malonelorence-blog1 - Tumblr blog

[malonelorence-blog1]

Nudging with Flo

I believe it was 2008 or 2009 that I was relaxing on a Friday afternoon after school, happy the week was over, and anticipating weekend festivities, when I saw a commercial from Progressive and noticed this extremely odd character. At first, I was annoyed. Plain and simple, very annoyed. Her exuberance and optimism for insurance was completely forced down my throat. I wanted to call Progressive and let them know that there isn't a soul on this planet that cares about insurance one-tenth as much as Flo.

To be honest, this feeling of annoyance lasted for at least 7 to 8 years. I honestly felt like I saw Flo at least once or twice a month for every month since 2008. There was no escaping her wrath. I honestly had some pretty mean thoughts about why a person would get this excited over insurance. I thought Progressive was trying too hard to annoy people that they couldn't forget Flo.

Well, it worked. After nudging Flo into my brain for over a decade, it worked. I needed to buy insurance for several different items. Absolutely first though that came to my mind when I was searching for insurance was low and behold, FLO. I even remembered the whole 30 second commercial about it. Flo was on the beach with 3 coworkers when 2 nearby people were talking about how they wish a company would combine all different insurances to make it easier. That was the exact predicament I was in.

It may have taken 10 years for Flo to finally wear me down after continuous nudging, but it worked. This kind of nudging is bizarre. I mean who would annoy customers to get money. It's certainly one of the most unique tactics I've seen where nudging continuously, in an annoying way, paid off.

[malonelorence-blog1]

Corona: The brand that symbolizes it's time to kick back, relax, and enjoy the sunny day. In my experience, corona is usually purchased when there is an outdoor activity that many friends will be involved in. Just envisioning the bottle, I recall 100 degree sunny days on the beach in Florida or the lakes in Louisiana. I don't believe changing Corona's marketing strategy will help them in anyway. At the time of the case, they're gaining ground. No need to change what works. Their brand and the way society views them is already in a highly perceived way. Any changes to revamping the image I believe would hurt their sales. At the time of the case, in 90's, their approach doesn't seemed to have changed much to today in 2021 with their beach easy approach. It seems that they have continued to pitch the "beach, sunny, easy" vibes as they featured Snoop Dogg in their latest commercials.

Heineken: This is the brand that doesn't quite capture a particular image in my mind. I associate with watching sports and drinking on the couch. In 1995, Heineken spent nearly 6x what Corona spent on media advertising. Despite this additional advertising, they started to see the gap between them in Corona get smaller in sales. It goes to show that just because you spend a lot on advertising doesn't mean it will work. You have to captivate an audience with a particular theme. They took a more attack mode approach to advertising addressing other imports as "fads". They continuously boasted about how their product is superior quality. Most people don't think that of Heineken in my experience. They had import drops due to the weakening US dollar in 1987 compared to Dutch Guilder.

Corona has surpassed Heineken in 2019 year! Corona had 2.4 billion in sales compared to Heineken's 2.3 billion in sales making Corona the largest import beer vendor in the US. Their efforts have paid off, and it's largely due to their amazing marketing efforts that just entice people to relax.