Marketing Brand Message Medium

THE BRAND, THE MESSAGE, AND THE MEDIUM
VOL. 3
http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
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2 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
Whether it’s through an online social netWork, the pulpit of a 2,000-
member megachurch, or a 5-second “adlet” on MTV, opportunities for brand
communication have grown exponentially over time and are only limited by the
imaginations of the marketing executives in charge of disseminating them. But
are these newer methods of communication—along with the latest viral marketing
techniques—successful brand builders? In the following articles from Knowledge@
Wharton, industry experts and Wharton faculty look at the latest in branding and
communication strategies, offer insight on selling to the teen market, and discuss
how, in the age of Vioxx and Martha Stewart, companies can salvage their brands
when scandal strikes.
The Brand, the Message, and the Medium
Losing Their Cool: The Downside of Expanding Hot Social Networking Sites 4
Facebook, a social networking site known as an online meeting place for college and high school students, is
opening its doors to more people in an effort to grow beyond its current 9 million registered users. Could such
a move end up blurring the company’s focus and diluting its brand? Are there better ways to expand?
Product Placement in the Pews? Microtargeting Meets Megachurches 7
Church pastors last year had a chance to win a free trip to London and $1,000 cash—if they mentioned
Disney’s film “The Chronicles of Narnia” in their sermons. Chrysler, hoping to target affluent African
Americans with its new luxury SUV, is sponsoring a Patti LaBelle gospel music tour through African-American
megachurches nationwide. Advertising has begun to seep into churches, according to religious, marketing,
and academic experts, pushing the boundaries by selling products with no intrinsic religious value.
Burgers and Other Goods in the Blink of an Eye: How Effective Are Short Ads? 12
Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,200 stations and is the nation’s largest radio
company, has begun selling 5-second, 2-second and even 1-second spots that they hope will appeal to cost-
conscious marketers. But how much can an advertiser communicate in a 5-second “adlet” or a 2- or 1-second
“blink,” as these super-short ads are called?
Talking Chimps, Subservient Chickens, and Others Blend Entertainment 15
and Advertising
A talking chimp arriving in e-mail inboxes speaks in its sender’s voice or recites a pre-recorded joke for the
boss, courtesy of CareerBuilder.com. JibJab is developing a new site called JokeBox, where consumers and
corporations can post and share funny videos or jokes online. These are among the latest viral marketing
campaigns that blend advertisement and interactive entertainment across informal consumer networks—
but it remains unclear whether such an approach is sustainable and measurable and whether it will actually
generate new business.
From Teen Fashion to Hershey Kisses: New Ways To Sell the Brand 18
How do you market to an audience that is skeptical of traditional advertising, very media savvy, and
possessed of short attention spans? And how do you turn a product that is highly dependent on seasonal
sales into a product of choice year-round? Both topics were addressed at a recent Wharton Marketing
Conference, which included a panel on “What Teens Want: Capturing the Attention of the Trend-Driven and
Lucrative Teen Dollar,” as well as a keynote presentation by Richard H. Lenny, chairman, president, and CEO of
The Hershey Company.
Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a Tarnished Image 22
Martha Stewart, accounting firm KPMG, insurance broker Marsh & McLennan, and Merck, manufacturer of the
troubled painkiller Vioxx, are among recent examples of companies that face the challenge of restoring damaged
reputations. How best to do that? According to Wharton faculty and others, companies that acknowledge they
have problems and launch communication programs to repair tarnished reputations stand the best chance of
rehabilitation. And the worst way? Hide the problem, lie, or appeal only to special-interest constituencies.
Contents
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 3
4 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
Facebook, a social netWorking site known
as an online meeting place for college and high
school students, is opening its doors to more
people in an effort to grow beyond its current
9 million registered users. The problem: The
move could be risky if it blurs the company’s
focus and dilutes its brand.
Social networking sites often connect people
within certain demographic groups—such as
students, business people, independent music
fans, or 20-something urbanites—using tools
such as chat, uploaded pictures from users, and
online diaries.
For Facebook, the move to expand comes
amid backlash over two features the site
added September 5, 2006, dubbed “News
Feed” and “Mini-Feed,” which allowed users
to track information updates of others in
their social circles. When a person’s profile
changed, updates would be broadcast to people
who subscribed to the feed. These updates
could include such personal information as a
subscriber’s decision to break off a romantic
relationship or start a new one. Although the
same information was available for viewing
in a person’s profile, some users objected
to the lack of control over the distribution of
their personal information. On September 8,
Facebook issued a mea culpa in response to
these privacy concerns, and now Facebook’s
new features have more finely tuned privacy
controls. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in
Facebook’s corporate blog: “We really messed
this one up.”
Now, according to reports from BusinessWeek
and Forbes, Facebook is opening its doors
beyond students and those affiliated with
certain companies to people associated within
geographies. Much of Facebook’s early success
was due to the close affiliation of its members’
networks. For instance, a person on Facebook
who attends the University of Arizona would
only have his profile viewed by others at the
school or other people he or she has identified
as a “friend.” “We made the site so that all of
our members are a part of smaller networks
like schools, companies, or regions, so you can
only see the profiles of people who are in your
networks and are your friends,” says Zuckerberg.
With Facebook opening itself up to broader
geographic regions, a person associated with
a place like the New Jersey shore could post a
profile that can be viewed by others in the area.
In other words, Zuckerberg’s small network
could get much bigger.
Underneath Facebook’s expansion plans is a
conundrum facing any social networking site:
How do these companies expand into new
markets without losing what originally made
the site popular and alienating their existing
customers? For instance, if a site starts out
as a trendy online hangout for young people
and then begins courting senior citizens, it
is unlikely its initial customer base will stick
around, say experts at Wharton.
Couple that dilemma with the fact that social
sites’ business models are already fragile, and a
loss of focus could be fatal. By expanding, “you
can dilute what the community stands for,” says
Wharton Marketing Professor David Bell. “Once
that happens, people leave. It’s a key tension
between growth and dilution of the brand.”
Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of IT at
Wharton, agrees. “It’s debatable whether broadly
expanding is a good idea. A lot of businesses
start small and expand, but when you are
dealing with affinity groups that hope to foster
a sense of community, [the decision] is more
complicated. Is it better to focus on a successful
niche or make a play for world domination?”
This issue is increasingly difficult for sites
that are associated with one group yet want
to expand their base of users, says Wharton
Losing Their Cool: The Downside of Expanding
Hot Social Networking Sites
Facebook’s move to expand could be
risky if it blurs the company’s focus
and dilutes its brand.
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 5
Legal Studies and Business Ethics Professor
Kevin Werbach. “Facebook will have a challenge
expanding, because it’s so closely associated
with the communal experience of college and
high school students. Even the site’s name
evokes strong associations with being a student
at a particular institution. Expansion will also put
Facebook directly in competition with MySpace,
which has many more users.”
Konstantin Guericke, co-founder and vice
president of marketing at business networking
site LinkedIn, acknowledges the expansion
dilemma, which is one of the reasons LinkedIn
decided early on to focus on the business and
career market. According to Guericke, LinkedIn’s
target demographic is people 25 to 65 years
old—those in the workforce. “We don’t have any
interest in becoming more than a business site,”
he says. “By focusing on business, we already
have a fairly big market chunk to go after.”
According to Guericke, deciding whether to
expand depends on the specific goals of the
site. LinkedIn doesn’t face pressure to expand
beyond its market because it already has a
sizeable target. Guericke says that any decision
to expand to new demographics has to be
weighed carefully. Why? Social networks rely on
the content provided by users; if they defect,
the network falters. It would be the equivalent
of eBay trying to survive without a critical mass
of buyers and sellers. There is a need “to think
about users much more,” says Guericke. “You
don’t want to alienate your audience.”
The Pressure To Expand
So why aren’t targeted networking sites content
to stay in their niche? After all, Facebook
managed to land Microsoft as an advertiser and
is the seventh most heavily trafficked site on
the Internet, according to comScore Networks.
Werbach says the primary reason social
networking sites like Facebook want to expand
is the network effect, which dictates that more
users mean more value. The more people using
your network, the more they can connect to
other people. The growth cycle feeds on itself.
“Social networks are inherently scale plays,
unless they focus on a well-defined, high-
margin niche,” says Werbach. “The network
effect means that the biggest social network is
most valuable to its users. Facebook knows that
if it stays limited to the college [market], it’s
only going to have its users for 4 years.”
Guericke agrees that the pull of the network
effect is significant. A large network means
people have more options to connect with
others. The danger is that an influx of new
users may turn off existing ones. For instance,
a 20-year-old Facebook user may deem the site
uncool if his 15-year-old sister joins. “You have
to match up the right people,” says Guericke.
