October 2023: The Cree Advertising Project
Skills developed: Marketing Analysis, Advertising Campaign Development, Prototyping
Context:
As part of a core marketing class at Wharton taught by Professor Jonah Berger, I worked with a team of five peers to analyze the launch of Cree Corporation’s LED lightbulb. For a successful launch, we needed to ensure that the Five C’s (company, customers, collaborators, competitors and climate aligned with the Four P’s (product, price, place, promotion) of the product. While the former addressed internal organizational factors, the latter prioritized customer needs.
Case data showed that Cree’s bulbs were preferred for their brightness and environmental benefits, though they were initially more expensive than the mainstream filament bulbs. The Cree LED launch was challenging because it required educating customers about a new technology entirely.
Three approaches with the assignment:
My focus was on the promotion strategy, crafting campaigns to address customer pain points and highlight Cree’s competitive edge. I developed three broad themes for promotional campaigns:
Approach 1: Longevity
One of the significant technological improvements of the LED was that it outlasted the regular filament bulb. We could emphasize the bulb's durability by using a hyperbolic narrative of the bulbs duration.
Approach 2: Brightness and Energy Efficiency
Another competitive edge that the LED bulb had over the filament bulb was how energy efficient the bulb would become over time. These ads contain a short and memorable tagline (“it’s cheaper to leave it on” or “this light stays on”) and were intended to drive the messaging that leaving the bulb on added negligible cost to the user.
Approach 3: Environmental Impact
This strategy takes a more directly competitive approach against the mainstream filament bulb. With a longer lifetime than the filament bulb, LED bulbs are less likely to populate trash bins as frequently, an ad campaigning targeting that advantage could appeal to the growing trend of environmentally-sustainable choices a consumer can make.
