Monday, January 31, 2011 | Edited by Daniel Moores
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Capital One Bank Reaps Sponsorship Rewards Sponsors and Properties Should Revisit Purpose and Deliverables of Partnerships Since joining Capital One Financial Corp.'s banking unit in March 2010 as director of regional marketing for Louisiana, Suzanne Hamm has worked to take the bank's local sponsorship strategy to the next level. Hamm, former chief marketing officer for Stanford Financial Group Co., has put Capital One Bank's prospective and existing partnerships in the Bayou State under a new lens to ensure the company is getting the biggest bang for its buck. "Like most financial services companies, we are looking at our sponsorship spending and trying to figure out ways to maximize value," said the architect of Stanford's notable sponsorship approach that combined sports ties with cause partnerships. Over the past 10 months, Hamm has concentrated on working with properties to develop collaborative partnerships that provide Capital One with access to one-of-a-kind benefits that add value to the consumer experience and can be leveraged among both internal and external audiences. Among the programs that have been re-engineered under the new approach is the bank's three-year-old sponsorship of Louisiana State University athletics. During the just-concluded college football season, Capital One ran a promotion with the Tigers that achieved unprecedented results. To offer benefits that would resonate with LSU fans across the state, the school worked with the bank to provide a package of never-before-offered experiences, such as the opportunity to participate in the on-field coin toss, personalized jerseys, and a tour of broadcast facilities at Tiger Stadium. Capital One used the once-in-a-lifetime experiences as the grand prizes in its You Rule Death Valley sweepstakes, referring to the nickname for the stadium on the Baton Rouge campus. The primary goal: Drive traffic to the bank's 178 Louisiana branches and help retail employees engage customers. The promotion paid off: More than 40,000 consumers visited a branch to register for the promotion, which could only be entered in person or by downloading a form from a dedicated Web site. "We saw an 18 percent increase in sales customers per banker per day, a phenomenal lift over the previous six months that can only be attributed to You Rule Death Valley," Hamm said. In addition to retail customers, the bank also used the promotion to engage employees, small business customers and commercial accounts, three audiences it had not tried to reach through previous LSU promotions, Hamm said. "We were able to engage every level of customer and executive within the bank from business to commercial, from retail to branch operations. "This is the first promotion of any type that has been able to serve as a point of connectivity to everyone associated with our bank. The internal proof of our success is that Louisiana had more retail executives achieve their bonus goals than all other regions of Capital One Bank combined." The bank also has worked collaboratively with French Quarter Festivals, Inc., which last year designated Capital One as the first-ever presenting sponsor of the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans. Rather than offering visibility, tickets and other basic sponsorship benefits, the event producer developed a custom package tailored to Capital One's needs. "We don't need a lot of signage -- our awareness is off the charts," Hamm said. "We wanted something to illustrate the meaning of our brand." The festival responded with a way for the bank to add value to the attendee experience: sponsorship of the event's shuttle buses. Capital One's support allowed the festival to reintroduce shuttle service for the first time since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. "It's a great way for Capital One to be part of the fabric of the event and add something meaningful," Hamm said. The opportunity to enhance the attendee experience also helped allay any consumer concerns over the 28-year-old event's decision to bring on a presenting sponsor, she added. In addition to LSU athletics and the French Quarter Festival, Capital One Bank sponsors a handful of other properties in Louisiana, including the NBA New Orleans Hornets and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell Oil. Capital One, N.A. -- the banking subsidiary of Capital One Financial Corp. -- was created as a result of several acquisitions, including the 2006 purchase of Hibernia Corp. -- which operated roughly 340 branches in Louisiana and Texas -- and North Fork Bancorporation, Inc., which had roughly 350 retail banking outlets in the New York City tri-state area. In 2009, Capital One purchased Bethesda, Md.