Here at Brand Strategy we’re always keen to bring you new marketing techniques. The sort of thing that will help your brand stand out from the crowd, something that will create real emotional resonance with your consumers.
And, initially, we were glad to see one brand really pulling out all the (bus) stops to achieve this. San Francisco’s Got Milk? campaign wanted to align its brand values with the down home, bedtime cookies and milk that resonates so well with family values-led America. To that end, it used scent branding to get the message across. The smell of cookies, hot from the oven, was piped through five bus stops in the city to get commuters’ tummies rumbling, and give them a hankering for cookies and milk the moment they got home.
Except these stops were used not by the target demographic of affluent, middle class commuters, but mainly by, as The Times reports today, the poor and the homeless. To this group, it must have seemed more like they were having their noses rubbed in it.
Response to the campaign, The Times claims, was poor, sending some consumers into the warm, cookie-baking embrace of Starbucks and others into high dudgeon over claims that it could possibly aggravate the symptoms of asthma sufferers.
The campaign was ditched one day after it was launched.
