Ant Hill Marketing

Time to make the donuts.

As if it weren’t already difficult to select the perfect donut at the shop, Dunkin Donuts launched an online campaign, engaging customers to create the next, best donut. Sweet. While the concept isn’t necessarily original (taken from many a marketing playbook like developing the next M&M color, the next HaagenDaz flavor, etc.), it is engaging and like a single donut, makes you want more. With the dangle of $12K for the winning donut, it’s all but assured that Dunkin will get many a creation.

This type of effort helps highlight why engaging your brand with both your internal and external audiences is so vital.  Engaging both employees and customers energizes and invigorates both the brand and the people around you. It gets people excited. It helps build evangelists who continue to support your brand. Dunkin Donuts has more than 460,000 fans on its Facebook page and more than 11,000 followers on Twitter.  They also have YouTube channel.  And minus a few downfalls with this effort – website isn’t mobile friendly – it is fun. This promotional effort is part of a $100 million national campaign developed by Hill, Holliday in Boston, American Runs on Dunkin. Time will tell how many donut creations they receive but the endearment and trust they build with customers is worth much more than the next donut creation.  Unless of course it’s filled with chocolate kreme.

Wondering how Portland will push through the down economy and grow stronger in the future? Mayor Sam Adams spoke with creative industry folk at the PAF event on March 10. He outlined his Sustainable Economic Development Strategy that details a five year plan to promote economic growth and job creation for our fair city. There are lofty goals including building the most sustainable economy in the U.S. and creating 10,000 new jobs. To do so, we (the businesses of Portland) must be leaders in sustainable job growth, sustainable way of life and inclusive prosperity that doesn’t leave anyone out from reaping benefit to growth. 

Recognizing the strength of creative services industry and the subset that includes marketing, advertising, design, and interactive shops, he told those in attendance that he would travel to help local businesses grow and help gain focus on local firms pitching clients outside the city and region. He and his team are also working diligently to aid in bringing new business headquarters to Portland (read – new clients).

Currently the Mayor and his team are working on a “creative capacity” project strategy to be delivered in April. Based on what he explained, this strategy does not include creative firms and is mostly the arts (due to lack of funding and the need to stabilize the arts). However, the plan is to partner with Portland’s creative services industry to aid in – what many have longed to hear – developing a brand strategy for the City of Portland.  He followed by emphasizing that the goal is to be strategic, not simply develop a logo or a look. 

Our Mayor seems to get the benefit of brand development.  But, it leaves me wondering, why not include the creative service industry folks in the planning now? To deliver on the brand, it’s got to be infused into and aligned with all functional areas of our city and needs to be a part of the strategy now, not simply a piece of the delivery.  Just as a private sector organization must align its business and brand strategies in order to deliver on the brand promise throughout the organization, so too should government entities align city strategies and brand. If not, our fair city may miss the boat and wind up with just a logo and a look and another campaign.

For those of you who may not have heard, Skittles has recently launched a new website. Instead of bringing you a taste of the rainbow through a flashy site that offers product giveaways, colorful contests, and a branded interactive experience, they have chosen to leverage what YOU the consumer are saying about them by utilizing existing social media outlets, such as Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc…

To Skittles credit, in the past few years they have been very brave with their ad campaigns and branding. Some of their commercials rank among my favorites with their off-the-wall concepts. But I have to wonder what is this new risky venture into social media saying about their brand? Already I have seen attempts from saboteurs twittering racist rants coupled with the #skittles hashtag. Are they really going to hand over the reigns to us?

Their strategy so far has just been to point us to the conversations that are occurring at the moment about Skittles. That’s it. And to that, I say BIG DEAL…but what benefit does the consumer get from seeing your Wiki page, or becoming a Skittles facebook friend? Is there really a brand culture that exists for Skittles, where taking this type of approach is going to help foster their brand? They are certainly getting plenty of PR buzz by taking a page from Modernista‘s playbook. But is that sustainable? How quickly will this schtick become tiresome?

This approach is still new. What I hope to see is that they will carry forth that edginess that was in their campaigns and engage us! What off-the-wall innovation is Skittles going to bring to these conversations? How will they wow us? And what are they going to do with their products to BACK IT ALL UP!

I know you are watching, Skittles, but are you listening?

New versus old packaging.

How about a little brand to go with that morning juice? Tropicana felt the squeeze (well their parent PepsiCo did) after launching a new brand look to juice packaging only to call “do-over” after customers and other industry experts cried foul.  Forget that the design was generic and that it was hard to really “see” on the store shelf (I admit I walked right by them), what about being true to the brand?  Tropicana has positioned itself around ”fresh” –  the iconic image of an orange, of picking the orange off the tree and getting that taste right into the consumer’s mouth.  The orange with a straw tells it all.  Was PepsiCo jumping on the “bargain” bandwagon by strategically trying to genericize the packaging? Probably not.  But it does seem like the bigger picture of the brand position was lost.  While the execs at PepsiCo may have spent millions to develop the new and now pulled package design, at least they shouldn’t cry over spilled juice.  The Tropicana brand has stood the test of time and it’s still fresh.

I am very excited that I can now blog about our non-profit client, Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center. Kim (one of our partners) met the CEO, Gil Muñoz, through one of the medical employees. After talking with Gil, our team realized Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center would truly benefit from our brand development process.

What’s great about their organization is that they already have a really powerful mission and an amazing staff that are 100% behind it. The organization just needed help defining their distinction in the market and then visually expressing that distinction.

For those who don’t know, Virginia Garcia fills a critical healthcare need to those with barriers to access in Multnomah and Western Washington Counties. They opened with one clinic out of a two-car garage in 1975 and have now serve over 40,000 patients each year, with multiple clinic locations. And they are growing every day.

We have completed our brand development process with Virigina Garcia and are now in the midst of executing on the developed strategies. We are working on many exciting projects for them including identity development, collateral and a website. Can’t wait to share more soon!

-Erin