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It was reported earlier this month that Twentieth Century Fox is working on a movie based on the babies from the E*Trade commercials that have premiered during the Super Bowl over the past two years. The movie will most likely be terrible but studio heads still believe it could do surprisingly well at the box office. The plot supposedly involves the talking babies from the popular commercials trying to cross a playground. This isn’t the first time trade characters have made the leap from commercials to longer endeavors. A couple years ago they gave the Geico cavemen their own television show. As expected it didn’t last a full season but it demonstrated the ability for trade characters to have a screen presence for more than 90 seconds. While having your recognizable trade character star in a full length feature seems like a good way to increase brand exposure it also runs the highly probable risk of destroying the character. The E*Trade babies have been launched pretty successful commercials for the brand; people talk about them and they are often picked as favorites among the Super Bowl commercial premieres, effectively increasing the company’s brand equity. If/when this movie fails it will cast a negative shadow on the trade characters making them unpopular, irrelevant, and possibly unsuitable for further commercials. Also, the movie would be blatant rip off of the Look Who’s Talking movies, which were run into the ground in the early 90s with uninspired sequels. I believe that if E*Trade wanted to prolong the success of their “talking baby commercials” and keep their credibility intact, do not make this movie.

There has been a recent surge in companies looking to expand their social media presence on outlets like Facebook and Twitter by offering new “fans”, “followers”, and “friends” free products. They offer coupons for free products and similar incentives to consumers for simply becoming online fans of their brand. Einstein Bros. Bagels recently offered digital coupons to users who registered as their friend and gained hundreds of thousands of new fans. TGI Fridays tried a similar campaign last year with dangerous results. They introduced a spokesperson for the brand “Woody” on Facebook who offered free burgers to his first 500,000 fans. They reached the target number of fans weeks ahead of schedule and did not plan to give away so many free burgers.  Facing potential backlash from potential customers the company had to extend the free burger offer to one million friends. Starbucks also ran a campaign to attract fans by offering coupons for free pints of their new ice cream brand. Learning from TGI Friday’s mistakes they put a limit on the free coupons and offered other coupons for a discount to fans who were too late for the free offer.

These tactics have been proven to be very effective in quickly increasing your online followers and social media presence, but are campaigns like this effective in reaching the “right” people. By using these strategies most new “fans” are not necessarily brand loyalists or even interested in the brand for that matter; most are there simply because they want free stuff and could care less about the brand. Are the fans genuinely interested in the brand or are they just taking advantage of a free deal? While Einstein Bros. gained hundreds of thousands of online fans they also gave away over $800,000 worth of free bagels.

For social media campaigns like these to be effective, brands must consider the usefulness of having fans on social media and it is a question of quality vs. quantity; is having more fans better than having loyal fans? Brands can take all their new fans and use social media try to mold them into true brand loyalists over time but what about retention rate? Fans can easily join for a promotion and take themselves off immediately after. Most brands derive value form social media by using it to educate their loyal consumers about new products or happenings in the company to build hype. They are also used to directly communicate with their valuable customers to improve performance or learn more about their target market. Some companies even use social media as another way to reach customers for customer service purposes. While quickly expanding your fan base is a good way to get in front of a large number of people how effective is it when they do not care about the message? It seems more important to be liked that simply popular. Brands can derive great value from using tools like social media but unless they understand why they are using it, understand how to use it, and have tangible goals preferably linked to some sort of return on investment, expensive campaigns like this can be largely ineffective.

In an interesting move last week, Xerox started running ads in the Hollywood trade publications like the Hollywood Reporter in an attempt to keep its trademarked name from being used. They are requesting that mainstream media stop referring to making a copy as “to Xerox” or copies as “Xeroxes”. Typically, having your brand name directly associated with and often used in place of the actual product would be considered an honor for the brand, demonstrating its impact on culture. Take Band Aid adhesive bandages, instead of making a shopping list and writing “adhesive bandages” people usually will refer to them as band aids by habit. Same goes for brands like Q-Tips, Kleenex, and Coke. Having your brand name interchangeable for the actual name of the product means that your brand is in the forefront of consumer’s minds increasing the chance that they will use your product. Now, there is the fear of brand dilution. They fear that by using their brand name as a noun in TV and movie scripts it will devalue the name of the brand as common usage continues. It will be interesting to see if this strategy hurts or helps the brand in the long run.