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What made Seinfeld one of the best television shows ever? A big part of it was his ability to based an entire episode on an everyday observation.  Over the run of the show, this method gave viewers such memorable moments as double dipping (taking a bite and then redipping the chip into the dip) and Festivus (a made up holiday for the non-religious to celebrate during the “holiday season”). Seinfeld stood out because every episode expanded on some quirky truth about life we already knew but never thought about.

How effective could your marketing message be if you managed to relate it to an observation like those on Seinfeld?  There was a perfect example I saw on television last week for an unlikely brand.  The ad featured a guy in a red, white and blue sweatsuit sniffing various objects happily.  It starts with obscure things like carpets and curtains – and eventually you get the sense that he’s on a cruise ship when he looks over the side and sniffs the uniform of the Captain.  At the very end, he utters just one line – “mmmm … new ship smell.” And you see the logo of Carnival Cruise Lines.

How many other cruise lines could have run the same ad?  Probably any one. Most of them have some new ships.  But this ad delivers a powerful message based on a truth that we all intuitively know (that new car smell).  The message is simple: we have ships so new they still smell new.  And if you’re going cruising, of course you want a new ship.

You can see the full ad below.  After you watch it, think about what quirky truth your customers all know that you could focus your marketing on.  Sometimes you might find your best marketing idea inspired by a show about nothing.

New Ship Smell

This post was republished from the original at http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/.

Imagine for a moment if you were the marketing director in charge of a considerably seedy backpacker hotel in Amsterdam. The property you are responsible for promoting is so spartan that they have pictures of chairs on the walls as an ironic replacement to having an actual chair in the rooms. There is no guarantee of toilet paper in the bathrooms. If you were like most travel marketers, you might decide to find a great photographer with a very wide angle lens and considerable creative talents. Then you’d find the best possible way to photograph the property and focus your marketing on some other angle, such as cost or location.

For Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam, the right strategy was exactly the opposite: embrace their awfulness and talk about it honestly. For 15 years, the hotel has been promoting itself as the “worst hotel in the world.” As anyone who has ever worked on promoting a destination or travel property knows, sometimes expectations can set you up for failure. Some frequent fliers expect to be upgraded to a seat they didn’t pay for, and then get angry when they are not. Patrons of luxury hotels expect perfection, and often feel justified to complain about any little thing, no matter how small. The solution, reasoned Hans Brinker’s agency KesselsKramer, was to lower expectations to a point where people could no longer be disappointed. Thus the concept of the “worst hotel in the world” was born.

The hotel uses innovative posters and direct marketing to promote their “experience” to their target audience of young backpackers. After all, what twenty-something wouldn’t want to return home to boast to their friends and family that they stayed in the worst hotel in the world while in Amsterdam? The campaign has turned the property’s biggest negative attribute into the only reason for people to stay. And it has worked, with a 42% increase in occupancy. Their success has even led to a newly launched book. What’s the lesson in this for travel marketers? Sometimes being honest and giving people something to talk about is the only thing that really matters.