Missed Social Media opportunities – When Men Speak ‘Woman’
Hello my name is Jennifer, and I am an addict. Like most marketers I’m a true sucker for a good campaign in any medium. But I have a secret thing for radio, a seriously underrated channel in its ability to deliver a sucker punch to a self selected audience. Great creative, well executed, particularly with finely judged humour is a win/win/win for the client, the station and the listener. Tremendous cut through can be achieved, setting the brand apart in the minds of listeners driven nuts by endless ads for “Wet and forget”.
So kudos to the folks at South Pacific Timber for their radio campaign playing to a primarily female audience on More FM.
With a few notable exceptions, the woman of the household is not the primary timber purchaser. However, a significant number of renovation design decisions are made by women. So with a product such as timber mouldings, which occupy a gender no-man’s land so to speak, the lumber muffins really do have to speak ‘woman’.
Enter baritone Kev, the guy from South Pacific Timber who has “learned to speak woman”. The concept occupies a narrow and treacherous strip between patronisation and cliché.
But Kev deftly segues from his pilates class to hair extensions with a deadpan delivery which highlights both the comedic aspects of a man ‘speaking woman’, and the fact that the wood guys at South Pacific are actually trying, but know it’s always going to be a tall order.
As a fully signed up member of the target audience and owner of the last unrenovated villa in Mt Eden, the campaign works for me. SPT would now be top of mind for architectural moulding or new floorboards. Prior to this campaign I would have defaulted to Carter Holt Harvey or Placemakers, both alienating environments for the timber newby, and particularly women.
As a marketing campaign addict, it’s disappointing to me that SPT hasn’t taken the campaign just a little further. Their website remains as blokey as their competitors’ with no welcome from Kev to the girls. There is nothing to reassure the new lumber purchaser that this is a woman friendly environment or to reflect the fact that women may take a different approach to choosing timber products. Sadly SPT’s Facebook page is also blank. There is so much unexploited social media promise here. A call to action added to the advertisements could have SPT building their community of renovators online.
As Kev says “When I told one of the girls from pilates how to get hair dye out of white towels, she was so excited she friended me on Facebook”. It’s funny, but it’s not just funny, it could also work, with a tongue in cheek creative execution online, extending their marketing reach within a notably female friendly environment.
Attention South Pacific Timber – Get Kev on Facebook. I’d ‘like’ him!
