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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
III. Analyzing the
Communication Process
in Plano, Texas, to be opened to the media on New
Year’s Eve night. More than a dozen journalists
showed up, and CNBC and CNN did live feeds from
the command center, as did local TV crews. Uzzi
noted: “We showed the world what EDS does and
how we do it. That’s something the company never
would have done before.” Once the new year
passed with few glitches, EDS celebrated with a
full-page “Y2KO” ad in The Wall Street Journal,
calling attention to the role the company played in
helping the world get ready for the date change.
The risk taking continued when EDS ran its nowfamous
“Cat Herders” ad during the 2000 Super
Bowl. The Super Bowl is advertising’s biggest showcase
and is usually reserved for major advertisers
rather than companies such as EDS, which was
nearly invisible in the ad world. The commercial
was shot in the style of a John Ford old-style western—big
sky, big country, stirring musical score—
and featured cowboys herding 10,000 house cats.
Uzzi noted that herding cats is an information management
metaphor for organizing an overwhelming
amount of varied data and captures perfectly
what EDS does: “We ride herd on complexity. We
make technology go where clients want it to go.”
The commercial was one of the most popular of the
Super Bowl ads, and the EDS website received 2 million
hits in the first 24 hours after the ad ran and 10
million hits in the first week. Clients called from all
over the world, asking for tapes of the commercial
to play at meetings, and EDS parlayed the ad’s success
into a high-profile presence at trade shows.
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5. The Communication
Process
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
EDS followed the “Cat Herders” spot with two
more high-profile commercials including an ad that
debuted on the 2001 Super Bowl called “Running
with the Squirrels,” which was a spoof of the traditional
running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and
sent a message about the importance of staying
nimble in business. The second commercial was
called “Airplane,” and it compared what EDS does
to building an airplane while it is in the air. Followup
research shows that the trilogy of commercials
resulted in a doubling of the percentage of people
associating EDS with e-business solutions and a 50
percent increase in overall brand awareness.
In 2002, EDS moved its advertising in a new direction
with a series of commercials and print ads
designed to move beyond creating awareness and
provide businesses with a better understanding of
each of the EDS lines of business—information technology
outsourcing, hosting, and security/privacy.
In just two years, a lot more people in the corporate
world have become aware of EDS and now
view it as a hip, hardworking company that can
provide solutions to information technology problems.
In addition to helping generate business,
EDS’s advertising has created excitement among its
employees and helped attract new talent to the
company. EDS wants its advertising to continue to
lead, surprise, and impress its customers as well as
its own employees. It is likely that it will.
Sources: Suzanne Vranica, “Cats Corralled: EDS Ads Go Back
to Basics,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, 2002, p. B9; Tom
Wasserman, “Brand Builders,” Brandweek, Feb. 11, 2002, pp.
17, 18; “Reinventing the Brand,” Fortune, October 2001, p. 112.
The function of all elements of the integrated marketing communications program is
to communicate. An organization’s IMC strategy is implemented through the various
communications it sends to current or prospective customers as well as other relevant
publics. Organizations send communications and messages in a variety of ways, such
as through advertisements, brand names, logos and graphic systems, websites, press
releases, package designs, promotions, and visual images. Thus, those involved in the
planning and implementation of an IMC program need to understand the communications
process and how it occurs. As you can see from the opening vignette on the EDS
Company, the way marketers communicate with their target audiences depends on
many factors, including how much customers know and what they think about the
company and the image it hopes to create. Developing an effective marketing communications
program is far more complicated than just choosing a product feature or
attribute to emphasize. Marketers must understand how consumers will perceive and