Category: Uncategorized

It’s harder than ever to know when ‘brand exposure’ will turn into ‘brand disaster’

I’ve done it plenty of times:  You organize a branded event in a bar or other venue, with lots of expensive signage.  By 2am, you’ve finally cleared everyone out, you’re cleaning up and you’re exhausted, so you think “Oh heck, I’ll just leave that signage up there.  Maybe they won’t bother to take it down and I’ll get a few extra days of exposure out of it.  My client will like that, and anyway I’m too tired to get up on a ladder and get it all down now.”

Except that the next night’s event is a dog-fighting exhibition, which almost everyone thinks is terrible.  And now the brand is attached to something awful, and thanks to the internet it goes viral in about 5 minutes.  What’s worse, it won’t go away:  The Heineken dog fighting photo [above] first circulated in April 2012 and Heineken dealt with it pretty promptly, but it showed up again in my Facebook feed just this week.

The lesson?  These days, marketers have to be able to predict the future more accurately than ever – what’s more, they have to be able to see all possible future scenarios in order to avert disaster.

Marketers have always had to be prescient:  After all, most of the time what you’re really saying to a client is “If we spend $X on Y initiative, we can expect Z results.”  It’s the hardest – but maybe most exciting – part of the job, because you really have no idea whether spending $500k to put your product in a will.i.am video is, in fact, going to deliver an incremental increase in sales (and in fact you may not even have the ability to draw a straight line from that $500k investment to any incremental sales at all). 

But these days you not only have to be a ‘visionary creative’ (ugh), you also have to be a brilliant strategic-thinking tactician, like [insert name of famously successful military thinker here], capable of seeing both the potential wins of a campaign or initiative, as well as all the ways in which that campaign could turn into a giant disaster.

What does this mean for marketers?  Well, I wish I could say it means that marketers will get smarter and the rest of the world would stop thinking we’re pretty much idiots who try to sell people stuff they don’t need.  However, I think it’s more likely that the real consequence is that big brands will become even more squeamish about taking risks, and successful marketing types won’t be the ones with great ideas, but the ones who are best at convincing their clients they’ve ‘driven results’ without causing any controversy. 

Great brand stories tell themselves.

A few weeks ago I was working in a client’s office, when I suddenly realized I was hearing someone saying words I’d written.  At first I thought perhaps I’d turned into Oscar Wilde without knowing it, but then I understood:  It was an employee, on the phone, and they were talking about the company.

What was satisfying about what I was hearing wasn’t that the employee (a senior exec) was repeating something I’d created word for word – he wasn’t working from a script or cold-calling.  A former colleague had called to find out what the guy was doing these days, and the employee was telling him about the company.  But he wasn’t just talking about the products and services or even how many people he was managing now.

He was telling the brand story.

 

What’s a ‘brand story’?

Essentially, it’s a compelling explanation of who you are, why you’re different, and why someone should care, all in a nicely-wrapped little story that gives some indication of your history and culture.  You can create brand stories for personal brands or big multinationals – the idea is that they’re easy to remember and retell.  

The truth is that if you give people a list of facts, you’ll be lucky if they remember one or two of them.  Put those facts into a story, on the other hand, and you stand a much better chance of the information sticking.  It’s why it’s easier to figure out the answer to a physics problem that starts with “If the sailboat was drifting towards the cliff at 5km/hour…” than one which starts with “Calculate the vector for X…”

And stories do a better job of inspiring and motivating people than facts alone can do.

(Years ago, Seth Godin wrote a very nice piece about using stories to market ideas – you can read it here.)

 

They need to take on a life of their own

Brand stories don’t work if the only person telling them is the president at the annual meeting, or if they’re just stuck on a website somewhere.  They have to be told and retold, internalized and shared, both within the organization and by stakeholders on the outside.

(One of the ways Google got so popular, even though they’re so big, is because their story, “Don’t be evil”, became widely known.)

So how does that happen?

By making sure that the story is:

• Real (you can’t talk about how your food products are based on ‘family recipes’ without showing your employees a framed copy of Grandma’s original cookie recipe, for example)
• Organic (think grassroots, not top-down)
• Consistent (‘friendly’ means being friendly to suppliers and employees, not just customers)
• Interesting (a “rags to riches” story will get you a reality show quicker than a “slow and cautious” growth story)

Possibly most important is making new employees feel like they’ve joined a special team or an exclusive club – an organization that they can feel proud of, and that they want to tell others about.  

My client’s organization isn’t the hugest in their industry, but they do a great job of onboarding their employees:  They make them feel important and special, they make sure new employees know the brand story from the very first day, and they go out of their way to make sure new employees feel like part of the brand story – that every employee has the power to change the company.  

