Viva’s Blog: Learn from chocolate?

Happen to see the pink and green CHOC on car bumpers, airplane banners, tweets, and everywhere these past few weeks leading up to Easter? Malley’s, the Cleveland chocolate company, understands the importance of presenting their brand frequently and consistently, particularly when their target audience is in the market for their products.

Successfully building a brand requires both creativity and consistency of message. It’s all about differentiating your product or service from all others in a manner that’s relevant and compelling to your audience. For Malley’s, it’s high quality chocolate products, from a local company, that are conveniently available. And, that’s just step 1. Step 2 is devising messaging and a plan to deliver it in a way that’s clear, concise and consistent.

Malley’s understands that their ads are just one or two of the 3,000 that the average consumer gets bombarded with every day. How do they effectively breakthrough to their audience and drive traffic to their stores and web site? By being painstakingly consistent and delivering the same message in a very simple manner. Have you seen their moniker, CHOC? It’s the fun symbol that they created that consistently appears in their well-known brand colors everywhere.

Wonder why more and more people are doing Malley’s advertising for them? Because Malley’s created a promotion that their audience likes. If your car is spotted with a Malley’s chocolate oval CHOC sticker on it, then you could win $500. Even if you don’t win the monthly grand prize, if a Malley’s rep stops you after seeing your bumper sticker, you are eligible to receive a $25 Malley’s gift certificate. Simple. Easy. Fun. It’s a clever way to engage your audience with your brand AND deliver frequent, consistent brand impressions.

Has Malley’s moved on to a new message or campaign? Nope. Instead they identify new and fun ways to further promote CHOC.

Follow Malley’s lead. Develop your brand, create messaging, and then stick to it.

As seen in Crain’s:
http://www.crainscleveland.com/section/blogs05