The hype leading up to the launch, hitting your target.

One of my current clients has been working on raising some hype for one of their products.  It made me think of the hype that companies raise in order to grow awareness.  One recent campaign that is a few  years old is the Android campaign where pre-launch commercials were produced and run non-stop through every major event.  I remember watching them through the Superbowl and every other major event.  When the phone was finally released the brand had been established and the consumers knew everything about it.  It seems to have lived up to exactly 89.3% of the hype.  It was positioned to rival the iphone and is sorta kind of doing that.

In the outdoor and sports world this type of things is a little more difficult to do.  Consider this: if The North Face wanted to launch a new type of coat that would be the end all be all for any type of activity (never gonna happen but I'm just saying).  How would TNF position this?  First of all you would have to consider the fact that not everyone is going to purchase your product.  Your target market is very defined.  Someone in Arizona or Florida is not going to need your product.  With a phone, everyone buys a phone and wants a phone.  This is not the same with outdoor products.  TNF would launch a huge campaign to hit their demographics but the ROI on that investment wouldn't be very good.  Conversely if TNF targeted their campaign to the traditional outdoors outlets they would probably sell the exact same amount of product.  It's like I've said before, those who are going to buy it are going to buy it.

This leads again to the question of how do you hype a product before you launch it if your results are going to be the same without the additional costs of the campaign?  The answer is long and murky but here is the brief version of it all.

Currently the mentality of the "next big thing" doesn't really exist in the outdoors community.  It doesn't make sense to do it.  The results will be the same without the spend.  Gun manufacturers have attempted this but it requires someone following the industry intently.  The best way to hype an upcoming product or brand is to piggy back on what is currently being done by the company.  There are plenty of really good campaigns out there but instead of completely focusing all the efforts on the next product only about 20 - 30% of the focus should be used on the next product.  While a complete campaign will need to be run for the product it's much safer to utilize the space of a current product that is doing really well.  One example of this is in the outdoor clothing space.  Take my old favorite Under Armour.  What Under Armour has done is utilized what they have done in the past, leveraged their brand and put together small campaigns announcing or advertising upcoming products.  A great example is ski and snowboarding clothing.  There was never a big campaign or even a lot of money spent, rather by inserting it as an option or "see our winter line" on their website they were able to spark interests and create the next "big" for them.

It's a tough industry to revolutionize.  That's why building large amounts of hype just doesn't work.  You have to parlay your current hype of one product into the next thing that is coming along.  Unless the overall product is really something that is show stopping it's not going to be worth the costs of creating the hype.  The outdoors market is finicky and has to be treated as such.  Make sure your campaign is concerted and hitting the right target.  One proven way is to utilize other products that already have awareness.