This Week in Marketing Strategy: Tic Tac Adventures, Abercrombie Strategy Shift, CMO Social Tips

Welcome to the September 5, 2016 edition of This Week in Marketing Strategy. Here I’ll highlight a few articles, blog posts or interesting pieces from around the web that are newsworthy or trending over the last one to two weeks. My goal is to provide you with the latest news and thinking that is worthy of your attention.

First up: Tic Tacs are Little Adrenaline Junkies in The Martin Agency’s Charming Ads, courtesy of adweek.com. Tic Tac has a new ad campaign—Little Adventures. In the campaign, the breath mints are personified and take on a variety of adventures that aren’t so little. From diving with sharks to jumping the Grand Canyon, Tic Tac makes a clear point about the benefits of a mint that’s only small on the outside.

The ads are simple, clear, visual and memorable. Which is your favorite?

Part of the brand’s clever “Go Little” positioning (almost like a modern-day version of “Think Small”), the clips are completely ridiculous, and thoroughly enjoyable—stupid and carefree, yet somehow on message. read more and watch at adweek.com

Second up: Abercrombie & Fitch Might Have Made a Huge Mistake, courtesy of businessinsider.com. Over the last year, Abercrombie has moved away from a teen target and instead has been working to age-up the brand. Hence, they’ve been pursuing 18-25 year olds with toned down imagery. This is in contrast to what initially made the brand great: owning sexy.

It seems the new marketing strategy hasn’t been successful, with heavy price promotion in progress. The promotions highlight the brand’s struggle to age up and compete with Gap, Zara and H&M for a more sophisticated consumer.

I especially like this article because it raises some very important strategic questions. Did Abercrombie decide to pursue a new target without establishing a compelling point of difference versus new competition? If Abercrombie’s equity is in sexy teens (and loud music and cologne if you visited their stores), doesn’t this seem like a turnoff for a slightly older age group that now wants to grow up?

“While the shift to an older customer is a strategy for Abercrombie, we see limited reasons for older customers to shift back to a ‘teen’ brand and, frankly, there are better brands and lifestyles for the 20+ customer to focus on,” Beder wrote. read more at businessinsider.com

Our third and final article this week: Three Steps to Personal Social Media Success for CMOs, courtesy of cmo.com. Lee Odden from TopRank Marketing provides suggestions for CMOs wondering if they should be on social media. Lee outlines good reasons to be active on social including:

• being visible to the community
• meeting expectations to be active
• being aware and hearing the voice of the customer
• staying up to date and understanding social dynamics

Lee also includes a few tips for how CMOs can be effective on social media. Setting specific goals, curating useful content, and interacting in an engaging manner will help set you up for success.

Clearly, many senior marketing executives and CMOs are still working out what an appropriate level of social engagement looks like. To help provide perspective, I reached out to several senior executives for their views on a basic question: “Should senior marketing executives be active on social networks?” read more at cmo.com

Those are a few of the popular and trending pieces in the news related to marketing strategy. They caught my attention and hopefully they are useful to you.

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Images from adweek.com, businessinsider.com, cmo.com.