Cricket World Cup 2011 Advertising: Which One Caught Your Attention?

All the conversations these days are revolving around the Cricket World Cup. Many a times, I am a silent observer and few times an active participant in such conversations around who will win the match, who played better, how a catch should have been taken or how it was missed and so on. As a marketer, I heard many conversations as to which company is doing well in terms of its branding and promotion and which could have done better.

Surprisingly, as a consumer, I don't hear many conversions revolving around which brand has got some great deal, which is my preferred drink while watching the match, which watch will I wear this cricket season or which pizza I will order when India plays.

Although the consumers are not consciously taking any decisions about choosing any particular brand, companies are spending heftily on branding and advertising during this Cricket season. Because these ads and campaigns are unconsciously playing a very important role in making the consumers choose a particular brand.

Companies now are choosing multiple options like TV channels, websites, social media, SMS, email, videos etc to reach out to consumers. But, in this clutter, it has become harder to get the required attention and mindset of consumer. It is no surprise that brands are coming up with innovative and catchy ways for making their presence felt.

As a consumer, following few campaigns caught my attention:

1. Amul: Amul butter has tied up with Netherlands team. The Dutch team is sporting Amul logos on their jerseys. “Why not India team”, because “It is not available” comes the response from Amul. This is being treated as a very smart move by Amul because it has already generated a lot of buzz!
2. LG Mobile: LG has set up a ‘LG mobile army’ where it is recruiting 2,500 cadets from 38 cities to cheer inside stadiums.
3. Lays Flavor World Cup 2011: I liked the way Lays generated the curiosity and buzz even ahead of the World Cup and slowly unveiled its six new flavors. It won’t be a surprise to see Lay’s revenue going up with these ads
4. Brands on Social Media: Many brands such as Pizza Hut, Adidas, Smith and Jones, KFC are promoting deals through social media channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Good use of social media I would say.

Are there any campaigns which caught your attention as a consumer?

Taking Marketing Contribution Beyond Marketing Department

Most of the times, marketing is a separate department in the organizations. There is a ‘marketing team’ which handles all the aspects such branding, positioning, pricing etc. Well, it probably worked well in past when there were only handful ways of reaching out to users. However, with the new age of social media, don’t you think the definition of marketing has expanded to blogging, managing customer comments, reviews, creating and managing social media presence, analyzing results and all such things? Marketing has become a lot about conversation.

I believe that a lot of people in the company – outside the marketing department - can very well participate in this conversation with the users of your products and services.

How? Imagine this:

• Your engineers writing a blog article about the latest technology which your company has mastered
• Your support engineer providing responses to user queries on your online community and resolving issues – beyond email, phone or chat support
• Your technical engineer creating a video on using a particular feature in your product and posting it on YouTube
• Your sales teams posting interesting, informative and educative presentations on presentation sharing websites
• Your content writer gathering inputs about a latest paradigm by participating in discussion forums
• Your technical architect writing a post about a latest, cutting-edge technology and inviting comments from other tech-savvy people around

The list can just go on. So what’s happening here? Variety of people and not just the marketing team are contributing in creating an image, a brand about the company by utilizing their knowledge. Isn’t it great? What more can you expect when the best and experts are in action!

Well, I am convinced on this because I have tried this. Do you think it’s time for you to take a leap in this direction?