I'm somewhat surprised not to have seen comment on this. If it's a duplicate, please excuse.
In the NY Time Magazine on Sunday, in one of their regular columns that discusses marketing strategies and unusual products, they had a piece on ATK, the parent company of Federal and other Ammo makers. The gist is that ATK is using the same sort of marketing techniques that are used by makers of other "commodity" items to try to make their brand work for them.
The link will probably go out of date soon:
Even bullets get branded
Target Marketing
By ROB WALKER
Published: November 5, 2009
On some level, all stories of successful brands resemble one another: the competitors in some category of good or service seem interchangeable until one of them, often a newcomer, dreams up some way of standing out from the crowd. O.K., maybe it’s not always that simple, but differentiating one choice partly by way of advertising, packaging and other image-enhancing strategies has long been a way of persuading shoppers to reconsider what they had previously seen as a mere commodity. Even, it turns out, bullet shoppers.
The ammunition business appears quite healthy these days; there are even reports of shortages attributed to ammo-hoarding by Americans who believe draconian gun restrictions are in the offing. Of course there is more to the bullet market than fear-driven stockpiling. Alliant Techsystems (ATK), a defense contractor, is a leading maker and seller of bullets — to the military mostly, but increasingly to hunters and other civilian gun owners. (In fact, a Business Week article last year suggested that the company is putting even more focus on the latter market in anticipation of slackening military demand.) ATK has been in the consumer-ammunition market for only a few years, but the commercial-products group of its armament-systems division now manages a portfolio of about 20 consumer-ammunition brands. That’s a fair amount of differentiation. Some of the reasons are obvious: the ammunition needs of duck hunters and of pistol-range enthusiasts are quite distinct from each other. But some of ATK’s ammo-brand differentiation sounds more akin to the sort of image making many people associate with, say, energy drinks or deodorants.
ATK bought the ammunition-maker Federal Cartridge Company in 2001. That firm’s pricier Federal Premium line had been aimed (as it were) at those willing to pay more for, say, their bonded or all-copper construction; the line had been around since the 1970s and was advertised in hunting magazines and the like with pitches that emphasized function and performance. But outside this high end of the market, “ammunition tended to be a last-minute decision” for most hunters, explains Jason Nash, an ATK communications and events manager. Soon after acquiring Federal, ATK introduced a new bullet line called Fusion, with what Nash calls an “aggressive” box design, including a foil label. Advertising for the brand was intended for 25- to 35-year-old deer hunters — a younger and more mass crowd, in other words. Recently, Fusion signed on Brock Lesnar, a mixed-martial-arts star (and hunting enthusiast) as a celebrity endorser.
This experience guided the more recent introduction of the Black Cloud brand of shotgun ammunition, used by duck hunters. Waterfowl hunting laws mandate the use of nontoxic shot, most of which is made from steel, so there’s not much room for differentiation in materials, but Black Cloud does brag about elements of its shell design (notably the “unique and patented” Flitecontrol Wad) and the construction of the shot inside it (Flitestopper Steel, to “devastate waterfowl on impact”). Still, technology by itself is not a marketing strategy.
Nowadays there are a lot more options for reaching any given target audience than just hunting magazines. Among other things, Black Cloud forged a partnership with Phil Robertson, “the Duck Commander.” The star of an Outdoor Network show and a series of DVDs, Robertson favors a postapocalyptic ZZ Top aesthetic and relishes duck hunting even in the worst weather imaginable. The company also made “a couple of viral videos” designed to “build buzz,” Nash continues. (These short skitlike bits include a “Webisode” in which the day’s least successful hunter must wear a duck suit and be chased about by retrievers while goofy music plays in the background.) Most recently Black Cloud built a brand-specific social-hub Web site, StormChasersNetwork, which features Robertson, and has signed up 1,200 members in its first month.
And then there’s the package design. “If you go into a store like Cabela’s and see a lineup of ammo,” Nash says, “you’ll see that ammunition is kind of treated as a commodity.” Boxes of Black Cloud ($24.99 for 25 shells) dispense with the predictable picture of a mallard for a bright color scheme that “really pops off the shelf,” Nash continues. “You’ve got that emotion of ducks coming in, kind of a daybreak look. If you’re a duck hunter you really identify with first light — that’s when you’re able to start hunting, and there’s a lot of excitement surrounding that moment.”
Does that stuff really matter? After all, we’re talking about ammunition, not a lifestyle accessory. Nash thinks it does. Black Cloud is probably ATK’s most fully articulated effort to date to convert an afterthought purchase into a brand that shoppers know about and seek. “We’ve kind of reinvented that category,” Nash argues. Which is almost always how a brand becomes successful, whether it’s an energy drink, a deodorant or steel-shot ammunition.
