2008's Top Marketing Moves

As 2008 draws to a close, the Torque crew gathered together thoughts on our favourite marketing moves of 2008. What resonated with target customers? What greatly improved the customer experience? Some of the team weighs in with their picks. Click the images to see the campaigns in action.

Tasha Kelton – Aviva Insurance
I would have to say my favourite marketing move this past year was Aviva Insurance with their new campaign focused around ChangeInsurance.ca. I personally love the commercial where the guy is walking down the street with his girlfriend and asks her what she thinks about the ring in the jewelry store window.  She freaks out and says yes, which he responds, “I was just asking the question, I didn’t mean it” (or something close to that effect). 

I loved it because it directly speaks to the psychological association that consumers have with insurance – it is the perfect anecdotal story of how consumers feel about not being able to ask questions of their insurers without “paying the price”.  It is such a great tie in to customer experience because it gets at the heart of how consumers want to voice their perspective (which Aviva is giving them with the site) to actually affect their perceptions of a long-held product/industry.

Mark Healy – Harry Rosen
Harry Rosen Inc., the famous men’s retailer, made tremendous strides in 2008 in terms of customer experience. Sales Associates are now much more aware of customers’ underlying concerns about shopping (men are often unsure what to match with what, and how certain styles make them look), and are focused on enhancing the in-store service experience.

Processes have improved in-store as well, with smoother hand-offs from sales associates to check out reps. Harry’s has adopted a customized direct email program which keeps customers informed of incoming styles and upcoming sales. The net effect is an improved overall customer experience, playing on important emotional connections to the brand – built from the customer in.

Mark Binns – Koodo Mobile
My pick for best marketing move of 2008 is Koodo Mobile’s cross platform campaign. Why? The message is clear. Cut the fat - burn off those excess fees. Unlike Amp'd, which was also targeting a youth cost conscious crowd, they are matching their messaging with the pain point of their youth target audience - cost! And fees = cost! Koodo is also clearly leveraging best practices from other TELUS ads, utilizing simple colours and very straight forward messages. The ads might be super quirky, but you remember them.

Katelyn Taylor – Discovery Channel
With its “The World is Just Awesome” campaign, the Discovery Channel reminds us that no matter how bad things seem on the evening news, we still live in a pretty cool world… And they do it with a catchy tune. The thing that turns this from a good ad to a great marketing campaign is the online support it’s been given. At the Discovery Channel website you can download an MP3 of the song, desktop wallpapers, ringtones, and even view and upload your own parody videos (of which there are at least 100).
The Discovery Channel’s choice to actively foster the community that formed around their commercial has me not only singing along at my desk, but remembering to set my PVR for Mythbusters.

Paul Leishman – Rogers Communications
To honour the passing of Ted Rogers, it’s only appropriate to call out the brilliant moves Rogers Communications has made with the Toronto Blue Jays, not just in 2008, but since the original purchase in 2000.
Getting the Name Right – People said the breathtaking facility that hosts the Jays would be forever known as the Skydome. They were wrong – it’s now definitely the Rogers Centre. If you think this change was a given, just ask the marketing folks at Steelback how successful they were at re-branding the Molson Indy… I mean, the Steelback Indy.
Finding Profitability – Ted bought the Rogers Centre in 2005 for $25 million. The building is on a massive plot of land in the middle of Toronto’s hottest condo development and originally cost $600 million to build. By 2006, the facility was profitable – the first time since 1992.
Never Turning Away a Customer – Unlike other Toronto live sports events where live attendance is limited to those who can blow their noses with $20 bills, Rogers made the Jays accessible to all. Ticket prices as low as $2. Interaction with the Rogers brand – included for free.

Briana Southward – Starbucks
Coming from a small town, I have always been a Tim Horton’s girl. So much in fact that when I moved to Toronto, I would walk the extra distance to go to Tim Horton’s rather than going to the Starbucks across the street. I ended up trying Starbucks a few times because my co-workers were going there and in only a couple visits I was sold. For the first time I felt that someone understood my needs! They had skim milk instead of 2%, honey for my tea, and they offered 2 hours of free wireless Internet. The only thing that was missing for me was breakfast. This year Starbucks added breakfast sandwiches to the lineup, and one of them has turkey bacon! Although they may seem small, these few offerings/services have enhanced my customer experience and turned me into a loyal customer.

Karen Passmore – Yellow Pages Group
With the growing popularity of search powerhouses like Google, Yellow Pages Group was in need of a serious change in orientation.  Enter the 'Find' Campaign, which drove a major repositioning of the way people thought about the entity.  The new orientation, which assured users that they would, indeed, find what they were looking for, was customer driven, and attempted to overcome the negative connotations associated with searching.  The change sought to associate with the positive experience of finding what you are looking for, while downplaying the negative experience associated with searching.  The campaign was accompanied by a multifaceted campaign which included tv spots and oversized yellow darts strategically placed around the city of Toronto to show that Yellow Pages was able to find all types of local businesses. 

Terence Smith – Apple’s App Store
In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store, an electronic marketplace where iPhone users can access thousands of software applications designed for use specifically with their device. Want a Russian to English translation program? There’s an app for that. Want to know where to find the nearest Tim Horton’s? There’s an app for that. Want to play your iPhone like an Ocarina, the ancient flute-like wind instrument from the legendary Zelda video game? There’s an app for that. For just about every ridiculous need and want out there, individual developers are building and selling software applications via the App Store to the hundreds of thousands of iPhone users across the world. Some apps are free, most cost less than a few dollars, and any of them can be yours just a few clicks away from your iPhone home screen. Why is this the best marketing move of 2008? Ask someone to show you how cool their cell phone is and they might take a photo with it or, or play you some polyphonic ringtones. Ask someone to show you how cool their BlackBerry is and they might PIN their friends, or if they’re on the Bold, they may even show you a YouTube video. But ask someone how cool their iPhone is, and be prepared for a 20 minute demonstration of the numerous software apps that the user has downloaded onto his or her device. Thanks to Apple’s strict development rules that prohibit developers from launching an App Store app on any other platform, any cell phone manufacturer that wants to pry customers away from the iPhone must also pry them away from the software applications that they have grown accustomed to as a part of their daily lives.

Improved stickiness and loyalty is not the only advantage though – Apple profits, of course, by taking a cut (30%) of all sales. With some estimates putting the number of apps downloaded each day in the millions, that’s a ton of extra money for the company (say 1 million apps are downloaded in a given day - even if half of them are free, and the rest are sold at $0.99 each, 30% of the revenues still amounts to almost $150,000 in a single day). Congratulations Apple, on yet again being the first – this time, it’s being the first wireless handset manufacturer to figure out how to successfully collect ongoing revenue from your users.

So what do you think? Who tops your list with the best marketing move of 2008?

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