Now that our nation's Independence Day is out of the way, your thoughts have probably turned to upcoming events throughout the rest of the year. Like the rest of summer, for example. If you're real Type-A, maybe you're already planning your Labor Day celebration. Maybe.

Then again, Sears and Kmart would like you to know that now's the perfect time to get ready for Christmas.

That's right.

Yesterday, 372 Sears stores put out a limited selection of Christmas gear. Also, Sears.com and Kmart.com launched dedicated Christmas areas on their websites.

No need to check your calendar — Christmas still falls on the 25th of December this year. It's just that sales are slow right now, and retailers all over are losing money. Sears and Kmart know that holiday shopping is a relative sure thing, so they've decided to start letting people make holiday purchases now. They've also reintroduced the layaway program: start slowly paying for your Christmas stuff today, and take it home by December. Sears and Kmart supplement their summer sales, and you get that herd of festive sheep you've always wanted. Everybody wins!

Considering the flack retailers (and radio stations) seem to get each year with the competition to be the "first" to market with Christmas stuff, this is a bold move, indeed. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures, but is this really the best way to increase revenue in a down economy? Aren't Sears and Kmart essentially stealing from their future revenues? It seems to me that the soundest retail marketing strategy would be to make the most of every retail season, not borrowing from future ones. That's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Maybe what they really need is to call one of the most experienced retail advertising agencies around. And clearly, I'm not talking about Young and Rubicam.

Read more about this story here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about the growing number of "older" users on Facebook. All of a sudden, the fastest growing demographic on the site that used to be exclusively for college students had become adults in their 40s and above. Facebook has clearly been tweaking their feature set and user interface to be — how do I say this? — more approachable to the computer skill level of, say, my mother. Facebook probably thought this was great news; they've been trying to figure out how to make more money through advertising, and adding a new demographic certainly can't hurt.

Right?

Well, looky here:



Look at the growth broken down by "Current Enrollment," at the bottom of the chart. Turns out, kids of all ages dislike having their parents and grandparents commenting on photos of an evening spent bar hopping, or reading their "wall," or, God forbid, friending their friends. In it's effort to be all inclusive, Facebook might have alienated the demographic on which it built its business. And if the kids leave, will the parents stick around?

We've often worked with retail clients who are convinced the only way to grow their business is to please everybody they can possibly reach. But that's just not possible. If you try to be everything to everybody, you're going to wind up spread too thin and you risk losing any kind of discernable identity. Our favorite retail marketing strategy is to identify a client's key strengths, and directly target the consumers who'd be most interested in those strengths. Why direct your retail advertising toward consumers who, based on their needs and preferences, really wouldn't chose your store over the one they already prefer?

In their bid to appeal to everyone, Facebook may see a new startup do to them what they did to MySpace not long ago. Sometimes, it's best not to please everybody, as long as you can be okay with that.

Chart found via Read Write Web.

When it comes to retail advertising, sometimes reaction time can make all the difference.

Design by Committee:

Stories are flooding the internet of consumers who look right past this container in their search for their beloved Tropicana Orange Juice, consistently mistaking it for a generic store brand. Why? Because it looks like a generic store brand. I'm sure the Arnell Group (the group also responsible for Pepsi's new logo) has plenty of research to suggest that this packaging had broad appeal in focus groups. Vanilla has broad appeal, too. Because it's vanilla.

Whose idea was this? One guy? An entire design team? What do you think they had in mind — current Tropicana consumers and the product they'd come to know and love, or expressing their own ideas about branding via their clients? (Remember the new Pepsi logo?)















Design by Strategy:


This is one of several packaging designs we did for one of our clients, Palermo's pizza. They're a family owned business based right here in Milwaukee, and they make some of the finest frozen pizza money can buy. (And I'm not just saying that. It's good.)

Their pizza is good because it's based on generations-old family recipes from Italy.
What other regional frozen pizza company can make that claim? Probably not a one. So we wanted their packaging to reflect their unique offer — frozen pizza that tastes like authentic pizzeria pizza because it actually is. So the packaging is imbued with subtle, rustic Italian imagery. Nothing groundbreaking, really. Just stubbornly on target. We wanted the package to really suggest the taste of the product and the ethos of the company that makes it.

