“We had some hesitation” about the characters, acknowledged Charles Lapointe, the president and chief executive officer of Tourisme Montréal. But the bureau felt a strong need to break through the sameness of most tourism marketing: the glossy shot of a gleaming downtown skyline, or of smiling people living it up on a restaurant patio. “Every city does that, every region,” observed Mr. Lapointe. “A nice landscape in Tuscany is as nice as a nice landscape in the Muskokas, I would think, so we have to become more creative and original.” He paused. “I’ll tell you next year if it was successful.”
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A BONDING TREND
The Toronto Trending project is part of a wave of marketers seeking to forge strong relationships with people by becoming useful, rather than being mere purveyors of goods and services.
This week, Canadian Tire took the wraps off a website loaded with how-to videos that were shot at a house the company had purchased and is in the midst of fixing up. HouseOfInnovation.ca currently has about 20 short videos offering step-by-step demonstrations of some of the improvements the Canadian Tire team has made to the house, from installing a touch-sensitive faucet to using a portable handheld nailer and stud finder to install baseboards in the kitchen.
The website of Procter & Gamble’s Pampers brand diapers seeks to form a bond early in pregnancy with mothers-to-be, with a section walking them through the entire nine-month development of their fetus: from the early formation of the placenta to advice on what happens if the umbilical cord gets wrapped around the baby’s neck. The website continues the relationship with parents by offering additional advice and tools – such as .pdf files of certificates that can be printed off for children who are successfully potty trained. (There are, of course, enough links to P&G products, such as training pants and wipes, to make it worth the company’s time and effort.)
“There is a real movement from marketers and agencies to make brands as meaningfully useful for people as possible,” noted Shelley Brown, CEO of Crispin Porter + Bogusky Canada, who acknowledged the change was not being driven by altruism. “You have to [become meaningful], otherwise they’ll shut you out of their space: ‘What are you doing for me other than selling to me?’ “
Now, rather than merely pushing out a message, Ms. Brown noted that marketers are trying to decode, “ ‘What do they need from us? How can we help? How can we be useful? What can we give them? How can we be generous?’ I think there’s a whole notion of brands now just being generous. And that doesn’t necessarily mean 50-cent-off coupons.”