The need to “match up the right people”
is also an issue in large enterprises, says
Deirdre Woods, Wharton’s chief information
officer and associate dean. The same social
networking tools that are popular today on
the Internet may also find a place within the
corporate intranet as companies seek better
ways to encourage knowledge sharing and spur
innovation. Wharton’s computing department
has a custom-developed social networking site,
called Aspect, used by the school’s technology
staff to allow them to easily share work
knowledge such as programming skills and
areas of technical expertise, as well as hobbies
and nonwork-related interests. “There are a
lot of people who work for us, and it’s nice for
them to keep in touch with what others are
working on,” says Woods, adding that Aspect is
about more than just transferring knowledge.
“It gives people a sense of affiliation with their
coworkers and the organization.”
As Woods and her employees work to fine
tune the details of the system, they are
considering rolling it out to other groups at
Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania as
a way to connect with current students and
recent alumni. The main challenge in doing so:
If Aspect expands to other groups, such as
students, alumni, and educators, would those
users find the unifying threads of common
interests to form a successful social network?
Woods believes so. She feels there is enough
common ground in the activities of students,
instructors, and administrators to form the
foundation for a strong school-wide social
A large network means people have
more options to connect with others.
The danger is that an infux of new
users may turn off existing ones.
6 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
network. For a firm like Facebook, which is
expanding based on geographical distinctions,
it’s still an open issue as to whether the bonds
of a region are sufficient to create a successful
communal experience.
Why Social Networking Is Different
Wharton experts note that expansion is a bigger
issue for social networking sites than for other
businesses, which don’t rely as heavily on user
input. “Businesses based on community can
become fragmented so much that they splinter
off the people who were attracted to them in
the first place,” says Bell.
Indeed, Werbach highlights another challenge
for the expansion plans of players like
Facebook: Users opinion can turn on a dime.
“The users that helped MySpace and Facebook
grow so quickly are fickle; just look at how
quickly Friendster, the early leader in the space,
crashed and burned.” Friendster, founded in
2002, was a pioneering social networking site,
but was overtaken by MySpace in 2004. Slow
load times drove users away, and the company
nearly went bankrupt. Friendster still exists
under a new management team and owns a
key asset in a recently awarded patent on social
networking technology.
As the Friendster saga shows, social
networking players have to worry about the
“cool” factor, says Whitehouse. Do users
get a psychological reward from being in the
club? For instance, MySpace initially catered
to independent bands. Today, anyone with a
browser can create a MySpace page. So far,
the expansion hasn’t hurt MySpace, one of the
most popular sites on the web, but Whitehouse
notes that other social networking sites may
have to “retain their air of exclusivity” to keep
their customers engaged.
While social networking sites wrestle with
the expansion dilemma, Bell argues that the
marketing problem these firms face is similar
to the issues faced by other companies trying
to segment a market. For instance, if Toyota’s
Scion unit initially targets younger buyers, the
cars could lose their cachet if Baby Boomers
start buying them.
Following the P&G Playbook?
While social networking sites have their own
dynamics, there are lessons to be learned from
the marketing practices of large companies in
other industries, which often face the challenge
of whether to become “a house of brands or a
branded house,” says Bell.
Consider Procter & Gamble, which has expanded
by focusing on a portfolio of brands such as Tide,
Pampers, and Bounty. A company like Facebook
could do the same thing. According to Bell, the
primary brand could focus on college students
and a new site could follow young professionals.
“That way, there’s little concern about diluting
the main brand. There are elements of other
industries that are analogous to this one.” Indeed,
social sites that want to expand and segment
audiences would be similar to a company such as
Toyota, which divides consumers with its Toyota,
Lexus, and Scion brands.
Given that the “portfolio of brands” model
could work for social networking sites, Bell
and others say a consolidation of these
sites may be warranted. For instance, if one
company owned a range of sites like MySpace,
Facebook, and LinkedIn, a user could migrate
from one to the other, and the site could keep
a customer’s profile throughout a career. “It’s a
fundamental issue,” says Bell. “These sites will
have to figure out whether their strategy is to
keep users as customers forever or grow them
to another product.”
While it may be counterintuitive to think
Facebook could learn from P&G, those in the
industry say it’s not so crazy. The lesson for
social networking sites: Just because the
business model is new doesn’t mean you can’t
learn from other, more established industries.
“Whenever there is something new, people
are quick to dismiss what works better in other
areas,” says Bell. ■
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 7
haven’t been to church recently? You might
have missed something.
Church pastors last year had a chance to win
a free trip to London and $1,000 cash—if they
mentioned Disney’s recent film “The Chronicles
of Narnia” in their sermons. Chrysler, hoping
to target affluent African Americans with its
new luxury SUV, is currently sponsoring a Patti
LaBelle gospel music tour through African-
American megachurches nationwide.
Advertising has begun to seep into churches,
and the phenomenon shows no signs of
slowing down, say academic, religious,
and marketing experts. Among the wave of
early adopters: the Republican Party, which
successfully sold its platform to church-goers
in the 2000 and 2004 elections; Hollywood,
which discovered the economic power of faith
when Mel Gibson’s church-marketed film “The
Passion of the Christ” became a blockbuster;
and publishing, with Rick Warren’s best-selling
The Purpose-Driven Life, heavily marketed by a
Christian publishing house.
These products—a conservative political
agenda, a film about Jesus, and an evangelical
book—all had at least some religious
connection to Christian consumers. Now some
advertisers are taking the next step: marketing
products—like an SUV—with no intrinsic
religious value through church networks. “If
we are going to target the African-American
consumer, we have to go where they go, rather
than ask them to come to us, and the church
is a major institution for that community,” says
James Kenyon, Chrysler Group brand marketing
senior manager.
LaBelle’s tour, which features both her
November-release gospel album and Chyrsler’s
2007 “Aspen” SUV, is passing through
14 of the largest predominantly African-
American megachurches in the country. Some
participating churches are also organizing “ride-
and-drive” events, where church members and
others can test-drive Chrysler vehicles.
The Chrysler-Patti LaBelle tour has so far
avoided the criticism that followed Chevrolet’s
2002 sponsorship of “Chevrolet Presents: Come
Together and Worship,” a concert tour featuring
leading Christian music acts and Max Lucado, a
popular evangelical preacher and author. Rabbi
James Rudin, then spokesman for the American
Jewish Congress, called the tour a “divisive”
way to reach the public, while other Jewish
and Christian groups condemned Chevrolet for
promoting a conservative brand of Christianity.
But Kirbyjon Caldwell, pastor of a megachurch
that co-hosted the LaBelle tour in Houston,
welcomes this particular pairing of church
and corporation. “I would like to see more
companies pay attention to the African-
American consumer,” says Caldwell, whose
Windsor Village United Methodist Church
attracts up to 14,000 worshippers every Sunday.
Product Placement in the Pews? Microtargeting
Meets Megachurches
A Patti LaBelle tour, featuring
both her latest gospel album and
Chyrsler’s 2007 “Aspen” SUV, is
passing through 14 of the largest
predominantly African-American
megachurches in the country.
8 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
“The Chrysler-Patti tour is a shrewd strategy
to galvanize the interest of a market that has
seemingly been forgotten.”
For Greater Grace Temple in northwest
Detroit, another concert host, the event
represents a chance to extend its reach into
the larger Detroit community. “Gospel music
is big in Detroit, not just as a spiritual thing,
but as a cultural thing,” says Melvin Epps,
communications director for the church, which
hosted Rosa Parks’ funeral in 2005.
Reaching nonbelievers—known as “seekers”
or the “un-churched” in evangelical-speak—is a
primary mission of megachurches, and events
that make it easy for newcomers to participate
are popular. “We don’t just want to stay within
the walls of our church,” adds Epps.
Greater Grace maintains a number of corporate
partnerships. Chase Bank, for example,
sponsored a back-to-school festival where
children received free backpacks bearing the
Chase logo. When church members bought
13,500 cases of Pepsi products, Pepsi donated
a 15-passenger van that the church uses
to transport senior citizens. “It’s a win-win
situation,” says Epps.
Megachurches as Consumer
Aggregators
You might think of a church as a steeple-topped
place of long and windy sermons, where
a loyal band drinks coffee from Styrofoam
cups and raises money to repair the roof. But
megachurches have changed the face of Sunday
mornings, combining the latest technology, a
casual Starbucks-like atmosphere, and upbeat
preaching to draw in crowds of thousands.
They offer a particularly tantalizing opportunity
for those intent on network or “word-of-
mouth” marketing, a strategy that capitalizes
on social relationships to spread product
information and influence purchasing, according
to Wharton Marketing Professor Patti Williams.
“Megachurch members are drawn together by
a strong common bond. Networks that exist
naturally facilitate word-of-mouth marketing,
because people tend to share information with
those they are close to,” she says.
Pastors make “great connectors,” adds
Wharton Marketing Professor Christophe
Van den Bulte, “because they reach a large
audience once a week, and their words
carry extra weight.” But the real potential for
word-of-mouth marketing, he notes, lies in
megachurches’ microsocial networks.
