Reimagining a 132-Year-Old Brand
Group: Alyssa Smith, Maryam Al-Haddad, Regina Peña, Scott Bowman, Jobert Adan
Type: Pitch Project Competition
With Energy…
Our task for the 15 week long semester in Spring of 2015 was to breath life back into a brand/product. The product was called The Los Angeles Times Marketplace, a subdivision of the LA Times. This website/print product hosted advertising content from local stores in LA by region and category, but almost no one was using it. So how do you take a product on its last leg and turn it into something that millennial 18-25 would use?
Our group of 5 energetically took on this project and saw it through from brand strategy to content creation. During our brand strategy we had:
43 qualtrics quantitative survey responses
68% Female, 32% Male and 22 of 43 were college juniors
10 1-on-1 survey
Insights:
1. The quality of the product pictures determine the quality of the product
2. People will impulse buy when their towns title is on the product
3. The word Marketplace elicits a nostalgic feeling of community, family and older times
4. You don’t buy a home until you see it
With Creativity…
Taking our research, insights, and positioning into account along with a little feedback we creatively came up with the “Welcome Home Campaign.” We wanted to make the Marketplace a brand with purpose and meaning in the LA community. Insights 3 and 4 really drove our ideas. Our main goal was to build awareness for the brand and product so we planned on doing this through a pay-it-forward campaign and a good neighbor fund. The idea of the pay-it-forward campaign was to have the Marketplace randomly pay for someone’s entire shopping cart while asking them to pay-it-forward to the next customer in line. The good neighbor fund would be geared toward giving the homeless a second chance by buying them houses and getting them back on their feet. The hope was that these campaigns would have a lot of earned media that would eventually drive people to the website.
With Versatility…
The beginning of the product was all about strategy and I personally really enjoyed it. I was able to figure out my personal way of going about a problem, which is sitting, reflecting, listening, writing and then responding. I personally worked a lot on the creative side toward the end project too. I edited the manifesto video and partially mocked up a website. We pitched the project to an LA Times employee and our professors on April 28th, 2015.