广告新思路：7巨头大打“小企业”牌

    百威啤酒（Budweiser）在超级有爱的超级碗决赛广告中生动地展示了小狗和马儿之间的跨物种友谊。与此类似，企业界在营销方面也发掘出了另一对令人感动的黄金组合，那就是大公司和小公司。

    采用这种风格的知名案例有美国运通（American Express）的“小企业星期六”（Small Business Saturdays），现在可能还包括了财务软件开发商Intuit的“小企业，大赛事”（Small Business, Big Game）活动，一家小公司借此赢得了一条价值400万美元的超级碗决赛广告。

    几年来，为小企业提供资源的非盈利组织SCORE首席执行官肯•扬西一直在注意这个B2B动向，后者的历史可以追溯到本世纪的头几年。扬西说：“随着小企业的经济重要性、购买力和它们对社区的影响变得广为人知，越来越多的大公司已经把它们作为一个细分市场来予以关注。”

    这样的广告也是大公司触及个人消费者的一个途径，其中蕴含的帮助草根的理念有取悦公众的作用。西北大学（Northwestern）凯洛格管理学院（Kellogg School of Management）营销学教授蒂姆•卡尔金斯指出，这就好像是说：“和我们联手，也就是和所有这些小公司联手。”

    但广告商必须小心；为单一的某一个品牌赋予某种信息就已经很困难，更不用说在一则广告里涵盖多个品牌了。卡尔金斯警告说：“它可能很快就会变成一团乱麻。”出于这个原因，卡尔金斯为西北大学的MBA们开了一门课，专门批评超级碗决赛广告。实际上，他还严厉地给Intuit的小企业广告打了个“D”。他说：“这条广告的问题之一是对品牌的塑造不是非常清晰。”

    下面就让我们来看看Intuit等公司以“小”博大的尝试：

    Like the interspecies friendship between the Budweiser puppy and the Budweiser Clydesdale, dramatized in the beer-maker's super-adorable Super Bowl ad, corporations have mined another kind of awww-inspiring alliance for marketing gold: the big business-small business relationship.

    It's a genre whose hall of fame includes American Express's "Small Business Saturdays," and now, too, perhaps Intuit's "Small Business, Big Game" blitz that gave a little company $4 million worth of Super Bowl advertising.

    Ken Yancey, CEO of SCORE, a nonprofit association that provides resources to small businesses, has been noticing this B2B trend for years, going back to the early 2000s. "As the economic importance of small businesses, their buying power, and their impact on communities has become widely known," he says, "more larger companies have focused on them as a market segment."

    For major corporations, such ads are also a way to reach individual consumers with that crowd-pleasing notion of helping Main Street. It's like saying, "When you're working with us, you're also working with all these small companies," explains Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

    But advertisers have to be careful; it's hard enough creating a message for one brand, let alone multiple brands in the same ad. "It can quickly turn into a jumble," warns Calkins. For that reason, the Super Bowl advertising critique session Calkins launched for Northwestern MBAs actually handed Intuit's small-biz commercial a harsh grade of "D." "One of the issues with the spot was the branding wasn't very clear," he says.

    Here, check out how Intuit and others have tried to win big with small:

    财务软件公司Intuit

    去年秋天，这家价值42亿美元的财务软件公司启动了一项超级碗决赛营销活动，承诺为一家小公司制作一条赛事广告。大约1.5万家小企业参与了竞争，最终，女孩玩具制造商GoldieBlox赢得了这段宝贵的直播时间。Intuit的QuickBooks会计软件徽标在这条广告中一闪而过。

    Intuit

    The $4.2 billion finance-software company launched a Super Bowl marketing campaign last July, promising to feature a small business in a commercial during the Big Game. Out of 15,000 or so entrants, GoldieBlox, a toymaker for girls, won the precious airtime, which included a brief shot of Intuit's QuickBooks (INTU) accounting software logo.