Harley Davidson: A brand community

1. Do you believe brand communities like Harley-Davidson result in greater involvement with the brand?

I do. I think that Harley-Davidson has successfully oriented their brand with a lifestyle, a broader sense of ideals and mindset. The effect snowballs when their ad campaigns, after defining their following, begins to focus on including non-typical Harley drivers like in this advert (right). They use the #StereotypicalHarley to show that they are not only a community of hardcore bikers, but of tech-savvy individuals who are free thinkers and free spirits.

2. What elements of the Posse Ride do you believe enhance the meaning of the brand for the riders?
I think one of the most interesting things about Harley is that they target the disenfranchised and provide them with an event that not only lets them network, connect and socialize with similar people (linked by the purchase of a bike) but it also lets them celebrate their disenfranchised status. The public complains about the noise and Harley riders use Posse Ride to go out and make noise. They revel in the community and chaos that it the noise brings, it is their brand and it says look at us.

3. Should Harley-Davidson get more involved in the ride or would that dilute the ride's meaning to the participants? I think getting more involved is a game of diminishing returns. It is better to organize and delegate the running of events through local and international clubs. If you use social networking to connect riders with local groups you still get out your brand message out without need for too much hands-on interaction and organizational expenses.

4. In addition to experiences such as the Posse Ride, what other ways could Harley increase involvement in the brand? I think if Harley developed a ranking system that logged years and/or events attended and awarded them with special patches for their cut, as well as giving them special ranking in their Posse Ride local clubs would be a way to award longtime loyal riders.

Chevy Drive a Cherokee

Our ad campaign idea for the Jeep Cherokee marketed to an older audience uses funny-man Chevy Chase to provide a friendly yet hilarious spokesperson for a generation wanting simple luxury.
The concept was to show Chevy ala his Community character Pierce Hawthorne, as a elder, out of the technology loop, disoriented and lost. The overall direction would be: If this dolt can do it, and enjoy the simple luxury of the Jeep Cherokee, than SO CAN YOU! By using humor and an actor that our target generation grew up adoring this ad campaign tugs on the heart strings and the brain strings (trust me, brain strings are a thing).

The ad would have Chevy get in, touching gadgets and being pleasantly surprised at the amenities and how simple they are to use. Chevy would then proceed to drive it everywhere even places not typical 'legal'. When stopped by the cops after driving down the beach, he will exit the car and yell "Where am I?" looking disoriented. The cops will laugh and give him a free pass (going back to their cruiser to continue eating their donuts) and Chevy will look into the camera and wink. 

Got Ethics?

The 5th Annual Spuler Ethics Symposium focused on ethics in advertising.
The panel included:
Michael Llewellyn-Williams, PhD & Founder and Principal of BrandMechanics®
Ivonne Montes de Oca, President & Founder of The Pinnacle Company
Tim Hendrick, Professor at SJSU and Marketing and Advertising Consultant
John Delacruz, Assistant Professor of Advertising at San Jose State University

One of the points that I took away from Montes de Oca is that Advertisers have the capability to uphold morals, that they are the gatekeepers between a companies message and the consuming public. This places a large burden on advertisers to not only make the company appear ethical, but encourage it to ACT ethically.

Llewellyn-Williams had an interesting counterpoint: that an ad can't be unethical, it is just a tool. Can a hammer be unethical? No, but the person holding the hammer can use it unethically. He ultimately places the burden of ethics on sellers saying that you can't blame ad agencies, they are the "public defenders" of  brands.

Nostalgic Commercials

Nostalgia is a useful advertising tool. To evoke a time period or event in the viewers mind and connect that feeling, not only to your product, but to an impulse to buy is a difficult thing to do. Nostalgia in advertising can be blunt and heavy handed, or subtle and deft. Both methods are relatively effective, given that your target audience remembers that time. Most ads using nostalgia aren't aimed at teenagers, instead they are targeting mid-aged people that have some life to reflect on. Here are a few examples of nostalgia used in advertising.

So God Made of Farmer for the Ram trucks is an interesting use of subtle nostalgia. It doesn't cite a time or a place but the motif it uses appeals to the "God-fearing-truck-driving-hard-working-farmer". The only problem is that not many farmers exist anymore, so what it actually does is sell cars to men who idolize hard work, and the others that this poem might speak to. The constant reference to Dad, Father, and how he is soft but hard, that is a nostalgic reference to people in the generation after the hard-worker, the sons and daughters of those farmers while still appealing to the hard-workers themselves.

