What Marketers Can Learn From Calendar Girls

In the traditional world of advertising, there are three types of clients: 
1. those with vast sums of money to spend; 

2. those who offer great creative opportunities; 

3. and then there’s everyone else.

At first, I thought that a company like Calendar Girls (a high-class strip tease venue in case you didn’t know) fell into the second category. How wrong I was. The truth is that Calendar Girls has some unique creative challenges that most marketers would struggle with. 

I recently met with Jacqui Le Prou, the Director of Calendar Girls, and asked her a few questions about how the brand is growing and how her distinctive approach to marketing has helped to fuel this growth. I wanted to know how she copes with the obstacles that her brand encounters every day and still comes out smiling. 


Let’s start with the fact that Calendar Girls can’t show their product in any of their advertising. You won’t see any gargantuan billboards on the motorway or full-page ads in the Herald showing off semi-naked, beautiful women, wearing sexy, seductive lingerie because it just wouldn’t be tolerated. Strange then that a lingerie brand like Bendon, which is also built around sex, seduction and power, does exactly that and gets away with it. 

Take a look at this borderline pornographic ad for Bendon’s Elle Macpherson Intimates range:

Calendar Girls would never (ever) get away with showing anything as revealing and risqué as this in any mainstream publication. And if they did, the village idiots would be marching down K-Road, flaming torches and pitchforks in hand, chanting “Who’s gonna save the children? We are!” 

And then there’s the intense scrutiny Calendar Girls is always under. New Zealand’s many media watchdogs always closely inspect Calendar Girls’ advertising, and there’s just no chance that they’d be able to get away with anything remotely controversial. Which doesn’t make much sense given that Calendar Girls is already seen by many as being controversial. So while companies like Hell, Tui and Libra can actively court controversy for the financial benefit of their brand, Calendar Girls can’t.

So how do you market and advertise a company like Calendar Girls when you’re so restricted that you can’t even show your product? And more importantly, what can we learn from what they do?

​It boils down to the simplest of things: the customer experience. 

When I interviewed Jacqui Le Prou, she was adamant that the experience was everything. She went on to say: “I want to give my customers the best possible experience they can ever have. If they come to Calendar Girls and have a terrible experience, they tell everyone they know, yet if the customer has an amazing experience he might only tell a handful of people.” Jacqui knows that word of mouth is vital for the success of her business and that it starts with the experience her customers have. 

Now let’s leave the strip tease world for a moment and look at the customer experience in another environment, such as the hardware industry. I think we can all agree that the hardware industry offers an awful experience at best. From the infinite amount of parity products to the endless miles of maze-like aisles, coupled with the underpaid and unmotivated staff, the in-store experience in the hardware industry is totally unsatisfying. The vast acres that places like Bunnings and Mitre 10 occupy are as bland as the dark side of the moon, and the only time customers ever have a great experience there is when they leave. Yet these companies spend millions of dollars on advertising every year to get customers into their stores, just so they give them a below-average experience. In fact, Mitre 10 and Bunnings spent over $65 million dollars combined on advertising in 2012. Did this immense amount of money change their customer’s in-store experience? Not in the slightest.

Back at Calendar Girls, Jacqui Le Prou knows that no amount of money spent on advertising will change how people perceive her business. As she puts it: “the stereotype is there and people will think what they want to think and no amount of money can change that.”

For Calendar Girls, and so many other businesses in New Zealand, it will always boil down to the customer experience, and that’s awesome news for marketers who want to change the status quo! Almost everything in the retail environment can be controlled and manipulated to make the customer experience something worth talking about, and this makes it an essential marketing tool. I’m not just talking about the in-store experience either – the way customers experience your products and your brand after the purchase is just as important, if not more so. 

Keep this in mind and always consider that in our connected world, one person’s bad experience can become everyone’s bad experience, but a good experience can create someone who actively promotes your brand: an evangelist. What’s that worth to you?

When unique selling points mean nothing to consumers.

I was recently discussing unique selling points with a group of clients and which would matter the most to their customers and which one we should advertise.

It is my belief that the greatest unique selling points are single-minded in their promises, such as the best fuel economy or the most legroom of any airline. However, David Ogilvy’s legendary ad for Rolls Royce had 19. 

View fullsize

Ogilvy's classic ad

And then we saw this ad from Cavalier Bremworth:

​Fire-resistant carpeting sounds like a fantastic USP. But what happens when the rest of your house/apartment/office is burning down? When the ceiling ignites and the fire’s so hot it’s melting the microwave, would anyone really care that the carpet isn’t burning? Or burning less than everything else?

Does the idea of fireproof carpeting mean anything to consumers when they’re buying carpets? No one wakes up one-day thinking “today’s the day the house burns down, I better get fireproof carpets” so why market it?

Maybe someone at Cavalier Bremworth can let me know. 

