part 10. was it worth it? how not to name a brand

companies launch new products for a reason. the primary reason for most is that they want to generate additional revenues and gain more market share. it's the same thing with running promos. brands run promos to gain a tactical surge in volume sales and market share, hoping that the promo will attract new users and get its current users to increase their purchase and hopefully enable the brand to sustain some of it after the promo. that's for existing brands.

the product description in the website calls the give-me-a-name effort a promo. taking aside for the moment the problems i have identified on the confusing product description and how confused the whole thing is, (http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/2008/03/part-3-how-not-to-name-brand-nestle.html) this is not a promo in the sense of generating additional cases for the brand as the brand has not been launched yet. the word promo is being used by nestle not in the marketing sense but on the "promote" the brand sense as in generate interest and excitement on the new brand. the thinking of the brand management group was to create pre-launch buzz so that when they actually launch the brand, anticipation and interest is already there to greet it. they want to seed the market with interest.

a lot of marketing funds have been spent on this promo. they seem to have produced a tv commercial, they did roadshows and the website. i don't know if they actually aired the tv commercial on tv because i have not seen it on tv at all. with the produced commercial, the website, the roadshows that would cost them some good money, if they aired the tv commercial, then their promo cost would have more than quadrupled. it can run to the millions.

since their objective for the promo is to create buzz and anticipation, then the first measure of success would be number of people who who participated in the promo. based on the entries of names posted in the website, it doesn't seem to be much. in fact, the number seem to be very small.

there are 62 entries and we can be generous to say each single entry was submitted by a different person. this is generous, the rules does not say 1 person can submit only 1 entry. so it's possible that one person submitted more than one entry. the number of votes is also a bad basis for estimating the number of people captured by the promo as the mechanics of the promo is such that you can vote once a day and this promos has been running for months. more importantly, based on the way the votes come in and the comments posted in the website, it's a sure thing the authors of the entries set up several email addresses to allow them to vote for their entries as many email addresses they can have.

we don't know the website stats, but based on what we can read in the website, the number of unique visitors and hits does not seem promising or encouraging. and also based on the kind of audience responses posted in the website, i don't know if any excitement or anticipation have been created. it reads more like acrimonious than excitement and anticipation.

to be continued....