Brand Power – no flashy copywriter needed
4March 30, 2008 by Colin
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why a brand manager would buy these ads. An ordinary woman, with ordinary if well-presented clothes, obviously standing in front of a false aisle of consumer goods, blatantly promoting a particular product – sauces, detergent, food.
The most direct comparison? Imagine the scripted pitch and rigid product positioning of an in-store sampling program, recorded with better lighting.
That’s Brand Power, the work of the Buchanan Group, which was featured in the National Post yesterday in an article called “Back to Basics.”
And here I thought Brand Power was a particularly Canadian program – but it’s obvious that audiences across North America and the Commonwealth are seeing one interpretation of the advertisements or another.
“… From a creative point of view the ad executions are awful, but mesmerizing. These are the type of commercials that are generally abhorred by agency brand strategists who spend months deciding on how to sell you breakfast cereal artfully.
“They are not ads that electrify you,” said Anthony Stokan, partner at retail consultancy Anthony Russell Inc. “They are very lame and uninspiring. But that said, they are highly believable because they focus on the essence of the brand and the products.” …”
Chris Clarke has made a strong, and emotional, argument in the past that Brand Power could be considered deceitful and misleading. I agree that the format is designed to appear informational rather than promotional, but I have never thought it anything but blatant advertising.
The commercials don’t want to be seen as blatant advertising. The more information they provide in that format, the more people are confused. Read some of the comments on the blog post I wrote and you’ll find that some people figured that Brand Power was a consumer group.
Oh, I saw those comments, Chris. And I figured those people were shut-ins without access to broadcast television.
When someone holds the product up in their palm, smiles, and tells you how good the product is, it’s an ad.
Advertising has never, ever looked so boring and appeared to be so information-heavy, so I can understand why people would confuse it for something else.
Advertise with “brand power” and you’ve convinced me, at least, that you’re a cheap, relatively worthless company selling a cheap, worthless product (usually for more money than it’s worth).