Buffalo marketing

Ladies GAA has become very popular of late!

Pat Kinsley, the branding and design expert, looks at how companies are using cheeky new ways of advertising their products and discovers that it seems to be working

News

18 October 2011

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Other than a pint of the black stuff the oul spud is an iconic symbol of Ireland. Lately, it seems, our national treasure has shaken off its rather dusty, dinner table persona and cheekily used the oldest repositioning trick in the book by using sex to sell itself.

The concept isn’t new. The Club Orange brand used a similar formula highlighting its ‘juicy bits’. You could say the melon created its own uprising back in 1994 through the luscious Eva Herzigová in the Wonder Bra “Hello Boys” brand to reposition itself. In fact, if you think about it, the National Dairy Council has missed a trick on really capitalising on this!

The double entendre

Hunky Dorys has embraced the age-old technique of double entendres with relish. The brand kicked off with its memorable “Who would you throw out of bed” campaign in 2005, capping it with last year’s controversial link to the IRFU. And now with its recent portrayal of the GAA, we probably should ask ourselves is our national cricket team safe?

This begs another question – should the Hunky Dory’s brand have left that sacrosanct institution, the GAA, alone? The short answer is no. In fact, this could just be what the (GAA) brand needs to bring it roaring into the 21st Century. The brand has always represented all things good about holy Catholic Ireland; but this holy Catholic Ireland represents an Ireland of the past. With the unprecedented post-Celtic Tiger climate we now find ourselves living in, even the Catholic Church is asking (possibly) do we need to re-assess our brand? This is a golden opportunity for an organisation like the GAA to ever so slightly refresh their brand philosophy and offering; capitalising on the free media boost this latest advertising blitz has offered them.

A fine line

However getting the campaign right without alienating your audience can be tricky. The wrong campaign can seriously damage your brand. So when your brand sticks its head over the parapet you better be sure you hit the right mark. If you step over a line or bring your brand and your audience into unfamiliar territory, you could find yourself with a revolt on your hands and a dwindling bottom line.

The key thing to remember is that a strong brand has a rock solid foundation already in place on which all its communications are built on. As long as a brand is true to its core values and maintains that rock solid foundation it won’t need to worry about breaking its relationship with its brand fans.

In the case of Hunky Dorys we need to ask what did the Hunky Dorys brand stand for prior to this new personality? It has always had pretty steep national competition. Just as legendary brands of the fizzy pop world Coca Cola and Pepsi have their own fiercely loyal followers, in the big bad world of crisps it’s just as tough. For decades the brand war was waged between two brand heavyweights – Tayto and King. They had their own brand followers who just would not switch. It was a sense of pride, until two outsiders seduced our tender palettes. Pringles was first to enter the fray, followed shortly by Walkers.

Sex sells

So the Hunky Dorys brand needed something to make a serious impact. And no better way to achieve this than by hopping onto the sex bandwagon! Raising temperatures was a sure way to capture the hearts and minds of young male crisp eaters as well as setting angry female pulses racing and guaranteeing total brand recall in both camps.

This reminds me of another campaign that blew us all out of the water back in the early 1990s. Ireland was about to embark on a journey like never before. We were having the divorce referendum for the second time, condoms were now being discussed openly in the media and the Stephen’s Green Centre was establishing itself as the forerunner of a new consumer revolution in Ireland and reflecting changing Irish attitudes.

Amidst this changing backdrop, the United Colours of Benetton brand took the Irish high street by storm. For the first time ever a brand forced the Irish people outside their comfort zone with a provocative and divisive ad campaign that either engaged or repelled the consumer, when in fact it was our first taste of what was going on in the outside world.

I can remember being about six back in the early 1960s in New York. Did I ask my Dad why the sky is blue? No, I asked him why do all these car advertisements always have pretty women lying across the hoods. He replied by telling me that unfortunately they don’t come with the cars, but they are there to help us decide what car to buy!

Establishing a point of difference

After all, branding is about establishing a point of difference that will help to carve out a tasty piece of the pie for your bottom line. Your brand is your most valuable asset; this asset sets you apart from your competitors. The crisp/snack market in Ireland is a very competitive landscape with all contenders scurrying to be the indulgent snack du jour. After all there are only so many salivating tongues to cross and only a handful of occasions to engage with your customer and capture the moment.

