Campaigns -- the ins and outs, the ups and downs

Campaigns -- the ins and outs, the ups and downs

JAKARTA (JP): Planning the right moment for a product launch, making an entrance into the marketplace, when conditions are right, can be crucial. Pt LippoMelco Electronic Indonesia pinpointed a time of year when two important events coincided. The company chose February/March, when the Chinese New Year and the Moslem Lebaran period coincided, to launch a new refrigerator. They linked the holiday period of festivities with the idea that refrigerated storage offered the potential for refreshments for parties.

To potential clients, LippoMelco offered the incentive of a hospitality offer. A free gift, a tea service, was offered with each refrigerator. Last year, refrigerators with cans of Coca Cola inside were offered to customers.

In the area of electronics, where one product can look, superficially at least, the same as another, there is growing competition in the market, especially from new products coming in at low prices. With current refrigerators sales in Indonesia at a 20 percent increase on last year's figure, interest in this "white goods" item is clearly on the rise. It is important for a company to distinguish the difference between its brand of television and another, similar but a lot cheaper model. The point about after-sales service also has to be made.

Quality can vary enormously and consequently so can price. For a company like LippoMelco, it is a challenge to convey to the market the difference between their products and the others. Quality among the competition will vary enormously. "Indonesian people are very sensitive about price," promotion and research manager at LippoMelco, Soeroto Santoso, says.

Launching a new product, campaigning for increased consumer awareness, or launching a new corporate identity on the market is a process involving detailed cooperation between client and advertising agency. From product brief to media placement, the process of developing an advertising campaign for a "high-end" product like a refrigerator may take between eight to 10 weeks.

LippoMelco offered this time scale: Product briefing takes about one week. The subsequent development of a rough presentation takes between two to three weeks. Correction of the presentation will take one week.

Approval of corrected final draft presentation will take another week. What will then follow will be the procedure to finished artwork -- another two weeks. The process to color separation takes another seven to 10 days. When this is completed, it is time to place the advertisement in the media.

That is just half the story. Fifty percent of LippoMelco's public relations efforts will need to go to developing their dealer and toko (store) relationships. This has to be very intensive with a difficult product to sell, such as an electronics item. So, half of the company's promotional energy is directed towards dealer relationships, and the other half to advertising and product awareness among consumers. Only then will the combined total result amount to product awareness or sales.

"Below the line" (product awareness, excluding sales) in the field of high-technology goods requires a concentrated effort. However, a situation can be foreseen, perhaps, when the level of dealer-oriented relationships will need less cultivating, when the consumer is better equipped to make comparative decisions about products with complex technology.

The banking sector is one of the biggest advertisers in Indonesia. It has a preference for print media, and is among the top five categories of print media advertisers listed in Media Guide 1995/96, along with real estate, vehicles, insurance and tours and travel.

One of these big advertisers is Bank Bali. It has two branches for publicity -- corporate awareness and product promotion. It first saw a need for an advertising agency in 1971, when it took on the name of Bank Bali, changing from Bank Persatuan Dagung Indonesia. The change involved not only a new name, but a new logo and a new identity.

The example of Bank Bali, with its 123 branches throughout Indonesia and two branches abroad, suggests that in this sector the advertising campaign might proceed in this way: Once the objectives have been decided on and the target market specified, the client gets together with the agency for briefing. The agency will come back with a concept on which the bank will comment. The agency will make revisions, produce a final proof and then come up with the final product.

Localizing a product for the Indonesian market is recognized among advertisers and agencies alike as an important strategy. In this area, local companies will have strengths over the international companies in being able to match up with local taste. "Sometimes, if we want to place an advertisement in the print media, in an international publication like Business Week or Time, we deal with agencies that have international links because they already know what the international public wants," Dian Syarief, of Bank Bali, explains.

For Bank Bali, the restriction on the use of English in advertising lends a further opportunity for being "creative", in ways to find the match between customers in the local market and the products and image that they want to sell. It is a "new chance" to adapt the Indonesia language to a new situation, a more relevant way of localizing the product for potential buyers, than by using foreign concepts and language. "Otherwise the message will not match with the audience", Dian Syarief says.

The advertising agency Cabe Rawit, winner of the industry's creativity award over several years, came up in interviews with client companies. This small agency has drawn attention to itself through clever concepts using the Indonesian language.

Appropriate

To make advertising culturally appropriate is a very sensitive area. Clients and their agencies must come up with choices for representations (selecting representative gender, ethnic group, and class), based not only on an understanding of their history but also their culture. Even when internationally-known products are being advertised, it is important to give them a local accent, to adjust them to the local scene.

A knowledge of the world of myth and legend inhabited by an advertiser's target group is prerequisite. The dragon, for example, signifies evil in the European mythologies but has a good reputation in the mythologies of Asia. A three-headed species of this beast was once chosen to represent the symptoms of a flu virus -- sore throat, headache, etc. The medicine advertised was represented by a figure like St George, the knight who relieved the dragon of its head, or in this case, heads. This was not a successful campaign in Asia.

Apart from culturally appropriate advertising, there is the matter of creating other dimensions, namely the "new luxury dimension", dimensi kemeyahan baru. Several years ago LippoMelco introduced a 27 inch television set to the market in Indonesia, a launch which began with a "customer campaign", enticing the buyer to make this kind of luxury purchase, outside the scope of their wants and needs.

It is important to get media placement in advertising campaigns right. "Now, we have to be a little smarter for placements," Johny C. Wijaya, marketing manager of LippoMelco, says. For instance, the media scene was, not so long ago, simple, but is now complicated by a proliferation of new commercial television broadcasters. As Wijaya sees it, people are "loyal to the program, not to the station". A problem in placing advertisements within popular programming can be this very abundance of advertisements within commercial breaks.

If there are too many products advertised, or if commercial breaks are too long, then viewers will turn away from the intrusion until the program returns. Without regulation to limit the number or duration of commercial breaks on television, the advertiser can be disadvantaged. "So, in this case, we need advice and information from the agency. Top-ranking programs may be useless for us," Wijaya says.

Media mix is seen as a key to a successful product launch or advertising campaign, as is the creative aspect. Choice of media will depend on the target audience. The product services development division at Bank Bali prefers to use the electronic media, rather than print, to reach housewives and young people.

A final word on adspend. The money that a company spends on advertising may be increasing substantially over the years, but the level of placements may not change much. It can be a matter of advertising becoming more expensive. For example, LippoMelco's adspend is "actually increasing very slowly", taking into account the quantity or frequency of the placement of advertising. The suggestion here is that figures on the adspend can be misleading, if these factors, together with currency inflation, are not taken into account.

Big corporations differ on the option for having in-house advertising divisions. Some feel that it is an impediment to creativity. Having in-house advertising can stunt the creativity of advertisements because, as Santoso of LippMelco (previously with Matari) suggested "independence, with another view" is needed.

A number of rapidly developing banking companies, under pressure from a lot of projects on the go at once, have found that having their own in-house staff developing concepts and designs for products and the corporate culture, connects with their needs. Bank Bali has a small staff, five to six in number, who are university graduates in design, working in-house developing designs -- but they do not deal with the media.

They are charged with developing concepts, for staff uniforms, for the general public image, etc. It is an arrangement that works well for Bank Bali because they are already working within the company. They already know the corporate culture, and they are aware of budget and time constraints. In their experience, it has been very effective to have people in-house.