I’ll save you the three mobs, but you know you’ve heard that commercial. You can try not to hear it, but it still gets stuck in your mind. Could there be a more annoying marketing campaign?
Well, it seems to be working. The folks at Head On have gotten a large part of the nation to know and remember the name of their product and what it does through what I assume was not a very expensive commercial to produce. They put some cash in places of purchase, but it seems they have also taken a quantity-over-quality approach in that area. However, they are getting semi-regular references from Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman, and many others.
It seems that everyone in America has seen these things. Somehow, these people have done the almost impossible. They took a very simple and profitable ad and apparently overnight they built a very well known brand.
Now, I have no idea how well this campaign is turning into sales and profit for the single painkiller. But I must admit, just out of curiosity, that I am tempted to pick up some tubes myself. Honestly, I don’t know if I’d ever want to use it, but how much fun would it be when someone at a party asks you if you have an aspirin and you take your head off?
Anyway, as always, I wonder what marketing lessons we can learn from Head On as small business owners.
I think the moral of this campaign is the old cliche KISS or Keep It Simple, Stupid. (Not to infer that you are stupid, neither am I!)
As a small business owner, it’s too easy to get caught up in the latest marketing trends. Especially on the Internet, you can literally go crazy worrying about your SEO, SERM, etc. Those are all important pieces of your marketing puzzle, but let’s not forget about the old, tried and true marketing tools that we may have forgotten or neglected. Print advertising, cold calling, radio and television ads, if possible, are valuable tools and should always accompany your web marketing and non-traditional methods. Chances are, some percentage of your target market is still more fond of the yellow pages, banner ads, brochures, or the like. Also, if there’s one thing we can definitely take away from the headache-causing campaign for headache relief product, it’s that replay is still a marketer’s best friend, so don’t worry about a little overlap between the media.
It’s always a great idea to examine popular ad campaigns or marketing techniques and determine if they can be applied directly to your forehead – I mean business!