Looking on from the last article in this series of analyse a real PPC campaign, I last looked at Pets At Home who supply pet food etc. for pet owners. What I found most intriguing about their campaign is about how they target their audience: at price sensitive customers. This does make sense seeing that most people will try and buy the cheapest pet food for their pet. Today, I will be looking at Sony. Sony is a name that has quality to their brand image. Therefore, it is unlikely that they are going to adopt a discounted PPC-style campaign. People buy Sony products not because they are cheap but because they are good (like Apple).
To view Sony’s PPC text advert, I typed ‘sony’ into Google search UK:
Straight away, this text advert begs the question why it is even there? Nearly the whole of the first page of Google is dominated by links to different areas of Sony’s website. Therefore, why do they need to gain an even higher spot on Google for their own brand name?
The answer is to gain as much publicity for a certain product. If Sony did not have a PPC campaign, the only way web users would find Sony VAIO offer is through looking at the computer section of Sony’s website. Sony are using PPC to gain awareness of an offer that is occurring with the Sony VAIO range. However, don’t be fooled into thinking Sony are aiming at web users that are a bit strapped for cash. The offer is simply four years free warranty…No price discounts or extra goodies to go with the laptop.
What I notice about the PPC advert itself is the use of copyright logos ‘®’. This is optional because Sony have not included the ‘®’ on their organic title but only on their PPC advert’s title. This gives the impression that if Sony, Intel and VAIO have been trademarked and copyrighted, they are good products that are likely to try and be copied. Therefore, Sony has exploited the ‘®’ and ‘™’ symbols to make it seem like these products are very popular. It’s a pretty clever text advert.
When I clicked on the advert, I came to the following landing page:
Sony are definitely not trying to aim at price sensitive customers from the fact that no prices are shown above the fold of the landing page. Below the fold are the prices of the two laptops shown starting at £450 ($700)! These are not cheap laptops.
Looking at the design of the landing page, it has a clean look with a bland colour scheme of black and white with areas of slight blue (incorporating the Intel name into the landing page design). Sony have included navigation links at the top left of the landing page to help those that are not interested in the laptops shown or the VAIO series in general. Unfortunately, I am not too keen on this landing page. The landing page does not make me cry out ‘Wow! I want to buy one of those!’ when if you have a scroll through, let’s say, Apple’s website, I would say it for just about all their products. Sony is a huge brand name that is competing against Apple. If they truly want to compete with them, they need to make sure they entice the web user into wanting their products more. For example, don’t just list the specs of the laptop!
Sony could have easily said instead:
- Includes Intel Core i7 for super fast speeds.
- Windows 8 providing the best user-interface.
- A large 14″ display with high resolution.
And so on… It is not difficult to advertise a product well. For Sony, they make their products sound pretty boring unfortunately.
