A relatively sure and definitely working approach in such cases is the quick play around with the logo! This playing around led to the first vision communicating coziness and comfort, while the next one carried on with the fast service and polite staff.

Actually, the above advantages are characteristic for many competition fast food restaurants, which brought about the next vision focusing on the tasty and healthy food.

The communicating of food automatically led to the next smiley saying how juicy and lean it was.

After the outdoor campaign start, the agency had much more time to develop a long-term communication platform. Based on the product advantages, which are practically characteristic for the entire fast food restaurant category, the team made up several scenarios for short TV commercials with an acute sense of humor in order to discern the brand’s advantages from those of the category. The scenarios were elaborated in storyboards by a huge team of professionals, and then the agency started conducting group discussions and in-depth interviews. Each scenario was put to the test before focus groups of both sexes and at the age of 23-29 years and 30-45 years with average and high income, regular restaurant customers, etc. In other words, each step was measured and done by the book. As wise books read, you can never know the end of the story, unless you have written it! In this particular case, however, the story was being written by many people. Focus groups killed anything childish. None of the stories was understood by the wide audience. The whole team of proved professionals was replaced by another team. Several months of work collapsed for a couple of days. This is a true story fact!

Have you ever had the feeling that something is happening backwards? The work on this project enlightened me that in one half of the Earth there will always be night … or vice versa. The last time I went to a restaurant of this chain to meet a friend of mine I found out that you can still order your Coca Cola with lemon and exchange some words about what is actually happening on the market in a relatively calm atmosphere. Not only on the market of fast food restaurants, but on the market as such. The world experience holds many examples of Marketing co-operation or Co-branding, which has developed the image of some trademarks in a direction appropriate for both sides (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3)! If you are aware of the psychological fact that most commercials are working (selling, successfully communicating, etc.) thanks to their humor, unlike the free information contained in the news of most media such as: ”Old man farted and knocked down a skyscraper”, you have a real chance of creating a working commercial. What happened after the quality research of TV commercial conceptions… everyone from the team felt as if they were walking in the shadow of an elephant in a Swarowski store. Some colleagues emigrated to Uganda, others began watching old movies with Sylvester Stallone, etc., which eventually led us to the thought… „We will not shoot a commercial for the Happy restaurants”! And so… while saying we won’t do it , we shot all characteristic advantages in a 45 second clip without cut …and without the focus groups’ opinion!

Emotions and established habits lie in the basis of a great part of everyday decisions and choices we all make consciously or subconsciously. About five years ago the number of internet users in Bulgaria was about one million people and many advertisers thought that internet is a weak and risky communication channel, even though there was already a tendency for participation in promotions through “new” mechanisms and communication channels. When your task is to sale one million promo products for seven weeks to an audience between 20 and 30 years of age from both sexes, you weigh the “risk” of “insecure” internet media and decide whether to play or not. It was a risky move back then, because no one on the local market had paved the way in this media as a main channel for participation in promotions. It is natural to have a back-up plan for parallel participation, though in the end 88% of the activity was generated through internet and only 12% through SMS messages. Practically, today there is hardly any BTL activity which relies on cutting, collecting and sending etiquettes or package logos. Participation through unique codes of promo products have become a steady tendency through which one can easily sale substantial quantities of goods and services as long as there is a good knowledge of the concrete market, media, audience, etc. By symbolic investments in television, the focus was easily moved to internet. After seven weeks of different games for girls and boys, the web page visits reached eight hundred thousand. Today, internet users in our country exceed three million people, yet a main part of advertisers, advertising agencies and media shops only cover My Space, Facebook and Second Life. I don’t even want to mention the number of world players well aware of the electronic sports, cyber culture and contemporary trends in the interactive PR… but with pleasure and respect I can say that for me electronic games have been something much more than fun for many years now.

Perhaps it was my love for electronic games or my vision of contemporary communication which made me plunge into the RIA technologies and online business. Perhaps the fact that a great number of my friends and business partners spend a lot of time behind the keyboard made me seriously consider not only what is happening to the global communication, but also what lies before humankind in a mental, emotional and purely human aspect. Perhaps right at this moment the game ends for someone and starts for someone else.

