Advert Strategy for Car Insurance Package - Case Study Example

AAMI: Advert Strategy for Car Insurance Package. Contents Objective 2 The Strategy 2 Price 2 Influence 3 Aims 3 Word on the street 3 Share of Voice (SOV) 4 Tracking 4 Channels 4 Attention. 5 Implicit learning (Teaching) 6 Creativity 7 Budget 7 Broad media recommendations for future advertising 8 Target group and timing 8 Objective The main target of the advertisement campaign will be the car insurance product. The company wants to create awareness for the product and specifically to attract the 18-30 age brackets with generation of greater interest to the product. The $100, 000 budget campaign is supposed to be supported by a combination of strong Unique Selling Points which the boss is not sure the company has at the moment. The boss recommends that we should constrain ourselves to radio advertising which he is convinced is the best in the current environment and he has made suggestions on some particular items that should be part of the advert. The Strategy A mixture of strategies will be used to come up with the ad, they will draw from the best practices in the field while still incorporating creativity and aiming at some level of originality. Price The ads should be designed in a way that will aim at reducing the reactions people tend to have upon realizing the cost of a certain product. The add will be designed in a way that it will draw the customers attention to the benefits that they will get from purchasing the product relative to the investment they will make therein (Du Plessis, Rousseau & Boshoff 2007). This approach has been proven to be a great profit builder. What with clients losing their price sensitivity and feeling they are getting one over the company. We have a great opportunity in that we will be building on the popular Rhoda adverts that appealed to the thrifty clients who wish to have the best value for their money and if possible get rebates (Thompson & Tracy 2011). Influence Due to the fact that the company desires an immediate uptake, the ad campaign should not rely entirely on emotions. It should be an ingenious mix between rationality and emotive appeal. To be successful, the rational part of the campaign will also be made to appear emotive so that the major mood of the campaign is emotional even though the rational message will be gotten through (Heath 2001). Aims The boss states that the campaign should be aimed at creating awareness about the package. While this is a noble mission, empirical studies done in the past have tended to prove that this approach bears little if any success. The fault lies in the ‘softness’ of its objectives. There is need to sit down and re-strategize and identify the real objectives that we want to achieve for the company. This could be in terms of market share, sales volumes or profit growth. Word on the street In the past, creative ads that have been able to permeate the street lingo with their catchphrases have been proven to be very successful (Blattberg & Neslin 2007). Our company had some luck with the ‘Rhonda’ campaign mostly with the masseuse line of “Rhonda is mine’. These catchphrases tend to stick on and are very effective in eliminating price sensitivity. The modern world of the internet and social networking has made this a lucrative ad angle. Once an ad is able to have the people associate with it and build ‘talk value’ the ad easily becomes viral and gets a life of its own even surpassing the timeframes that had been budgeted for. This will be one of the major points that the copywriters will be required to excel in (Macrury 2009). Share of Voice (SOV) Since a correlation has been proved to exist between the share of voice and the Share of market, the design, execution and follow up for the campaign will be mostly geared to enhance the relationship between the two measures. The need to maintain this balance will also be a great influence to the media to be used to discuss later. Tracking The most effective ads are known to improve many aspects of the business regardless of those that were initially targeted (Association of National Advertisers, & Russell 2001). This will be achieved by recognizing that even though we shall set out to achieve specific goals, we shall keep shifting the ‘goalposts’ for the ad to be able to efficiently evaluate its achievements. Channels The more channels a campaign adopts, the wider the reach, the greater the voice and the more likely the success it will garner (Blattberg & Neslin 2007). This however does not mean that a campaign should be on every media available rather, it implies that the marketing team has its homework well set. The campaign should be carried out on the channels that address the target audience the best without alienating any other demography that might be reached. For instance, it would be wiser for any ad targeted at the youth have social media as one of its channels. The rule of the thumb here is that the more the better but we should take note not to be shortchanged by the law of diminishing returns. The How In this section, we seek to establish the mechanism through which the ad campaign is going to work. Attention. Even if the add will be formulated to have an implicitly learnable concept, the amount of attention that the clients will afford it will be directly proportionate to the level of learning that will be imparted. There are many factors that will have to be considered which include the perceptions to commercials on whichever media we choose (Kelley & Jugenheimer, 2006). The number of adverts that the particular media is running also determines the attention levels since the more the clutter, the less the client will notice an outstanding advert or have any meaningful remembrance. The relevance of the advert will also be of concern since we will have to segment certain media according to the likelihood of delivering the message to the target audience. The ad will have to be formulated in such a way that it places the consumer in a context they can associate with and this is a feature that the Rhonda campaign capitalized on by first of all having a character that the majority of the consumers could identify with and find some little of them in her. The fact that the boss wants a campaign majorly anchored on the radio will present its own challenges as far as attention grabbing is concerned even though studies have previously shown that the division of attention in radio advertising does not necessarily affect uptake even though this is all relative to the attention competing activity (Moriarty, Wells, Mitchell & Wells 2009). To achieve this, it will be suggested that the