Alberta Business Marketing

A weekly 'marketing lesson' from Quizative on the heels of its participation as a 'Marketing Mentor" in the reality show Recipe to Riches airing on the Food Network.

Marketing lessons from Episodes 1-3 here.

Recipe to Riches: Episode 4
Marketing Lesson: Culture Counts

In this episode, the two finalists were Melaney Gleesen-Lyal of First Nations descent and Wayne Reid who grew up in Jamaica and was passionate about his traditional island cuisine. Wayne joined our team at Quizative and his bold personality was right at home in our boardroom.

Immediately it was clear that the two distinct and unique cultures would play a role in defining their brand and deciding who would win this week’s $25,000 prize. What could have been a stand-offish battle between the two very different competitors seemed to instead be about mutual respect. Wayne’s words summed it up well when he said it was about “two cultures battling out for the best taste. Canada is such a multicultural country!”

Wayne’s product was a new take on a traditional Jamaican paddy and was stuffed with salted codfish and ackee fruit. Like many, we weren’t familiar with the popular Jamaican fruit but food trends are in favour of healthy alternatives including fish. Wayne’s original name idea was “Ackee and Codfish Stuffed Yummy Dumpling.” It didn’t take a team of agency experts to know he had to move away from this mouthful of a name! We wanted to embrace the healthy fish aspect and absolutely wanted to feature the Jamaican cultural roots of the product. We explored with Wayne what Jamaican culture meant to him. In doing this, we came across an interesting term “Grab & Yum” (pronounced Grab ‘n Yam). This essentially means ‘take and eat’ or the habit of eating on the run which was perfect for his portable paddy. Our recommendation at Quizative was to name it the “Grab & Yum, Jamaican Fish Pie.” His branding and advertising also leveraged traditional yellow and green Jamaican colours and his event included traditional Jamaican music and themes.

On the other team at FUSE Marketing Group they pursued a similar strategy and decided to fully embrace the First Nations culture that inspired Melaney and her recipe. Her product was named Savoury Bannock Pie. She had a great tagline, “From my Family to Yours” and her event was a vivid display of First Nations culture.

In the end, all the judges loved the integration of unique cultural stories that inspired the naming, design and experiential events to launch the products. When it came down to it, they selected Melaney as the winner and the judges unanimously disagreed with Wayne’s decision to pull the word ‘fish’ from his name despite our recommendations against it.

The lesson: Culture Counts. In a world of parity and multiple competitors, you can stand out from the crowd by leveraging a unique cultural story – but make sure you do it in a genuine way.

Adrian Capobianco

Tags: Around the World, Branding, Customer Experience
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I'd be very interested in gaining the persepctive of this group on global marketing operations.

Specifically, how are you managing the tension between Global Brand Consistency vs. Local Relevance? Most Brands run numerous global marketing campaigns that start with a single message, but what is the best way to convey that message in each country in which the company operates? This leads to many follow on questions: Who makes the final decision on what goes live in each country? What is the process by which campaign assets are localized and produced? How are brand guidelines defined in a manner that is relevant for each market? And so on.

In talking through these questions I’ve started using a 2X2 to help frame the high level conversation. The matrix can be found here

Which quadrant does your company fall into? How will you move from there to the desired quadrant? Please share where your company is at in the comments section. We are also launching a research effort with the CMO Council to survey companies on this topic. Please click on the contact author link under my picture if you would like to be included and receive a copy of the results.

Marc Osofsky
SVP Marketing Lionbridge

Tags: Around the World, Strategy
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Today, as I was riding in on the subway, reading the New York Times on my new iTouch, I stumbled upon an article about Apple's launch today (Wednesday Jan. 27) of its tablet product, or iPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_zI21XEo0Q

Being an Apple fan from way back I couldn't help but feel a sense of real excitement. It got me reflecting on how much the Apple brand has meant to me over the years. And I'm not alone. The excitement that's building up in the media and among the Apple Faithful is almost palpable and very real.

