EFFECT[ive] Marketing…Connecting Real-Life Businesses with their Online Market

[This entry was first published at HubPages.com.]

If you were born in the U.S. before, say, 1982, you surely remember the wrinkliest, purpliest spokescharacters ever unleashed on the American public: the Claymated California Raisins. The transformation of the Raisins characters into cultural icons has often been presented (even as a business–school case study) as a testament to the success of the ad campaign. But very few know how the tale actually ended, and therein lies a valuable lesson for the contemporary marketing landscape.

The California Raisin Advisory Board had succeeded, a good ten years before anyone had heard the term, in crafting what we know today as a viral hit—of a pop–culture–shaking magnitude. Of course, without YouTube, it took $80 million a year over two years to create and maintain it.

So what did they really get for their eighty million dollars?

Well, in the first year of the campaign, 1987, the Advisory Board logged a 10% jump in U.S. raisin sales. That year, Post Cereals, anticipating that the ad push would boost sales of their Raisin Bran cereal, bought up more raisins. By about 10% of the previous year’s U.S. sales.

The rest of that year? Sales were flat.

And the second year of the campaign, when the nation was gripped by California Raisins fever? Flat again. Not even the previous year’s 10% bump, as Post, seeing no increase in Raisin Bran sales as a result of the ad blitz, had returned to their previous purchase level.

Just two short years after the animated Raisins had begun their assault on American consumers, the campaign had burned through eighty million dollars, countless people had “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on a permanent playback loop in their heads, and a cottage merchandising industry had made a fortune off licensed California Raisin products. But sales of actual raisins had remained as flat as a dried grape…and the California Raisin Advisory Board was history—bankrupt and out of business.

So how is it that, today as then, this campaign is widely considered a tremendous advertising success story?

The California Raisins campaign generated a ton of noise—in today’s terms, it went viral in a big way. And it seems to be human nature to mistake noise for results. Rather than looking deeper, at the measurable results of the campaign, we’re content to interpret the level of noise, the media and consumer attention a campaign receives, as the measure of its success.

So when you’re setting up a marketing campaign, know your goals. It’s hard to know whether you’ve succeeded if you haven’t set out what success will look like.

Next, measure your progress toward those goals.

And then? Be prepared to act on the information those measurements give you—adjust the campaign’s focus, fine–tune it, even drop it if that’s the best course.

We’re not arguing that virality (viralness? viralosity?) is a bad thing. As long as the attention it draws to your brand or product is positive, viral is good. Viral boosts your profile and your visibility.

But if you stop to congratulate yourself after your roller–skating–monkey video gets its millionth hit and don’t bother looking at whether that popularity has boosted sales of the product it’s tied to, then you’re just a higher–profile, more visible business with the same sales you had before.

Consider the very funny spots that California diary farmers have been running for a few years—”Great Milk Comes from Happy Cows.” Funny enough to hold your attention? Probably. But really—do they make you want to check the milk label when you’re grocery shopping to see which brand comes from California? Not likely. Over twenty years later, it seems no one (at least in California) has learned their lesson.

Are you looking to create noise, or are you looking to create sales?

Our local cable television/internet/telephone company has been running a TV spot to showcase to their business customers how effective advertising with them is: a car-dealership manager (a real customer, as they say, “not an actor”) brags that everywhere he goes around town, people see him and sing his commercial’s jingle for him. That, he says in no uncertain terms, is how he knows advertising with, let’s say, Acme Cablevision works for him.

Really? That’s the landmark? Not increased sales, or increased traffic, or even increased phone calls, but the number of people who can sing his little ditty?

Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that I believe that all traditional advertising, air and print, for all companies, in almost all circumstances, is unnecessary – and unnecessarily costly. Which I do. Because it is.

Does this businessman really gauge the success of his TV ad by how many people have memorized his jingle? Does that equate to business success? I believe so. And it’s not just small, local businesses that make this mistake; it’s been common in advertising for generations to focus on the memorability of a thirty- or sixty-second spot, as if the ability to simply blunt-object some string of characters into the public’s brains somehow equates to money in the bank. Remember the gerbils/hamsters/chipmunks launched into a wall out of a cannon in a SuperBowl ad years ago? Sure you do. PETA does. Remember the company that ran it? Not unless you’re with PETA. They folded within months of that ad’s first airing.

Advertising is a marketing activity. The goal of all marketing activities is to bring in more business – more sales, bigger sales, sales from new revenue streams, new customers, repeat customers, any of the above, all of the above. And marketing is a core business activity. Just like any other core element of your business, like inventory or labor, if cost > return, it’s a bad deal.

If you decide traditional advertising is a worthwhile investment for your operation, then go into it for the right reasons, from the right perspective, and with the right point.