Maintain Store Distinctiveness in Ad Groups

A retail mall operator or a downtown association might produce advertising and other marketing campaigns which feature your store as part of a group. The financing of the campaigns might be covered by your rent or membership levies, so it could seem to you there’s no additional cost. If you start thinking that, you could be wrong. Consider other potential costs—such as to your reputation.
     Let’s say you’ve a car dealership in an auto mall. A set of studies at University of Washington and University of Southern California explored what could happen to the reputation of your brand if a safety recall is announced on a rival brand. As the researchers suspected, a bad impression spreads. Consumers’ negative chatter about a recalled car model causes an increase in consumers’ negative chatter about other models in that same brand and, to a lesser, but still important degree, to models of other brands.
     The cross-brand spread will be greater if you’ve not sufficiently maintained your brand’s distinctiveness. That’s where the danger of a unified car mall advertising campaign carries risks.
      Teaming up with other retailers to fund a media campaign can save you money and allow you to diversify marketing dollars. Just be sure your store's distinctive advantages are featured in the advertising. With retailer advertising groups, fund a set of advertising messages, not only a single message. Different ads can feature different distinctive features of the ad group members’ businesses.
     Any distinctions can make a difference. In a soft goods store, you can distinguish even items that are common commodities by the ways in which you display them or offer them in combinations. In the studies, the spread of bad reputation from an auto model recall was less to brands that were seen as from a different country.
     In drawing distinctions, I do recommend stopping short of schadenfreude—delighting in the misery of others. Let’s go back to the auto mall example and the January 2010 Toyota recall of eight of its best-selling models. Promptly afterwards, Ford and GM dealers began offering $1,000 bonuses to any consumers who wanted to trade in their Toyotas.
     That sort of thing could undermine negotiations about subsequent cooperative ad campaigns.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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In Ad Group Ads, Feature Your Advantages
Present Commodity Products to Distinguish
Sell Exclusive Offerings by Combining
Brag About Your Retailing Humility