Brewed in Mexico by Grupo Modelo, the brand has clearly been a huge success in Canada. I recently spoke with Robert Armstrong, the president and CEO of Modelo Molson Imports, which markets and distributes Corona Extra and Corona Light in Canada, about how he grew the brand from just 8,000 cases in 1986.

Armstrong attributes much of the brand’s success to its target. Unlike many beers that go after 19-24 year-old guys, Corona markets to slightly older, well-educated males and females with decent incomes. In fact, purchasers of the brand are split 50/50 between men and women. Wooing the fairer sex makes sense. As Armstrong points out, total beer consumption among females is greater than consumption among 19-24 year-old males.

The consumption of Corona in Canada, of course, has a lot to due with its advertising. While the brand’s creative executions have changed over the years, Corona has stayed true to its positioning of  “refreshing, memorable moments,” helping to firmly establish its identity among hundreds of competitors. “If you look at a Corona commercial we did in 1986, it’s not significantly different from the ones we did in 2006,” Armstrong says. (Here’s a link to Corona’s latest campaign dubbed The Promise.)

Aside from keeping Corona’s message consistent, Armstrong says switching to a small agency from a major one about 10 years ago was also a key to the brand’s success. “It was hard to get the attention we wanted from a larger agency, because at that time our business wasn’t that significant,” Armstrong recalls. “We wanted to be a big fish in a small pond,” he adds.

The Marketing Channel, Corona’s current agency, has helped make drinking the beer into an experience, another crucial factor in the brand’s rise. Yet the ad shop nor Armstrong can take credit for one vital aspect of the brand: the practice of slipping a lime wedge inside the bottle. Armstrong says rumours abound on its origins but believes it was started by bartenders in California.

While Armstrong doesn’t deserve kudos for the lime wedge, he gets props for emphasizing relationships with media partners. That’s allowed him to understand exactly where and how his brand’s media dollars—by far the most significant expense in any campaign—are being spent, and to negotiate executions like the recent gatefold ads in national newspapers for The Promise.

Most beer brands can only hope to achieve Corona’s level of success. But Armstrong says he isn’t finished growing the brand. There are opportunities to broaden Corona’s drinking occasions, such as getting more people to pair the beer with food, he says. Armstrong says he also wants to maintain Corona’s spot as the market leader in its category, a distinction it grabbed from Heineken in 1992. If Armstrong can pull that off in the upcoming years, that’ll be an accomplishment most marketer would drink to.

Bee Keeping

Aside from the fact they’re totally lame, they don’t give people one solid reason for wanting a Forte. It’s not as though the car doesn’t have attractive features. Got kids? The Forte has one of the roomiest interiors in its class. Like music? You can plug your iPod into the 4-speaker sound system–or if you’re old school, rock the CD player. The car also gets a respectable 34 miles per gallon in the city and 49 mpg on the highway. I’m no gearhead, but a 156 horsepower engine sounds pretty good for $16K.

Now some of you may be thinking, you can’t do much more than build awareness with a 15-second ad. Well, I would run a 30-second ad instead. I called Kia Canada to find out how the ads have done. A spokesperson wrote in an e-mail: “Our latest ‘That’s my Forte’ TV spot is generating a significant amount of consumer interest based on the number of unique visitors to the Forte micro site (mykiaforte.ca)and the additional traffic at Kia dealerships. The upcoming ‘That’s My Forte” give-away contest is sure to add to the excitement and momentum of this campaign.” I wonder how much more interest there’d be with better ads.

She performed a study where people sampled wines and then picked their favourite. Participants tried two to five samples. Here’s where things got underhanded for the sake of science. The human guinea pigs were told they were tasting different varieties of wine from the Niagara region. In reality, each person’s samples were from the same bottle, which was made by students at Brock’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute. Given that twist, you might expect people who had two samples to prefer the first and second options with equal frequency. The study, however, revealed participants picked the first sample 68.7% of the time and the second 31.2%. When the number of samples increased, people still chose the first one more often than the others.

Mantonakis has a few theories on the reason for the bias. She says participants may treat the first sample as an automatic winner that needs to be beaten. Society’s tendency to view the first of something, such as the first place in a competition, as the best, may also be playing a role, she says.

As for the practical application of her research, Mantonakis says salespeople who offer multiple options for a purchase, such as a real estate agents, may want to first pitch the item they want to sell the most. Consumers, on the other hand, should be aware of the bias, when shopping, she says.