During seasons of festivity or pivotal months in the sporting calendar featuring events such as the rugby world cup and the Croke Park GAA finals there is a limited stage to flaunt your wares and gain breakthrough that will create talkability for the future. Hunky Dorys seems to have once again seized the opportunity to get recognised and somewhat dubiously raise their brand profile.

Now we could argue that the brand’s strategic approach does not appeal to all audiences, but then again “a good brand can’t be all things to all people”. This form of mass market communication will, of course, offend certain audiences and age groups, but we then have to ask ourselves if they are all going to be Hunky Dorys’ future brand advocates? Personally, the mere thought of a challenger brand trying to buck the “acceptable” trend works for me.

I can only assume that the promoters of this brand sat in their board room convincing all the shareholders to approve a hefty budget to pull this off, promising that they would see an uplift in sales and more importantly more than make their budgets back through bucketsful of bonus media not to mention giving the nation a little bit to smile about in the current climate.

A publicity machine

We must not forget that the brand has now become a huge publicity machine. Hunky Dorys is now selling autographed calendars as well as enjoying a very successful online presence. The fact of the matter is that last year’s quick blast of these new rugby babes gave the brand a 17% increase in sales.

As stated before the Hunky Dorys brand is not the first to use this technique and will not be the last. Only earlier this year all of the hype and national attention was on one of Ireland’s other well known iconic brands, Club Orange. They launched their own provocative campaign message “Some bits are essential”. This once again brought us, the viewer, down a saliva-inducing tour of their factory only to end up wanting more (or for some others, no more). But ironically the people who found it most offensive were the ones who inadvertently promoted the campaign more. On the last count there were 650,000 YouTube hits for the commercial.

Other brands are engaging in similar tactics

We have also seen this type of consumer infiltration through other forms of marketing techniques. In recent times our very own Paddy Power has been pushing the boundaries with its own controversial ads. Years ago the Yorkie brand shocked the traditionalists with its sexist stance, claiming that its chunky chocolate bar was only for men. In more recent times we have seen the exploitation of the O’hAilpin boys. Yet another coup for the GAA, but I guess it’s okay because after all they are boys! David Beckham’s simmering six pack peddles his own wares, the women oogling the Diet Coke hunk and even our old favourite the Malteser guy – topless, toned, glistening, lying seductively on the couch.

On an international stage there has been no great game-changing plan. It seems that this sex thing is used almost everywhere and in many different formats. The Dutch beer brand Bavaria tends to use this tactic as often as it can. Who could forget all the hype it created using ambush marketing at last year’s World Cup in South Africa. The brand did as it did before, using young females to attend en masse, wearing Danish-style supporters’ uniforms only to unveil what was underneath…you guessed it! All at once they were transformed into bright orange mini-skirted ambassadors for the Bavaria beer brand. Needless to say they were escorted off of the premises and dealt with accordingly.

So it seems that when your brainstorming sessions are going down the tubes and those creative juices just aren’t flowing you could always take a leaf out of Croke Park’s book and remember there is always a Plan B! Or in the case of Hunky Dorys – Plan DD.

Pat Kinsley

Buffalo marketing

However, there are a few key questions we have to ask: Are we being selective in what we find offensive? Are there two sets of rules? Should the brand wars be allowed to continue and let the viewers decide who has meandered from their values and pushed it one sex message too far? Traditionally brands have been selling to us by using strategic above and below the line vehicles to try and differentiate themselves. In more recent years we are being enlightened by new forms of sales/awareness tactics such as direct marketing, through the line campaigns, stealth marketing, ambush marketing, social media, blogging, sensory marketing and guerrilla marketing. But thanks to Ray Coyle and the visionary team at Largo Foods we now have accepted “buffalo marketing” as an industry term.

Pat Kinsley
MD Neworld Associates

Growing up in the shadow of the 1964 World Fair left an indelible mark of the power of branding on Pat Kinsley. After graduating from the New York School of Visual Arts, Pat moved to Dublin where he was one of the founding partners of New World Associates, one of Ireland’s leading branding agencies. Pat has spent the past 26 years extolling the virtues of branding as a commercial device that improves every company’s bottom-line. Pat also finds the time each week to tease out the pros and cons of branding on each of the Irish media platforms and speaks regularly for the Design Management Institute (DMI) at international conferences.

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