The campaign, now under way, is for Post-it notes, sold by the 3M Company. The campaign, which includes television commercials, ads online, the brand’s Web site and social media, portrays Post-its as much more than sticky pieces of paper that are good for scribbling reminders.

The campaign, with a budget estimated at $10 million, presents Post-its as a vehicle for self-expression by depicting the unusual and unexpected ways that consumers use them. That is different from the typical top-down tack in campaigns when marketers offer consumers new ideas for using products, most often seen in food ads that are centered on recipes.

The change in tactics by the Post-it brand is underlined by the theme of the campaign, “Go ahead,” which cheerfully encourages consumers to come up with their own nontraditional uses for Post-its. The campaign is being created by Grey New York, part of the Grey division of the Grey Group, which is owned by WPP.

The campaign is based on — and recreates — examples of Post-it creativity around the world. They include how passers-by blanketed a window of an empty store in Cambridge, Mass., with Post-its that replied to the question “Who inspires you?”; the so-called “Post-it wars” waged by office workers in buildings in cities like Paris and Seattle, who covered facing windows with thousands of Post-it notes to duplicate the look of pixilated images; and the initiatives by teachers who use Post-it products to enliven their classroom lessons.

The Post-it campaign is the most recent in a series of efforts by marketers to take advantage of a trend known as customization, which is particularly reshaping pitches aimed at millennial consumers in their 20s and 30s.

Customization refers to the penchant among younger consumers to be expressive and personalize mass-market goods — having it their way, to paraphrase the old Burger King slogan — as they seek to have a say in the story a brand is telling them.

Another example in the field of office products is a campaign by Draftfcb, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, for the Sharpie brand of markers sold by Newell Rubbermaid, which carries the themes “Uncap what’s inside” and “Start with Sharpie.” The home page of the Sharpie Web site asks, “What are you starting?” and prompts visitors to “join the Sharpie community” and “show how creative you can be with Sharpie.”

The Post-it campaign begins as 3M reports strong results in its most recent fiscal quarter for sales of Post-its and other products sold by a business segment the company refers to as consumer and office, which includes office supplies and stationery.

The Post-it campaign is “a component of our overall revitalization strategy with the business and the brand,” says Jesse Singh, vice president for the stationery and office supplies division of 3M in Minnesota.

“If you think about the product, it’s iconic, it’s been in the market over 30 years,” he adds, and until recently the strategy to sell it was by “taking a functional view of the brand.”

“As we did research on our customer base,” Mr. Singh says, the crucial finding is that people “had a much more emotional relationship with the product” than 3M executives had expected.

“They’re using it to communicate, using it to collaborate, using it to organize themselves,” he adds.

That led to a rethinking of how to market Post-it, Mr. Singh says, shifting from a “product-out” perspective to one that is “really consumer-in.”

“We were inspired,” he adds, by the “quirky and inspired uses of our product.”

That is brought to life in the initial two TV commercials in the campaign. One, which runs 60 seconds, is composed of vignettes. The spot begins with a man sticking a Post-it, which reads “Morning, beautiful,” and includes a pointing arrow, onto the mirror on the bathroom medicine chest as a woman brushes her teeth. “Go ahead, keep the honeymoon going,” a narrator says.

The scene shifts to what appears to be a college campus as young people affix Post-it notes to a wall outside a building that is near a sign reading, “What inspires you?” As that vignette, clearly based on the Cambridge store window, appears on screen, the narrator says, “Share on a real wall.”

Other vignettes include people adding Post-its to a wall covered with them, which is divided into categories like “App name” and “Features”; a woman sticking Post-its bearing tasks onto windows; a young man covering a wall with artwork created with Post-its of multiple colors; a young woman with a notebook filled with drawings of bridges and Post-its, who is posed between two bridges; and students with a teacher in a classroom.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/mutfund/3m-says-go-ahead-make-something-of-it.html?partner=rss&emc=rss