In order to create the intimate feel
of fellowship in the midst of massive
congregations, megachurches channel
members into small groups. The affiliation
groups can be based on any commonality,
such as church-going neighbors, widowers,
teens with divorced parents, home-schooling
mothers, and everything in between. In a
weekly prayer group, says Van den Bulte,
“you have the reinforcement of a dense
social network. It’s one thing to have a
pastor saying something on screen, but it’s
a real turbocharger if you have a small group
discussing it as well.”
The opportunities for network marketing
through churches carry their own risks,
however. “If people share an ethical connection
based on life values, then using those ties for
blatantly commercial purposes could backfire,”
says Van den Bulte. “Sometimes people feel
it’s a sacrilege to use a human connection to
further another type of goal.”
But there is no doubt that megachurches—
defined as churches with weekly attendances of
over 2,000 people—offer advertisers some huge
enticements. They reach more than 7 million
people every Sunday morning, an aggregation
of potential consumers that secular advertisers
have ignored until recently, according to Scott
Thumma, an expert on megachurches at the
Hartford Seminary in Hartford, CT.
“Megachurches represent the concentration
of larger numbers of Christians in fewer
congregations,” says Thumma, whose latest
research will appear in a co-authored book next
year. “If nearly 50 percent of people who attend
church go to 10 percent of the churches, then
marketers have not given that phenomenon
nearly enough attention.”
Christian companies have long marketed
through churches, but Thumma agrees that
mainstream marketers are beginning to catch
on. Every week now he fields calls from
companies who want to buy access to his
database of megachurches. (His list, though
publicly available, is not for sale.) “For a long
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 9
time, companies marketed to the ideal of
American culture, which didn’t have anything
to do with Christianity or religion,” he adds.
But marketers paying more attention to cultural
subgroups see that “conservative Christians
represent a very large group, and if they want
to appeal to them, they have to go directly to
the source.”
Daycare and Sports Analogies
According to Greg Stielstra, vice president of
marketing for the Christian Trade Book Group
at Thomas Nelson Publishers, a product must
tap into the church experience in order for
the marketing effort to succeed. “People who
gather in church on Sunday are practicing a
common faith, but that doesn’t make them
more susceptible to margarine or minivans.
The Republican Party was successful because
it connected with the fundamentals of
Christian faith. But it won’t work if you sell
a product lacking relevance,” says Stielstra,
who also directed The Purpose-Driven Life
marketing campaign.
Megachurches do offer opportunities for
secular marketers, Stielstra adds, but
uncovering them may require creative thinking.
He recalled a financial planner who came to
him with this problem: Potential customers
were likely to hire his services if they heard
his presentation, but few people were willing
to sit through it. The number-one reason for
marital conflict is money, Stielstra told the
planner, and church-going couples are likely to
seek out their pastor—rather than a financial
planner—for advice. The solution? Stielstra
put the financial planner in touch with local
pastors, who now provide him with a steady
stream of potential clients interested enough
to sit through his presentation.
Thumma, of the Hartford Seminary, points to
another characteristic of megachurches. Their
congregations are usually quite homogeneous.
With the vast majority located in the suburbs
and exurbs of sprawl cities, megachurches
tend to attract “relatively modern, high-tech,
middle-class, well-educated, upwardly mobile,
suburban family types,” he says.
The matchup between church preference
and demographic profile may be more than
coincidence, according to Applebees America:
How Successful Political, Business, and
Religious Leaders Connect With the New
American Community. Authors Doug Sosnik,
Matthew Dowd, and Ron Fournier demonstrate
how megachurch leaders target potential
members based on lifestyle, often using market
research techniques in order to meet specific
needs. For families with small children, the
churches provide high-quality child care. Men
turned off by theological sermons hear pastors
draw analogies from sports and business.
Casual dress puts those turned off by high-
church formality at ease.
But secular advertisers have been slow to
see churches as demographically aligned
communities. “Who works in the marketing
communications industry?” asks Van den Bulte.
“It tends to be young people, liberal people,
who probably don’t go to those churches. There
is a cultural disconnect.”
Judy Smith and Candace McKeever, partners
at Impact Media, the marketing company
producing the Chrysler-Patti LaBelle tour, are
two people who have an inside track. “We’re
both church-going folks, and if you are in it and
of it, then you know it,” says Smith. In African-
American churches in particular, adds McKeever,
“business and church have traditionally gone
hand in hand, working for the betterment of
the community.” Indeed, at Greater Grace
Temple in Detroit, the partnership with Pepsi
came about because the father of someone in
community relations at Pepsi’s Detroit office
knew the father of Greater Grace’s bishop. “It
was a personal connection,” says Juanita Bass,
executive assistant to Bishop Charles Ellis.
The Logic of Growth
Outreach Media Group, a Christian marketing
firm founded in 1996 to help churches reach
potential members, receives “repeated
requests from organizations wishing to get
their message to pastors and churches,”
according to its website. While the firm was
helping churches market to the unchurched,
outside companies realized the process could
be reverse engineered to reach pastors and
Megachurches do offer opportunities
for secular marketers, but uncovering
them may require creative thinking.
10 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
church members. Though the majority of
Outreach clients are companies selling faith-
related products—like church insurance policies
or donor management software—the list also
includes Disney, DaimlerChrysler, and other
secular corporations.
Outreach’s sermoncentral.com was the group
that sponsored last year’s sweepstakes offering
$1,000 and a London trip to the lucky pastor
who submitted proof of mentioning Disney’s
“Narnia” movie in a sermon. And as part of
its promotion of New Line Cinema’s 2006
church-targeted movie, “The Nativity Story,”
sermoncentral.com offers free sermons,
PowerPoint presentations, and outreach ideas
based on the film. The website also allows
pastors to sign up for free screenings of the
film in 45 cities.
The Narnia sermon sweepstakes, first reported
last December by the Philadelphia Inquirer,
gave rise to the new term “sermo-mercial”—
along with concerns expressed by blogging
Christians that the pulpit was now open for
product placement.
While the Narnia example struck many as
crass commercialism, however, the concept
of harnessing sermons for sales was not
new. The engine driving the runaway sales of
The Purpose-Driven Life was the “40 Days
of Purpose” campaign, in which author Rick
Warren signed up 1,200 churches to devote
six sermons to the content of the book, while
church members read a chapter every day
for 40 days, says Stielstra, who was senior
marketing director at Christian publisher
Zondervan when it published the book.
“That simple process created an army of
400,000 customer evangelists whose word-of-
mouth recommendations sold 18 million copies
in 18 months without a national advertising
campaign,” Stielstra says. His 2005 book,
Pyromarketing: The Four-Step Strategy To Ignite
Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life,
describes how nonreligious companies can use
similar sales campaigns.
That secular-minded marketers could borrow
models from The Purpose-Drive Life’s
evangelical-driven success comes as no
surprise to historians of religion, who say
American churches and businesses have
long fed off one another. Some of the first
organizations to use modern marketing and
production techniques were 19th century lay
religious corporations like the American Bible
Society, according to R. Laurence Moore,
author of Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of
Sacred and Secular in American History.
But the overlap between commerce and
Christianity also leaves some churches
vulnerable to purely commercial marketing,
says Moore, director of the American Studies
program at Cornell University. “When you
have churches thinking along business lines,
receptiveness to sales pitches is just the
direction that things go.” Megachurches are
particularly vulnerable because they are so
intent on growth. “Religious organizations
actively seeking to grow and expand—raise
money, reach new members—do things that
are as much secular as religious,” Moore notes.
“When you have megachurches with huge
auditoriums, and lots of stores and schools and
gymnasiums inside, it begins to look less and
less like a religious place.”
Underwriting the Mission
Growth is key to megachurch success because
large, enthusiastic congregations are what
megachurches “sell” to potential members,
according to James Twitchell, author of the
forthcoming Shopping for God: How Christianity
Went From In Your Heart to In Your Face.
The first thing you hear at a megachurch these
days “is how many new members they have.
Churches used to be politely noncompetitive,”
says Twitchell, professor of English and
advertising at the University of Florida.
But since so many megachurches are now
independent or quasi-independent of centralized
denominations, they aggressively compete with
other churches for members. Maintaining rapid
growth is tough, and when churches falter,
that’s when corporations spot an entryway,
Twitchell adds. “Advertisers can go to the heart
of your mission—in the case of megachurches,
that’s evangelism—and underwrite it.”
Even business guru Jim Collins, best-selling
author of Good to Great and Built To Last, has
an opinion on the topic. Growth for the sake of
growth is potentially destructive, warns Collins,
who spoke this summer to a megachurch
leadership conference about his new publication
applying Good to Great concepts to “social
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 11
sector” organizations like churches. The
key question for churches, he says, is, “Do
they have the discipline to say ‘no’ to any
resources that will drive them away from their
fundamental mission?”
For some churches, using corporate
sponsorships might be a great opportunity;
for others it might lead them astray, Collins
suggests. “It would be too broad a brush to
say it’s all good or bad for churches, just as
it’s too broad to say debt is all good or bad for
companies. Churches need clarity to decide
what’s right for their financing.”
