A niche of one

by Mark Nagurski, June 17th, 2008

Really Practical Uncle Sam Billboard

Anybody who has been to one of my marketing planning workshops has probably heard me explain the importance of good targeting using the ‘one man billboard’ idea.

Imagine you were driving down a street and saw a billboard that read: “Hey John Brown, STOP. You need to buy our product.” You’d slam on the breaks, probably cause a pileup and undoubtedly want to know a little more about the product in question (assuming your name is John Brown of course, not so effective otherwise).

A slightly less pointed version would be to ensure that all of your marketing communications were reaching out towards - and clearly addressing - a well defined group. You can find a twist on the idea in this past post.

Anyway, as you might have guessed someone has taken the idea of targeting to the next level.

As reported by two Andys (Nulman and Sernovitz) amongst others; Wilkes University is in the second year of its personalized ad campaign that targets individual prospective candidates from local high schools by name. Billboards, posters, gas pumps, pizza boxes and even an MTV ad have all been used Wilkes University advertisement - via Adrants to target as few as seven students.

Of course, the knock on effect is that the campaign becomes notable in itself, differentiates Wilkes from the mountains of glossy prospectuses (prospecti?) and makes minor celebrities out of the chosen few. All good for word-of-mouth and all good for raising the university’s profile in those areas.

And in a very competitive marketplace, Wilkes is positioned as “an innovative and fresh kind of school” and one that takes a specific interest in their students.

Counterintuitive it may be, but targeting the smallest niche sometimes attracts the most attention

Useful link No. 1: PDF detail of creative from agency 160 over 90

Useful Link No. 2: Adrants article