On a side note, Mantonakis’s study also revealed the tendency for people to pick the last option increased with the number of samples. She says the last option could overtake the first one as the preferred choice at higher sample numbers. Mantonakis, however, didn’t have the chance to show this through her study. Turns out, the university’s ethics committee wouldn’t allow people in her experiment to drink more than five samples of wine.

Roger: You can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that they’re missing something from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root our the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants.

Swanson’s theory may be right, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Scientists essentially took people that consider themselves to be intelligent, made them feel a bit dumb and then asked them to choose between two parting gifts: a fountain pen or a pack of M&Ms—a separate experiment had shown picking the pen over M&Ms made people feel smart. In the study, 65% of the participants selected the pen. When the researchers conducted the experiment but omitted the step that caused people to feel a bit stupid, just 39% chose the pen.

Guess you can learn a thing or two from the movies.

As you can guess, this happened to my fiancé and me. Boy, did this piss off my better half. She fired back a curt e-mail pointing out that the renovation wasn’t even 100% complete. He apologized and said his accountant made him send the e-mail, which went to many of his clients. That wasn’t good enough for my partner. She no longer wants to hire the contractor for our washroom and 3rd floor renovations, as we had planned. As a result, this guy just lost about 50 grand of business.

Anyway, this experience got me thinking. Plenty of companies talk to their loyal and occasional consumers, but how many spend time with people they’ve lost forever? The way I see it, businesses should maintain a list of “customer relationship killers” and track their progress towards eliminating them. I bet it would have a noticeable impact on sales.

The interconnection of sport, beer and gender is a “holy trinity of contemporary popular life” and as such “a marketer’s dream” say the editors of (what else) Sport, Beer, and Gender, a book published earlier this year. Indeed, sport is a major driver of the beer marketplace and most of the beer advertising is aimed at men. About 60% of the US$1 billion spent on alcohol advertising in the United States supports sports programming.

On this side of the border, Saint John, N.B.-based Moosehead has a long history of supporting sports at both the professional and amateur levels. It is currently the NBA’s official beer partner in Canada and the title sponsor of an NBA fantasy game and also sponsors a team in the Nova Scotia Senior League called the Dartmouth Moosehead Dry, which will host this year’s Canadian Senior Baseball Championship.

Now, I don’t know what you think about Moosehead’s other offerings (and it boasts about 10 beers in its line-up, although some are only available in the east), but Cracked Canoe is a light beer whose chief enticement seems to be that it has less than 100 calories per bottle or can. No surprise, then, that it checks in at just 3.5% alcohol. If you like light beer, Cracked Canoe is an easy switch.

But Moosehead is also going after a more mature, upscale audience, both men and women, particularly those who are health conscious. No wonder it decided to launch Cracked Canoe at Canoe, a particularly swanky restaurant that overlooks Toronto’s business district and the lake. Matt Johnston, Moosehead’s vice-president of marketing for North America, describes the beverage’s appeal as one of “approachable sophistication.” A television and print campaign called An Ode to Slow certainly drives home that message, featuring two lingering romantic-type scenes sandwiched around a baseball pitcher throwing a knuckleball in slow motion.

While such soft-ball marketing would seem to shut out the high-testosterone crowd, Moosehead president Derek Oland says sports is still a key part of Moosehead’s strategy even as it seeks a higher clientele. “So many beer-drinking occasions are associated with sports, after a golf game, after a workout or after a racquetball game,” he says. “But the reality is that you probably have to move on to something else, like go back home, or back to work, or something along those lines.”

That’s where a light beer like Cracked Canoe comes in, says Oland. Drinking a couple of these certainly won’t make you feel light-headed or heavy, and advising people to slow down fits in with the idea that Moosehead takes its time making its products. “The knuckleballer is one of the images we used because there’s such a great connection between the throwing of a knuckleball and what we think is the skill involved in producing this great beer,” says Oland.

You’ll get a chance to see the ad if you’re watching the NBA playoffs on TSN or Score, which is part of the media buy Moosehead has in its deal with the league. Ironically, the largest Canadian-owned brewer doesn’t have a deal with the only NBA team, the Toronto Raptors. Then again, the Raptors didn’t even come close to making the playoffs. That, too, may take some time.

Airport
Digging
Running

Zig, the Toronto ad shop behind the campaign, which launched last year, does a decent job of communicating that the chain has a variety of sandwiches in an entertaining way. But they do nothing to make me crave Mr. Sub. In fact, the strip search scene at the airport is unappetizing.