But why is it many feel, instinctively, that
the market and the church should inhabit
distinct spheres? The Constitution mandates
the separation of church and state, but the
relationship between church and commerce is
largely unregulated.
One answer may lie in the gospels themselves,
where Jesus spoke frequently about the
dangers of wealth, warning that “you cannot
serve both God and mammon.” More
dramatically, he overturned the tables of
businessmen inside the Jewish temple and
drove them out with a whip, saying “Make not
my Father’s house a house of merchandise.”
To some Christian critics, the analogy could
not be more direct. Isn’t having Chrysler or
Chevrolet vehicles parked in the foyer of a
church “a little too much like putting the tables
back inside the temple?” asks Skye Jethani,
associate editor of Leadership, a journal for
church pastors published by ChristianityToday.
The dangers of commerce intruding—or
being invited—into churches are “infinite”
from a religious point of view, says Jethani,
who is one of two pastors at an “accessibly-
sized” congregation of 400 in Wheaton, IL.
“Christianity comes to be viewed, not as
submission to Christ and love of your neighbor,
but an identity like any other, defined by what
you buy, who you vote for, what entertainment
you consume. Becoming so cozy with the
methodology of business completely warps the
message of the New Testament.”
Ad experts like Twitchell, however, predict that
advertising will increasingly appear “inside the
frame” of church experience. Look next for
corporate sponsorship advertisements in church
bulletins or on walls and windows of church
buildings, he says. Yet Caldwell, head of the
massive Windsor Village church in Houston,
cautions that churches should be thoughtful
about when to partner with corporations. “At
the end of the day, we don’t want the church to
become a prostitute of business.” ■
12 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
buy this car. Try our juicy burgers at 10
percent off. Watch our action-packed show
tonight. Drink a cold beer. Read Knowledge@
Wharton regularly.
These aren’t exactly examples of scintillating
advertising copy. But the messages are
short and to the point—and in that respect
they are the kinds of ads that Clear Channel
Communications is hoping sponsors will buy on
its radio stations.
Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200
stations and is the nation’s largest radio
company, has begun selling 5-second, 2-
second, and even 1-second spots in the hope
that cost-conscious marketers will find them
attractive, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Clear Channel is hoping to benefit from
increased ad sales in the face of heightened
competition for ad dollars from a variety of
new and old media. But how much can an
advertiser communicate in a 5-second “adlet”
or a 2- or 1-second “blink,” as these super-
short ads are called?
Faculty members in Wharton’s Marketing
department and a media expert at Penn’s
Annenberg School for Communication say
such ads cannot be relied upon to be effective
in establishing a brand or introducing a new
product. But they may be quite useful in
heightening awareness of an existing brand in
the minds of listeners or viewers.
Adlets and blinks are part of a broader shift in
a fragmenting media industry as broadcasters
try to adapt to new technologies—such as
TiVo and music and video downloading—that
allow listeners and viewers to evade traditional
advertising. In addition, many listeners simply
change stations when long commercial breaks,
known as “pods,” begin.
On its website, Clear Channel discusses how
it has cut down on the number of ad minutes
per hour and on the number of ads in each
commercial pod in an attempt to create a
better experience for commercial-weary
listeners and a better advertising environment.
“When the music stops, the listening
shouldn’t,” says the website, adding, “With
fewer commercial breaks, shorter pods, and
shorter, more creative copy, spots get more
share of voice and higher recall.”
According to Wharton Marketing Professor
Patricia Williams, “there is an increasing
recognition that consumers just tune out ads.
So the likelihood that you’re going to keep
consumers engaged for a 60-second or 30-
second ad is minimal, especially on radio and
TV when people will channel-flip as soon as
the ads appear. There’s also recognition that a
good amount of the time advertisers are buying
in a traditional 30- or 60-second ad might be
a waste anyway because consumers aren’t
paying attention.”
Joseph Turow, a professor and associate dean
for graduate studies at Annenberg, agrees. “So
many people are using iPods and going on the
web to get music,” he says. “And radio stations
Burgers and Other Goods in the Blink of an Eye:
How Effective Are Short Ads?
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 13
are seeing that a lot of people are leaving
because they can’t stand the number of ad
minutes. So Clear Channel is trying to cut down
[on ad minutes] to get more [listeners].”
Radio and TV advertisers typically focus on the
number of consumers reached with a message
and the number of times those consumers
are reached, or frequency, for a given amount
of spending, according to Wharton Marketing
Professor David Reibstein. Over the decades,
advertisers have turned to ever-shorter radio ads
in an attempt to get a bigger bang for the buck.
Sixty-second spots, which were once the norm
on TV and radio, eventually gave way to 30-
second and 15-second spots.
“When advertisers went from 60-second to
30-second commercials and from 30-second to
15-second commercials, they said, ‘Wow, I can
reach twice as may people with shorter spots,’”
says Reibstein. “But that ignored the question
of whether a shorter ad has the impact of a
longer ad. Clearly that’s not the case. However,
if all you want to do is get your name out
there, shorter is fine. But if you have to explain
something, or visually show something more
complex and with more content, you can’t do it
with a little blip.”
Reibstein likens an adlet or a blink to ads and
corporate logos painted on vehicles in a stock-
car race. Sponsors of auto racing can measure
the number of fans they reach every time a car
goes around a racetrack, as well as the number
of home viewers who see the cars on TV. The
advertiser does indeed reach millions of people
in this fashion, but the impact is not the same
as that of a 60- or 30-second ad, says Reibstein.
Burma Shave Revisited?
It is noteworthy that Clear Channel is taking
a prominent role in offering short radio ads,
according to Wharton Marketing Professor David
Schmittlein. The reason: Clear Channel is
also a leading player in the billboard industry—
a business where consumers typically get only
a fleeting glance at an advertising message as
they zip along.
“Two seconds is a long time to be not looking
at the road,” Schmittlein notes. “A lot of the
tricks of the trade in making 5-second or 2-
second spots effective are going to be the
same in the audio domain as what outdoor
advertisers face.”
People tend to think of a billboard as a one-shot
advertisement on a highway that tells motorists
to get off at the next exit for McDonald’s. But
the billboard business is more complicated
than that. What advertisers buy is a set of
locations that will cover, say, 80 percent of
drivers in certain regions over the next 30
days, says Schmittlein. The ad agency buys
that space on a 30-day minimum, and they
usually buy a number of exposures keyed to
the size of the population in the region. Each
billboard is owned by many different individuals
and companies, so advertisers hire billboard
‘consolidators’ like Clear Channel, which puts
together packages of billboard buys using
information about traffic flows.
Research has shown that billboards work best
when their text is limited to three to five words
because the message is exposed to motorists
for only one-half of a second to 2 seconds,
according to Schmittlein.
What is the best way for an advertiser to take
advantage of super-short ads on either radio
or TV? The Wharton marketers say 5- or 2-
second ads may work well in reinforcing an
existing brand with a high level of consumer
awareness or announcing an upcoming event
at an established retailer or a new product by a
well-known manufacturer.
“Ads that remind people to ‘Do something
now’ and basic brand-awareness ads work
great on billboards,” Schmittlein says, and
probably they will on radio, too. Here are some
examples: A computer company is introducing
a new desktop model and uses a short ad to
direct consumers to its website, where they
can learn all about the model’s functionality. A
supermarket chain informs viewers that their
stores will be open all day on an upcoming
holiday. A TV network urges listeners to tune
in tonight to the season premiere of last year’s
“Adlets” and “blinks” are part of
a broader shift in a fragmenting
media industry as broadcasters try
to adapt to new technologies that
allow listeners and viewers to evade
traditional advertising.
14 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
top-rated crime drama. A chain of convenience
stores tells consumers during a July heat wave
that its popular iced drink is available at a
reduced price.
Say It With a Song
Several of those interviewed say adlets or
blinks that use melodies, sound effects, or
well-known taglines—or a combination of the
three—can be especially effective in keeping
a brand or product top-of-mind. Examples of
notable audio signatures include the Southwest
Airlines “ding,” the “Intel Inside” tinkling audio
tag, Fox’s thumping theme music for National
Football League games, or Coca-Cola’s famous
jingle, “It’s the Real Thing.”
“Advertisers can use short ads to broadcast a
very quick image and a brand identification, like
a logo or package, and a sound associated with
your brand,” says Williams.
Schmittlein says advertisers buying short spots
may also find it useful to leave off part of their
message so that consumers can complete the
message in their minds—if consumers already
have been primed to do so. Schmittlein recalls a
1960s ad campaign for Chiffon margarine which
featured a female voice singing: “If you think
it’s butter but it’s not, it’s Chiffon.” After the
ads appeared for a period of time and left the
entire jingle permanently entrenched in people’s
memories, the advertiser took a new tack by
running the ad with an incomplete jingle: “If
you think it’s butter but it’s not….“ Listeners
completed the catchy tune in their heads by
filling in the blank—“…it’s Chiffon.”
