Chemi Sagardia through the years

CASE STUDIES

Strategic insight is the key to memorable and effective creative.

These are some of my favorite projects throughout the years. They all have in common a particularly interesting insight as the starting point for the creative development.

MAPFRE

From "MA... what?" and, "that little tree is a shamrock?" to recognizing MAPFRE just by seeing its logo

In 2005 I was the Creative Director for the team hired by MAPFRE to handle its communications. At the time there was very little brand awareness for the company mainly due to the fact that it had been in the market for decades under the name PRAICO and had just started operating as MAPFRE recently.

KEY INSIGHT

All insurance companies want their clients to have the best luck in the world. They don't want anything bad to happen to them. On the customer's side, everything a person would like to insure is, in a sense, product of having good luck in life. And, when bad things do happen, it's a good thing to be insured. It all pointed to good luck being at the center of MAPFRE's offering. But what allowed the company to address this in a proprietary way was that the company's new logo was a shamrock. A symbol traditionally associated with good luck (granted, the good luck charm is a four-leaf clover and MAPFRE's logo has three but who's counting).

The communications efforts started presenting MAPFRE as the insurer of its customers' good luck - "Asegura tu buena suerte, asegúralo todo con MAPFRE" - and for the following three years the shamrock logo was central to the efforts.

RESULTS

In 2004 MAPFRE had a 10% top-of-mind awareness. By the end of the decade, within the context of a low involvement category, that number surpassed 60%. This was achieved with budgets that were a fraction of those of the other main players in the insurance industry. Insight-based creativity was key.

“THE PRESENT PAINTS THE PAST WITH GOLD”

H E N R Y R O L L I N S

Medalla & Coors

Changing the beer market...

MEDALLA

In 1986 I was part of the team hired by Medalla Beer to handle its advertising. At the time Medalla was the main player in the light beer market with 90% share of the segment (4% share of the total beer market). Up to that point the brand had been marketed as a low cal alternative and had a feminine image.

KEY INSIGHT

How to break the light beer barrier? Taste tests assured us that Medalla could compete with Budweiser - the market leader at the time - for a share of the non-light market. So if you have the taste... who cares about the caloric content. The low cal aspect of the brand turned into an added value and taste became the main reason to drink it.

Our team at the agency developed an advertising campaign directed at the heavy beer drinker that positioned the beer as the one to have when you wanted beer and nothing else ("Cerveza, cerveza y nada más"). At the time I was Creative Director for public relations and we complemented the advertising with an arm wrestling competition to address the feminine aspect of the brand and turn it into something the heavy beer drinker would feel comfortable with.

COORS LIGHT

By 1990 I was working with West Indies & Grey and in charge of the creative development for pubic relations, sales promotions and direct marketing when the agency landed the Coors account for its launching on the Island.

KEY INSIGHT

Medalla had changed the image of light beers in the market. We built on that and the fact that the refreshing taste of Coors Light was a perfect match for our hot climate.

One of the most important launch initiatives for the brand was the relationship marketing project Club Coors. The first of its kind in Puerto Rico. It proved invaluable when package deregulation hit the market and the Miller brand, with its clear bottle, put a temporary dent on the amber-bottled brands.

RESULTS

What we did with Medalla in the 80's changed the beer market forever. Then in the 90's, as part of the Coors Light team, we built on Medalla's success and launched the new brand on its way to reach a whopping 50% share of market by the 2000's. As for Medalla, it currently enjoys over 30% share of market.

Cable TV

"What good is a TV without cable TV?"

In 1994 Cable TV of Greater San Juan, the predecessor of Liberty in the San Juan metroplex, hired me and my partner at Sagardía & Calderón Maru Calderón to do all their advertising. This was the era when the cable company enjoyed the benefits of being the only provider of paid TV entertainment in San Juan. Even though cable TV had been in Puerto Rico since the 70's it felt that it still had to convince people to buy their entertainment instead of being complacent with the free options they could get through their TV antennas.

KEY INSIGHT

Using the Chemistry Quest we at Sagardía & Calderón redefined their offering from TV programming to an essential TV peripheral - the reason you buy a TV set for. "Para qué sirve un televisor sin cable TV".

We worked several campaigns for Cable TV of Greater San Juan as well as its successors Adelphia and One Link Communications. Some of the most memorable were the ones against DirecTV entitled El Cuento del Pescaíto, El Platito Feo and El Tostón. They all used the shortcomings of the DBS technology and the failure of a previous supplier in the area to successfully protect the Cable TV subscriber base in San Juan.

RESULTS

DirecTV entrance to Puerto Rico's market had no negative effect on the cable TV supplier in the San Juan area, in fact, during DirecTV's first year Cable TV of Greater San Juan experienced its best year ever.

Our positioning of cable TV as an essential peripheral and the reason you buy a TV set anyway was ahead of its time in the 90's and foreshadowed the current situation in which the TV set is used to watch programming from web-based sources.

PPR 2008

A political campaign shaped by the Chemistry Quest

Towards the end of 2007 I was approached by a group representing the Puertorriqueños por Puerto Rico Party (PPR) to do the campaign of their candidate for governor Rogelio Figueroa. One of the things I enjoyed most of this job was that I was able to apply the Chemistry Quest to a political campaign without any type of limitations.

KEY INSIGHT

The Chemistry Quest showed us the way to the "Vota por tí" concept. The process identified the anger that voters had with the traditional parties and used it to structure a message that turned the paradigm around and made people realize that for years they had been voting for candidates when what they should have been doing was voting for themselves - their dreams, their needs, their goals...

Our campaign was conceived to get the most out of a budget that was three and four times smaller than the ones of the major parties. It allowed us to concentrate the economic resources in media reducing the production costs to a minimum. The campaign was launched with a 60 second commercial that ran in movie theaters across the Island. The spot presented the party, its ideology and its candidates. It was followed by a series of spots that presented specific projects and ads meant to create an emotional bond with voters.

RESULTS

The campaign was copied by other candidates and universally praised by political analysts. Even though the party’s candidate for governor received a small 2.9% of the votes, the exit poll conducted by El Nuevo Día revealed that only 30% of the voters who identified themselves as members of the PPR voted for its candidate. That means that in only five months our Chemistry Quest based efforts converted 10% of the total universe of voters to the new party.

In 2012 two more new parties entered the fray and in 2016 candidates from parties other than the traditional NPP and PPD received a significant 20% of the total votes for governor. The ripples of our 2008 efforts still move our present.