Tobacco industry Sulzer Sutter, Zurich, relies on fresh colors and the fun society of young adults for a relaunch of Parisienne Extra and Ultra. "Newly painted" is the theme of the campaign for the new packs of Parisienne Extra and Ultra cigarettes. The color orange for Extra is an unconventional choice - strong color signals for a mild "cig". Closer to the product, light blue has been chosen for the restyled Ultra. The new wrappers are intended to give the two blends in the entire Parisienne product family with the other Super, Mild and Special Mild blends a more confident appearance - something the previous packaging was clearly unable to do. The new boxes were developed by the Sulzer Sutter agency in collaboration with its customer British American Tobacco Switzerland and external designers.
The subjects of the "Newly painted" campaign show packs in displays with splashes of paint, as if a paint bag had flown against the cigarette packs. But stands were also designed that look as if someone has brushed over them with a paint roller. A teaser campaign highlighting these color changes has already been launched in the scene titles Kult and Forecast. In the ads, yellow bananas are painted over with the color blue or yellow mailboxes with the color orange.
The poster and advertising campaign is accompanied by selective measures which, according to the agency, have always been well received by the Parisienne public. At selected locations, for example, posters are painted over by promoters in painters' overalls.
Paint your Parisienne yourself
Since April, graphically convincing samples with the new colors have been sent to selected addresses of smokers who are "guaranteed over 18" in a sneak preview. Typical of Parisienne's constantly surprising ideas are the give-aways with the claim "Coming soon" and real seeds from which orange and light blue flowers grow. In another campaign, postcards with thinly printed real watercolor "pots" are sent out, with which you can redesign your old Parisienne yourself.
The old packets at the kiosk are also marked with information stating that the two types of cigarettes will soon be available in new colors. An insert in the box draws attention to the upcoming changes.
"Coming soon" is also the message of a promotional campaign in bars and pubs. For example, there is a competition in which promotional hostesses encourage smokers to discover the new colors of the Parisienne, for example on a dress or in the real-life surroundings of their bar, using a color swatch. The event is strongly reminiscent of the game "I see what you don't see" and is captured by the promoters with a Pola. For spontaneous contest participants who have spotted the new color somewhere in their surroundings, there are various goodies to be won as instant prizes in addition to a main prize. "A campaign alone is not enough, you need events at various levels that are fun," says Francis Sulzer.
One hundred years of success
Parisienne is only available as a brand in Switzerland and Austria. It is 100 years old and successful. While other national brands have gone under in the wake of American marketing offensives, Parisienne has overtaken Marlboro with its mild yellow cigarettes among the target audience of 18 to 30-year-olds. The cigarette has thus been able to steadily increase its market share to over 12 percent in the last seven years. This is also the period in which Sulzer Sutter is responsible for Parisienne's budget, says a delighted Francis Sulzer. This success has been achieved during this time with marketing measures that have "deliberately reversed all the rules". With its trashy packaging, Parisienne is considered a trendy glow-in-the-dark drink in the techno scene, among other things. Sulzer Sutter's new campaign, however, did not focus on this particular target group, but once again deliberately opted for a completely open style.
Sulzer Sutter's orange and light blue are the new trend colors for the Parisienne brand.
Andreas Panzeri

Eye-tracking measurements help to test the effectiveness of advertising subjectsBy Bruno Amstutz The company Management Tools offers eye-tracking for pre-tests of advertising subjects. The eye-tracking measurements are intended to help direct the eye to the essentials and to reveal possibilities for optimizing the design.
What good is the most extravagant logo and the crispest headline if no one is looking? Advertising doesn't have much time to get its message across to women and men. This makes it all the more important that the essential elements of communication are perceived right away.
Since the fall of 2001, the company Management Tools (www.mgtools.ch) has been pretesting the subjects of advertisements and posters with the aid of the eye tracking method: a camera measures the gaze of test subjects who are presented with a test motif.
In principle, the technology is nothing new, but its implementation was previously associated with considerable effort: Helmet-mounted cameras had to be calibrated, the course of vision was recorded on video tapes, and the analysis required enormous man-hours.
Dominant eye catchers distract the eye from the essentials
New measurement techniques and the software developed by Management Tools provide a remedy. The camera is located at a distance of about one meter from the head and can be calibrated within a few minutes. The analysis of the gaze patterns is software-supported and much faster, without the time-consuming detour via video tapes.
The camera records how the subjects' gaze wanders over a subject in the first few seconds and where it rests. These points provide information about the places where information is absorbed. In subsequent interviews, the recall performance and impact of the advertising message are assessed.
Eye tracking checks the attention paid to individual image elements and can warn, for example, if an eye catcher attracts so much attention that the brand next to it is no longer noticed. If, in the interviews, all the male test subjects remember the beautiful woman with the plunging neckline, but no one remembers which product was next to it, the advertising misses its purpose. Eye-tracking primarily reveals the weighting of visual elements and detects optical voids.
Eye tracking helps to detect errors
Walter Bösch, co-owner of Management Tools, sees a sensible use for the method when advertising agencies or clients are faced with a choice between different motifs. Even if they seem equivalent at first glance, the pretest can reveal optimization opportunities before the campaign is launched.
"We want to intervene as early as possible in the creative process," says Bösch, "so that the tight advertising budgets are used efficiently." Bösch is aware that eye tracking is not a panacea: "In a vacuum, the measurements say little; they have to be supplemented by interviews and do not allow any universally valid statements."
External influences can distort the course of the gaze
Other market researchers approach the method with a certain degree of skepticism. They see the pure eye-tracking as merely a benchmark for a diagnosis. And they doubt that the measurements provide more far-reaching insights than the detection of unnoticed elements and distractions of the gaze from important content and messages.
"The gaze progression alone only says something about the process of stimulus processing, but nothing about its results: the emotions and cognitive processes," finds Hannes Steinmann, a member of the management board of the Publitest market research institute, "even if different target persons see the same elements, they process the impressions differently."
External influences can also distort the results. "Visual stimuli before the test can change the gaze pattern of a test person," Thomas Gehrig from the research team at Scope psychologische Marktforschung und Testlabor AG points out.
It is therefore difficult to draw direct conclusions about the success of an advertising campaign from the way people look at it. Cognitive and emotional processes still have to be deciphered through interviews, Bösch also emphasizes. However, eye tracking is suitable for revealing deficits in the perception of central messages.
A pretest helps in the selection of subjects
This has been the experience of Swisscom's Subscriber Switching Systems division. Last summer, the business unit appeared for the first time under the name Swisscom Systems and ran an image campaign. The subjects were tested by eye tracking between the first and second waves. "The general goal of the campaign was to make Swisscom Systems' service offering known," explains Pascal Rebmann, market researcher at Swisscom Systems. "But the eye tracking showed that smaller image elements totally distracted the eye from the essentials." With graphic corrections, these shortcomings could be remedied, and of three subjects originally used, only one has been used since the tests.
An important argument put forward by Walter Bösch of Management Tools is that a pretest can reveal optimization potential earlier and, above all, more cost-effectively than expensive ad tracking that follows the placement of the campaign. Taking a moment to measure eye-tracking can be well worth it.