One thing to avoid in scheduling super-short
ads on radio or TV is clutter. According to
Schmittlein, airing too many brief ads back to
back would be a disservice to all the advertisers
because their individual messages could get
lost in the jumble. “It’s just like billboards: If
you have 10 billboards lined up next to one
another, that’s a problem,” he says.
Another risk with 5- and 2-second ads—
but particularly the 2-second spots—is that
listeners and viewers may miss them altogether.
“If it’s easy for consumers to avoid a 30-
second message by changing the station, it’s
really easy to tune out a 2-second message,”
suggests Williams.
At the same time, though, Williams says a 2-
second ad may work well, not in spite of its
brevity, but because of it. When an ad comes
on the air, it takes most people a couple of
seconds to change the radio station or TV
channel, and even TiVo recordings jump back
a bit when programs are replayed. So viewers
may see a couple seconds of commercial
content they did not necessarily wish to view.
Despite some potential pitfalls, short ads can,
by and large, be put to effective use. “In the
past, advertisers always tried to do something
catchy in the first few seconds of a 60- or
30-second ad,” says Williams. “These short
ads mean they can’t ever do that, but the
short ads will have people’s attention for 2 or
5 seconds. So advertisers should try to use
them. The trick will be to look for some level
of effectiveness. After they have tried the ads,
advertisers have to figure out the appropriate
metrics and measure what the ads seem to
have accomplished.”
Annenberg’s Turow, who says he doesn’t know
whether short ads will catch on, likens adlets
and blinks to product placements in TV shows:
Advertisers will pay handsome sums to studios
even if their beer can, cereal box, or automobile
appears only for a few seconds. “The whole
idea of whizzing past people is part of what
product placement is about. When a show has
a product there and the camera pans away
from it—and these short ads are not all that
different—it’s a fleeting mention of a product
that’s designed to reinforce a kind of memory
retrieval system.” ■
One thing to avoid in scheduling super-
short ads on radio or TV is clutter.
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 15
a talking chimp arriving in e-mail inboxes
speaks in its sender’s voice through a telephone
connection or recites a pre-recorded joke for
the boss. “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Not me,
because I quit!” The monkey can be customized
with aviator glasses, a tiara, or an iPod and set
against different locales, including the corner
office, a cubicle, an airplane, the golf course, a
prison cell, or an exotic dance club.
Say hello to the Monk-e-mail, which is among
the latest viral marketing campaigns that
blend advertisement and entertainment across
informal consumer networks. And doing it with
great success, according to CareerBuilder, the
job-search firm behind this ad, which claims that
more than 18 million of its Monk-e-mails have
made their way across the Internet. Another
corporate-initiated viral ad offers a version of
the cartoon opening of The Simpsons shot
with live actors, produced for the British Sky
Broadcasting television network. Burger King
recently sponsored a “subservient chicken”
site, where viewers can type in commands
to a person in a bizarre chicken suit with red
garters. The chicken will do a cartwheel, sing,
fall, jump, and even drop to its knees and pray.
(This chicken has standards, however: If asked
to strip, it marches forward and wags a finger at
the requester.)
The intersection of advertisement, entertain-
ment, and interactivity is a key part of the
business model behind a new service
developed by JibJab, the Santa Monica, CA,
production company that created political
cartoons passed virally to millions of PCs
during the last U.S. presidential campaign.
One of the best known ones, a parody of the
song “This Land Is Your Land,” has a singing
George Bush calling John Kerry—dressed
as a hot dog and clutching a bottle of Heinz
ketchup—a liberal weenie. Kerry later opens
Bush’s head and puts in a brain while singing,
“Sometimes a brain can come in handy.” JibJab
has developed a new site called JokeBox,
where consumers and corporations can post
and share funny videos or jokes online.
According to Wharton Marketing Professor Peter
Fader, the convergence was inevitable. “It took
a long time to get to this point because it was
a sacred cow—the separation of content and
commercial—but now everything is a big mush.
Why bother trying to separate it?”
JibJab’s JokeBox and other humorous viral
marketing campaigns are a natural venue to
launch commercial messages, says Fader, who
adds that early efforts to virally promote serious
financial services or consumer products failed.
“The key to success is to do something that’s
naturally viral. And there is nothing more viral
than jokes.”
JokeBox’s business model relies heavily on
advertising revenue (Bud Light is an initial
sponsor). Visitors to the site will see banner ads
and paid advertisements after every few videos,
says Gregg Spiridellis, chief executive of JibJab,
noting that the site will accept submissions
from advertisers along with noncommercial
contributions, and both will be judged on
entertainment value. “If they are not funny, no
one’s going to pass them along, and they will
disappear in the mix.”
The rise of viral marketing could change the
nature of the advertising business by providing
a relatively low-cost way for companies to
distribute their messages, Spiridellis adds. At
the same time, the quality of the content will
become more important than ever and will
require advertisers to ratchet up spending to
create ads that are worth passing along.
Wharton Marketing Professor Patti Williams
suggests that the latest forms of Internet
viral marketing build on the traditional power
Talking Chimps, Subservient Chickens, and
Others Blend Entertainment and Advertising
The rise of viral marketing could
change the nature of the advertising
business by providing a relatively
low-cost way for companies to
distribute their messages.
16 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
of word-of-mouth. “Advertisers are taking the
initiative to provide the spark that starts the
word-of-mouth. That spark is providing value
to consumers by being entertaining. If you can
provide something consumers find entertaining,
even if it’s advertising, they are likely to expose
themselves to it.” Increasing adoption of high-
speed broadband connections allows the more
intricate viral messages, which often include
video, to pass from PC to PC, she adds.
Viral Internet messages are also a way to build
integrated brand campaigns, says Williams.
CareerBuilder’s e-mail, for example, is based
on characters introduced in the firm’s Super
Bowl television spots. The monkeys, wearing
suits and ties, climb around cubicles in an office
as their lone human coworker laments that he
works with a bunch of monkeys. “The monkey
e-mail is not that different than what we see in
their traditional campaign,” she says. “It’s smart
of CareerBuilder to leverage this asset. They
are extending the equity they have in those
characters into a new venue.”
As for Burger King’s subservient chicken, she
says the viral campaign enhanced Burger King’s
push to present itself as an edgier brand, one
that the company hopes will appeal to men
between the ages of 18 and 24.
Going for Stealth
According to Kendall Whitehouse, senior
director of information technology at Wharton,
Internet viral campaigns are part of advertising’s
evolution. In the years following World War
II, advertisers were successful in reaching
consumers through mass media, including
television and magazines. Now, with cable
television, TiVo, and the fragmentation of
advertising markets because of the Internet,
companies are turning to alternative sources to
get their messages out. “The problem is, how
do they find a business model that’s successful
in this user-selectable-content universe,” says
Whitehouse. “It will be interesting to see
which of these schemes are durable, which
are scalable, and which are one-shots.” While
the subservient chicken may have been clever,
he says, it is not clear that quirkiness alone
is a sustainable model. “If this kind of thing
becomes standard operating procedure, then
it loses its impact,” Whitehouse notes. “That’s
part of the danger here. It’s great while it
works, you can get more visibility than you
might get from doing the same old thing, but it
really is an interim strategy” until more durable
business models emerge.
Another dilemma for viral marketers attempting
to meld entertainment with a message is how
blatant, or discreet, they should be in pushing
their brand. “Some of these are almost stealth
campaigns,” says Whitehouse. “A technique a
number of companies have employed is to do
something clever and subtle because people
will be more inclined to pass it along when it’s
not a blatant product pitch.”
Art, Not Advertising
Yet no matter how funny or technically cool the
campaign, viral marketers are still bound by
the basics of successful advertising, suggests
Wharton Marketing Professor Leonard Lodish.
“The most important thing is first, to have a
product or service that will satisfy and delight
and make people want to talk about it with
their friends.”
Lodish says some campaigns add incentives to
consumers to talk about a product by providing
awards or prizes if they refer others. Viral
campaigns that direct consumers back to an
advertiser’s own web site, he adds, may not
spread as far as a pure viral campaign. However,
that strategy could provide the beginnings of a
two-way communication between the company
and interested consumers that could be valuable
to both. “There are a number of products
where it’s legitimate to have a dialogue with the
customer,” Lodish says.
Wharton Marketing Professor Xavier Drèze
points out that the impact of viral marketing
is difficult to assess and is biased toward
acknowledging only those ads that are
successful. “We keep talking about the ones
that work. We don’t talk about the ones that
don’t work. By definition, when a viral campaign
doesn’t work, nobody knows it ever existed.”
Drèze also notes that developing a viral campaign
to spin a message off onto the Internet through
chat rooms and discussion boards can be labor-
intensive and scattershot, whereas television and
print media can provide advertisers with data
about the size and demographic makeup of their
audience. “I can put an ad on CSI: Miami and I
know who I’m going to get, and I know when
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 17
I’m going to get them.” Viral marketing can also
quickly slip out of an advertiser’s control, adds
Drèze. It is impossible to know who will receive
viral ads from friends or what the context is. For
example, CareerBuilder does not know what its
Monk-e-mails are going to say. “So there is a bit
of a risk to it.”
