brandknewmag.com
08
The marketing team for Viagra doesn’t use email newsletters.
You can probably guess why – but I have often thought for
some time that anyone who can figure out a good marketing
strategy for a product like that could probably promote
anything. If that person existed in real life, he or she would
probably resemble the character of Don Draper from the
popular AMC show Mad Men about the wildly creative,
alcoholic and chauvinistic advertising industry in the 1960s.
In the pilot episode for the entire show, Draper is confronted
with the challenge of building an advertising strategy for the
Viagra of his time … big tobacco. At the time, the tobacco
industry faced growing evidence from medical studies that
their product was actually dangerous and deadly.
In
response,
the FDA took
the
relatively
minor step of
banning tobacco
c o m p a n i e s
from promoting
healthy messages
under threat of big
fines.
Claiming
that more doctors smoked a certain brand cigarette was
(thankfully) no longer acceptable. So Draper is faced with the
impossible task of repositioning cigarettes. His solution, in
a moment of inspiration, is to change the message to focus
on a small part of the drying and curing process involved in
making cigarettes; toasting the tobacco leaves. His two word
tagline: “It’s Toasted.”
The client shares that all their competitor’s cigarettes
are toasted as well – to which Draper replies, “no, yours
are toasted. Theirs are poisonous.” That’s the power of
positioning.
The best recent modern example of the same principle in
action is the growth of Coors Light in contrast with their biggest
competitors. Struggling in what MillerCoors CMO Andrew
England called a “relatively nondifferentiated segment,” the
beer took over the #2 spot in the US behind Bud Light – the
first time in two decades that anyone other than Bud and Bud
Light were #1 and #2.
How did they do
it? For the past
six years, the
entire strategy for
positioning the
beer has been
a single