SHAG week in London

I spent a week in London on holiday (and partly on business:). But don't get me wrong - it wasn't a sex holiday! The "SHAG Week" I'm talking about is a marketing campaign slogan that I came across by the London School of Economics, a prestigious business school. It made me stop, raise my eyebrows, come back and read the banner once again more carefully. A perfect marketing solution that did exactly the kind of job it was supposed to do!

This particular banner is an example of Good Cases I referred to in my first posting on this blog. First, the slogan is ambigious and slightly misleading (I hope the title of this posting had the same effect on you; let me know - by way of comments - if it didn't:), which peforms the key function of advertising and marketing communications in general - to catch the readers', viewers', listeners' or browsers' - i.e. consumers' - attention.

It's no secret that we live in a highly competitive environment in terms of the volume of information and news around us. Therefore, it's more and more difficult for producers and disseminators of such information (i.e. marketers) to succeed in getting our attention. Once consumers' attention is (at least for a fraction of a second!) caught, then the next step is to communicate the necessary message in the most effective way.

The students' slogan "SHAG week" does grab our attention and it does it in a very effective way. Good job! And then it does communicate the message - the second line below the slogan, in a smaller font - promotes the sexual health awareness campaign. Well done! The solution, I'd say, is as if taken from a marketing text book. Congratulations, LSE students!

When I joined the glorious ranks of maketing communications professionals back in 2000, my boss then said: "Giedrius, marketing is not a rocket science." Well, it definately isn't. Basically, it's all common sense. But to be a good marketer, it also takes a little bit of creativity. Without it, you're just a sensible person.:)

More "Good Cases" to come from me in the New Year. Merry Christmas everyone!

London, December 2006. Photo by Giedrius CP.