A nostalgic commercial that we looked at in class was Axe's Susan Glenn ad which similarly to the Ram Truck ad uses a lone, deep voiced, serious narrator (seeing a trend here?) to describe a girl from his past. Axe chose ladies man, action hero, and all-around-bad-ass, Kiefer Sutherland, to narrate the ad. This ad's target audience is a little broader, although is mostly male. It uses nostalgia in the way that it harkens back to a similar experience that many men go through in highschool and offers the solution to that problem: Axe along with the tagline: fear no Susan Glenn.

Internet explore took a more direct, slap you over the head route with its browser you loved to hate campaign. There message was effective, it reminded you of things that were popular in the 90's which is always good for a quick laugh. But it also left you with an interesting message: 'We know we weren't the best browser ever, but that was then, we've grown up now.'

Gender Stereotypes in Advertising - The Big Game

Every year the Superbowl of advertising is, well, the Superbowl. Many of the ads that aired in this year's Superbowl had rampant gender stereotypes but not all were 'offensive'. There were also a few ads that gender stereotyped men, a group not usually vocal about offensive ads. So where is the line between acceptable, tasteless, and offensive use of gender stereotypes in an ad?

 One of the most offensive was Axe's commercial Lifeguard. It not only portrays women as helpless but also that they are objects of rescue. It implies that to repay being saved a woman is expect to fall in love with her rescuer, typical knight in shining armor.

Verdict: tasteless, because ultimately it seems as if the ad is parodying the knight in shining armor gig with the astronaut showing up at the end. But regardless are they using gender stereotyping to deliver their message: yes.

Kate Upton washes the Mercedes CLK in slow-motion. I don't even understand this commercial. It's almost like they didn't even try. This is how I imagine the ad meeting going: "What will sell cars?" "I dunno, boobs?" "I don't know, isn't that a little classless?" "What about boobs in slow motion with super cheesy Vegas stripper music?" "Sure, seems legit."

 

Verdict: tasteless, offensive, and not funny. This commercial is like a dead horse that Mercedes decided to put lipstick on. The genre is old, offensive, not clever, and only appeals to teenage boys on Reddit.

Now here is a curveball, a commercial that gender stereotypes men as stupid, laughable (by squirrel standards at least), and overweight.

 

Verdict: funny, not offensive (to me at least) but still uses gender stereotypes to sell its product. Did you catch that the woman could eat as much chocolate as she wanted?

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs classified as symbols, icons, index and how these signs make up the majority of human interaction and culture. Without semiotics we would be unable to communicate; image speaking to someone who is blind that doesn't speak the same language as you. When you take away the visual and linguistic references that we used to communicate then you are left with no communication. Advertising has to be very cognizant of these cultural semiotics because they determine how you message is received. As we move closer and closer to a global culture, advertisers have to be more careful about their message because the 'target audience' won't be the only one seeing it.
For example, this ad for Groupon might be funny to most of the American audiences but it is seen as greatly offensive to the Tibetan people.

The American public might see the human right violations in Tibet as some far-away rarely-talked-about issue but the Tibetans don't see it that way. Could you imagine if the ad was changed to some issue with more media coverage in America like: Boston, Katrina, Iraq, or Israel? Many Americans would be outraged by the nonchalance shown by the ad towards issues that hit so close to home.
Advertisers often use metaphors, play on words, and jokes that only make sense in a certain language as well. This is a form of semiotics. 

This ad for Modelo, a Mexican beer, says "Modelos y Futbol. Para que Mas!" or in English "Models and soccer. What more could you want?" The play on words is Modelos, which means in spanish: models, refering to the sexy ladies in the ad, and/or Modelos, the plural form of the brand of beer. Any audience that doesn't speak Spanish, wont get the joke. This is semiotics in advertising in a nut-shell.

Toblerone Social Campaign

For our Toblerone social ad campaign we decided to mimic a campaign similar to the on run by Lay's chips which let the fans choose the next flavors of Lay's. Through a facebook application it allowed users to customize their own Lay's bag complete with stock picture, text, and bag color. Once you create your flavor it shares it to your facebook wall and gives you the option to instagram, tweet, or email your flavor. It also connected with your friends and allowed face off type voting to create flavor competition.




With this campaign Lay's effectively created a library of user created content that engaged and challenged other users to create better and better flavors which eventually lead to a final three fan-made flavors put into production.



Our campaign takes similar a similar stream of consciousness, forcing friends to compete against one another with their own custom Toblerone flavor. "Two is better than one" "We made a new flavor, now it's your turn."
The flavors will compete in a bracket voting system leading up to the holidays. The winning fan-flavor will be sold during the holiday season and share a special edition holiday box with our holiday Crunchy Salted Almond flavor.