Cool Marketing Thoughts

I don’t quite know what to think of the P&G’s shareyoursecret.com campaign. Yeah sure, it’s not quite the same as PostSecret, true. But the concept is very very very much alike. Except that the shareyoursecret.com site is branded all over. I don’t think it’s lame, but I can’t really be optimistic about it either. Maybe it’s because I’m not part of the target audience?

Brian Chiao notices: “While PostSecret is an amazing art project that even offers depression support through hopeline.com (saved a few lives), this campaign is just so fake and laughable. If you’re going to copy, at least build on it and make it fresher.”

I agree with the last part of the quote. The texted messages are just so ‘average’. It could’ve been done ‘fresher’. Another thing I don’t quite get is that there are 1700+ secrets shared on the site, but the highest number of views is around 250. I don’t know how to interpret this right but that either means a load of the secrets are uploaded by the same author under a different name, or that the ‘members’ of the community “of strong women, whose candid secrets reflect their character – flaws, frailties, intelligence, nerve and wit” really don’t care about the other members of the community. Something smells fishy here. Maybe the fact women could text their message already meant enough relief to them? Maybe.

On the other hand, you can’t really expect the Secret brand to go down the dark alley of PostSecret, as pointed out in the comments on Room116.

yes, of course it could be better, but knowing the brand and what they’ve done, these more “shallow” secrets are the things they look for and how they want to represent themselves. They obviously don’t want a slew of people talking about being sexually abused, almost killing themselves, not loving their husband, etc. to represent their brand.

Hmm. Good point. But I’m still missing something. I just can’t figure out what it is exactly. Anyone?