Now, I didn’t read the creative brief for this execution. The goal of this campaign may not have been to make Mr. Sub’s sandwiches seem mouth-watering—of course, a 30-second spot just showing subs would be a waste of money, since nobody would probably remember or pay attention to them. But I do see the opportunity for an ad that fell somewhere in between those two extremes.

I called the PR rep for Mr. Sub to see how the campaign has done, and got a no comment. But it’s unlikely sales went through the roof. The chain switched agencies in March and is now with BOS Toronto.

How do you find them? They over-index (127%) among members of a company’s loyalty program, according to Colloquy’s research. That means for businesses with such programs, they’re just an e-mail away.

It’s the fourth tagline created in four years by Toronto agency Publicis Canada for the Jays, a tactic rarely seen outside of the sports and entertainment world. Many of the best companies use the same motto for years before retiring it. Think GE with “We bring good things to life”—which stood the test of time for almost a quarter-century—Tim Hortons’ “You’ve always got time for Tim Hortons” and “Always fresh,” or Gillette’s “The best a man can get.”

So why can’t the Jays pick a tagline and stick to it? Because that’s not the way sports marketing works, according to Duncan Bruce, Publicis’ managing partner, executive vice-president and creative director. “Sports teams, in general, see the season as a chunk of time,” he explains. “That one season is one event and they have to see it as new and fresh, be thinking differently and defining the team differently, and have their communications feel fresh and new.”

From that point of view, ever-changing campaigns makes sense. After all, building a tagline that actually ends up in the social psyche can take five to 10 years and a lot of investment in maintaining the same message. Generally, a professional sports team is anything but consistent. Every year brings new players, sometimes new management, and, at least at the start of the season, new hope

“Sports teams need to have that point of view and they need to be able to motivate their whole organization around that idea,” says Bruce. “Because of that, it’s a lot harder to bring anything forward from the last year, especially if they’ve lost or been injury-ridden. Every year is a chance for glory, every year is a fresh start.”

And if any team needs a fresh start, it’s the Jays, who have not lived up to the promises general manager J.P. Ricciardi made when he took over the team in 2001. Last year has to be especially irksome to the team’s fans, who saw the lowly Tampa Bay Rays make it all the way to the World Series before losing to the Philadelphia Phillies.

But while the Jays were painful to watch on the field, the Publicis campaigns were excellent TV watching. The partnership started with an award-winning series built on the “You gotta believe” premise (also the catchphrase of the 1973 New York Mets) and continued a very amusing series of ads two years ago using the tag “It’s always game time.” Those ads featured various Jays in domestic scenes using their athletic skills at someone else’s expense.

One ad, which featured now-retired slugger Frank Thomas engaging in a pillow fight between two boys, was even banned because it showed Thomas swatting the boy off the bed. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. The Jays followed that up with a Frank Thomas pillow giveaway day.

This year’s campaign is designed to show the multiple experiences you can enjoy at a baseball game. The first three ads feature a drive-through hamburger jockey yelling at Jays third baseman Scott Rolen, outfielder Vernon Wells trying to get into his locked car while an ever-increasing line of people chant his name, and a bank heist where the robbers will only talk to pitcher Roy Halladay. The message? “Watching a game sort of galvanizes everybody, brings the family together, brings everybody together, and you can have a great time,” says Bruce.

I’ll post a link to the new ads if it becomes available. Meanwhile, you can hit Publicis’s website and, with a bit of navigating, see the older ones.

I recently spoke to him about his appearance in the latest Harry Rosen campaign. (Rob is on the far left.) Since the ads are meant to showcase bold leaders, I asked him to critique the execution, which includes print and online components. He praised the retailer for having the balls to push high-end clothing in the midst of an “economic shitstorm” and going with regular-looking guys instead of models. (While the men in the ads may not have chiseled jaws, perfect pecs or washboard abs, they all have resumes that would put the accomplishments of many male models to shame.)

We got on the topic of the campaign’s website. I mentioned that when I clicked on “Spring 09″ I didn’t get images of Harry Rosen clothing. (There are pictures now.) Just a blank screen with the message “coming soon” or something along those lines. I thought that was poor execution. Guenette responded by launching into a story about how Tommy Hilfiger, after going from obscurity to ubiquity, once asked George Lois, his ad guy, to put more shirts in the ads. The tale ends with Lois putting his hand on Hilfiger’s shoulder and saying, “Tommy, it ain’t about the shirts!”

