Target seeks to balance ad message in new campaign

Target Corp is re-balancing its advertising message, hoping to attract a US consumer who has regained her financial balance and is willing to spend more on discretionary items like clothes.

The new campaign, with the tagline- life's a moving target- includes 30-second television spots that feature items like dresses and other things that consumers largely shunned during the recession.

A couple years ago, we were focused on differentiation, Target Chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel said in an interview Friday at the company's headquarters in Minneapolis.

As we went through the recessionary time frame, we were focused more on the Pay Less aspect of it.

The new campaign ;seems to be an acute balance of the two, he said.

Besides the 30-second ads, the campaign will also include 15-second spots that each focus on one item to solve an everyday situation. For example, one of the short spots shows a girl washing her dog in the bathtub, before a picture of Drano drain cleaner flashes on the screen.

The 15-second spots will include the price of the item, emphasizing the Pay Less, Expect More slogan.

But the 30-second ads focus more on the breadth of items Target offers, ratcheting up the Expect More part.

Target saw its business suffer during the recession as consumers focused strictly on price and were unwilling to buy anything but basics like food and medicine.

With the economy improving, consumers have shown some willingness to add discretionary items to their shopping lists, Target executives said.

The story we have is that we really have both sides of that list in our store, Shawn Gensch, vice president for brand marketing, said.

That shift toward more discretionary spending favors Target, which devotes a large part of its stores to those items, said Edward Jones analyst Matt Arnold.   

I think it''s the right move, he said of the campaign.

The pendulum does seem to be swinging more toward discretionary purchases coming back.  

The company expects the campaign, developed by Weiden and Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, to run for at least a year, with at least 30 different spots featuring different products, Gensch said. He declined to say how much the campaign costs.

The 30-second commercials have already started running and the 15-second spots will begin airing on May 16.