And what happened in both of these examples? Well, sales of Palermo's Frozen Pizza have pretty much been steadily up since. More than any other regional frozen pizza maker. They've launched in new markets and introduced new pizzas. (There's even reason to suspect other manufacturers have tried to copy their packaging layout and color scheme.) As for Tropicana, they've pulled the new packaging in favor of the old, familiar carton we'd all recognize. That was an expensive experiment!

Here at Meyer & Wallis, we don't just do retail advertising (although you should hear the radio spots we've done for Palermo's). We're also a graphic design company. We're media buyers. And we're good at all this stuff. We won't run an experiment on your brand. Instead, we'll leverage our 40+ years of experience to achieve exactly what you need us to. That's how we roll.

A while back, I wrote about Campbell's introduction of a huge line of healthier soups that it introduced to compete head-to-head with competitor Progresso. For a company whose oldest products are notoriously high in sodium, this was a daring move that would require nimble and precise marketing messages.

Well, Campbell's efforts have proven highly effective, and Marketing Daily just named them their food marketer of the year. You can read the whole article here, but I just wanted to point out a couple interesting facts for the sake of this blog.

First, Campbell's introduced several new products last fall. They accompanied this introduction with an intensive multimedia campaign. Both these efforts surely required a large amount of capital, amids an economy that was already showing signs of instability at the time of their launch. But get this: when the mortgage/credit crisis struck its first big blow on September 29th last year, Campells was the only company in the S&P 500 to show gains on the stock market that day. But they didn't stop there. As the ecomony continued to reel, Campbell's quickly adapted their marketing messages to tout the frugality of a meal made with Campbell's soup. At the end of the year, company-wide sales were up 8% to $8 billion and net earnings were up an astounding 36% to $1.17 billion. In their first fiscal quarter of 2009, condensed soup sales alone are up 14%. Campbell's is in a comfortable position to release more new flavors this year and continue their marketing push.

What can careful advertising in a down economy do for your company?

That.

Hats off to BBDO New York for a great campaign that included use of cross promotion with Kraft and interactive text messaging. If you're in the Midwest and you find your company struggling in this economy, some skillful marketing by one of the area's most experienced retail advertising agencies might be just the trick. We can't say this enough -- marketing in a down economy works! And Meyer&Wallis knows how to do it.

This week, the USDA begins requiring retailers to include country of origin information on several products, including fresh and frozen produce, nuts, and fresh meats. We’ve seen cute little stickers on most of our fruits and vegetables for a while that tell us where they hail from. But within the next 6 months, expect to see similar declarations of origin on beef, pork, lamb, etc. I asked our CEO Bob Meyer, who on his own has over 40 years’ experience with retail advertising and retail marketing, for his thoughts on what this means for supermarkets.

“I think it will create a huge advantage for American breeders... probably an almost unfair advantage because the assumption is that the controls here over the raising of livestock are much tighter and more stringent than they are in foreign countries. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but, that being the assumption, it will give the advantage for American growers. It will put an impetus on foreign growers — which is probably very positive.

You almost have to believe that the reason this got passed is that American breeders wanted it and lobbied for it because it does create kind of an unknown advantage for unknown reasons.

It will put the impetus on subjectively lesser origins. We don’t know that they’re lesser, we just think they are. The impetus on retailers of those products and those suppliers will be to promote their own cleanliness. I think it will create some opportunity, either for Americans to come out and say, “we have better meat here, “ or for foreigners to claim that they do something better.

It’s interesting. meat breeders have been trying to figure out a way to brand meat for a long time. Meat, historically, has been largely unbranded and if there’s any assumptions of quality that come to the meat it’s from the store, not the breeder, because meat is one of the things that the store prepares and presents, and upon which their reputation is built. Breeders, for at least 20 years, have been trying to figure out how to brand meat. Coleman has tried with beef— that’s where our president Chris Mortenson worked. Right here in Wisconsin, Provini has tried with veal. People have been trying to do it with limited success, because the stores don’t want to get caught having to stock three different brands of beef.

It seems to me that what will eventually come from this is an opportunity to brand the meat. I mean, if New Zealand lamb is really better, then now there’s much more of a reason to call attention to the fact that it’s a New Zealand product. But it also creates a huge downside risk. If there is any significant problem or health risk in the food supply of a foreign company, it will kill them in the marketplace here. All it will take is one person saying they got sick from a “New Zealand lamb product,” and it will hurt all New Zealand lamb sales. This will probably have a huge impact on quality control in foreign countries that import these affected goods into the US.”