╠ Commonwealth Bank - Dollarmite ╣

Many apologies for the random update schedule. With Melbourne Anime Festival looming most of my time is going to that. However that shall be finished in two weeks so look forward to some normality then

Anyway I'd just like to say thankyou for all those who read or commented on my woolworths insight piece. It was really inspirational to get responses like that and also taught me a lot. One of the things that surprised me most however is that my post was even popular enough to pick up a bot in that of Tina which seemed to just respond because there was mentioning of a credit card.

Also please note the logo is slightly different this time around. I lost the original in my laptop issues and needed to start again. I'm happy with how it turned out...and since the main difference is in the font it doesn't hurt too much since it's all covered up. Anyway on with the show.

Commonwealth Bank - Dollarmite



Overall I must say I quite enjoy this ad. I think it is compiled quite well and it all starts with the first line...

"Keeping with the banks determination to evolve..."

This line just sets it up, it embodies everything that the banks current media campaign is standing for. Most importantly the word determination which is actually emphasized because of it's importance and it links with the previously established slogan of determined to be different to actually make sure you know who the ad is for without stating it.

I believe there is a lot of power to this approach. Once you label something with advertising of a brand it seems to cheapen it overall and I think this can even apply to advertising. This is why some of the most successful ads can be the ones like Cadbury's Gorilla ad which don't directly spam the brand directly at you.

Now for those of you unaware of the Determined to be different tagline, it may well be because you missed this ad.

Commonwealth Bank - Determined to be different



This campaign itself was quite spectacular. The beauty of it was that it wasn't your conventional campaign saying 'buy this'. All this campaign did was launch a tagline 'Determined to be different' fast. And as far as I'm aware it succeeded. That brand spanking new tagline has effectively established its place in such a prominent company.

The reason this needed to be established is because banks used to be horrible at customer service. They were just another Telstra basically. Then along comes St George with superior customer service and bam...all of a sudden the market for customer service excellence in banks begins. Commonwealth is not the only bank doing this. I'm sure a few of you have noticed the banks all arcing up recently such as NAB's Climb every mountain.

Sure there are nonsensical and borderline disrespectful misrepresentations of Australia but it is different and as such syncs with the tag. I'm not sure how many of you can remember back but in the time of this ad these advertisements were everywhere. Ridiculous amounts of money simply advertising determined to be different...and overall I think it was worth it.

None the less, back to the original ad. Each line and shot in this ad helps so much in so many different ways. First you've got the transformer dollarmite, and I'm not sure about kids these days but if this ad was around when I was a kid I would have gone up to my mum and made her sign me up for it no matter what it was. Getting kids excited about banks is sort of an untapped market...mainly because kids are poor by nature...but kids become adults, more importantly adults who are too lazy to transfer over to a new bank. So it's good to see some targeting there.

There's also the humour aspect. Personally I think to most this would be an enjoyable ad overall. Compared to normal ads you wouldn't feel too hurt if this was in an ad break...some of you may even smile or chuckle at it. That in itself gives a lot of power to the ad because it means you're open to giving the ad attention which effectively makes you mroe susceptible to its message.

I really like the reps response to the idea as well because it is so smart, so calculated and because of this it gives you a sense that you would trust these individuals with the big decisions. It makes you happy to have these people in charge of your money.

Overall sneaking all of this into one 29 second ad is quite an achievement. I am quite proud of Commonwealth bank for this and am a proud member of their bank.

Anyway thankyou again for taking the time to read my blog. Feel free to comment or whatever. Also remember there is a poll to vote on which ad I will break down in the possibly distant future. It finishes soon so if you want your vote to count get in quick.

Happy Banking

╠ Insight - Woolworths Credit Card ╣

Intro
When I was first getting into the marketing blog scene I noticed that everyone took a sort of different approach to what I did. Everyone else focused more on insights on any form of marketing. I avoided this because I never suspected myself to have insight on such things. However today I found myself actually pondering something worthy of such a blog and figured it was worth putting here. I think this is all more of a frame of mind, if you keep your mind open to such things they are all around, and the more I involve myself in this hopefully the more insights I will have. Anyway on with the insight.

As some of you may know I work for Dick Smith Electronics, which is a subdivision of Woolworths. Overall my opinion of Woolworths has been quite low with my dealings inside the business. They don't take care of their staff overly well. However their new venture in that of the credit card.

The first thing that has to be pointed out about the credit card is that it is in no way a supermarket trying to become a bank. In fact the card itself is linked to HSBC so they aren't actually taking care of that side.