To address the issue of effective measurement,
the Advertising Research Foundation is about to
embark on a pilot project to evaluate consumer
“engagement” in advertising. The project will be
designed to develop new standards to evaluate
the success of innovative forms of advertising,
including viral campaigns, across all forms of
media. Bob Barocci, chief executive of the
Advertising Research Foundation, says research
indicates meaningful advertising communication
occurs when consumers have a role in creating
the message. “The idea is that if we can do a
better job of measuring engagement, we will
move a whole lot closer to accountability, proven
effectiveness, and better return on investment.”
Fader, however, is dubious about whether
measures of engagement will tie back to sales.
He says high-concept, entertaining spots may
be engaging but fall short when it comes to
actually selling the product. “There are a lot of
awards for dumb ads that are considered to be
art, but they are not advertising.”
Indeed, the advertising industry has long
wrestled with the question of whether a
memorable ad is effective in generating
business, he says. Online advertising provides
different ways to measure responses—such
as counting how often users click on an ad to
view additional information—in a more timely
and objective way than older media, says Fader.
“Our modeling technology is better, but I don’t
think we are that much closer to a clear vision.”
For now, much of the viral advertising produced
with elaborate video and interactive capabilities
is viewed at work, where corporate systems
have better broadband capacity than home-based
networks, according to Owen Plotkin, chief
executive officer of the now corporation, a New
York communications firm that develops Internet
advertising content (and uses a lower-case ‘n’).
Employers have been tolerant of workers
using office systems to view content because
it is one way to keep them happy as they
work increasingly long hours, says Plotkin.
But he warns that this could change if the
rate of Internet monkey business increases
dramatically. “People are working longer hours
than ever before so it’s only right to let them
balance that with e-mailing their [friends]. But
if they are just surfing the web and sharing silly
movie clips and chatting on AIM [AOL Instant
Messenger] all day, I wouldn’t be surprised
if we are reaching a point where a happy
employee is becoming less productive.”
Plotkin said the promise of new interactive
viral communications goes beyond product
promotion and could have a deeper impact
on society. Traditionally, only wealthy people
owned television stations or publications and
had access to media outlets for their own views.
Now, the Internet has democratized media, he
says, allowing everyone greater access to wide
audiences to promote commercial products and
social causes.
Basketball Courts and Free Cakes
Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn says
interactive and entertaining Internet advertising
is part of a larger trend in branding in which
ads have moved from being product-focused
to being consumer-oriented; experience is
now part of the equation. “The idea is that
it’s not enough to focus on the benefit to the
consumer; you have to provide an experience.”
As an example, Kahn points to Niketown, the
shoe manufacturer’s retail chain that features
basketball courts in many of its locations. “It
wasn’t enough to buy the shoe; you had to play
basketball in the shoe in the store,” says Kahn.
Another example is a child’s birthday cake.
Cakes used to be made from scratch with sugar
and eggs. Then they were made with a mix.
Later, they were purchased at bakeries, thereby
adding to the value chain. Today, birthdays are
often celebrated at party locations where the
cake is thrown in for free. “Now the birthday is
the whole experience around the cake, and it’s
no longer about the cake.”
The focus, Kahn says, “has become more on
the total experience that wraps around the
product. We see it in retail, so it makes sense
that we are seeing it in promotion.” ■
18 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
hoW do you market to an audience that is
skeptical of traditional advertising, very media
savvy, and possessed of short attention spans?
And how do you turn a product that is highly
dependent on seasonal sales into a product of
choice year-round?
Both topics were addressed at a recent
Wharton Marketing Conference, which included
a panel on “What Teens Want: Capturing the
Attention of the Trend-Driven and Lucrative Teen
Dollar,” and a keynote presentation by Richard
H. Lenny, chairman, president, and CEO of The
Hershey Company.
Whether a company’s marketing target is the
$175 billion that 30 million teenagers in the U.S.
will spend annually on everything from fashion
to electronics or the $65 billion that U.S.
consumers spend on snacks every year, the
goal is “to play to win,” conference participants
emphasized. “Very simply, it’s what we all do,”
said Lenny. “Whether you are in marketing,
sales, operations, or trying to get a Supreme
Court Justice appointed, playing to win is
what’s most important.”
One Fickle Market
But with the teen market, noted the panelists
on “What Teens Want,” that goal is particularly
challenging. Teens, after all, constitute a
very unique segment—fickle, competitive,
ever-changing, and constantly on the move.
Companies that want to get a toehold in the
teenage landscape must be able to speak
their language, identify their latest trends, and
find the optimal ways to target them through
everything from music downloads to instant
messaging advertising.
“Teens are an enormously important segment
because they are disproportionately powerful
in terms of being trend setters and early
adopters,” said Keith Niedermeier, Wharton
visiting professor of marketing and panel
moderator. “Additionally, they are an attractive
market because of the lifetime value they offer.
Capturing teens and establishing brand loyalty
can launch decades of positive yields in the
future. It is an incredibly lucrative market, but
definitely not for the faint of heart. Nowhere
in marketing does marketing research have a
shorter shelf-life than when talking about the
teen segment.”
But while the teen market is indeed fickle, it is
also increasingly sophisticated and challenging,
noted the panelists, who included Michael
Marquis, group product director, Clean & Clear
Skin Care Business, Johnson & Johnson; Stacey
Paddock, senior product manager, Frito Lay; Lisa
Reiner, vice president, retail management, at The
Beanstalk Group, responsible for development
and management of the mary-kateandashley
brand; and Melissa Lavigne of The Intelligence
Group, a leading research, consulting, and trend
analysis company that specializes in Generation
X (those born after the Baby Boom in the 1960s
and 1970s), Generation Y (those born from the
late 1970s to the early 1990s), and Tweens (a
relatively new term used to describe anyone
who is a pre-teen from 10 on up).
Panelists discussed the trends that influence
a company’s ability to capture the growing
teen market, including teens’ skepticism
toward traditional advertising, their knowledge
From Teen Fashion to Hershey Kisses:
New Ways To Sell the Brand
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 19
of different forms of media, and the fact that
their attention is easily diverted. “They are the
proverbial moving target,” said Niedermeier.
According to J&J’s Marquis, from ages 12 to
19, teens “have a desire to be spoken to like
adults. And from their [own] perspective, they
are under more pressure than adults. They are
worried about getting good grades, making the
sports team, getting into college—whatever it
might be. They look at themselves as adults, as
being mature. If you are putting yourself into
their mindset, you have to tap into that desire
to be spoken to as a sophisticated user.”
When marketing to teens, Frito Lay’s Paddock
suggested that companies have to “first
understand key business drivers and second,
match communication efforts with the target
audience.” For instance, while leading the
teen marketing efforts for the Frito Lay Doritos
brand, Paddock created partnerships with MTV
Spring Break and MTV Video Music Awards,
Yahoo Music and Universal Music, and later
created a partnership between Doritos and
walmart.com to offer teen consumers free
music downloads with a purchase of Doritos.
Said Paddock, “We had to think about what’s
important to teenagers? Fashion, e-mail, instant
messaging, video games, movies. In looking
at all of those platforms, we decided to focus
on music. Music is the best fit for Doritos; and
in 2005, we offered 5 million free downloads
through Doritos bags. Our ROI was enormous,
and it was an incredible success.”
Once established, it’s important to stay true
to the marketing message around teens, said
The Beanstalk Group’s Reiner. For example,
with the mary-kateandashley brand and lifestyle
products, “we have kept the brand promise: To
be aspirational, accessible, and age appropriate.
We stuck to this marketing strategy around
the globe, and the global population of tween
girls has proved that the (brand promise)
transcended barriers, although we were warned
that it would not.”
When it comes to macro trends, The
Intelligence Group’s Lavigne sees many that
have important implications for marketing
to teenagers. First, teens have multiple
personalities and enjoy expressing different
aspects of who they are: gifted athlete,
scholar, member of a band. “In the 1980s,
teens were fragmented, very specific. Now,
with the Gen Ys, it’s cool to have different
aspects of your personality as something that
identifies who you are.”
Second, today’s teens are defined by groups.
“Gen X was all about me; Gen Y is about
groups or being a part of a group of friends,”
said Lavigne. This teen dimension has been
fueled in part by the increasing levels of
communication available to teens, from instant
messaging to cell phones to text messaging.
“There are a lot of ways to be in touch.” And
teens today are all about “experiences—the
new social currency,” she said. “Products can
be replicated or knocked off, and there are so
many of them today that it is difficult for kids
to identify themselves through what they own.
When marketing, it’s important to integrate
experiences like trips they take to South
America with their families. Their experiences
can’t be ‘knocked off.’ They’re real.”
