Office Depot's Lame Response to the Easy Button

We have already seen recent offensive and foul :30 spots in 2007 and Office Depot has wrung in the new year with a big misdirected and off-the-mark advertising campaign of their own. As Office Depot has recently began a campaign to counter Staples' Easy Button advertisements. The advertisements feature a box containing an arm protruding from the top and assisting people in situations where an extra hand can be helpful. The Easy Button campaign has been largely successful for Staples and the company has even sold millions of replica Easy Buttons.

This new campaign for Office Depot is not only disturbing it almost is laughable. Instead of store workers helping out customers, a box with an arm is doing the job. It almost feels like I'm watching a promo for the Adams Family with Thing, a servant in the form of a disembodied hand, doing office work.

How well does using a hand helping differentiate Office Max, or was it Office Depot, anyways, from its competition? Not very well. In the already commoditized market of office supplies, this new campaign doesn't help Office Depot set them self apart from the competition. This is something that their next campaign should focus on.

A big thumbs down for this campaign.

Rebranding Wal-Mart Green; The Right Direction

With "Unruly Julie" out of the picture at Wal-Mart and the advertising campaign effectively treading water, Wal-Mart's brand is in disarray.

Before Julie Roehm left, the executives were attempting to make the brand more prestigious in order to compete with Target for the consumer with more disposable income than the average low-price shopper more commonly found at Wal-Mart.

Target has done an exceptional job competing against Wal-Mart as a big-box retailer by not going head-to-head against Wal-Mart, but rather by going after a different set of consumers. This set of consumers don't want to be known as cheap, but still wants to buy department store type products inexpensively. As Wal-Mart established itself at the "low-price leader," Target built a brand around trendiness and style.

Wal-Mart is trying to bring in customers that will buy higher priced items in an effort to raise profits for year over year same store sales. The retailer cannot stock high-end items that bring higher margins in the stores until they have a customer base that can actually afford such items.

Wal-Mart should steer away from trying to change they meaning of their brand as a low-priced retailer. However, Wal-Mart should highlight its effort to be environmentally friendly. By highlighting their efforts and making eco-friendly products hip, Wal-Mart can alter their brand and draw a more profitable customer into the stores. Instead of being thought of as a penny-pincher, those shopping at Wal-Mart will be known as environmentally friendly and "hip."

By not trying be more prestigious, but rather by highlighting its environmentally friendly products and stores, Wal-Mart can move in a new direction. Putting being known as "cheap" in the background and bring in more customers that have a higher level of disposable income.

Jack-in-the-Box Cuts the Cheese

There has been some poor advertising in 2006 and we have started 2007 with a poor choice by Jack-in-the-Box's advertising agency, Secret Weapon Marketing, to tag the end of its most recent promo.

Jack-in-the-Box has started the new year with a campaign promoting a free upgrade to Curly Fries with the purchase of a combo meal. While I see nothing wrong with the campaign and promotions, the end to the :30 spot highlights an old man fanning a newspaper will chastising a dog for passing gas.

Now there is a poor connection, one that I would not want to associate with my next meal.

Best Brand Extension of the Year

Energizer phone battery charger

First, I have a bone to pick. As BW/TS recently released their survey results of the best brand extensions for 2006, they left out some big products and touted winners that have no business being on the top. Now I know that the results are from a survey, but the results are tainted because of the design of the survey. How can you limit the number of great brand extensions to 5 and ask people to pick a winner. All the brand extensions should be listed and rated by everyone. Here is a link to the survey (it may only be up for a little while).

As for my Best Brand Extension of 2006, that would go to Energizer Energi To Go Instant Cell Phone Charger.

This is what I call a Power Brand Extension, the power has nothing to do with the part about the batteries, but rather the fact that this brand extension helps sell more of the core product.

Blockbuster vs. Netflix - More Comparison Advertising?

Blockbuster has been playing catchup to the startup Netflix company for sometime now. As recent numbers released show, Blockbuster is making progress; even though both companies have shown near 50% increases in 3rd quarter revenue (Blockbuster's DVD mail division).

Recently, Blockbuster has come out swinging. Sponsoring Pre-game, Halftime and Post-game footballs shows for both college and professional. New :30. spots highlight Blockbuster as a superior choice to the rival Netflix because of the option for free in-store rentals. This campaign has definitely raised a few eyebrows and I predict will continue to shine strong for Blockbuster in 2007.

Comparison advertising for those companies trailing a category leader is nothing new. Recently I have highlighted Apple's comparison advertising and have talked about other notable comparison campaigns. It is worth noting that it is rare for a category leader to initiate or respond to comparison advertising as Anheuser-Busch did when Miller launched an attack/comparison campaign.

2006 lead to some spoof rebuttals for Apple's comparison advertising campaign on YouTube and other Internet video sites, but it is not commonplace for a category leader to acknowledge such a campaign because it only highlights the initial advertisements.

I believe however, that a rebuttal campaign might be necessary for Netflix, even though, according to a recent Forbes.com article, Netflix is the leader in the category with a customer base is 5.7 million compared to Blockbusters' 2 million online rental customers.

Being able to pickup and drop-off DVDs is something that Netflix can't do, but highlighting its strength of size and speed versus Blockbuster may stop the bleeding that Blockbusters' campaign may be causing. While stopping the bleeding is not the only thing that Netflix needs to do, establishing their own drop-off locations is something that needs to be addressed.

As it is the biggest competitor to both of these services is Video-On-Demand options that easily let consumers view/download the movies right to their TV. If both of these companies aren't addressing this problem then they are leaving themselves open for more competition.