5-Hour Energy shows small business marketers how to leverage brand strength
Posted by Dave Mace at 5:27 pm
Right in the midst of the holidays and college football bowl season, 5-Hour Energy has kicked up its promotions a notch by appealing to higher-level benefits of the product: convenience and motivation.
Prior to this new round of television spots, everything I saw and heard on TV or on Jim Rome’s radio show was about the performance of the product in helping the user avoid fatigue and post-high let-downs from soda and coffee. If you haven’t seen the spots, you can view them here: http://www.5hourenergy.com/commercials.asp.
But these new ads point out that 5-Hour Energy can be used in the morning as a replacement for coffee that takes time to make. So, whether you never get up early, you have trouble getting started or you just oversleep, you can reach into the cabinet for 5-Hour Energy instead of hassling with making coffee.
What I like most about the brand taking this tack is that it doesn’t presume to adopt an entirely new persona (ala Subway serving breakfast) but rather elevates the conversation from the product benefit of increased energy to a couple of things that hit home with many people: not having enough time to make coffee and not wanting to get up and get going to work or the gym.
After all, “feel like going to the gym again,” is a nice value proposition, even for someone who doesn’t care so much for getting an afternoon energy boost on the job.
My prediction for 5-Hour Energy is that the brand will successfully leverage its equity built in effectiveness and superiority over its rivals. This means the brand has a good chance of capitalizing on its current promotional campaign that focuses on inherent, yet higher-level benefits and staving off new entrants to the market.
Small business owners would do well to learn this lesson. If even a rapidly-growing and developing brand cuch as 5-Hour Energy can tweak its strategy mid-stream, it is probably advantageous for all of us to consider how to leverage our brand strength while not diverting from our core brand values.
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