I have conducted surveys on TV scenarios many times, and I have also worked for the Milka brand. I have experience with not well finished storyboards and beheading of good ideas, produced by good professionals, exactly at group discussions. Pretty often people who are in the marketing business depend on giant Excel tables or steady emotional platforms, which is a decent precondition for the death of piles of pure creativity, so far as this can exist for commercial purpose.  You want to sell more, you catch monkeys on the street with Alpine legends and expect to receive a golden lion in Cannes for creativity? Piles of bullshit! The Milka brand brought back to me impressions ranging from the “Alpine milk”, through the plastic chocolate Kinder eggs and stories about the “Whipped cream”. I believe that after a certain age one would appreciate stories about milk on the covers of some educational magazines more than being brainwashed by straight-line plots about natural foods. I do respect brands like Milka and Kinder, yet sometimes cuisine does not come down to bigger market share, image gradation, distribution expansion, communicating new packaging designs etc., but to the establishment of mutual trust between manufacturer and consumer. It is in the trust plane where many brands settle, and after decades of treading on the same emotional prism they forget that generations and values develop. How do you step on a  product benefit relying on Most tender chocolate pleasure and on product attributes like Alpine milk and mythical Alpine world, and then on the back of the packing there are addresses of factories located thousands of kilometers away from the Alps … lilac planes drone non-stop back and forth with freshly obtained milk?! At first sight, positioning works in the mind of manufacturers and promoters of a certain brand. At second, any average professional from the branch will easily guess whether a cross promotion with Burton snowboards or a Tim Burton movie can move a brand like Milka to a new emotional epoch, and as for third sight, I believe that one doesn’t need a spaceship construction diploma in order to discover the values in a chocolate movie or to appreciate the potential of World of Warcraft characters in the Kinder eggs.

Striving to sell to a wider audience, many manufacturers fall in vacuum states, which seriously impedes the achievement of emotional depth and trust in the different target groups, ethnical groups and cultures. Few brands succeed in being equally stable on several markets and tens of communication levels. The PR, below the line and above the line activities, sponsorships, development of new tastes, product and emotional advantages, etc. are a small piece of the devices used by marketing to get deep under the skin of our consumer society. Children are the top target group for many brands being more “thin-skinned”, and Milka has been delicately playing with the child-parent emotions, as well as with the cleanness of the Alpine nature. When a concrete promotion is targeted at a 25-30 year old professional, who has the self confidence of an independent person, he/she has either achieved or is after the dream of his/her life and tends to buy brands, widely known as premium, the brands with a long history, the brands perceived as a synonym for a high quality, it is pretty naive to believe that people of this age group have been growing in lilac flower pots for the last 30 years. To me this brand is on the verge of emotional crisis because it does not realize that there is the far more varied palette of “Alpine emotions”, which recently split the snowboard in two leading to the appearance of a totally new style and epoch in the ski, and it also turned the X-related sports into a giant industry.

Later on the same day, on my way back from the second exhibition I heard a familiar voice:

” Hello, I am from the X sociological agency, we’re making a survey about TV commercials…”

In Bulgaria for several years now the free culture has been speeding up and has been finding more and more supporters. Freedom to share, remix and above all to create is an indescribable fun which wants to be shared. It is a great pleasure for me to add another brick in the building of Creative Commons.

The work on Georgi and the Butterflies is among the few projects on which I have raged with 100% pleasure. When your soul and mind are free from any unnecessary information and the Assignor knows what it is like to create something for an audience from 5 to 105 years old, then everything happens for several days, with minimal number of clicks of the mouse.

In 2002 a company with traditions in production of potato and corn chips - Intersnack, popular with its world-known brand Chio, purchased the production and the local brand Chipi. Owning about 30% from the salty snacks market and over 80% of the chips segment is more than a serious market achievement. At first look it seems wonderful, but considering 2 brands of similar targeting - men and women between 20 and 30 years of age, having a dynamic lifestyle with consumer habits “on the go”, it is almost impossible to achieve a bigger market share. There is always a sufficient quantity of solutions! A main move in the repositioning of the Chipi Chips brand was below the line activity with revolutionary for its time approach in the FMCG market, namely - instant monetary wins (money in-packs). With this “bomb” we achieved 75% sale growth as compared to the previous year and substantial growth in distribution. Along with this move we started working on a new package design, new logo and new target audience, with which later we entered in focus groups. We wanted to attract the family audience - 30 - 40 years old and those who love Bulgarian cuisine and traditions. In Bulgaria, the top of mind association for natural clean potatoes is restricted to roadside merchants who stalk on the mountain roads in the autumn.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned from focus groups and group discussions is that it’s not healthy to trust the results to a maximum extent. The market research throws light, but should not be the basis of creativity. It is extremely important how the research materials were prepared (designs, storyboards, questionnaires, etc.), but the most important thing is the researcher! He is the one who can protect you from slipping when working with indecisive respondents, who are supposed to direct your decision for a long-term strategy! In the end the research extract should reveal to you why and how an idea will work when it is bold, risky or innovative.

Here’s how the prototype of our idea looked like…

After perfect focus groups we had the key to success…

Later on we chose location for its implementation…

For 2 days we shot it…

…and all the time we had so much fun.

