Guest Speaker: Julia Talbot, Burt's Bees

Some people are addicted to shopping, some are addicted to exercising and even some people are addicted to food. So what’s my addiction? The answer is Chap Stick, especially to Burt’s Bees Lip Balm. Everywhere I go I always have my Burt’s Bees with me, I can’t live without it. So I must admit I couldn’t have been more ecstatic to find out Julia Talbot, the Global Brand Manager for Burt’s Bees Lip Category, was coming to speak to our class!

Julia Talbot was Marketing major here at Virginia Tech, she graduated in 2003.Talbot also earned an MBA at Rutgers University. Before she started working for Burt’s Bees Talbot was an Associate Marketing Manager at Godiva Chocolates in NYC. She was responsible for leading development, implementation, and launch of Godiva’s seasonal collections. She loved her job at Godiva but wanted something more. In 2008 Talbot joined the Burt’s Bees team and in 2010 she was promoted to her current position as Global Brand Manager for lip products. Talbot responsibilities as the Global Brand Manager comprises of handling all aspects related to the product lifecycle, from idea generation all the way through product discontinuation. The Burt’s Bees Lip Category, which includes lip balms, glosses, and shimmers, is considered to be worth more than $100 million dollars.

Burt’s Bees is commonly described as a “natural personal care company” meaning they make products for personal care, health, beauty, and hygiene with all natural ingredients. They manufacture around 200 different types of personal care products, the most popular being lip balm. Consumers highly identify with the natural ingredients used in all of Burt’s Bees products and are willing to play high prices for these “green” products. People also identify Burt’s Bees as a company whom is committed to corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. They are recognized for their volunteer work and for giving back to the community.

I have been a loyal customer of Burt’s Bees for years now and I never realized, until I was doing research for this blog post, that Burt’s Bees produces many other products besides lip balms. I think a lot of Burt’s Bees products are forgotten about because consumers do not realize they make a variety of other products, not just lip balm. It’s a problem is that the Burt’s Bees brand is primarily recognized for only their lip balm. Burt’s Bees needs to raise awareness and get the word out about their other products.

Questions:

      1.  Burt’s Bees describes themselves as a “green” company, what kind of sustainable practices does Burt’s Bees have in place?

      2. What charities and non-profits is Burt’s Bees involved with? Is there any reason why you align yourself with these organizations?

Guest Speaker: Chip Shumaker,CMO, Publicis

Tomorrow Chris Shumaker from Publicis is coming to speak to my advertising class. Shumaker graduated from Virginia Tech in 1982 with a degree in marketing. Shumaker started his career in account management working for several agencies in Richmond, Virginia. Shumaker was able to learn about an agency’s perspective of marketing. He then became the head of a marketing communications department for Hamilton Beach. This position taught him how to understand the client’s side. Shumaker also founded his own consulting practice helping advertisers find the right agency partner. Shumaker has a wide range of career experiences over his 25 years in the industry, which has really helped him differentiate himself. 

Shumaker joined Publicis in 2007. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and is responsible for marketing the Publicis Worldwide brand through business development and public relations. Publicis is a French multinational advertising and public relations company. Publicis provides creative advertising services as well as campaign planning and other marketing services. Publicis is an expert in with many different types of media, from print to digital. It is one of the world's three largest advertising holding companies and had 200 offices around the world. 

Publicis  has a wonderful reputation and is acknowledged for having some top notch clients such as BMW, The Coca-Cola Company, Terminix, and Procter & Gamble. Because Publicis is such a huge global company, the possibilities are almost limitless. They have endless resources and a lot of man-power. But sometimes size can be a challenge. Publicis has to make sure they don’t let their clients feel unimportant. They have to continue to stay connected with their clients.

Question: What are the differences between clients that are located in the U.S.A. and ones that are located abroad? Has it been hard to adapt to the different type of clientele?

Learnings from Brandon Thornton

      This week I had the opportunity of hearing Brandon Thornton speak twice about two different topics. I really enjoyed both of this presentations because he did a great job getting his message across while also using cool visual aids to further justify what he was saying. Thornton seems like a very down-to-earth and straight forward person. I respected how Thornton shared his background with us and the journey he took to find his true passions in life. I think its common for successful professionals in the corporate world to expect young students to know exactly what they wan to do with their life after graduation. But the reality is, when most of us graduate, we won't know what we want to do. Thornton is a great example of this. It took him a long time for Thornton to make it to the top, but he explained that he learned a lot from his previous work experiences and they truly helped prepare him for the position he has now. It was inspiring to hear from a young professional that your life doesn't have to already be decided when you graduate. Thornton instead gave the advice of always having a voice; if you don’t have a voice you cannot make an impact. And to always do things in your own way and know what you stand for. I thought that this was great advice for a senior in college trying to figure out what to do with their life.