I bought my first Mac (Mac Classic II) back in 1993ish. I was working at an agency and wanted a way to be able to work on those weekends when I was going back home to Kingston to visit the folks. The idea of a portable computer was exciting. Imagine, being free to take your computer anywhere. It was only 14 or 15 lbs. Oh, you PC people chained to your desks. How quaint.

Then when the first Apple notebooks came out, I was fortunate to be working on the Apple account and helped develop a launch campaign for them. (Best. Account. Ever.) The objective, as outlined in the brief, was to get the public over the mental hump of being able to work anywhere. Imagine sitting in a park or in a coffee shop clicking away on your laptop computer. Why, you could even work from home!

Then of course, the iPod changed everything. The recording industry, advertising, interaction (or lack thereof) between people in public places...everything. The iPhone then revolutionized how we think of what a phone is and what it can do. People could earn money and express their creative by developing Apps. We were now all working for Apple.

Walk into any mall where an Apple store exists and you'd think they were giving stuff away for free in there.

And now the anticipation for the iPad is reaching a fever pitch. People can taste it. The article in the NYT suggests that it's going to do for newspaper publishing what the iPod did for music. They're counting on it because we all know where the newspaper industry is headed. But will our collective love for all things Apple mean that we'll be willing to pay for things like the Star or the NYTs online through the Slate, when so much of the same information can be found on free sites elsewhere.

That's just one fascinating question we as marketers should be watching and reading about -- probably on our iPads.

Bryan Tenenhouse

Tags: Around the World, Customer Experience, Digital, Mobile
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There are times when there is no possibility of being constructive when writing about the absurdities inflicted on an innocent world by others in our field. There are even times when, as honest proponents of our business, we have no choice but to call it like it is. And this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is one of those times. (By the way, stop me if you’ve heard this one!)

I am referring to the Province of Alberta rebranding project — the one (I am not sure whether it is for tourism or just for the sake of doing it) which has as its tag line: “Alberta. Freedom to Create. Spirit to Achieve”. Normally, as those who know me would expect, I would let a slogan as completely mysterious and meaningless and nonsensical as this pass with barely a snide comment. But this isn’t normally.

Seems the marketers in Alberta (or whoever is responsible for this) took the “Freedom to Create” part literally, and “created” a beach and coastline for the province in order to make a point in an ad. Yes, I kid you not. They used a scene from a beach in Northumberland as the image in an advertisement. More than just the beach, they also used the image of two English girls romping on the beach.

Not surprisingly, they were caught out in the blogosphere, and this is where the fun really starts. It turns out that the image, over which the Alberta logo and the tag line appear written large, is not meant to depict Alberta — it is meant to be a visual depiction of Albertans’ concern for the future of the world (this according to Olga Guthrie of Alberta’s public affairs bureau). It is likely that the intent of the campaign may be to counter the idea that Alberta’s oil sands extraction process is an economic depiction of Albertans’ lack of concern for the future of the world. If that is the case, then wouldn’t the fact that they could not find a pristine example of concern-for-the-world in their own backyard, rather prove the critics right?

Apparently not. The Prime Minister’s head of media relations (sorry, but what the hell is the Prime Minister involved in this for?), helpfully points out that, “There’s no attempt to mislead here. The picture used just fitted the mood and tone of what we (we? we?) were trying to do.” Obviously, whatever Alberta is trying to do, is something they can’t do, if they can’t find a picture to fit the mood and tone of whatever it is, in Alberta. Whatever happened to authenticity?

The little English girls, too, were not meant to deceive — they are meant to be British girls because (implicitly) only English girls are suitable “symbols of the future.” (Olga again).

If you don’t believe me, here is a link to a PDF of the article in The Guardian Weekly.

Need I say more? Have we achieved absolutely nothing in the marketing world? Has everything we’ve been trying to do and say really been so tediously boring that it is totally ignored? I am desolate, disappointed and going to Mexico!

Tags: Around the World, Branding, Customer Experience, Get it off your chest, PR, This and That
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