The final result of the activity looks like that. The campaign for the re-launch of the Chipi Chips brand started at the end of 2004, three months later the sales were 50% up as compared to the previous year, with no negative effect on the sales of Chio Chips. Out of 2 brands which were cannibalized at the end of the undertaking we had an overall growth of the segment by +21,0% in terms of volume and +18,2% in terms of value YTD 2004 vs. 2003 (ACNielsen RI ON’04).

You go to the cinema, buy a ticket, something to drink, snacks and sit comfortably so that the only pre-movie ad could hit you. Pleasant job, with enough ground for creative work - TV spot, posters, cinema programs, branding of all movies released on DVD - what more could you possibly want? From one question mark we created the whole communication platform. All the time, while working on this project, there was this other question: “Movies, big cinema halls… but there are so many video stores and isn’t it more pleasant to watch the movie at home?”

It is this question exactly that made us buy thousands of boxes of VHS cassettes and DVD and search for a new communication channel. It’s nice to use exclusively the big cinema halls, but with the hundreds of video stores the world became different. The question mark obtained a character compared to the movie genres.

The most interesting thing to me was how the new communication channel turned into a distribution one!

Yellow or golden? They’re both pretty much the same to me, but when it comes to brands competing in one and the same branch, the matter is more of a “Coca-Cola or Pepsi?” kind. During the last two years quite many players entered the business directories and guides field. At present the leader in the market are Yellow pages and Golden pages, as the latter are by default placed in a slight image shadow. I’ve known the first ones’ representative for years and he’s among the few friends of mine who like to work at night like me. Several months ago we chatted about the ability to lead or to follow the way. An infinite philosophic theme that you can dwell upon for hours over a nice coffee and aromatic tobacco with utmost pleasure. The history of telephone directories with yellow pages started at the time of the most renowned detective of all times and will soon celebrate its 130^th jubilee. Yes, my thought brought me right there, to the recesses of the so called ME2 brands, to my former experience with such cases and positioning based on traditions. “Imitate or Innovate?” is one of my favourite cliches in marketing, which I decided to clean from the dust for this project and add some character to this specific search in the yellow-golden guides.

Here’s how the same-year-born Yellow pages and Sherlock Holmes were joined together on one cover, and friends from Ashley & Holmes supported the concept in giving it a regional weight. The main communication channel and information carrier in this case are the directories themselves, and the big towns’ monuments, in which they are distributed, added to it the weight and tradition that are usually lost in the leading position competition.

I am convinced that within 5 years this race and business will be mainly online and paper will be substituted with powerful internet portals and cutting edge user experience.

Positioning and communicating a brand in a market of young and dynamic people is not an easy job especially when the client’s portfolio includes brands like Heineken, Amstel, Murphy’s and 4-5 more local brands. On top of this you add the portfolios of the two other strongest world beer leaders, some alcoholic mixed drinks as well as a whole additional universe of all cool brands popular among the young status seekers and then you get a good idea about the task. One of the toughest details was that for many years this beer was known under the name Zagorka Gold to one generation, and now the company wanted to bring up only Gold for people like me. The umbrella brand Zagorka, the elder brother Heineken and the Brewinvest corporation had to keep a low profile, an approach that has been used by many customers before. And so… to summarize… Local Premium segment representing 1.5% of the total market volume and 3.6% of the market value… approximately 700,000 people target market, 25 to 30 years old, men and women, progressive and expressive. The brand to them needed to have the emotional appeal of … “it demonstrates my personal sophistication, status, success and refined style” but the naked truth was closer to “am I cool enough to drink Zagorka Gold, instead of some of the world brands from the Premium segment (Stella Artois, Grolsh, Carlsberg, Beck’s, Tuborg, Corona etc.)”

I’ve always thought that the key to the successful advertisement is in the ability to get into your target market’s skin, but at this time I was drinking really cheap liquor on the streets and the brands closest to my heart included Volcom and Burton, and I couldn’t care less about what kind of beer I was drinking as long as it was cold enough. While seeking sufficiently emotional meaning combined with a sexy and fashionable taste we concluded that we needed people with unique charisma who would be the opinion leaders in their communities. A fashion model from the cover of a lifestyle magazine, chocolates and alcoholic beverages promoter, a face control person from a popular night club and a Mig-29 pilot… 4 people, 4 print layouts, 4 outdoor layouts… Go 4 Gold!

Looking at where the brand is several years later… back to the well known Zagorka Gold name, in a new bottle and with a new design and a new taste… I wonder how healthy it is and is it an easy task to spin the kitchen for a new round?