KFC Skips Ads, Fixes Potholes Instead

There’s so much talk about how important it is to spend your marketing budget wisely these days. But if traditional advertising isn’t working like it used to, then what? KFC came up with a pretty good use for their advertising dollars recently. They’re sending the Colonel to five major metropolitan cities to repair potholes.

It’s not as weird as it sounds. They’ve recently launched a campaign aiming to focus on the high-quality and unsurpassed freshness of their chicken. As a tie-in, they’ve decided to “re-freshen” streets in five cities by filling potholes, and marketing them “Re-Freshened by KFC.” It’s a win-win-win. The public gets better streets, the city saves a ton of maintenance costs, and KFC gets the credit for responsible marketing, and news outlets, Twitter streams and blogs just like this one are telling EVERYONE all about it. Wouldn’t it be great if more marketing was for the good of all mankind?

I am curious as to why they didn’t choose to integrate this effort with an interactive and social media presence. I think a microsite with a description of KFC’s campaign and their efforts along with video, images, and more could have given the campaign even more horsepower. And a strong presence on Twitter could have been really powerful in spreading the world-of-mouth marketing. Even still, this is a pretty innovative use of a marketing budget.

Btw, KFC - We have a few potholes here in Washington, DC that are RIPE for filling. Come onnnnn down!

by Garret Ohm

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Cartype

We just wanted to take a moment pass along another cool site aimed at folks that love automobiles and have an interest in brands and design. If that describes you, you’ll love Cartype. Cartype bills itself as a “museum of car typography” but it’s really more of a museum of all automotive design.

Curious to know about the history of the Ronn Motor Company? They’ve got you covered. Want to see what the hood ornament looked like on an old-school Maybach? No sweat, seek and ye shall find. They’ve even compiled an archive of car cut-away images and gauge clusters…you know, just in case you ever wondered what the gauge cluster looked like in the Land Rover LRX concept vehicle:

They also keep up a pretty good automotive blog that’s worth a visit or an addition to your RSS aggregator.

by Garret Ohm

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#endautoDM

One of the most important things to remember when orchestrating a social media program is to keep it personal. The same way consumers largely reject traditional advertising, they are also turned off by being blindly marketed to on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with my good friend @rdeal1 about how important this is and it led to us lamenting about how sick we were of following someone on Twitter and immediately being bombarded with an automatic direct message encouraging us to check out their website or blog. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine, and I know I’m not alone.

The end result of the conversation was a new crusade to end this practice, centered around the #endautoDM hashtag. We decided that we would start to propagate this idea through word-of-mouth on Twitter, and politely encourage people that auto direct message to abandon this practice.

So how is it working? The word has spread like wildfire—blogs have been written, reputable industry players have started talking about it, and many, many influential people on Twitter have begun to spread the #endautoDM love, including a high-profile member of the Dell social media team. You can see some of the chatter on Twitter search, HERE.

If you’re a Twitter participant, please help us to spread the word. If you’re considering adopting Twitter as a part of your communications strategy, by all means do (or better yet, call on us to help), but go out of your way to be yourself, be personable and avoid the robotic auto DM at all costs. (And don’t forget to follow me...and TSG)

by Garret Ohm

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Why Not Washington?

Today I’m taking a bit of a detour from the usual marketing topics to discuss something that’s very near and dear to our hearts here at The Sutter Group: The future of the automobile. As much as we love today’s vehicles, we know the cars of the future will not and cannot be propelled by gasoline engines. We’ve been closely following the development of new alternative energy technology for automobiles including electricity, solar, hydrogen (fuel cell), biodiesel, diesel, hybrid, etc.

We’re not entirely sure which technology will hit the tipping point and really take off, but it looks like they’re all making strides. The technology that’s received probably the most significant amount of attention (and investment) is electricity. In fact, fully electric vehicles are here, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, you could even have one in your garage at this very moment.

more...

by Garret Ohm

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Grab What’s Yours…

Ok, so you’re not participating in social media. Despite all the articles written about why you should join the conversation, you’ve decided it’s not for you – at least for now. We get that, and promise not to judge.

But if we can offer you one piece of advice, it’s that you go grab your name (or your company’s name) on all of the social media sites, just in case you decide you want to participate in the future. Doing this will ensure that nobody with the same name is able to grab it before you—or even worse—before your competitors grab your name and start to use it to promote their own business…that’s exactly what happened to our friends over at Elevation Burger, a fantastic organic burger concept based right here in the Washington, DC area. They’re in the process of talking with lawyers and representatives from Twitter to get it resolved, but it sure ain’t pretty!

by Garret Ohm

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