A brand that makes a good example of, first and foremost, connecting emotionally to its customers is Dove, with its ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’, adopted by Unilever back in 2004.
Before 2004 Dove had only communicated product benefits, just as the majority of personal care brands. With the Campaign for Real Beauty, Unilever and Dove took on an emotional stand instead, aiming to convey a more democratic vision of attractiveness. Dove wanted women to feel beautiful every day by widening the stereotypical views of beauty.
Dove’s commitment to this mission started with using women of various ages, shapes and sizes, not super-thin models, in their commercials. The brand was doing so to provoke discussion and debate about today’s typecast beauty images. Employing various communication vehicles including advertising, a web site, billboards, events, a Self-Esteem Fund and more – the campaign invites women to experience the brand and join the discussion about beauty, and share their views with others all around the world.
Dove has successfully taken a stand with the Campaign for Real Beauty, engaging their target audience by giving back something of value - the value of good self-esteem. At the same time, the brand has enabled customers to engage with both the brand and the customer’s social networks, spreading the word about Dove to others.
With regard to personal care brands, the Campaign for Real Beauty has been one of the most recognised ones during the last couple of years. With a movement of close to 200 000 fans of the brand online, Dove has successfully created an admired brand, which is now perceived as differentiated from its competitors, and has positioned itself as a preferable choice for many consumers, owning an exclusive position in their minds. The result of the Campaign for Real Beauty is a significant increase in sales of Dove’s whole product range.
A Nielsen study suggests that the majority of customers only recall two of the countless advertising messages we are exposed to daily. No wonder. By the age of 65, the average consumer will have seen more than 2 Million TV commercials (that equals eight hours advertising a day, seven days a week, six years in a row). Thus, an authentic and consistent brand identity is crucial for brands striving to stand out and reach through the media clutter.
To differentiate from competitors, brands need to create and care for their identities, also referred to as brand personalities. However, a brand can’t just tell their audience what it is and stands for, and make that the common truth. A brand personality is the outcome of what customers experience from the brand. Just as with human personalities, brand personalities are affected by everything that is associated with the brand. This makes it more important than ever for a brand to act the way it wants to be perceived. Only an authentic and consistent brand personality will make a sustainable point of differentiation, and stand out as genuine and unique, being the natural brand of choice. It’s about ‘owning’ an exclusive position in the consciousness of the customers.
Above you find one of McDonald’s many ‘i’m lovin’ it‘ commercials. The campaign was launched in Germany in 2003, under the title ‘ich liebe es‘, then spread globally. A consistent use of the slogan, the golden arches, as well as a uniform interior and menu, has successfully made many instinctively think of McDonald’s as the preferable hamburger brand.
In previous posts you can read about the philosophy of the four Es, emotions, experiences and engagement. In the posts to follow, we will provide you with case studies of brands working successfully with the four Es, as well as a rundown of the marketing model.
Conversations between people are accelerating. To a very large extent, discussions have moved online to platforms such as Facebook, twitter and YouTube. Many brands are eager to join the conversation but quickly realise that old marketing rules no longer apply. Traditional marketing and advertising just isn’t as effective anymore. To be successful today brands need to engage consumers.
Nowadays, a customer can pass messages from one source to many, through a myriad of social networking opportunities. These can then be passed to the masses through viral marketing activities. Therefore, brands need to start to think of ROI not solely as in ‘return on investment’, but as ‘return on involvement‘ or ‘interaction’. This will enable them to embrace engagement in their marketing strategies.
Brands must dare to say good-bye to the monologue, pushing out messages, and welcome the dialogue, through engaging their customers.
To do this successfully, brands need to bring something of value to the dialogue - something people can appreciate and connect with. In this way your customers will become advocates of your brand and share it with others in their network. This is now more important than ever. As many as 90% of us trust recommendations from people that we know, and 7 out of 10 trust consumer opinions posted online (Nielsen).
Above you can watch clips from Tipp-Ex, Old Spice and Pepsi. These are three brands that understand the power of interaction and how to engage customers in their marketing campaigns. The Pepsi Refresh Project will be presented in a case study later on in this series about the four Es of emotions, experiences, engagement and exclusivity.
Brands offering direct and authentic experiences are more likely to create deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers than brands that don’t.
In order to feel important, understood and connected today, people need meaningful and memorable experiences. A recent consumer survey in UK showed that people’s brand recall of an experience is 60%, while for newspapers only 30% and for TV almost as low as 20%. As more companies start to understand the importance of producing cultural capital, authentic brand experiences are becoming increasingly important in order for brands to connect deeper with their customers and get the desired customer attention. To be effective, the experience of a brand has to be rooted in the story the company tells, and appeal to as many of the human senses – i.e. sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – as possible, and the more meaningful the experience is, the more cultural capital will be associated with it.