“What George was trying to say, and this is true of the Harry Rosen campaign, is it more about what the brand is expressing, what the message is, as opposed to a specific shirt, a specific pair of trousers or specific suit,” Guenette said. “When these fashion brands are communicating to their target consumers, they’re communicating an attitude or a feeling as opposed to cataloging what they’re carrying,” he added.

I agree with Rob that fashion brands need to have a personality. But I believe Harry Rosen dropped the ball by not having clothes that would pique my interest enough to walk into one of their stores. Because of that, I’ll just keep shopping at Banana Republic.

I don’t remember a ton from my days at Western, but I do recall learning about dynamic pricing, which is a way companies maximize revenue by constantly tweaking prices over time. It’s the reason why a plane ticket from Toronto to Vancouver will cost, say, $800 today and then $823 tomorrow.

The approach made a lot of sense to me at the time, since it lets businesses capitalize on the fact demand for their products or services likely fluctuates over a period. As a business student trying to get ripped for spring break, the technique was as impressive as the fat-cutting properties of the Foreman Grill. But dynamic pricing has some drawbacks—which have recently been highlighted by the research of a former game show contestant.

Eric Dolansky, who won two games of Jeopardy! and is an assistant professor at Brock University, has studied how consumers respond to a series of prices. Working with the University of Alberta’s Kyle Murray and Ivey Business School’s Mark Vandenbosch, he’s discovered that consumers will more often choose the products of a company whose prices show an upward trend rather than those of a competitor whose prices seem random—even if it means paying up to 40% more in the future. (For those of you who remember your stats classes, this holds despite both companies having the same median and variance in their historical prices.)

The reason? People value predictability, Dolansky says. He points out there are plenty of examples of this, such as how fixed mortgage rates are typically higher than variable ones. Companies thinking about a dynamic pricing strategy should consider Dolansky’s findings. “People don’t like to see prices bounce around,” he says. “It’s a big turn off.”

A free dinner at the Four Seasons is hard to pass up—even in a good economy. But, hey, that’s not the only reason I was at the Toronto location a few months back. I was there for the Marketing Hall of Legends, an annual event that recognizes some of the industry’s top professionals (while generating a healthy dose of publicity for Mandrake, the Toronto-based executive search company that co-founded the event.)

While nursing a Heineken, I spoke with the mattress king, Stephen K. Gunn, the co-founder, CEO and chairman of Sleep Country Canada. Funny guy. He told me he and his colleagues once considered putting zippers in their beds, so people afraid to invest in the market could actually stuff their mattresses with cash.

Gunn, who was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends in 2005, shared one of Sleep Country’s keys to success: his organization puts a ton of focus on the delivery experience, since it’s customers’ last and often lasting impression of the company. When it comes to hiring for this role, he said, it’s more about picking people with pleasant personalities and the right attitude rather than experience driving a van. In fact, Gunn recalls in the early days turning away truckers with decades in the transportation industry, because of how housewives might respond to them in their homes.

Gunn insists Sleep Country’s focus on delivery is one reason it has become Canada’s market share leader in mattresses. The way he puts it, “We get a customer in the store but get the customer’s friends and family members during delivery.”

What’s your customers’ last experience with your company?

Here are a few other interesting news items that underscore the impact of cause related marketing (from the Cause Marketing Forum).

Product (RED) recently announced that it had hit the $50 million mark in funds generated by the sales of (RED)-licensed products and contributed to fight AIDS in Africa.

In the eleven years after its launch, the General Mills Box Tops for Education program has engaged over 90,000 K-8 schools in raising funds by sending in Box Top coupons worth 10 cents each. The program stands out in terms of transparency thanks to its simple 10 cents per box top metric and the clarity with which the programs other fundraising options (online shopping and book clubs) are explained.

Paul Newman and the Newman’s Own Foundation donate all profits and royalties after taxes to educational and charitable purposes. This has amounted to over $200 million to thousands of charities since 1982.

I wonder when more Canadian brands will demonstrate this degree of commitment to a cause? Importantly, genuine commitment also delivers the authenticity that is needed to overcome skepticism from consumers.

I believe business purpose + social purpose = more meaning at a consumer level. And, with an increasing “genericness” to products and services, more meaning means more differentiation, and more differentiation translates into more sales. ]]> http://blog.canadianbusiness.com/csr-news/feed/ 0