Kudos to Liz Bastiaanse Hamren on her AdAge “CMO Strategy” interview that came out today. Great comments on the role of PR, Channel Marketing….and CreativeFeed!
When it comes to launching consumer technology products, Liz is a consummate pro. We’re thrilled with the work we’ve done together over the past year. And mentioning us in her AdAge interview was not bad.
Ad Age: Had Plantronics focused much on consumer marketing before? And was that the challenge?
Ms. Hamren: The marketing challenge is to communicate effectively how good the products work…We what we wanted to do was communicate to a broader audience how good those products are. This is why I brought in Creative Feed as an agency because I felt like they strategically got what we were doing, and they could also execute in a really fast way. That’s what we needed — that bridge between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.
Ad Age: So you hired the agency and then created a marketing campaign?
Ms. Hamren: We developed the messaging for both of the two new products, and to give you some context, Plantronics launched two products into the high-end [of the headset market] at the same time. The first, the Voyager Pro, launched in April as a performance product. We developed a video used for both consumers and retailers and created channel-marketing collateral from end caps to shippers that communicated the message that this product was engineered for sound quality. The marketing is all about bringing out the science behind the product.
Then we launched the Discovery 975 in August, and that was at the other end of the spectrum in the premium space — a product meant to be the essence of technology and design. We created a campaign called “Ingeniously Simple.” It has amazing audio quality, but in a much smaller and more discreet form factor that’s easier to take on and off.
They’re both high-end products at $99 and above. We divided the whole market by people who only care about performance, and so here is this form factor, battery life and speaker designed to be worn all day. And then for other people who still want a high-end headset, but want it to be more discreet, easier to take on and off, for them, we have this other product. [Then] the two don’t cannibalize each other. It’s been an interesting strategy to take the high-end part of the market and segment it this way.
Ad Age: How do you figure out the media mix for a niche tech brand like Plantronics? It’s obviously not a “Desperate Housewives” TV buy, but what is it?
Ms. Hamren: The two things to really focus on are public relations and channel marketing. These decisions are made at retail, so it’s about working closely with channel products where the product is sold to create great campaigns with them at retail. Everything from promotions and shippers and great creative in all the channels, whether that’s Best Buy, Radio Shack, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile stores, and then also online, where Amazon is a big channel for us.
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