In the NY Time Magazine on Sunday, in one of their regular columns that discusses marketing strategies and unusual products, they had a piece on ATK, the parent company of Federal and other Ammo makers. The gist is that ATK is using the same sort of marketing techniques that are used by makers of other "commodity" items to try to make their brand work for them.
The link will probably go out of date soon:
Even bullets get branded
Target Marketing
By ROB WALKER
Published: November 5, 2009
On some level, all stories of successful brands resemble one another: the competitors in some category of good or service seem interchangeable until one of them, often a newcomer, dreams up some way of standing out from the crowd. O.K., maybe it’s not always that simple, but differentiating one choice partly by way of advertising, packaging and other image-enhancing strategies has long been a way of persuading shoppers to reconsider what they had previously seen as a mere commodity. Even, it turns out, bullet shoppers.
The ammunition business appears quite healthy these days; there are even reports of shortages attributed to ammo-hoarding by Americans who believe draconian gun restrictions are in the offing. Of course there is more to the bullet market than fear-driven stockpiling. Alliant Techsystems (ATK), a defense contractor, is a leading maker and seller of bullets — to the military mostly, but increasingly to hunters and other civilian gun owners. (In fact, a Business Week article last year suggested that the company is putting even more focus on the latter market in anticipation of slackening military demand.) ATK has been in the consumer-ammunition market for only a few years, but the commercial-products group of its armament-systems division now manages a portfolio of about 20 consumer-ammunition brands. That’s a fair amount of differentiation. Some of the reasons are obvious: the ammunition needs of duck hunters and of pistol-range enthusiasts are quite distinct from each other. But some of ATK’s ammo-brand differentiation sounds more akin to the sort of image making many people associate with, say, energy drinks or deodorants.
ATK bought the ammunition-maker Federal Cartridge Company in 2001. That firm’s pricier Federal Premium line had been aimed (as it were) at those willing to pay more for, say, their bonded or all-copper construction; the line had been around since the 1970s and was advertised in hunting magazines and the like with pitches that emphasized function and performance. But outside this high end of the market, “ammunition tended to be a last-minute decision” for most hunters, explains Jason Nash, an ATK communications and events manager. Soon after acquiring Federal, ATK introduced a new bullet line called Fusion, with what Nash calls an “aggressive” box design, including a foil label. Advertising for the brand was intended for 25- to 35-year-old deer hunters — a younger and more mass crowd, in other words. Recently, Fusion signed on Brock Lesnar, a mixed-martial-arts star (and hunting enthusiast) as a celebrity endorser.
This experience guided the more recent introduction of the Black Cloud brand of shotgun ammunition, used by duck hunters. Waterfowl hunting laws mandate the use of nontoxic shot, most of which is made from steel, so there’s not much room for differentiation in materials, but Black Cloud does brag about elements of its shell design (notably the “unique and patented” Flitecontrol Wad) and the construction of the shot inside it (Flitestopper Steel, to “devastate waterfowl on impact”). Still, technology by itself is not a marketing strategy.
Nowadays there are a lot more options for reaching any given target audience than just hunting magazines. Among other things, Black Cloud forged a partnership with Phil Robertson, “the Duck Commander.” The star of an Outdoor Network show and a series of DVDs, Robertson favors a postapocalyptic ZZ Top aesthetic and relishes duck hunting even in the worst weather imaginable. The company also made “a couple of viral videos” designed to “build buzz,” Nash continues. (These short skitlike bits include a “Webisode” in which the day’s least successful hunter must wear a duck suit and be chased about by retrievers while goofy music plays in the background.) Most recently Black Cloud built a brand-specific social-hub Web site, StormChasersNetwork, which features Robertson, and has signed up 1,200 members in its first month.
And then there’s the package design. “If you go into a store like Cabela’s and see a lineup of ammo,” Nash says, “you’ll see that ammunition is kind of treated as a commodity.” Boxes of Black Cloud ($24.99 for 25 shells) dispense with the predictable picture of a mallard for a bright color scheme that “really pops off the shelf,” Nash continues. “You’ve got that emotion of ducks coming in, kind of a daybreak look. If you’re a duck hunter you really identify with first light — that’s when you’re able to start hunting, and there’s a lot of excitement surrounding that moment.”
Does that stuff really matter? After all, we’re talking about ammunition, not a lifestyle accessory. Nash thinks it does. Black Cloud is probably ATK’s most fully articulated effort to date to convert an afterthought purchase into a brand that shoppers know about and seek. “We’ve kind of reinvented that category,” Nash argues. Which is almost always how a brand becomes successful, whether it’s an energy drink, a deodorant or steel-shot ammunition.
