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October 1, 2005
Achtung Baby
According to an article in Friday's USA Today, several publishers in Germany have kicked off a four-month, $36 million advertising campaign designed to "lift German spirits." http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-09-29-german-pride_x.htm.
What's next? A campaign to increase passion among Swiss? Improve organizational skills in Italians? How about raising the humility level of Americans?
Apparently the campaign includes an emotional (sic) two-minute TV ad featuring celebrities such as Katarina Witt and the theme song from the movie Forrest Gump. Don't know about you, but my mood has improved already.
The campaign is being bootstrapped by publishing giant Bertelsmann and 23 other companies, including newspaper Der Spiegel and broadcaster RTL Germany. The thinking is that, even though this is a country with a jobless rate above 10 percent, economic growth of less than 1 percent per year, and a huge defection of jobs to Eastern Europe, India and China, an ad campaign featuring an Olympic skater from a decade ago and an obscure song from the Baby Boom generation is just the ticket to improve the moods of an inherently cynical German populace. I have several good friends in Germany, and I honestly can't tell when they ARE in a good mood!
Setting aside the fact that this is a wholly unmeasurable campaign in the age of metrics, somebody thought this was a good use of $36 million. If we're really honest with each other, we'll admit that we see companies making dumb decisions like this every day. Rather than address the fundamental business problems facing their organizations -- deficient products, an ill-equipped sales force, poor relationships with suppliers, a focus on profitability to the detriment of long-term sustainability -- these companies will assume that a good ad campaign will smooth over all of those rough edges.
The fundamental truth of marketing -- managing product, price, place and promotion -- doesn't change -- you can't compensate for deficiencies in the first three with the fourth. At least not over the long term.
So if you're expecting a flashy ad campaign to fix all of your business problems, I have only two words for you.
Achtung, Baby...
Posted by Matt Kucharski at October 1, 2005 7:32 AM