Marketing Mnemonics

Alligator Tough

The Background:

Regal Plastic Company is a manufacturer of thermoformed plastic parts. The company was rated as #118 with sales of $3.85 million in the December 1998 issue of Plastics News Market Data Book. The sales from the previous year showed a significant decline. The company specialized in thermoforming of heavier gauge materials. Their existing markets were material handling products and OEM parts. The company actually had three businesses and three markets to tackle with minimal resources.

The company produced a line of standard high quality material handling products. They also produced custom material handling products. This created a need for separate marketing communications pieces. Discussions with management led to the point that their competition wasn't just other thermoformers, but injection molders that produced a much cheaper product. Thermoformed container products cost more than injection molded containers. However, the injection molded products were not as durable and had to be replaced more often. Sales made a good argument that in the long run, it was cheaper to go with the more durable. Also, thermoform tooling was significantly cheaper than injection molding tooling. We determined that the target for their standard containers were purchasing agents. And, the target for their custom containers were manufacturing engineers.

The company had the machinery and also produced high quality thermoformed OEM components for a variety of industries. The target there was design engineers. A suitable image and positioning statement had to be developed for all three markets and targets. It also had to be developed with a minimal budget.

The Positioning:

We believed that positioning of the company should be correct in all three markets. The company's direct competition had more financial resources than Regal. We determined that any positioning we developed had to be a positioning of the thermoforming process itself. We believed that the durability of the end product had to be stressed.

We developed the theme... Thermoformed Tough.

We accomplished two things with this statement. We positioned the process as durable. We also positioned the company as the company that produced tough, durable, and lasting products.

The Mnemonic Image:

We knew the image had to be high impact, tie in the process of thermoforming, and project an image of toughness. We chose an alligator. We artistically thermoformed an alligator from a sheet of heavy gauge plastic. We wanted the alligator to jump off the page.

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Comments from Mark Goff:

In Regal's case, the words came before the picture. We knew what we wanted to say. We were able to locate a satisfactory alligator picture and morphed it into a sheet of plastic.

We developed two separate full page sell sheets and quarter page ads. These sell sheets could also be used for a full page ad or the cover of a folder. The two individual designs satisfactorily addressed the material handling market and the OEM market.

Unfortunately, this program was halted. Management felt that the approach was too aggressive. I hope that the company will eventually use these images to their advantage . The company can carry this alligator theme through many marketing avenues.

As a side note, the company had a graphic logo from the fifties. It had to be redone. I first recommended that management consider changing the name of the company. I felt that the name Regal was too common and did not reflect what the company did. There were also two Regals in the same city. One carried the name Regal Plastic and the other carried the name Regal Plastics. And, their ads were bigger. Furthermore, the name Regal belonged to a car. An Internet search with the name Regal yielded over 62,000 hits. It would be a difficult project getting this Regal to come up in the first 10. Management declined changing the name. We however, were able to redo the logo to a more modern look.