advertisement adopts several techniques including; Personification: this technique works by giving products a human face. The story flows from the product to the target audience rather than from a third party (Foxall 2005). Application in this case could be letting the car explain the need for insurance from its point of view. Exaggeration; exaggerations are an entertaining and interesting way to push forward a message. The more the exaggeration, the easier it becomes to simplify the message. The technique is great for television, online and print media but is hard to plan out for radio (Foxall 2005). Borrowing from the Rhoda campaigns, we could exaggerate the benefits associated to purchasing the package and extend them to benefits to the clients’ life. Strategic positioning: This will helps us get to the targeted audience. Since the demographic group targeted is the youth, we could try sending a message that the package eases them of the cares and concerns related to car insurance and leaves them time to pursue fun activities. Metaphoric symbiology: According to Simon (2009) this is where we use symbols to create a metaphoric representation of the product or its benefits. It is the interesting and creative angle of this technique that draws the attention of consumers. An added advantage of this technique is that it could help the company develop its USP’s or push new ones. Benefit not product: As enumerated by Pattis, (2004), the ad should try to draw the clients by impressing upon them the importance of the benefits that they are likely to draw from the product and the benefit itself. For our package, the benefits draw from the safety and security that comes from knowing one is insured. Implicit learning (Teaching) The ad will be structured such that it will impart the required information on the target audience passively (Kaufer 2004). One of our strongest positions as mentioned earlier is the previous Rhonda campaigns that were successful and which were very well received by clients and which are yet to outrun their shelf lives. These ads will be built upon through the incorporation of a young angle into the whole Rhonda concept. The Points to consider when building upon this success will be; Consumers don’t set out to look information about products unless under very special occasions, this will push our hand towards relying heavily on emotional content so as to be able to deliver our message implicitly to the consumer (ANA 2001). The fact that consumers are believed to not want to watch commercials (at least the most of them) is also a bargaining strength for this approach (Gladwell 2000). Creativity The major goal of any creative writer or anyone at all involved in advertising is to have a noticeable product or concept. Some opponents of this belief propose that any add is noticeable as far as it speaks to the right people who may actually be in need of the product. This argument is flawed on its premises since one of the objectives for advertisement and one that cuts across board is the need to create awareness (Stevens, David & William 1991). The ad will have to be noticeable such that among the matrix of issues calling for the attention of the consumer, it will rank in the upper quartile. Towards this end, coherence will be our key selling point. We will have to design an ad that incorporates the narration of the package with the USP’s and the entertainment aspect of the advert to ensure communication and ‘stickiness’ (Statt 1997). Budget The company seems to have already adopted the ‘Previous year + media inflation cost approach to budget allocation which is a commendable method due to its consistency and predictability (Anderson 2009). Its major shortcoming is the fixed cost assumption which seems to assume that the cost of advertisement is fixed and not dependent on goals and products. Due to the fact that TV seems versatile enough, I would advise the company to consider it as more viable than the radio with a 35% plus share of the budget, the social media would come second with 25%, the radio 15% and the print media and the billboards would share the rest. Social media advertising is more quantifiable since the operating company would deliver statistics on how the ad was viewed (Lee, Johnson & Joyce 2008). Broad media recommendations for future advertising Though the radio is still a very effective media outlet, when it comes to this generation, it somehow falls a little bit short. This is due to the fact that this is a generation that catches up on their information needs on the go (Joachim 2008). This age group streams its movies live on their fancy gadgets and these also act as music files and source of news. The most effective media for this group is online advertisements and mostly in the social media. The other media could be TV, billboards and the radio and very possibly in that order. In future it would be prudent to allocate a large part of the budget to social media and TV commercials with print and radio media receiving small portions. Target group and timing Due to the nature of the package and the primary audience targeted, it would be wise to present the ad just before the summer holidays begin. This is advised by the nature of car purchase of the age group under target. Most of these people will buy cars for the holiday season while the younger spectrum of the group is likely to be through with their schooling and buying their ‘after school’ cars. The ad should capture their imaginations a month or two before they embark on these activities (Advertising Publications, Inc, & Crain Communications Inc. 2006). The target age group is a well advised venture since these people are yet to build too much loyalty to a particular competitor and this makes them ripe for such a marketing plan. The generation buying their first cars is most certainly an excited group and this means that they are also easily excitable (Kotler & Keller 2009). References Advertising Publications, Inc, & Crain Communications Inc. 2006. Advertising age. [Chicago, Ill.], Crain Communications. Anderson, C. (2009). Free: the future of a radical price. New York, Hyperion Association of National Advertisers, & Russell H. C. 2001. Defining advertising goals for measured Advertising results. Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall. (Du Plessis Blattberg, R. C., & Neslin, S. A. 2007. Sales promotion: concepts, methods, and strategies. Englewood Du Plessis, P. J., Rousseau, D., & Boshoff, C. 2007. Buyer behaviour: understanding consumer psychology and marketing. Cape Town, South Africa, Oxford University Press Foxall, G. R. 2005. 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