Thornton also gave great advice about developing a creative brief and offered a new way of looking at the process. He said that the first and most important thing to do is identify the problem, because having a clear and compelling problem beasts most insights. He calls this the "human insights approach." Thornton says that instead of trying to identify positive aspects of the brand/product, you should instead work to find a solution to the problem because this will inspire the creative team more. I thought that was a very different, yet helpful way of looking at the creative brief process. He is saying that to be inspired you need to have a clear problem so you can strategize to find the most compelling solution.

A great example of this is Procter and Gamble's (P&G) sponsorship of the Olympic games. What does a consumer goods company have to do with athletes? The main issue for P&G was to figure out how to connect with the audience watching the Olympic games. Figuring out a solution to this problem fueled the creative team to formulate an amazing strategy. The commonality they found was Moms. Mom's raise kids who turn into Olympic athletes, and they need help from P&G's commodity products to assist them. This ad did a great job emotionally connecting the P&G brand with consumers.They were able to do this by first identifying the main problem that  P&G was facing.

I admired Thornton for giving a real and honest presentation. He gave us great real word advice while also giving us advice that we can use for our creative briefs.

Guest Speaker: Brandon Thornton, Wieden+Kennedy,Nike

Tomorrow we are having a very significant guest speakers talk in class, Brandon Thornton from Wieden+Kennedy, Nike. 

 

 Our first speaker is Brandon Thornton, who is an alumni of Virginia Tech. Thornton graduated from Virginia Tech in 2006 with a degree in Marketing. After graduation he took the first job he got at UPS Freight in Richmond, VA. He sat in a cubicle all day and worked with customer service, so all he did was deal with problems. The job wasn’t for him; he knew he could do something bigger and better. He realized he needed to find his voice and figure out what he is passionate about. He had always been interested in creative things such as art and writing. Thornton also looked up to athletes like Andre Agassi, the Fab 5 Freshman from Michigan University and Michael Jordan. He realized that all of these athletes did things in their own way and had something to say. He soon discovered that Nike endorsed all of his favorite icons and decided that his dream job would be to work for Nike in a creative way. He wanted to pursue a career in advertising and decided to quit is current job and attend VCU Brandcenter, which is one of the top advertising schools in the country. Thornton graduated from VCU in 2009, when the economy was suffering. It was take a lot of time for him to reach his goal for working for Nike. For a year and a half he was a manager at American Apparel. While working there he learned about the best and worst ways to represent your brand. Finally an opportunity arose and Thornton was hired by Wieden+Kennedy, a privately owned advertising agency based in Portland, Oregon. With a lot of hard work and creativity, Thornton was able to work up to his dream position as the Lead Strategic Planner for Nike Basketball. His job now as a strategic planner is to ask the right questions, because the right questions lead to the right answers, and the right answer allow you to see the most interesting things possible. He acts as the voice of the consumer for Nike basketball.

Wieden + Kennedy is one of the top independent advertising agencies. Wieden + Kennedy has a total of 9 office all around the world, in places such as Portland, New York, São Paulo, Tokyo, London, Delhi, Shanghai and Amsterdam. They work with tons of top companies and have created countless award winning campaigns; most know them for the fantastic ads they create for Nike. Wieden + Kennedy are known for giving Nike their voice and are responsible for their famous slogan “Just Do It.” Dan Wieden, the found of Wieden + Kennedy said:

“Nike didn’t discover the power of advertising; they discovered the power of their own voice.”

Questions:
1) How exactly did you manage to work up through Wieden + Kennedy to be the Lead Strategic Planner for Nike Basketball?

2) Is the relationship between Nike and Wieden + Kennedy “set in stone?” Or is the a possibility that Nike will start working with another agency?

Taking Flight For The Fight

Delta Airlines is a major airline that is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is know as the world's busiest airport and this is mainly due to the traffic Delta Airlines provides.

Since it is Breast Cancer Awareness month, I wanted to spotlight Delta Airline's support for The Breast Cancer Awareness Research Foundation (BCRF). Delta has paired up with (BCRF) and produced several different campaigns that have all made a huge impact on raising awareness for Breast Cancer.

Delta's support of BCRF is a great example of cause-marketing, if you don't know what that is it is easy to explain. Cause-marketing is when a "for-profit" business and a "non-profit" organization combine efforts and decide to work together. They co-brand their products and advertise them together. For example, Delta  painted one of their large commercial planes pink to help raise awareness for breast cancer. The aircraft has carried nearly 266,753 customers and flown nearly 10,600 hours (or 1,300 trips) around the world since being painted pink in May 2010. This is a brilliant idea. Delta ans BCRF and joint-advertising

In addition to the pink plane, throughout October Delta's office building will be illuminated in pink lighting in support of BCRF. Delta employees also will wear pink uniforms and sell pink products like pink lemonade and pink headsets onboard their planes. Delta also will donate $1 to BCRF for the first 50,000 new "Likes" on the Delta Facebook page during October. All of these advertisements that Delta produced for BCRF have been very successful and reached many people. Since 2005, Delta employees and customers have raised a total of $5 million for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, its wonderful that Delta is showing so much support for BCRF, but what do they get out of it? What was the goal they were trying to achieve with this joint advertisement campaign? What was their advertising objective? Well I can answer that folks.

