Protect Your Business from Ambush Marketing

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Dan Janal, PR LEADS Newsletter, http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=112833

THWARTING AMBUSH MARKETING

FROM Jay Lipe
My name is Jay B. Lipe, I'm a small business expert and the author of the book The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses. For over ten years now, my firm Emerge Marketing has helped growing businesses develop and implement business and marketing plans.

I've worked directly with over a hundred businesses including Fortune 500 giants like Land O' Lakes and General Mills, as well as countless small and independent businesses. I have also given speeches to thousands of other small business owners.

Here is my story on ambush marketing:

Ambushed by a consumer
When I was working for a nationwide direct marketer of sleeping mattresses, we were ambushed by a consumer. I was the Marketing Director of this company in 1995 and part of our fulfillment package to inquiries was a videotape. On the videotape, of which we produced roughly 20,000 annually, we introduced the product, had testimonials from satisfied customers and explained the dynamics of the mattress.

You saw what on the tape...?
One day I received a call from an irate person. Seems this person received their fulfillment packet and popped in their videotape. But a few minutes into the tape, the content changed from sleeping mattresses to hard core porn.

Turns out that a previous videotape owner had recorded over the tape with porn scenes and returned the videotape to us. Up until that point, returned videocassettes were just stacked back in the pile, awaiting re-shipment out to new inquiries.

What's she doing in there?
The marketing department sprang into action. We met with the video duplicating house and changed over to a (more expensive) video tape that could not be recorded over. We adopted a policy of not re-sending returned tapes, and we had to then review all the returned tapes to ensure they hadn't been taped over.

We used a woman who was on disability leave to review each and every one of the returned tapes to make sure there weren't any porn scenes on those. For about 3 weeks, I'd walk by our conference room and see this woman, bleary-eyed, with mountains of tapes stacked in front of her staring in a bored fashion at the TV.

Occasionally I'd overhear someone ask "What's she doing in there...?"

Learnings

I learned that:
1) Some people out there delight in taking advantage of others. It makes them feel better about themselves, and they're in every business.

2) Customers and prospects are just as likely to ambush a campaign as are competitors.

3) The costs of incidents like this ultimately get passed on to other (innocent) customers. We had to account for additional costs of a new tape format, not re-sending out tapes & hiring this woman to review tapes for 3 weeks. When it came time to raise our prices, we had to add in these costs when developing our new pricing.

Thanks.
Jay B. Lipe Author of "The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses" CEO, Emerge Marketing www.emergemarketing.com ph: (612) 824-4833 fx: (612) 824-8597

FROM Sunny Kobe Cook
About me: Entrepreneur who started a 28 store retail chain with $5000 to do $50million annually. Inc. Magazine NW Woman Entrepreneur of the Year & consistently voted "Best Place to Work". Author of "Common Things Uncommon Ways", Proven techniques to grow any business through your staff.

How I Ambushed my Competition:
I was an "upstart" business coming into a market owned by a large department store who had dominated the mattress business for over 100 years. When we began to make significant inroads into their market share, the department store began to air a radio campaign stating "More people in the NW sleep on a mattress from the Bon Marche than anywhere else."

Given their 100 year head start doing business in this market, that was certainly a true statement. We immediately contacted our advertising agency and the day the first ad ran by our competitor, we drafted our own version stating: "More people will go to sleep tonight on a NEW mattress from Sleep Country USA than from anywhere else."

We were outselling them and making more deliveries each day than they were so we were able to make this statement authoritatively.

We IMMEDIATELY added this as the tag line to our current radio advertising replacing the standard information regarding store locations and other miscellaneous information. Within 24 hours of the first competitor ad running, ours began to run.

Given our advertising budget and the frequency with which our spots ran, within a week, people were mentioning to me that they noticed the Bon was trying to copy our ad with their statement.

By acting immediately and mirroring their phrase with an equally true statement of our own, we were able to steal the thunder of their campaign and create the image that they were chasing us rather than the other way around.

How we Combat Ambush Attempts:
As an retailer with an aggressive advertising program, we were ever vigilant with competitors who would try to ride our coat tails by using plays on words which were similar to our slogans, etc. In each case, we had protected ourselves by registering the trademark of each of our slogans in addition to our logo so we were able to stop most of what our competitors tried with only a letter from our attorney. We made sure to send a copy to the station manager or media editor to insure they would quickly pull the offending advertisements.

In either situation, being aggressive and responding quickly helped to cement, protect and grow our market share in the Pacific Northwest.

For more information, feel free to contact:
Sunny Kobe Cook
206-669-1459 (PST)

FROM John Reddish

1) While some ambushing is campaign directed, most is event or situation driven. Outside of politics, there is usually not enough dollar potential, or share gaining opportunity, in just knocking off a competitor to justify the effort. For example, if you are lead sponsor in an event, a competitor can program around the venue, have a spontaneous demonstration in the stands, send airplane or blimp messages from above, etc. If done right it can take some of the wind out of your sales, but if you are backing up the sponsorship with a host of dealer and customer/consumer promotions on the back end there is no sure way to derail the effort.

2) One danger in Ambushing is the one-upmanship aspect. You do it to me. I retaliate and it goes on and on. Focus is taken from the brand efforts and squandered in the process.

3) Another danger is in comparison. The less strategic advantage you have the more you should avoid ambush marketing as it throws you, after you do it a few times, into a parity pack with others who have look alike products and services.

Best,

J.

John Reddish speaks to entrepreneurs and top executives who want to master growth, transition and succession, showing them how to get results faster, less painfully and in ways that work for them. For booking and product information: www.getresults.com. Or call 800.726.7985 in the US, 01.610.388.9335 internationally, or at johnr@getresults.com.

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