Return of Gruen asks whether Melbourne or Sydney should be capital, examines carbon campaign and looks at THAT Coles ad

Soo unfair. We’ve had lovely Spring days for ages…www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/melbourne-in-line-for-hottest-start-to-august-on-record-20110802-1i8uo.html

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Crikey, Teddy must really concerned about critical analysis of something that’s working its arse off. Have you seen Coles latest sales figures?

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when people are mindlessly humming or singing ‘downtown’ at work you know a campaign is doing its job… perhaps advertising likability according to the ‘industry’ types frequenting this and other sites should be a contraindicator to success

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Well, the people in Sydney never have had much grip on reality. Sydney has the heavy continuous rain, the floods and the frequent storms, while Melbourne has the fine weather. But keep it quiet — better that they stay where they are!

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The Pitch would be a really interesting segment if the agencies took it as a genuine challenge rather than just playing for laughs and doing a lame joke ad.

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yes the coles ad is embarrassing and awful. But isnt the whole idea of advertising is to get your brand name to your target audience? People are discussing the brand and commenting about the ad which means no one is talking about woolworths. You only ever remember the really good ads or the really bad ads. No one likes a mediocre ad!!

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Here’s how it works:

If you’re happy for your brand to be associated entirely with one thing: LOW PRICES ALWAYS, then you can do the big red hand crap that Coles are churning out.

Not only can you do it, but you should do it. Because if you want to be known for nothing more than cheap, cheaper, cheapest you’re crazy to dilute the message with other brand values.

Now, only Coles and Ted would know exactly how they’re trying to position the brand. If they’re happy to own cheap long-term, they’re on the money. If they see cheap as only one pillar in their brand, then they’re going to do the brand some long term damage.

And sure, you can do cheap a lot nicer than giant foam red hands, but what kind of person shops at supermarkets, catalogues in hand, looking to shave $3.50 off their grocery bill? The kind of people who don’t give a fuck about subtlety.

Having said that, I personally can’t stand this work and provide fair warning to Ted: If you ever decide to go after Springsteen’s Going Down, I’m going to kill you. Not from a keyboard, but literally hunt you down and kill you. The Coles marketing people too.

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The Coles ad is quite possibly the worst piece of advertising ever shown on Australian television.
It is utter crap. Do not apologise for it with piss weak observations like – everyone is singing it/my kids like it/ look at the sales. The last is bullshit. Anyone can get sales by killing their margins, but it is not sustainable.
This is possibly of no consequence to the Pommy amigos running the business. Like Solly Trujillo before them theu will load their bags with pumped up Aussie dollars and head home to the motherland. The legacy – Coles will be left as a cheap discount retailer with no value as a brand still stuck with a massive contract on Masterchef as that show withers and dies. Not to mention another massive contract with the increasingly absent Curtis Stone.

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The Coles campaign is appalling crap as Noel so eloquently states. Any retail marketing expert would see that Franklins learned that low price lesson the hard way. The only winner here is Woolworths. The consumer will be the loser as Woolworths incentive to market well disappears with Coles decline.

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The psychology of retail is a strange beast.

If the products you offer have a high perceived brand value and you’re offering them at discount prices, there is a perceived ‘win’ from the consumer. Coles would be in a perfect position to take advantage of that.

If however your products have a low perceived quality value people expect you to discount that – so you’ll always compete on price. Think ALDI which offers generic brands to the consumer with very low perceived quality.

People will always pay slightly more for something that they think is better quality, but when comparing prices – which is what the supermarket game is all about – discount and buying power wins. Nobody’s going to pay twice as much at an IGA for the same product, unless convenience and other factors settle in.

Is it the worst ad on TV? No. It’s shit, that’s for sure, it’s annoying, but it’s nowhere near those shouty carpet ads we’ve all seen, and the take-out is Coles sells the same crap as Woolies ‘cheaper’ (although most sentients know this is not really the case).

However, if you’re advertising a Bugati Veyron, only a dealer could get away with this, not the brand, which concludes my rant on the very basic fundamentals of retail communication.

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