It's fairly common for airlines to sponsor charities and to make donations for non-profits. Most major carriers give to local charities in their hub cities and to national organizations. But Delta takes this to a whole different level. Instead of being the type of sponsor that just writes a check to a non-profit and calls is a day, they decided to co-brand themselves with BCRF and advertise as one. Delta’s goal was to demonstrate community support while also differentiating themselves from their competition and increasing customer loyalty. Sponsorship can improve perceptions that the company is gracious and genuine when they see joint advertisement with a non-profit organization. People connect emotionally with a brand they can relate to and admire. By aligning themselves with BCRF, Delta not only supports a good cause, they also boost their public image and helps distinguish it from the competition.

All of these campaigns are done to raise awareness and support for breast cancer research. These campaigns benefit both the non-profit organization BCRF and the for-profit company, Delta.

Mans' Best Friend

My family is the definition of dog lovers. To us dogs are not just animals they are apart of our family. So today, instead of talking about my pride for Atlanta's prominence in the business world, I would like to share a campaign that I found touching and extremely creative. Purina is premium dog-food maker, and is actually the brand of food that I feed to my dogs. Recently Purina decided to launch a new marketing campaign to try and raise their brand awareness in hopes of  beating out their biggest competitor Pedigree, another top dog food brand. The Westminster Dog Show is the most prestigious dog competition in America, and is watched all over the nation by animal lovers. Pedigree has been the sponsor of the event for 24 years; this opportunity has allowed them to increase their brand awareness greatly over the years. Because they are sponsors for the event, they receive repeated brand and ad exposure throughout the tournament, which has helped them increase their product name.Purina was determined to become the new sponsor of The Westminster Dog Show in hopes of increasing their brand awareness, but they knew it would be a challenge. Purina realized that in order to become the new sponsor of the event, they needed to create a new and different campaign.

Purina's current commercials usually showed champion show dogs competing in dogs shows and described how champion show dogs only eat Purinia dog food. They were trying to send a message that Purina is for winners and that if your dog eats Purina, they can be like champion show dogs. The problem with this campaign is that it only shows the benefits of eating Purina and doesn't connect and give meaning to people's lives. Purina realized they needed to change their tactics if they wanted to take the top spot from Pedigree.

Purina decided that they needed not to focus on show dogs and dog shows, but instead try to connect with people on a broader scale. Most of the population doesn't have a champion show dog, so only showing show dogs in commercials wasn't a good way to connect with the average dog lover. This commercial was created by Purina to try and change their image.

 

The campaign is called "Inside Every Good Dog Is a Great Dog." The commercial depicts average dogs, of all different shapes and sizes, being loveable while doing great things. The reason they wanted to show dogs of all different types of breeds was so that pet owners would view them as normal dogs, and be able to relate to them in their own lives. I think the soundtrack to the ad went along perfectly with the message Purina was trying to send. Toward the beginning of the song, the dogs are shown doing simple tasks such as napping, playing with a tennis ball and just being silly. Eventually the music picks up and the lyrics start to urge listeners to strive for greatness, the dogs follow and the ads starts to show police dogs and rescue dogs doing great things. All the positive canine imagery, and especially the behavioral progression throughout the video evokes their new tagline. The key to this commercial is that it connects emotionally with the audience and allows pet owners to picture their dog in the commercial. These new ad does a great job celebrating average dogs; unlike the old campaigns that promoted champion purebreds. The new ad sends the message that Purina is the key ingredient for pet owners to uncover greatness in their dogs. 

This commercial was a huge success. People absolutely loved it. Because of this commercial, Purina became the new sponsor of The Westminster Dog Show. Pedigree had formally been the sponsor of the dog show for 24 years, but couldn't compete with the overwhelmingly positive response from Purina's new campaign.  Ever since the commercial launched their brand awareness has increased greatly and people have really made a connection with the brand.

Recapping on what I discussed today:

What was the problem?

  

Purina wants to raise their brand awareness in hopes of  beating out their biggest competitor Pedigree. Pedigree has been the sponsor for The Westminster Dog Show for 24 years and Purina was to take the top spot from them.

What is the advertising objective?

Create a new campaign that connects emotionally with pet owners so Purina can become the new sponsor 

for The Westminster Dog Show. The sponsorship will help them build their brand awareness. 

Who is the target market?

The target audience are people who are dog lovers of those who don't necessarily have a show dog. Most people who watch The Westminster Dog Show are not show dog owners.

What is the SMP?

"Inside Every Good Dog Is a Great Dog."

Purina learned from the problem they had with their previous campaign, and was was able to turn their brand into something great and knock out the competition. Purina did a great job evoking the special relationship people have with our dogs and connecting with them emotionally.