The power in this card is the market research that will now be at Woolworths fingertips. From every sale at their store they will be able to track everything that you buy on the card which allows customer tracking like never before. In the past you could always see what someone was buying but now you can track that same consumer unobtrusively.

Visit Frequency
From this card you can track regularity of visits, you can find which people return each week, people who return only for certain sales, people who only shop when the weather is nice, people who shop determined on how much they bought in their previous shop etc. Of course all of this depends on having brand loyalty to woolworths. However woolworths are offering double points on when you shop with them and triple if you buy their products which is quite an incentive which itself helps for that loyalty.

Purchase tracking
Also with each visit you can keep tracking items which people buy and as such develop the lists of what items consist of that customers staples and what are irregular purchases. This could be incredibly useful for working out sales or just base prices.

Say you value Tim Tams at $2 and will buy them only when at or below this price and lets assume that's below their normal cost. By repeated sales eventually Woolworths would be able to discover this. Now say their are 100,000 people out there that have varying levels of what they value tim tams at. From this Woolworths could discover the perfect sale amount in order to sell the exact amount they want and get the highest price to do so. Including this with the previous ability to determine when people shop and you just have to start wondering just how much control the consumer has on their actions and how much power this market research can have on people.

Woolworths have the power to control peoples sales unlike any other competitor in the Australian market. With this they can set their base prices, sales value and time with incredible effectiveness.

That being said this is only if they utilize this. As I said before I don't have the greatest respect for them, however the potential here is amazing, and as such I hope they do use it. Anyway I hope I've put forward my excitement about the possibilities that this card represents and somehow at least intrgiued a few of you.

Other Gruen News
Now back onto the normal stuff. I'm really busy this coming week with assignments as well as Manifest stuff so the Commonwealth breakdown may still be delayed a bit but I now have the Sony ad to do after that and now here's a new series of ads to vote on for after these two. The choices are as follows

Optus - End of Time (Advert with various clocks lacking time and an elephant for some reason)

Birdseye - Exaggerator (Mates eating chips discussing getting back from a footy match with one hugely exaggerating everything)

Vodafone - Take Everything With you (Guy getting ready to leave folds up his life and puts it in his pocket)

Votes are heavily appreciated. Also if you have any comments on anything just leave them below. Once again thankyou all for your time.

╠ Comic - Doomed To Repeat ╣

I have returned! After over a week of being laptopless I can now return to the internet world in all of its glory. I must say the time off was hard. Not so much my dependence on the internet but more all the stuff I had to do. Unfortunately I lost quite a few files in the process such as all my bookmarks and programming files so there are a few other things I was planning on doing that have to now unfortunately go on hold.

None the less onto the catch up. Here is the comic to go with the Cadbury Trucks ad breakdown. In order to make up for the loss in time I decided to trial colouring the comic. Let me know what you think.



Since I did Cadbury again I thought why not have the same sort of thing happen. This also introduces the April character and the relationship that Tannie will be perceived to have with her. Although I sort of hope I'm not painting Tannie as too much of a jerk to begin with.

None the less I hope you enjoyed this comic. As usual any comments are welcome. The next post of mine shall be on the Commonwealth Bank ad which shall hopefully be done some time this week. As for after that the current poll is still open and in dire need of a few tiebreaking votes.

╠ I'm Not Dead...Loosely Speaking╣

Some of you have probably noticed my sort of large absence from posting anything here. The reason for this is because my laptop caught a virus and had this issue of being unable to start. So because of this I took it to get the data extracted before a reformatting and being the cheap guy I am I opted for the free approach of going through people I know rather than paying for it and getting it back same day. My first quot was last Saturday, then on Saturday I was told Tuesday, then on Tuesday I was told Today and then today I was told next Saturday so personally I'm just not expecting it back any time soon.

Unfortunately being computerless there is very little I can do for the Gruen Transfer. As some of you know I volunteer for the Melbourne Anime Festival which is coming up on the Grand Final weekend and so all of my very limited access to the internet(Mostly Uni) is going to either that or all of those assignments I should technically be working on.

None the less I shall still set up a poll for this week. I had quite a few ads that I was going to put up but since youtube isn't cooperating I shall have to use some old options. Since last week had a total of 1 vote I figured the two losers for being so close deserve another chance. So this week you are choosing out of Vodafone - Take everything with you, Mitsubishi - Daniel's Birthday and Sony - All Eyes on you. Please vote. I'd really like to have more than one single vote deciding everything.

Last weeks winner was the Commonwealth Dollarmite ad so once I'm back on track I'll get the comic up for cadbury ad and then head straight into commonwealth. Anyway thankyou all for your time and I hope you continue to read on once my laptop gets back on its feet.