Raising the Bar on Marketing

If you had a $2.4M lying around for marketing, would you plop it down on a SuperBowl ad?

John Moore at BrandAutopsy.com lists his creative suggestions for alternatives to GoDaddy.com's decision to hit the SuperBowl with a big bang. His first suggestion was to pour it into "building a better product" (I'll remind everyone that the Fuzzy Front End of product development is marketing too). To his credit, the president and founder responds on the blog (kudos!) and says they simply need more visibility and it won't detract from money allocated for the product itself.

(BTW, Tom if you want to know what's wrong with most marketing campaigns - it's that often products and services are created in a vacuum - without truly being in tune with their market - and focus groups are a close second to a vacuum - so ultimately the campaign is all too often pushing a big rock up a steep hill.)

In another case study below (full article is worth it at Business 2.0), Clif Bar Inc. shares a few ways to gain visibility with the added bonus of staying close to your market (and close to the trend translators) - all at the same time. A SuperBowl ad is as far away from intimacy with your market as you can get.

I had the pleasure of hearing Sheryl O'Laughlin speak (she's now CEO of Clif Bar) while she was still in charge of marketing (if you're not familiar with their products, they're energy bars). The entire Luna bar product itself and launch was her idea based on her own intimate understanding of the market. It was obvious then and it's obvious now that Clif Bar is no average company. (Also of interest, the founder's new book: Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business, the Story of Clif Bar, Inc. by Gary Erickson)

In the late '90s, when few cared who won the Tour de France, Clif Bar had sponsored Lance Armstrong and two dozen other members of the U.S. Postal Service cycling team. But in 2001, when Armstrong came back from cancer to nail his third Tour win, PowerBar offered Armstrong $400,000 a year, 10 times what the team had been getting from Clif. Clif couldn't match it and lost the deal.

It was a defining moment, as [founder and then-CEO Gary] Erickson and [CEO and then-marketing director Cheryl] O'Loughlin realized they couldn't win with conventional tactics. Instead of sponsoring Armstrong, O'Loughlin launched a program heralding the domestiques - support riders who help top cyclists win races. Fans could go to Clif's website and vote for the best of the total unknowns, withthe winner getting $10,000. Armstrong's Tour heroics had vastly raised interest in cycling, and the marketing program, called "Beyond the Podium," drove "thousands of people to our website to vote," says O'Loughlin, a marketing manager for Quaker Oats and Kraft prior to joining Clif in 1998. "We created a dialogue with those consumers, which is different than just seeing an ad about Lance." The program cost less than $150,000.

Grassroots sponsorship deals became part of a concerted strategy to keep Clif Bar's marketing message distinctive. It dovetailed nicely with branding that Clif was already doing, such as using the backside of bar wrappers to tell the story of how Erickson started the company and to tout the causes that Clif supports. Erickson killed off any notions of TV advertising in favor of grassroots promotion. Chris DeJohn, sponsorship director of the Chicago Marathon, recalls being surprised by the reaction to his suggestion that company do TV promotion. "They said, 'We're not into that. We'd rather be at the event and have people interact with the product,'" recalls DeJohn. Similarly, Clif prefers to set up sampling stations in grocery stores rather than pay slotting fees - pricey guarantees for better positioning.

PowerBar and Balance Bar also do some of this grassroots marketing to athletes, but Clif pulls it off more effectively. "They're in touch with their target market better than their competitors," say Bob Hilarides, a partner in Connecticut-based consulting firm Cannondale Associates. Indeed, Clif and Luna are the top two sellers in the natural-products supermarket category, with a combined 25 percent of the market. "Being a small company forces us to think hard about what we're doing and what our brand stands for," O'Loughlin says. "It makes us more creative."

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[Mark Cerney]

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