Ice cream man eats himself. Just make me feel sick! This is what the Little Baby’s Ice cream from Philadelphia aimed for? Creepy!!! After watching this online spot I would be surprised if Little Babies Ice Cream is made of babies.
Ecotricity, as the biggest green energy supplier in UK, launched campaign “dump the big six” since Feb 2012. The company is specializing in wind energy and considers itself as the “greenest” energy supplier. The campaign is about making people switch their energy supplier from “big six” (British Gas Business, EDF, E.ON, Npower, Scottish Gas Business and Scottish & Southern) to Ecotricity because it’s more sustainable.
From the angle of responsible design, the campaign is a good way to publicize the importance of green energy. With the dropping down of chimneys and rising of wind generators, you can feel the mood of cheer up. It seems that finally these “monsters” have been killed and blue sky back to our life. However, is it really suitable for a company to do the campaign like this? The basic reason for Ecotricity to do the campaign is persuade people use their energy. It can be consider as a business activity with the cover of public service activity. The company use the word like sustainable, it makes people think the movement of switching to Ecotricity is the way to protect the earth. Finally, who take the profits of these activities? The company! With the slogan of “dump the big six”, the company put itself at the position of a “justice fighter” and makes the others like criminals. Arguably it is totally unfair. I wonder what will happen if “the big six” fight back of this campaign. I think maybe they will all raise the flags of “clean and green energy”, at that time, what should consumer choose? It will be a big confuse for people to justice truth and lie.
Above all, I want to say sometimes the words like green, clean, sustainable have already been the package of business activities. Do people really care about “organic” food? In my opinion, the only organic food I trust is the one I grow in my garden. It is the time for us to think about the real of responsible design. Sometimes, the starting point is good, but always ends in different ways.
Q4: Pick an advert from two different ears in the “Time Tunnel” and compare the advertising strategy employed by each poster discussing the following categories in your teams: product, era, target market and advertising strategy.
1
Product: Cadbury’s chocolate (Image from telegraph.co.uk, anyway, it’s not the original piece of poster from museum, I couldn’t find the same one, so I got a simple one to explain)
Era: 1950’s
Target market: We believed in Cadbury milk chocolate target all people, especially people who love the milk and cream taste.
Strategy: “Taste” is the key word to promote the product, the poster want to attract people to taste the cream flavor of Cadbury and highlight it contain dairy milk. We think the poster is only focus on product itself. It didn’t put any emotion to the poster. The poster is just a piece of chocolate. However, in this way, people can remember the product package and buy. It is a simple and fast way to promotion the products. We think it will work because at that time, people do not have many choices and it is the direct way for people to remember the brand. It has been used today. We can see the poster of Kallo original organic soya’s advertisement. It promotion the products directly and push people to buy it at supermarket.
2
Product: After Eight Wafer Thin Chocolate Mints (Poster)
Era: 1960’s
Target market: People from middle to high classes who fancy the leisure life style.
Strategy: The poster doesn’t focus on the product itself but the brand. There’s a elegant lady on the right side of the poster and brand logo is on left side. The poster is mainly promote the brand image. It seems that After Eight sales not only mint chocolate, it want to change consumer behavior and make people to have a new kind of life style. It been thought fashion to enjoy After Eight chocolate, it is a symbol of the taste. We think it is a huge change from 1950’s to 1960’s. The advertising is not about the products anymore but focus on brand itself.
Brand management requires integration of all communication mediums to convey the brand image at one frequency. The branding requires active communication with the market to capture the attention and interest for the offer.
Following are the key types of advertisement themes for brand…