The Real Group Blog

I was once again chillin’ out with my advertising guru friend over beers and somehow (as always), we started talking about Mediacorp’s questionable strategy of spreading the Mocca brand.

 ”What the hell were they thinking?” was my approach to the matter and loving to play devil’s advocate, he pointed out that like it or not, their “all-out” advertising campaign was a huge success. Why so?

Let’s face it. Within a month from its launch, almost every Singaporean has come to know of Mocca.com. People either talk about it or shoot spoof videos of the muscle dude and post them on YouTube (go check them out). In a nutshell, top-of-mind recall was emminent and perhaps that was Mediacorp’s number one objective.

The flip side of the argument however, is that people don’t always talk about or remember Mocca.com in a positive way. No doubt there is top-of-mind recall, but what is the point of that if they don’t recall anything great about it? Countless forums speak of its bad marketing and countless people take a piss out of its silly ad concepts.

Mocca’s tv ads have also been focusing heavily on its video embedding capability. Visiting the website however shows no such ads that have embedded videos of ordinary folks advertising their wares. Is the market not ready for this feature? Did Mediacorp play too many cards at one shot too soon?

Perhaps the 1o min video in “The Ries Report” (http://www.riesreport.com/index.php?month=10) is enough to illustrate where Mediacorp went wrong in their marketing strategy. Al Ries (marketing guru) elaborates on the difference between a commonly used ”big-bang” approach versus a “slow build up” approach, and why waiting for the right time (tipping point) to advertise “all-out” will yield a much greater ROI.

Our conclusion: Mediacorp doesn’t have a baaaaaad product (though we love saying it). The only thing that was reeeeeeally bad was their timing. The moment Mocca.com was launched, they almost immediately blasted the whole Singapore 24/7 with advertisments that have only served to set expectations way high. When people went to the website and realized that “it ain’t that great”, credibilty fell. And everyone knows that when a new product emerges in the market and loses credibility from day one, it’s going to take a miracle to gain it back.

What they could have done was to simply sell the fact that people can now turn to an online classifieds platform as opposed to the traditional newspaper classifieds. That capability already sells itself. Afterwhich, they can then focus on selling their search function which should really be their back-bone core feature because the truth is, searching for an item over the newspaper classifieds really just sucks.

When they start to win over early adopters and the early majority (hence stabalizing their initial user-base), they can then execute their “all-out-blast-the-whole-Singapore” advertising approach, not just because they have the easy means to, but because by then, they would have had a more solid product and a stronger user-base to back up their claims. And over time, when the masses have further grown to accept and approve the website, market the video embedding feature, which by then, should result in a higher acceptance and adoption rate.

But with all that has been said and done, alas…it might already be too late for them…

We’ll see…