There’s a fine line when it comes to marketing strategy. On the one hand, companies plan for long-term campaigns that will build brand value in order to slowly drill into the audience’s mind; sometimes without them even realising it. And on the other there’s hitting on an idea that for whatever reason captures a particular resonance, and before you know it, this one-off event leads future marketing campaigns for as long as they’ll last.

Quite often the advertising with the most immediate impact are based around anthromorphosised versions of characters, including things like Flat Eric, the Budweiser frogs, the whole Whassup! thing, Johnny Vegas and Monkey in the UK (which even managed to jump brands completely from digital TV to selling tea), Yellow Pages with Jan here and J.R. Hartley in the UK, and I’m sure that you can think of many more.

It’s quite often hard to tell if a company determined from the outset that they were going to run with this character or ‘theme’ for 6 months regardless of initial impact, if they suddenly found a hit on their hands and so wanted to get as much bang for their buck as possible before the whole thing died down, or if its a mixture of both.

At the moment, Australia has the frog and the goat for Trading Post. Aside from the fact that half the country couldn’t work out what the damned frog was saying until it was written on the screen (http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100127020503AAFCk9u) the issue is that 1) unless handled very carfeully, the public are going to get sick of this double-act relatively quickly, and so 2) is a short-term campaign blitz campaign more worthwhile than patient chipping away at long-term brand building?

From the industry review (http://www.bandt.com.au/news/8B/0C06698B.asp) it looks as if this campaign is in it for the long-haul (although search engines don’t bring up the Trading Post when you type in ‘goat and frog’), rather than the company hitting on a magical idea by luck through blitz-channels such as social media and more traditional word of mouth. If so, they are going to need to thing very carefully about building long-term brand value when it comes to deciding whether to chop-and-change, or to try and strecth the one-joke concept to its limits.