The panel participants acknowledged the
significant subsets in the teen market. For
example, female teenagers, global teens, and
even 19-year-old boys were identified by Paddock
as specific target groups for Doritos during one
campaign. Paddock gave one example to show
how targeting teens can be tricky. When an
advertisement that featured male teens looking
up girls’ skirts proved offensive, it was pulled
the first day. “We really thought this was the
way to talk to 19-year-old boys, but the problem
was that we focused on 4 percent of the
population and basically offended” the other 96
percent, she said. Recent advertising efforts that
offer music downloads for teens have proven
much more effective.
Marquis agreed that “teen segmentation is
important. In skin care, there is a group of
girls who are confident and take good care of
their skin. There is another group of girls who
are extremely image conscious and concerned
about every little pimple on their forehead. And
there is another group of girls who don’t care,
who use soap and water, and that’s okay. You
Teens are an enormously important
segment because they are
disproportionately powerful in
terms of being trend setters and
early adopters.
20 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
have to marry the segmentation to the mind set
and tailor your messaging accordingly.”
But when it comes to marketing to teens, it’s
difficult to identify the so-called “leading edge.”
The biggest marketing challenge, said Lavigne,
“is understanding that for every 100 things
teens experiment with, one or two things will
trickle down. The early adopter is sometimes
called a trend setter, but they don’t really care
about the trend. They are so immersed in video
or technology that they just know what the cool
things to look for actually are. And then you have
the influencers; they are looking to the early
adopters, but they are not going to figure it out
on their own. They are leading edge, but they
don’t look too far head. In marketing, these are
the ones you want to get a hold of, because they
will spread the word about products and trends.”
Kiss and Tell
When Hershey’s Lenny talks about “playing to
win,” the playing field he competes on is the
$65 billion snack world, where every year nearly
38 percent of all sales falls into the category of
confection or candy. Lenny credits the steady
“emotional connectivity” that Hershey has with
its customers for making it the number-one
sales leader within the candy category, with 29
percent of the total candy business. “We are an
iconic brand,” he noted, displaying pictures of
Hershey Chocolate Bars, Hershey Kisses, and
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, to name a few.
“We have 14 $100 million brands.”
When Lenny arrived at Hershey in 2001, he
quickly realized that the chocolate giant was just
“doing okay”—a lukewarm endorsement based
on his assessment that the numbers didn’t add
up right. “We had sales growth and compound
growth rate of 4 percent, net income of 2
percent, and earnings per share of 5 percent….
There are a couple of things happening here.
One, when sales are growing faster than net
income, the company is not getting leverage
through the business system. And when EPS
is growing faster than net income, this isn’t a
sustainable business model going forward. So
for us, our strategic priorities were clear.”
First, Lenny worked to reset the company’s
cost basis in order to capture the money
needed to reinvest in the business and invest
in brand building. Overhead was reduced,
underutilized factories were closed, and
nonprofitable businesses were sold. But the
key growth opportunity was “to accelerate
innovation. We have some of the best brands
in confectionaries, some of the best brands in
the cold snack market. Yet our product track
record was hit or miss. We weren’t investing
from a customer standpoint in terms of being
innovative with our retail trade.”
The good news, as Lenny saw it, was that
Hershey was “dealing from a position of
strength. We are a market leader. We are an
iconic brand. We had to look first at winning
more consumers.”
Consider the company’s new marketing
approach with Reese’s peanut butter cups
and Heshey’s Kisses. Objective? Leverage the
brands. While others looked at Reese’s and saw
only a chocolate-covered peanut butter cup,
Lenny saw “a billion-dollar platform, a significant
opportunity to broaden the appeal and satisfy
multiple needs with the Reese’s franchise.
Here you had one of the largest brands in the
confectionary category, clearly the largest brand
at Hershey, and yet we weren’t capitalizing on
the opportunity to expand the equity.”
Enter White Chocolate Reese’s, Reese’s Pieces,
Reese’s Bites, and, coming soon, Reese’s with
Fudge and Reese’s with Caramel. “Reese’s
Peanut Butter Cup makes a lot of sense in the
United States, but fill it with marshmallow or
hazel nuts in the Far East or Western Europe,
and now you start thinking about creating a
global platform for Reese’s as opposed to
expanding it in the United States.”
Next, consider Kisses, the Hershey’s chocolate
kiss created by company founder Milton Hershey
over 100 years ago that has grown into a
$400 million brand. “But here is an interesting
statistic, which is either a problem or an
opportunity, and we saw it as an opportunity,”
said Lenny, who pointed out that 60 percent of
the Kisses business is seasonal, centered around
special holidays. Why not make Kisses the candy
of choice year round? Towards that goal, the
company has now come out with dark chocolate
and mint-flavored Kisses, as well as peanut
For every 100 things teens
experiment with, only one or two
things will trickle down.
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 21
butter and caramel-filled Kisses. And most
recently, there are Kissables, single-serve snack
packs of candy-coated Hershey’s Kisses readily
available for pickup in local convenience stores.
“The orders are exceeding our expectations,”
said Lenny.
He noted other examples to show how Hershey
now leverages existing products into new
consumer and marketing avenues. For example,
the company:
Offers single-serve cookies, Hershey snack
bars, nut products, and Hershey hot chocolate
in convenience stores, to not only build brand
following but capitalize on the burgeoning
convenience store market and new
opportunities in “permissible” snacking.
Tweaks gums and mints to offer a
refreshment benefit through such products as
Ice Breakers Liquid Ice.
Co-brands confectionary products like Jolly
Ranchers, Kisses, and Hershey Miniatures for
the U.S. Hispanic consumer through Thalia, a
popular singer and actress in Mexico.
Creates exclusive products for retailers like
Target or 7-Eleven stores that guarantee
exclusive marketing promotions, customized
advertising placements, and in-store support.
The results? Lenny pointed to what he called
a “dramatic up tick” in net sales over the
past 10 to 11 quarters, with 6.5-percent to
8-percent growth in the first three quarters
of 2005. “That’s a very good performance,
driven primarily by new-product innovation,” he
said. The company’s earnings per share have
increased from 5 percent in 2000 to nearly
13.5 percent over the last 4 years and is up 16
percent in the first three quarters of 2005.
■
■
■
■
Lenny also offered a few lessons—under
the rubric of “Increasing the Odds”—“that
might be applicable in what you do from a
career-business standpoint.” First, learn from
the past; don’t live in it. “I was the first CEO
from outside the company in its 108-year
history. It was a shock for both of us.” Second,
understand the true sources of your company’s
competitive advantage. Within Hershey, Lenny
cited brand franchise, confectionary expertise,
and superior selling capability. “If you forced
me to pick one of the three, I’d say superior
brand franchising. We knew our big brands had
room to grow, and we capitalized on them.”
Third, rely on insight-driven consumer marketing
and insight-driven customer marketing. Fourth,
“maintain a foot in the familiar. It makes a lot
of sense for Hershey to go into the cookie
business in a certain segment. It does not make
a lot of sense for Hershey to go so far that
we can’t leverage our source of competitive
advantage. There’s an old expression, ‘You can
go a long way staying close to home.’ I think
that applies to brands.”
Fifth, when it comes to leadership and people,
“marginalize the middle one-third. There’s
one-third who are with you, one-third who
are against you, and one-third who are in the
middle. The goal is to marginalize the middle
third. Hopefully you can move them up to the
one-third that likes you, to where they are
understanding and supportive of your agenda,
or they go down.” And sixth, “realize that
neither brands nor leaders are industry neutral.
Brands either create energy with consumers, or
they sap energy; leaders do likewise.” ■
22 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
FolloWing a corporate scandal, managers
who acknowledge they have problems and
launch communication programs to repair their
tarnished reputations stand the best chance
of rehabilitating a tainted brand or corporate
image, according to Wharton faculty and
branding consultants.
Martha Stewart, accounting firm KPMG,
insurance broker Marsh & McLennan, and
Merck, manufacturer of the troubled painkiller
Vioxx, are among recent examples of
companies that face the challenge of restoring
damaged reputations.
Depending on the nature of the scandal, says
Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn,
companies can take a slow and steady approach
to brand repair, or a swift “silver bullet”
solution. McDonald’s, she says, could take the
slow road in addressing charges that its fast
food contributes to the nation’s rising obesity.
“What you would do is associate McDonald’s
with more nutritious offerings and slowly move
the image in a believable way.”
For example, the company might begin by
focusing ads on its use of high-quality beef,
then continue by promoting its salads. “Each
leap you are making extends the brand’s
meaning, but it is small enough that the
consumer is willing to make the jump. This
takes a long time,” says Kahn, adding that
the fast food giant went too fast when it
introduced its McLean sandwich in 1991. “It
didn’t work. It wasn’t credible. You have to do it
in a slow, reasonable way that doesn’t test the
consumer’s belief system.”
Marsh & McLennan is taking a quick, clean-
sweep approach to restoring its corporate
image after running afoul of New York’s
attorney general Elliot Spitzer. In January,
the firm agreed to pay $850 million to settle
charges that it took kickbacks to recommend
insurance providers to clients. Meanwhile, the
company has tapped former prosecutor Michael
Cherkasky, head of its Kroll investigative
firm, as chief executive. Cherkasky is now
restructuring the company to de-emphasize its
insurance business and boost other divisions,
such as Mercer Consulting and Kroll. After
bringing “in a person with ‘the right image,’ the
message is, ‘Now we have new management.
