Quinnipiac Assignment 12 – ICM 527 – Strategic Campaign Plan Formatting and Differences
This week, we looked at some more campaigns, from InScope, Toms Shoes, and the Century Council.
Comparing InScope, Toms, and the Century Council Plans
InScope, is a “user-friendly search engine is dedicated to finding peer-reviewed, academic research among Belcher Rollins’ publications, back-dated to 1960. This equates to 27 million document entries.” (Page 4) Note: Belcher Rollins is a publisher.
The campaign for InScope focused on planning. The idea was to become and remain an online solution for librarians and academics. Enumerated goals (Page 9) were:
- “To generate substantial interest in InScope from academic librarians, in order to support sales: positioning it as the best in the market and ‘a new generation in research’
- To generate understanding and support for InScope among industry influencers and opinion leaders
- To strengthen Belcher Rollins’ position as the brand leader in international academic publishing, underpinning its reputation for innovation and quality
- To manage communications around contentious issues within scholarly publishing: (a) pressure on academic financial resources and criticisms of profiteering by publishers, (b) the lobby for open access publishing and (c) international censorship”
Events were planned with an eye toward attracting media coverage. There were a large number of internal communications planned, in order to keep the key stakeholders informed, e. g. librarians, academics, academic budget holders (the people with the money), and the media. The budget exceeded £2M, which currently converts to over $3.8M.
The Toms campaign, in contrast, had a markedly different look and feel. InScope was traditional and felt conservative, whereas Toms felt somewhat casual and even crunchy and hippie. Toms is a shoe creator and seller (they also sell other accessories such as purses and necklaces). The company’s mission is to donate a pair of shoes to charity for every pair purchased. The donated shoes are sent to children in countries such as Argentina. As the plan itself noted, on Page 30, “When a customer interacts with the TOMS brand, it is more than just buying shoes.”
The Toms objectives were to increase sales and repeat purchases, and to boost brand awareness. For Toms, the tactics included using the opening of new stores as events, although, in contrast to InScope, these events were not touted as a means of involving the media. Further, the Toms plan acknowledged the organization’s nontraditional stance in the media as being an opportunity (Page 15). Other tactics were even more grass roots, involving an email list, a shoe drop, and even posters. The Toms budget clocked in at a far more modest $17,420, although a lot of the biggest ticket items (such as the use of a plane for the shoe drop) were not enumerated among the planned expenses. Planning seemed looser, perhaps in keeping with the organization’s more relaxed overall philosophy.
For Century Council, the main goal was to kick off a new website to reach collegians in particular and help change attitudes about drinking. A further goal is to reduce underage drinking and drunk driving. The plan emphasized segmentation, whereby college students were divided by age and by activity (e. g. athletes, members of Greek letter organizations, etc.). The website would be specially tailored for each participating school. The tailoring was broken down further for age groups, as the message differed, being zero tolerance for those under 21 years of age, and responsible drinking for those over. The budget was in excess of $8.9M. In some ways, this campaign split the difference between InScope and Toms, at least in terms of presenting a strict and staid presence like InScope did, yet relying less on traditional media (one of the ways Century Council was looking to reach its publics was through a pizza box advertisement), like Toms did.
Each plan had a lot of the components of what we have been studying all along, from careful research into publics to clear-cut goals and objectives. Budgets were carefully laid out, although the one for Toms was incomplete. The timetables for all three campaigns seemed realistic.
Reading the Plans and Recognizing their Components
There were some language alterations between the plans as presented and our readings. InScope in particular used a lot of synonyms. Goals were enumerated as aims, for example. All three campaigns laid out their SWOT analyses clearly, using an easy to follow grid format. Evaluations for all of the campaign plans were clearly labeled.
Formatting and Stylistic Takeaways applied to the ILSC
The Toms plan in particular took advantage of a stylistic look and feel which mirrored the organization’s view of itself. The plan contained images of the founder, Blake Mycoskie, in Argentina, with children that the organization has helped. These images helped to add an emotional component to the campaign plan that was missing from the other two plans.
The Century Council plan was more generic-looking which seemed to reflect almost a PTA budget kind of communication. This tied in fairly well to the campaign being related to what happens on college campuses. By having the formatting look this way (and it may not even have been intentional), the campaign called to mind straightforward academics and straight talk.
The InScope campaign, in contrast, was poorly formatted. Word allows for headings which make navigating a document a lot easier – the campaign didn’t have those. The spreadsheet denoting the timetable was a bit wide and threw off other formatting. It was walls of text with little formatting or emphasis, and no imagery to speak of. Word also makes it easy to create a dynamic table of contents whereby a reader can click on a part of the table and be taken directly to the desired section of a document. The campaign did not take advantage of these simple yet powerful formatting tools – the campaign’s typist could use an intermediate course in Microsoft Word!
For the ILSC (Institute for Life Sciences Collaboration), the website is already rather bland. They are doing interesting things, such as teaching youth around the world, possibly finding cures for all kinds of fatal diseases, and potentially saving lives in Ghana. This is exciting stuff, yet the walls of text make the site look industrial, sterile, and unfeeling. There can be stylistic symmetry between the campaign plan and the look and feel of what the ILSC website should be all about. The ILSC needs to show its heart.
Visual impressions matter, particularly online. There is no reason why the ILSC cannot get started by making the campaign plan easy to read, well-indexed, and visually appealing.
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