Blue Ocean Strategy / Cherkizovo’s Hamcolates campaign is a great example of a brand diversifying and operating in a new space that their competitors have yet to capitalise on. This is called the Blue Ocean Strategy and is outlined in W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s 2014 book of the same name. Here, Cherkizovo is positioning its meat products as gifts while similar brands are fighting over the cliched consumption occasions of appetisers or sandwich fillers.
Contagious previously wrote about premium New Zealand pet food brand My Dog (known as Cesar in other markets) that also tapped into this strategy for its The One Who Misses You Most campaign. The brand targeted passengers arriving home in the Auckland New Zealand airport by guilt-tripping them into picking up a present for their dog (who inevitably had been left behind for the trip). Similarly to Hamcolates, the treats were packaged up as premium chocolates and were available directly from a pop-up store in the airport.
Creative sampling / According to a 2017 study by Retail Dive, 62% of consumers want to test out a product before they buy it themselves. While the primary objective of this campaign is to position the brand’s products as a gift-giving option, the supplementary function is as a sampling opportunity. Both the act of receiving the Hamcolates as a gift, or the teacher actively exchanging their unwanted chocolates at supermarkets, results in the product in the hands of potential consumers at no cost to the recipient themselves. Due to the rise in ecommerce, physical product sampling has become an increasingly difficult marketing strategy for FMCG brands to utilise. Hamcolates serves as worthwhile inspiration of how brands execute product sampling through both digital (online sales before the holiday) and physical (candy trade-in following the event) channels. At Most Contagious 2019, staff writer George Wyndham discussed the effectiveness of product sampling and the longevity of the tactic given the increasing rise in ecommerce. You can watch the talk here.
Consumers just want to have fun / A 2009 study by LinkedIn and polling company HarrisPoll surveyed a combination of 2,000 US adults and advertisers to understand which characteristics they felt were the most effective. Markets gave the top spots to ads that ‘make people stop and think’ and ‘give me new information’, while consumers selected ‘entertaining’ and ‘funny’ as the two most convincing traits of ads. As this research suggests, brands can sometimes get so bogged down in making a campaign smart and purposeful that it can forget to make the campaign fun and exciting for the audience consuming it. Part of the success of Hamcolates lies in the newness of the idea, but it’s also fair to say that another big influence is in simply how funny, bizarre and entertaining the creative choice is.
