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?

A (one-time) major player in the (pre-big-box) midwestern retail grocery industry, Marsh Supermarkets last week launched their very first viral marketing campaign with a $10 coupon for their Facebook fans. It crashed and burned. Badly. What went wrong?

Marsh Supermarkets, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has a Facebook page with about 3,300 fans. Last week, when they had about 3,100 fans, Marsh posted a message on their wall offering a $10 in-store coupon to their Facebook fans, old and new alike. The offer was posted for one day, only on their Facebook page, and linked to a printable coupon.

What happened? Their fans responded to the offer. Boy, did they ever.

But they didn’t just print the coupon for themselves; many of them forwarded the link to their friends, who forwarded it to their friends, and so on, and so on. No numbers have been released, but it’s probably safe to guess that, on the very low end, more than 10,000 coupons were printed. Sound like a successful viral campaign? I’d say so. Those coupons represent a whole lot of bodies through the doors of Marsh’s stores, each ready to spend money. And nowadays, going head to head with WalMart, SuperTarget and Meijer (an aggressive midwestern big-box chain), Marsh could surely use that money.

So how did Marsh respond? The offer ended on schedule on July 29th. But on July 31st, Marsh panicked. They posted a note on their Facebook page that said, in part:

“Unfortunately this offer has been widely distributed in an unauthorized manner throughout our marketing area. Due to the vast numbers of inappropriately transmitted and replicated copies of this offer, we will no longer be able to accept these coupons in our stores.”

(To their credit, they did include an apology.)

Unauthorized? Inappropriately? It’s the Web. You put up an easily replicable coupon, people are going to jump on it. Times are tough, and people need groceries.

But apparently, it never entered the collective mind of Marsh’s marketing department that people receiving a coupon offer on the Web might not want to hoard it.

The Web is a social medium.

People find things they like, they share them. That’s really not news where I come from (and I come from literally just down the road from Marsh’s corporate headquarters).

[As an aside, I'm currently reading (and enjoying, and learning a tremendous amount from) David Meerman Scott's new "World Wide Rave," which directly and comprehensively addresses viral marketing. I wholeheartedly recommend the book and Scott's blog to anyone considering the jump into online marketing (but most of all to Marsh's marketing department).]

So what went wrong? Did Marsh fail to prepare properly for the promotion? Should they, as many commenters on their Facebook wall and on the Indianapolis Star/News website’s story on the debacle have noted, have prepared better? Without a doubt. A little homework on viral marketing (like reading a good book) wouldn’t have killed them.

But I’d say the real problem with the promotion was that Marsh was utterly unprepared for its success. They apparently thought the math was simple. They’d give up about $31,000 in coupon discounts. That number, for them, had value. That is, they had to believe that redeeming $31,000 in coupons would bring in more than that much in sales. Otherwise, the promotion would never have made it past the bean-counters.

So my question is, if the promotion was expected to yield a positive return for Marsh at the $31,000 mark, what changed at the $100,000, or $250,000, or $500,000 mark? Were the rest of those people expected to walk the aisles with coupon in hand, searching for an item that cost exactly ten dollars? Not likely.

More coupons meant more people in their stores. More people in their stores meant more sales.

But here’s the worst part: Marsh has for years offered a “Marsh Fresh Idea Card” that, like any such store card, has personal information attached to it. Does the technology not exist to tie the use of the coupon to the customer’s card to prevent multiple redemptions? It seems unlikely. And doing so would have motivated coupon-holders who didn’t already have a Fresh Idea to obtain one. Seems like a win-win-win for Marsh. More traffic, more sales, more customer information in their database.

In the end, though, Marsh took a wildly successful “World Wide Rave” and, instead of riding it out and reaping the rewards, deliberately turned it into a crushing customer relations failure. Marsh ended up with a bad taste in their mouth for online promotions, which is tragic, and with tens of thousands of local customers, potential customers and former customers who are furious with the chain – which is beyond tragic. For a company teetering in Marsh’s position, it could just be fatal.