-based Chevy Chase Bank, owner of roughly 250 branches in the Mid-Atlantic region. Three other regional marketing directors spearhead sponsorships in their respective areas: Diana LaRocca, Texas; Shannon Finberg, Mid-Atlantic; and Tricia Carter, Northeast. Regional ties outside Louisiana include Hofstra University athletics, the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth, Texas, and New York City's Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex. Capital One Financial Corp., which was founded in 1995 as a credit card issuer, maintains its longstanding title of college football's Capital One Bowl in Orlando, Fla. and signed a multi-year deal to become an NCAA "official corporate champion" in March 2010. (Source: IEG Sponsorship Report, 01/10/11) What's In It For You: Amidst all the "woohooing" of the success of this excellent program, the key to its sale is found all the way down in the 13th paragraph: "Rather than offering visibility, tickets and other basic sponsorship benefits, the event producer developed a custom package tailored to Capital One’s needs." When calling on a serious sponsorship prospect, even if you are selling a specific event, leave the one-sheet, package plans at the office. Your first appointment is all about asking smart excavation questions and LISTENING to your client as they explain what it is they really need. Even if the answer is "more sales," get to the specifics: sales of what, to whom, when, where? There may be elements of your packages back at the office that you can include as relevant in your custom proposal, but it's the customization that's going to net you the bigger sale. |
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Mattress Wars Get Hot and Heavy I read with great interest that the mattress folks have gone to the mattresses. Sealy and Simmons are at war over the fact that the former is introducing a new line with its coils encased in fabric. "Pocketed coils," or "Marshall units," as they are known among bedding wonks, have been the latter's shtick since forever, which is to say 1924, giving it the famous bowling-ball-on-the-bed positioning. It may not be as bloody as a battle between warring Mafia families, or as ruthless as campus politics, but the snarky insults were flying back and forth in The New York Times. #1 Sealy doesn't think giving its consumers another option is such a big deal, Stephanie Clifford reports. "To say it's not a major shift -- of course it is," Simmons CEO Gary Fazio fires back. "Do you not have faith in the brand promise you're making?" "This, to me, feels like the competition is just aggressively going after this," Sealy CMO Jodi Allen tells Clifford. "Consumers could, really, to be honest, care less." We've been shopping for a new mattress for, oh, about a decade. Maybe more. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with the full-sized Sears-o-Pedic Dream Velvet polyurethane model we purchased more than 25 years ago -- except that it has gotten smaller by dint of the two cats and one pit bull insisting on their territorial rights where human legs have every right to go. There have been intense active periods and long passive stretches where we just gave up looking. Nothing has been more difficult in our lives to sort out. Not a house. Not colleges. Not financial services, automobiles, computers, cell phones, surgeons or bottled water. A little newspaper in the countryside where the deadlines are later than 7:30 a.m., perhaps, but that's another story. It all started when I became enamored of Tempur-Pedic ads circa 1990. I got on their mailing list. They must have spent more than the cost of an original twin-sized bed, with a few memory-foam pillows thrown in, trying to get me to buy. The marketing material sounded so...right. I can't give you specifics but I remember walking around for years thinking that I was spending about a third of my life (eight hours a night) on a mattress and I deserved, by golly, to have those eight hours be as restful and restorative as possible, no matter what the cost. (Make that should be spending, according to sleep researchers; unfortunately maintaining the lifestyle that such aspirational thinking supports means that I've actually been spending, like most Americans, about 25% [six hours] of my lifetime sleeping and a good portion of the rest of it earning enough to pay off previous my aspirations.) Anyway, I never pulled the trigger on Tempur-Pedic's many glossy, 90-day free-trial offers. In the end, whatever I bought would have cost at least five times more than the Sears-o-Pedic Dream Velvet and the trusty captain's bed we'd gotten at an unpainted furniture store to support it. Plus, I didn't think I'd have the guts to return it if I didn't like it. And when I finally lay down on a memory-foam Tempur-Pedic in a Sleepy's, I felt I was mired in pond muck. But that's just me. From polls I've seen, the vast majority of memory-foam purchasers feel good about their mattress. Let's go back to the cost factor for a moment because, truth be