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Designing an Experiment: Etch A Sketch
Watch Raj Venkatesan explain the challenge Etch A Sketch faced as it tried to boost sales during the holiday season.
So now that we’ve seen the theory of experimental design, we walked through some examples. Let’s walk the shoes of a real marketing manager. Let’s walk through one company that did three different experiments at three different times and see their evolution from TV advertising to digital advertising and experiments that they did in both these cases. I’m talking about a company that is out of Ohio. A small village out of Ohio, but the product that they make is known worldwide. These guys are the ones who make Etch A Sketch. So it’s the Ohio Art Company.
And they are the ones who made Etch A Sketch, this iconic product. And here you have, I just have to show you Taj Mahal. There the one on the right is a picture of the real Taj Mahal and the one on the left is an Etch A Sketch rendition of the Taj Mahal. So you can see what you can make of the Taj Mahal, and we saw in the brands module, how Etch A Sketch’s personification of creativity, and expression, and nostalgia. This is an iconic product, it was there in Toy Story as a product placement and sales took off. Now the question the marketing managers are asking themselves is, can they boost sales of Etch A Sketch through TV advertisements?
Awareness is high. What they really want is getting people to remember Etch A Sketch again and giving them a reason to go buy this product in the store.
So what they are trying to see is can they use TV advertising to boost sales of Etch A Sketch? So the one thing that they are aware of that they need to take care and pay attention to when they do this TV advertisement is that their product is highly seasonal. So if you see on the graph here, we have plotted sales from February to December, January over here. And if you see here, the peak season is over here, which is actually the Holiday season. So that’s where sales of Etch A Sketch really takes off. So keep that in mind.
And think about how you would design a TV ad experiment for Etch A Sketch to know whether TV ads help Etch A Sketch sales.
We will take a look at three different product advertising experiments by the Ohio Art Company. We will start with Etch A Sketch. Learn the background on this product experiment.
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