COMM 0014 Assignment #1, Blog #4

No name® Cheeky Ad Campaign Gains a Cult Like Following

Photo: thestar.com

Loblaw companies has been a part of the Canadian landscape for over a century with their first store opening in 1918.   Since that time, Loblaw has promoted lower prices and delivered quality products.  In spite of their low-cost philosophy they nevertheless have endured price wars over the years and in 1978 during a particular price sensitive time, no name® brand was created. 

Loblaw’s first foray into digital marketing began in 2019.  This was a multi-platform effort with the use of Twitter, YouTube videos, website copy as well as a TikTok video.

Loblaw is a customer centric company and while ensuring that products are available and delivering a relevant and streamlined experience to the customer, Loblaw has fun and entertains their customer through their ads.  The campaign content is delivered primarily through Twitter with tweets delivered a couple of times a week.  Simple product descriptions do double duty to deliver humour in clever tweets. For a product named “dirt release”, the tweet reads “not a jug of dirt”.

A Buzzfeed post of 2015 titled “21 Of The Most Hilariously Honest “No Name” Products” pokes fun at the simplicity of the no name® products.  Buzzfeed describes the product coffee whitener as “This coffee creamer that politely explains exactly what it does to the appearance of your coffee.” Loblaw in their witty fashion recently tweeted about this same product with the retort of “actually a beigener”, even making up their own word for added effect.  In the same post Buzzfeed comments on no name® social tea biscuits with, “These biscuits that remind you how lonely you are.” The Loblaw tweet on the same product reads “can be consumed alone”.  How clever.  One would have to conclude that Loblaw is listening to their consumer and replying in kind.

The no name® Twitter account has garnered thousands of followers online with all tweets eliciting some feedback in comments, retweets and likes.  Offline, Loblaw continues to enjoy that following.  In the image below a customer, appreciative of Canadian uniqueness dons a no name® Halloween costume.

Photo: blogto.com

By conducting the greater part of the campaign on Twitter, Loblaw has the reach of a male audience with Twitter users being majority male, not only that, 80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials. Millennials is an important demographic for marketers to target; when people are starting families and shifting in habits that is an opportune time to catch their attention.

Loblaw has done an excellent job of promoting no name® in a fun and memorable way while reaching their target audience.  Twitter seems to be a good platform to promote their product in the way that they are doing, with an active twitter feed that shows engagement with the audience, through timely and relevant content. 

COM0014 Assignment 1, Blog #3 Identifying, Relating and Communicating with our Target Market

Image: Unsplash Avila Beach, CA

Celplast Metallized Products is a manufacturer of high barrier flexible packaging films for food, pharmaceutical and industrial markets.  The high barrier film is just one layer in what becomes the final package.  A converter will take the barrier film and marry to another printed substrate and then add a sealant layer to create a complete structure for the finished pouch or package.   This structure or image of, is what ends up on the store shelf or the web page for the ultimate consumer.

Target Audience

The packaging industry has been under pressure of late due to the large amounts of waste that the industry creates.  China’s National Sword policy brought to light the dirty side of packaging.  After disposal much of this waste ends up in land fills, oceans and beaches or is transported to distant countries to be recycled afar.  Consumers, non-government organizations, as well as governments, are demanding that changes be made to reduce, recycle and create a circular economy for all this packaging.

This is no small feat and the packaging industry has risen to the challenge, creating new films and making them sustainable and recyclable.

As a supplier of high barrier films and with a focus on creating sustainable and recycling solutions Celplast’s target audience is the engineer and product development person at the converter and the consumer good company (CPG) who is developing these new structures.  The demographic will be male or female in their late twenties to retirement age but a cluster of late twenties to fifties. They are highly educated or at minimum have many years of experience in packaging.  They are generally married and in this target audience a broad range of ethnicities and religious affiliations are covered.

Strategy

To reach this group of highly technologically savvy people, Celplast uses twitter and LinkedIn as the main platforms to communicate.  Being short on resources, relevant news from industry publications and association websites among other sources is curated and republished on the various platforms.  Celplast will add a clarifying statement or a linking idea to add relevance for the intended audience.  Facebook is also used but strictly because of its reach, no leads have yet to be generated from this platform; it is not found to be very useful for business to business transactions.