And maybe that’s the key to the whole thing:  When employees feel like they’re part of the brand story, they start telling the story to others, because they feel a sense of ownership.  

Are your employees telling your story?

Whether it’s B2C or B2B, people only want 3 things.
Good marketing is just about demonstrating how your product delivers.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  Whether they’re at home or at the office, making purchasing decisions for themselves or their company, people all want the same 3 things:

1. To make or save money
2. To do less work (or save time)
3. To look like a star

In other words, everyone wants money, time and love.

Great marketing is really just about demonstrating how your product, service or brand will deliver against one or more of these things.

Making or saving money

This is the easy one:  Demonstrate how your product or service is cheaper, or will save the consumer money in the short- or long-term, and you’ll have lots of customers.  This is why Brita focuses on how many bottles of water you won’t have to buy, rather than on the quality of the charcoal in their water filters.  Works in all settings (i.e. whether the consumer is making buying decisions in a work environment, for family, or for themselves).

 

Doing less work or saving time

If you’ve ever had to sell anything in a corporate environment, you know that telling a roomful of people how your product or service is going to make their day-to-day lives easier by cutting their workload in half is enough to get you halfway to the close.

And of course I don’t have to tell you that 95% of household product advertising is dependent on the old ‘Our product will save you so much time!’ chestnut.  Like this one:

(Though I can’t help thinking:  If using a dryer bar instead of dryer sheets does, in fact, leave you more time to “think about what your boys are doing”, you probably weren’t using the dryer sheets properly in the first place.)

 

Looking like a star

This one is also known as ‘getting love/admiration/recognition’.

In B2B marketing, this translates to a message like “If you use our product or service, you will definitely earn the admiration of your peers, the respect of your manager, and probably a promotion and a raise!”  (We’ve all heard the old saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM…”, which is a direct reference to the fact that buying decisions in a corporate environment tend to be made not on a totally rational basis, but on how those decisions will reflect on the decider.)

In B2C marketing, this is really where ‘branding’ comes in to the picture, and we need look no further than the huge lineup outside of Tiffany & Co. at Yorkdale Mall this past Christmas Eve.  I wish I’d gotten a picture, but trust me when I say that by 9am on December 24th, there were 250 men in line outside Tiffany’s. 

Nothing in Tiffany’s was going to deliver against #1, and standing in line with 250 people definitely isn’t going to deliver against #2.  But giving someone a little blue box is practically guaranteed to make you look like a rockstar, at least for the rest of the day.  Why?  Because for lots of people, wearing Tiffany makes them feel loved/admired/the envy of their peer group.

 

Having trouble deciding whether a marketing message ‘resonates’ with the target?

Just ask yourself:  Does it clearly demonstrate how the product or service delivers against the 3 things everyone wants?  If not, you probably want to go back to the drawing board.

 

 

 

Introducing ‘Scream and Shout’ by will.i.am ft Britney Spears

 

This isn’t the worst song in the world – I find I like will.i.am’s production, most of the time – and even Britney is giving off less of that tragic desperation I’m-trapped-in-my-own-myth vibe than usual.  So that’s nice.

But I feel like the song is actually just the soundtrack to a commercial for various products will.i.am is endorsing, starting with a host of Apple-related products and accessories:

 

(This is part of the new will.i.cam line of high-end accessories for iPhones.)

And then moves on to Beats by Dr. Dre speakers:

(To be fair, Dr. Dre speakers and headphones show up in almost everything these days, and the kids are so busy ignoring the potential cognitive dissonance inherent in some of Dre’s, Jay-Z’s and 50 Cent’s money-making schemes – formerly known as ‘selling out’, now recognized as ‘cashing in’ – that they haven’t got time to notice they’re being had.)

And, finally, a robotic hand:

 

Now, it’s just possible that this was some kind of freebie, because I’ve heard will.i.am interviewed and I think he’s genuinely interested in robotics.  He also hosted a robotics championship last year, and that’s not something you’ll catch, say, Jay-Z doing.

I’m not in a position to condemn product placement entirely – after all, I listen to lots and lots of music online (i.e. free), watch lots and lots of videos online (free) and watch lots of tv online (again, free).  So if artists are finding ways to get paid without it having to come out of my pocket, that’s fine with me.  

But…I get uncomfortable when I can’t even pretend to myself that I’m not watching a commercial.

 

A random song + thoughtful art direction + barely suppressed hilarity = a video I’m usually guaranteed to love. Apparently these are two guys from ad agency TBWA/Helsinki (my guess is they’re a creative team, with guy on the left as art director and guy on the right as copywriter), and they are having the kind of after-hours fun that makes people want to work in ad agencies.

Camera quality and general skill level has increased a lot in the past few years, but in the early days of YouTube I used to love Back Dorm Boys (aka ‘Two Chinese Boys’) for the same reason: