site. Look at the content and text with a fresh eye. In addition to selling the benefits of buying your products and services ask yourself:

Is my web site well laid out?

Is it simple and easy to navigate?

Is the text on the site well laid out and easy to read?

Do the images on my site break up the text in a pleasing way?

Is the text on my site all in the same font and colour?

Does my site appeal to my prospective customers?

Is it easy for visitors to fill in contact details?

Are special offers simple and punchy?

Are the words people looking for my products and services included in the text and source codes of my web site?

Does doing all of this work?

One of my customers sells gifts on line. The site was new but sales were poor. The site as a whole was simple and easy to navigate. Hits to the site were good so clearly something was going wrong when visitors clicked on the site.

 Looking at the site it was clear that the text had been written over a period of time. It was disjointed and was written in more than one font.

 We deconstructed the site and reviewed the text. After considering markets for the products being sold we rewrote the text. Good quality images were used to break up the text and a simple font (Verdana) was used in an off black colour. A simple enquiry box was inserted in the top left of the site inviting visitors to ‘Join our mailing list to claim your 10% discount’.

The result?

The site now looks easy on the eye and can be scanned quickly. Site visitors now staying longer on the site, visit more pages and sign ups are increasing.

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And finally...........

A new gold rush?

As oil prices rise and stock markets loose stability gold is once again seen as a safe investment. As a result in America a new Gold Rush has hit California. Gold hit a new high of £500 an ounce earlier this year some gold diggers now believe there is money to be made from prospecting.  

In the 19^th century fortunes were made and lost in towns like Jamestown and Columbia. In the first five years of the Gold Rush early pioneers extracted £6bn worth of gold, at today's prices. Now these ghost towns are stirring up again, as more and more amateur prospectors try their luck.

They mainly find small flecks as they pan for gold in river beds, but the good news is that there is plenty of gold left in California. It is estimated that the original prospectors found at most 15% of what is believed to be there. Commercial mining claims in California have rocketed 17-fold in three years, from 132 in the first quarter of 2005, to 2,274 in the first quarter of 2008.

Source BBC Business news

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To attract wealthy consumers airlines are now offering a range of services to outclass their competition. These include in flight cocktails and massages, private fridges, flat beds and in flight nannies.

source the Marketer.