We are a new company,’” says Bruce T.
Blythe, chief executive of Crisis Management
International in Atlanta and author of Blindsided:
A Manager’s Guide to Catastrophic Incidents in
the Workplace.”
Staying “Under the Radar”
Kahn points to Johnson & Johnson’s rapid
response to its Tylenol tampering incidents as
the gold standard in addressing a corporate
problem openly without taking on blame. “J&J
came out and said it cared about its customers.
That’s what you do. You don’t want to be
defending yourself. You want to put forth the
values that are critical to your company,” says
Kahn, adding that the situation differs from
Merck’s current problem with Vioxx because
J&J was reacting to a problem that was created
externally. If Merck says too much about
allegations that it withheld critical information, it
could damage its position in pending lawsuits.
As a result, Kahn says Merck might choose
not to address Vioxx in the mass media but
instead communicate with doctors who are an
intermediate channel in marketing prescription
drugs. She notes that Wyeth focused on
marketing hormone replacement treatments
through doctors after questions were raised
about the safety of such therapies. “The good
news about brands is that people know who
you are. The bad news is that if something goes
wrong, everyone knows.”
Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a
Tarnished Image
Depending on the nature of the
scandal, companies can take a slow
and steady approach to brand repair,
or a swift “silver bullet” solution.
© 2007 UhiversiIy oI Pehhsylvahia ■ WharIoh E×ecuIive EducaIioh ■ Khowledge@WharIoh 23
She points to the flap over a minor calculation
error made by a Pentium chip in 1994 that
drew more attention than it would have if the
manufacturer, Intel, had not been so successful
in branding its chips. To avoid problems down
the road, she says, some hedge funds and
financial service firms prefer to remain little
known in the mass media. “They want to stay
under the radar.”
Wharton Management Professor Katherine
Klein suggests that in the process of designing
a rehabilitation strategy, corporate executives
should first consider the nature and severity
of the offense. When people think about a
corporate crisis or scandal, they are likely to ask
two questions, she says. The first is: What is the
nature of the scandal? More specifically, who
was hurt and how badly? The second question
is: Who is at fault and why did they do it?
“If the public’s response to the first question
is that few people got hurt, they weren’t hurt
badly, and the people who were hurt had a lot
of resources, then the potential damage to the
brand is relatively small,” says Klein. Martha
Stewart, who is openly addressing her past with
television ads about how she learned to make
crème brûlée in a prison microwave, represents
an example of a brand that may not suffer
greatly following its founder’s prison sentence
for insider trading, Klein suggests.
Turning to the second question, if only one or a
few people were at fault, the potential damage
to the brand is limited and can be addressed by
getting rid of the person or people who are to
blame, says Klein. “KPMG looks as if it might
fall into this category.” Eight former KPMG
partners and a lawyer have been charged with
helping wealthy clients avoid at least $2.5 billion
in taxes, and more indictments are expected.
However, last month a federal judge approved
a $456 million settlement that allowed the firm
itself to escape indictment.
On the other hand, if numerous people are at
fault in a corporate scandal because the company
does not hire or train people well or operates
with excessive greed, then that indicates a more
systemic problem that cannot be addressed
with a few strategic firings, says Klein. “The
worst damage to a brand occurs when the public
concludes that many defenseless people have
been, or could have been, harmed and believes
that many people in the organization are at fault
because they, and the company as a whole, are
incompetent or immoral.”
According to Wharton Marketing Professor
Josh Eliashberg, Merck may be facing this
situation with Vioxx, the arthritis drug that
has been linked to heart attacks. “Essentially,
Merck instructed its sales force not to disclose
all the information they had about the efficacy
and the safety of Vioxx,” Eliashberg says,
suggesting that Merck should begin the process
of restoring its brand by settling outstanding
lawsuits with people who took the drug.
The company’s situation is complicated because
it must communicate with two key audiences:
doctors who actually prescribe medicines
and patients who often demand treatments
they see advertised. Furthermore, Merck’s
problems with Vioxx could extend beyond a
single brand to damage the image of the entire
company, Eliashberg says. “The perception of
a drug company starts with the perception of
a particular drug…. The company now has the
problem of being perceived by consumers and
physicians as irresponsible, which may have a
carryover effect from Vioxx to the other drugs it
sells. Merck needs to think seriously about how
to demonstrate social responsibility.”
Letting the Dust Settle
Bernd Schmitt, executive director of Columbia
University’s Center on Global Brand Leadership,
says a crisis can become an opportunity for
a brand. “After the scandal, the brand will be
noticed by the customer and other constituents,
like the media; that could make things much
easier,” he suggests. “It’s a huge opportunity
for the company to concentrate on the brand
right away while it is still the focus of attention
and can get a lot of awareness.” Subsequent
advertising and other communications with
consumers should then delete associations with
the scandal and insert new images and ideas
about the brand.
If the company handles the initial crisis poorly,
resulting in weeks or months of negative
headlines, it might want to sit back for a
time before returning to the public eye, adds
Schmitt. “You would want to let the dust settle.
Depending on the company, it might be a
month or a year. Then you would start the re-
branding process.”
24 WharIoh oh MarkeIihg ■ The Brand, the Message, and the Medium, Vol. 3
According to Schmitt, when a scandal affects
an entire corporation, not just a product brand,
the company should set up communications
that focus on its core values, such as innovation
or leadership, rather than hawking products. If,
however, the scandal is related to a single brand,
managers need to fix the problem. If they can’t,
they should consider killing off the troubled
brand. “If it is a brand extension or a new brand,
most likely you have a broad portfolio and can
promote another brand. You then gradually phase
out the brand with the problem.”
If scandal hits a major brand, such as Perrier,
the restoration process would require
immediate and intense crisis management
and an elaborate re-branding, which requires
attention to strategy and intricate details,
Schmitt notes, adding that top corporate
executives with a sense of the company’s
overall goals and strategies should be involved
in post-scandal re-branding. “Branding is
normally something the marketing guys do, but
unless the company has prepared and set up
cross-functional teams to deal with a situation
like this, it is going to get out of hand.”
Lou Rubin, managing director of DPrime
Consulting, a unit of Omnicom Group,
the marketing communications firm, says
successful brand rehabilitation begins with
openness and honesty. “The first issue is, you
can’t hide. You must acknowledge the problem.
People want to forgive, and contrition is an
accepted part of our culture. Lying is not.”
Acknowledging the problem is not only critical
for later acceptance by outsiders but is key
to the morale of employees who ultimately
form the company’s connections to the
public. Rubin suggests that it is important
for top management to consider the “mom
factor”—how an employee feels when his or
her mother reads about the company where
the employee works.
He, like Schmitt, suggests that after a scandal,
companies should focus on communicating their
core values. He points to Tyco, where current
chief executive Edward Breen mounted an
aggressive communications program to improve
the company’s image after its former chief
executive, Dennis Kozlowski, and former chief
financial officer, Mark Swartz, were convicted
this summer of stealing millions of dollars from
the firm. “He let people know that Tyco is a vital
part of their world, that Tyco makes everything
that makes the world go around,” says Rubin. As
a result, Breen was able to unify the company’s
far-flung business units, helping them heal. “He
spent a significant amount of money to get that
point across.”
Flogged by Blogs
Another company Rubin says has effectively
weathered scandal is Boeing. In the past
year, the company’s chief financial officer was
sentenced to prison for recruiting a Pentagon
official responsible for billions in Air Force
contracts, and its chief executive was dismissed
after having an affair with another Boeing
executive. “The company has never stopped
telling people what it does, which is invent
the most incredible flying machines in the
world,” says Rubin. Companies that are already
communicating a solid message when scandal
hits should not retreat, Rubin adds. “Stay the
course. Don’t pull back. If you pull back, that
says, ‘We didn’t believe what we said before.’”
With myriad choices of how to communicate,
Rubin says traditional media, such as
newspaper and television, are the best places
to come clean after scandal. “The traditional
media tend to be broader than what you might
normally use, but that’s a way to make sure
you are acknowledging the issue as opposed
to appealing to special interests,” he says. “You
don’t want to be perceived as communicating
only to special interests.”
The rise of the Internet poses new problems
for post-scandal communications, adds Blythe.
“Blogging can kill you. Before, when we had a
problem, it was addressed in the public media.
Now the Internet is many times faster, more
unforgiving, and out of control.” Increasingly,
Blythe’s firm is helping companies monitor
statements about them on the Internet and
generate their own blogs.
The most important new development in
scandal management, however, is the passage
of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which holds
executives personally liable for accounting
irregularities and is likely to prevent scandals
before they happen, Blythe notes. “There is
no excuse now for unethical behavior. The
consequences are grave. Senior managers are
looking at this with deep concern and making
sure that they are doing the right thing.” ■