told, that's what's really been separating us from a purchase. I Googled "Why do mattresses cost so much?" and came up with some interesting insights. Superior technology costs more. There's more steel in the inner-spring mattress than there used to be and steel is expensive. Government regulations drove up the price (what, you think it doesn't cost money to produce models that don't go up in flames every time you drop a lighted cigarette on it?). Then there's the fellow in Arizona who sells "eco-friendly" latex mattresses, purportedly at a price far better than the competition. He says the new latex models are "just bad for business due to their durability." Bottom line: the major manufacturers ratchet up the price because they're not getting the repeat business they used to get. His marketing philosophy is "maybe not, but if you like my deal, you'll tell your cousin Vinnie." Good ol' Consumer Reports says that the margins are usually higher for mattresses than any other product in a furniture store, with gross profit margins of basic models as high as 30% to 40% each for wholesalers and retailers. And those deluxe versions carry margins as high as 50%. You can read more about "Eight Mattress Mysteries" (including the difference between a "warranty" and a "comfort guarantee" if you have a subscription). But what Consumer Reports editors won't do is make a recommendation. Despite extensive testing on memory foam, air, latex and inner spring models, they beg off with the "it-all-comes-down-to-individual-preference" demurral. I did find one fellow who has compiled a bunch of those individual preferences into a database that names names. When he made this very helpful YouTube video, he'd sorted through 8,300 responses. (I'm not sure, as a marketing wag, that I'd have advised him to use SleepLikeTheDead.com as a brand name, but that's what separates the commentators from the doers.) Nick Robinson now has collected nearly 14,000 "consumer experiences" about a whole bunch of foam-memory, air, latex, coil-spring and water-bed brands, as well as ancillary products like mattress toppers, electric blankets and dog beds (yeah, right, who uses those?). The models are rated in a number of categories including price, durability, motion isolation (do you get seasick every time hubby rolls over?), allergies and "less pain." On the grand scale, memory foam, air and latex all score around 80% in user satisfaction. Inner-spring mattresses -- the mainstays of Sealy's and Simmons -- come in at 61%. There was only one category in which users rated inner-spring mattresses better than air, latex or memory foam. Sex. I'm not going to go anywhere with that. I'm just surprised that the mattress companies haven't. In fact, and surprisingly, no mattress advertising I've seen would get anywhere near a "C" rating from the Legion of Decency. Except, perhaps, anything for Bob's Discount Furniture's Bob-O-Pedic. There's nothing salacious about it. You just have to condemn it out of, well, aesthetic decency. (Source: Thom Forbes, Marketing Daily, 01/27/11) How You Can Make Money: An advertising war between Sealy and Simmons means better results for the retailers who take advantage of their co-op programs. It's time to start talking to those retailers about the power of theatre-of-the mind and the benefits of your station before they allocate those funds to print, direct mail, or television. |
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What Stations Are Doing: Country-Loving Foodies Have a New Place to Feast The growing profile and respectability for food trucks around the county has now come to radio, as "Go Country 105" KKGO, Los Angeles, recently unveiled the first-ever radio station food truck. "In an age of unlimited media choices and competition, we're constantly trying to think outside the box to maintain our current fans and reach new listeners," station manager and marketing director Michael Levine said. The truck has been dubbed the "Chuck Wagon" and it is part fun dining, part promotional vehicle for the Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters stations. "Along with incredible food, your lunch might be accompanied by fun promotions, giveaways or even a live performance by a country superstar," KKGO creative director P.J. Ochlan explained. It's already attracting media attention. A local television station was scheduled to feature the Chuck Wagon during its morning news. KKGO air staff won't exactly be flipping burgers inside the truck. The station has teamed with a local catering company. Hungry listeners can follow the truck's daily location, hours and menu on its website. (Source: Inside Radio, 01/24/11) More information on the benefits of using food trucks for marketing is featured in the 12/06/10 issue of Radio Sales Today. You can find the article in the RST archives under the Research Tab on RAB.com. |
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