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MARKETING - October 2004 The Bottom Line, Of Sorts “It’s a fan,” said Buell, “marketing guy” for Lexington’s Big Ass Fan Co. “It goes around, and around and around.” But if selling giant industrial fans is challenging, the man behind the company’s low-key, slapstick public persona isn’t sweating it. The manufacturer has shown double- or triple-digit growth in each of the past three years. And after posting $10 million in revenue last year, the company is shipping fans so quickly it can’t keep them in stock. They owe it all, of course, to a branding campaign that’s made Big Ass Fan a landmark in an industry wrought with mundane – or nonexistent – promotions. It’s also become a case study of sorts in the inexact art of marketing. “There’s no such thing as a marketing expert,” said Richard Stafford, a marketing lecturer at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics. “It’s whatever works.” Buell actually doesn’t take credit for coming up with the term “big ass” to label the fans his company makes, which range from six to 24 feet in diameter. It evolved from comments made by clients into a mantra when the company was still called the HVLS Fan Co., short for high volume, low speed. In 2002, Buell came to his post after selling an international horse-industry publication he had owned. The “big ass” slogan had taken on such a life of its own by that time that Buell lobbied hard for HVLS Fan to embrace it even further. In early 2002, the company adopted the off-color phrase as its name. “I looked at that and I said, ‘brilliance.’ Run with it,” Buell said. Since his arrival, the company has swelled from seven to around 30 employees. Marketing professionals warn that shock or gorilla marketing can sometimes backfire, especially if a brand becomes tainted with unintended offensive associations. Case in point: clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co., whose sales tumbled more than 15 percent at the end of last year after conservative shoppers boycotted the company for its sexual exploitation of teenagers in its quarterly catalogue. But what the company has done right, according to UK’s Stafford, is become the antithesis of industrial drudgery in a minimally offensive way. The bullish marketing campaign has stayed mostly in the realm of lowbrow humor and has steered clear of sexual innuendo. “I don’t necessarily think sex sells. I think it gets attention,” Stafford said “I encourage the student to go for humor. Generally, humor is far more effective.” Ironically, such humor has had mass appeal among white-collar industrial executives and plant managers, who bring Big Ass Fan advertisements from magazines to trade shows to brandish to colleagues. Melissa Chesser, a receptionist at the company’s main office, greets everyone who calls with the company’s name. “Some people start laughing as soon as I answer,” she said. Using animals for humor is an old but enduring advertising tactic employed with success by other corporations like Anheuser-Bush, Inc. and Quiznos, Inc. Big Ass Fan’s marketing has garnered attention from trade magazines, talk shows, newspapers in Milwaukee, Wis., and Bangor, Maine, and the British Broadcasting Corp. At the height of the company’s quibble with Lexington’s city council, BigAssFans.com registered nearly 18 million hits in one day. But Buell is quick to point out that good publicity cannot prop up a poor product. Big Ass Fans, which move large quantities of air and consume little energy, are used nationally and overseas by companies like Toyota Motor Corp., Amazon.com, Boeing Co. and Office Depot, Inc. “You could shock people until you’re blue in the face, but if you can’t hold their interest, it doesn’t matter,” Buell said. Signing ex-Chicago Bear William “The Refrigerator” Perry as its spokesperson last year has not hurt Big Ass Fan, either. Perry’s pull, coupled with the company’s unmistakable name, usually earns Big Ass Fans some of the best floor space at trade shows. Show goers form lines to get Perry’s autograph. “We’ve brought some excitement to this dull market,” Buell said. |
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is copyright 2004, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
Standing beneath the heavy draft of a giant ceiling fan, Bill Buell doesn’t pretend the product he must promote has much entertainment value.
Big Ass Fan Co. has offended its share of industrial buyers, too. The company’s Web site has a section exclusively devoted to love letters and hate mail in response to its name. And last year, a small contingent on Lexington’s city council rallied unsuccessfully for the company to remove a giant mural of Fanny, Big Ass Fan’s donkey mascot, from the outside wall of its building.