Every other month or more, Celplast generates their own content and publishes to their subscriber list via e-blast.  This self-produced content is also re-purposed in varied format on the various social media channels as well as on the company blog. 

As this curating and publication process improves, that is as more content fills our pipeline, Co-schedule scheduling tool will be used to pre-schedule publishing of content to increase frequency of posts. 

Additionally, Celplast intends to create a giveaway such as an e-book or guide to film or product selection and will use this in the blog call to action to more effectively grow their subscriber list.

It is an exciting time to be creating an online presence.  In our market not all companies, including Celplast are not participating fully in the online community and there is tremendous opportunity available to those companies that are engaged and bringing value to their respective audience.

COM0014 Personal Biography

Image: Unsplash

I grew up in a rural farming community in the fruit belt of Ontario, in a large family, the middle child of nine with three brothers and three sisters.  My parents had moved to the farm the year of my birth, from Hamilton. The farmhouse in March was not suitable for an infant and so my parents left me with their former neighbours in Hamilton for two weeks while the family got moved into the new house.

Our upbringing was strict and when I got older, though I grew up in the ’70s, I sometimes thought that our family was like Little House on the Prairie, with the boys having the outside farm related chores and the girls being responsible for the household duties of making beds, cleaning and some cooking.  Back then, and not just in our family, the motto was “children are to be seen and not heard” and my parents lived by that adage.

Aside from the no-nonsense approach to child-rearing, our parents did permit a lot of free time and my brothers and sisters spent many a day out exploring in the fields and woods behind our house or bike riding along the country roads just for something to do and to get candy and pop at the country store a mile or so from our house.  We discovered an abandoned barn at one point and spent many an afternoon there, jumping from the hayloft into a haystack on the level below.  This lasted until the barn burned down one night undoubtedly from older trespassers who made use of the secluded barn.

Fun in the winter was time spent building forts in the snow and shoveling the pond to make an ice rink for hockey.  This was not my idea of fun as I was never too athletic and playing goalie with my brothers taking slapshots on me was more scary than anything, but there was no other choice with older brothers making the rules.

When it came time to head off to university I was not in the least intimidated.  The years of home structure, independence and need for self-regulation had set the stage for life outside of the home and being my own disciplinarian.  My housemates would tease me when they saw me sitting doing homework in the evening but I graduated in four years as planned and a short time after graduating found employment.

Our lifestyle, what we had access to and my experiences I can appreciate now as being what have shaped me into who I am today.  On the one hand, I have at times been too accepting of how things are and maybe not too discerning about what direction my life would take, but on the other hand, I have made good decisions that have moved be forward in life consistently.  I have been resilient and tenacious when I needed to be in order to keep on a forward trajectory.  Today I feel the need to push myself in order to expand my knowledge, capabilities and my career.  With a demanding, job and family I am taking continuing education courses for the next chapter in my life. I am looking forward to what this next chapter has to bring.

Comm0014 Blog #2

The Truth about Storytelling

There is a lot more to storytelling than meets the eye. When we think of storytelling we might readily think of the literal meaning of ‘telling a story’. As a writer of non-fiction material, I was happy to learn this week that all forms of communication are in fact storytelling. What a relief; especially as I write about plastic materials and sustainability. How can I engage my audience and get them to take action? Well now I have a new tool.

The rule of thumb is to approach any content and present it in the form of storytelling. This means to communicate clearly, communicate with passion and in a manner that will be universally understood.

You will want to start with the most compelling idea for your material and then follow with the less important information.  Before you even begin however, be sure to consider your audience and identify at the outset what emotion you want the audience to feel and what you want them to come away with upon reading your material.  It is useful to note that active voice lends itself to a more interesting read versus a passive voice.

In order to hold the audiences’ attention, communicate in a fashion that provides sufficient detail but not overly so to bore. The goal is to get, in this case, the reader to understand and to also create the opportunity to form their own opinions and make their own connections to arrive at new ideas.

While grammar and spelling are important and not to be overlooked, it is the above guidelines that will keep the reader engaged. I know from my own experience that when drawn in with interesting material that an occasional typo can be forgiven, but dull content or presentation will be quickly passed over.

When these guidelines are followed you will find that your writing comes together more easily and yields a better product.