The Advertising Agency Pitch

If you spend large sums of your money on advertising, and if your profits are dependent on its efficiency, it is your duty to take great pains to find the best possible advertising agency. 

Amateurs do it by cajoling a group of agencies into submitting free campaigns, on speculation. This is called a "Pitch". The agencies which win these "Pitches" are the ones which use their best brains for soliciting new accounts; they relegate their clients to their second-best brains. If I were a client, I would look for an agency which had no new business department. The best agencies don’t need them; they get all the business they can handle without preparing speculative campaigns. 

The sensible way to pick an agency is to employ an advertising manager who knows enough about what is going on in the advertising world to have an informed judgment. Ask him to show you the work and commercials from the three or four agencies he believes to be best qualified for your account. 

Then call some of their clients. This can be particularly revealing. Then invite the chief executive from each of the leading contenders to bring two of his key men to dine at your house. Loosen their tongues. Find out if they are discreet about the secrets of their present clients. Find out if they have the spine to disagree when you say something stupid. Observe their relationship with each other; are they professional colleagues or quarrelsome politicians? Do they promise you results which are obviously exaggerated? Do they sound like extinct volcanoes, or are they alive? Are they good listeners? Are they intellectually honest? 

Above all, find out if you like them; the relationship between client and agency has to be an intimate one, and it can be hell if the personal chemistry is sour. 

Should Brands Use Facebook?

Should Brands Use Facebook? There is no simple answer to this question. 

Every form of mass media that has ever been used for advertising purposes was never created for advertising. When Tim Berners-Lee developed the Internet he didn’t do it so he could see ads popping up. Likewise for the inventors of the television, the radio, and the printing press. Advertising came along after the fact. And this is also true of Facebook.

Traditional marketing has always been about the numbers: 

• How many people are watching a TV show?

• How many people read a magazine?

• How many people listen to a radio station?

The bigger the numbers, the more advertisers are prepared to do to get in front of all those people. And that often means paying heaps to be there.

So you can imagine the excitement amongst the first global brands that advertised on Facebook a few years back. The numbers were huge and the cost to reach them was tiny when compared to producing and flighting an ad for the Superbowl. 

But do those high numbers translate into sales?

Let’s look at an example.

I worked at one of New Zealand’s larger clothing companies. They were really good at measuring the effectiveness of their marketing material and they tracked all their printed and online activity meticulously

So one day we were in a meeting discussing Facebook, and one of the online account managers was very happy because the company had just racked up more than 15000 likes. This made everyone happy, especially top-level management. But those likes were not translating into sales. On average, only 2% of those likes purchased anything from the online store during any given month. And to make matters worse, the company routinely got an 80% or higher purchase rate from their mail-order catalogues.

There are possibly dozens of reasons for this, but the root of the problem is the fact that Facebook is an extremely social place, and thus it comes with its own, often volatile, cocktail of emotions. We go to Facebook to share our lives and to peak into the lives of others. It’s only logical that this environment will have a few psychological factors affecting it.

A recent study done by two German Universities proves this fact. According to their research, Facebook is rampant with envy simply because Facebook has produced an unprecedented platform for social comparison. 

The researchers found that one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most. Research showed that many people have a negative experience with Facebook in regards to envy, which leaves them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry, leading people to leave Facebook or at least reduce their use of the site.

The biggest causes of resentment were:

• Vacation photos - with more than half of envy incidents triggered by holiday snaps on Facebook

• Social interaction was the second most common cause of envy as users could compare how popular they were i.e. how many birthday greetings they received to those of their Facebook friends and how many "likes" or comments were made on photos and postings.

• They found people aged in their mid-30s were most likely to envy family happiness

• While women were more likely to envy physical attractiveness.

These feelings of envy were found to prompt some users to boast more about their achievements on Facebook and to portray themselves in a better light i.e. lie about themselves.

Men were shown to post more self-promotional content on Facebook to let people know about their accomplishments while women stressed their good looks and social lives.

The researchers said the respondents in both studies were German but they expected the findings to hold internationally as envy is a universal emotion.

They said, "From a provider's perspective, our findings signal that users frequently perceive Facebook as a stressful environment, which may, in the long-run, endanger platform sustainability.”

We all know that this research is true. Humanity is a social mix of dizzying highs and dreadful lows and it’s no more apparent than on Facebook.  

So should brands be on Facebook?

What you need to consider is:

1. Why do you want to be on Facebook? If it's for the numbers or because everyone else is doing it then you've made the wrong choice.

2. How are you going to connect? E-Cards, pics of kittens and special offers aren’t enough

3. How will you measure it? Facebook and social media is barely 10 years old so the metrics change all the time.

4. Most important: If you stopped your Facebook activity, how would it impact your business? Does anybody care enough about you being on Facebook?