Brands with the ‘fingerspitzgefühl’ of navigating between culture and commerce and direct authentic experiences, will be able to create a deeper and more meaningful relationship to their customers, and more easily succeed in building brand advocacy. Most good experiences tell stories, and a good brand experience makes customers feel closer to the brand. Greater customer loyalty is developed due to the emotional bond, established through the experience. Customers are also willing to pay more for products from brands providing them with meaningful brand experiences.
Today, we can also see more brands that have started to approach experiences in a more strategic way. Above you can watch intros for T-Mobile’s Electronic Beats Festival, and Intel’s Creators Project, a project that will be presented in a case study later on in this series about the four Es of emotions, experiences, engagement and exclusivity.
As much as we’d like to think of ourselves as objective decision-making machines, our actions often say otherwise. When we ‘shop’ for something, we typically generate rational reasons to justify our actions. But the decision at the exact time of purchase is quite impulsive and largely emotional.
Emotional advertising content makes more impact on customers than any rational information. This has been strengthened by neuroscience research during the last few years. In short, our emotions ‘decide’, and do the ‘shopping’, for us. In the end, our actions are formed on the associations and feelings we have for a brand, together with our subjective history of it. Hence, it is essential for brands to establish positive, or ‘right’, brand associations and connect emotionally with customers.
Establishing ‘right’ brand associations helps to shape positive customer perceptions around the brand, and build strong affinity that leads to a much-increased brand preference amongst the customers, generating engagement and increasing customer loyalty.
Emotional substance in marketing and communication increases the likelihood of being remembered as well. Customers pay more attention to emotionally-stimulating brand activities than brand activities lacking emotional content. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, coined the expression ‘lovemarks’ in 2002, in his book with the same name, where he stated the need for emotional brand connectivity with customers. Eight years later we find this need stronger than ever.
Brands that establish emotional bonds with their customers will effectively place themselves apart from their competitors, enabling the growth of customer loyalty. Today it is no longer a question of struggling for recognition alone. Today it is a question of being relevant, and connecting with customers. Because only then customers will forward your brand to their peers, writing testimonials and recommending your brand to others they are connected to. Successful brands are thus the ones that offer their customers emotional content which make the customers associate with the brand in a positive manner.
Worth noting is that rational strengths shouldn’t be utterly replaced by emotional ones: for smaller brands, or new businesses, rational marketing may well do better than exclusively emotional marketing, but for most of the already established brands, or bigger businesses, emotional marketing will definitely outperform solely rational ones.
Above you can watch film clips from Levi’s and Dove, two brands successfully working with emotions in their marketing campaigns. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty will be presented as a case study later in this series about the four Es of emotions, experiences, engagement and exclusivity.
As a promotion, the beer brand Beck’s gives bands a chance to perform live. The bands battle against each other to convince a jury that they are Beck’s European Newcomer 2010. The winner gets to play on the same stage as world famous French band Phoenix later this year.
Not so long ago, brands wanted nothing but the big bands – to promote their (often big) brands. Today however, global companies such as Diesel, Mountain Dew (Pepsi) and Converse have adopted the ‘exploration strategy’, to reach the crowd and build their own fanbases.
Many things have changed within the music industry during the last fifteen years or so. The business is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to consume music. In the 80s and 90s most brands strictly wanted the big bands to promote their brands, because only they would generate the desired customer attention and raise sales (brand managers thought). Now however, brands have started to adopt what we at Heartbeats refer to as the ‘exploration strategy‘. Instead of spending loads of money on our time’s counterparts to Michael Jackson, Prince or Madonna, brands choose to promote new and up-coming talents, the superstars of tomorrow.
An early adopter of this strategy is fashion brand Diesel, with Diesel:U:Music (D:U:M), launched 10 years ago, as a yearly unsigned music talent award and a worldwide support network with new artists, labels, radio stations, journalists and producers across the world. Recently D:U:M partnered with Sonicbids, a music gig discovery and booking website, to launch Diesel’s Stupid for Music World Cup in celebration of D:U:M’s 10th anniversary. In World Cup style, indie bands battle for a chance to win not only prizes from Diesel, but a professional PR campaign, music video production and recording session as well.
Another brand that has adopted the ‘exploration strategy’ is Mountain Dew (Pepsi) with record label Green Label Sound, where the brand gives away free downloads and promotes new artists and bands - giving their audience something more than just a soft drink.
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Yet, another example of a brand exploring undiscovered artists and musicians is Converse with its Get Out Of The Garage contest, as well as its global creative project ‘You’re It’, launched earlier this year.
New technology has definitely opened the door for these kind of marketing strategies. However, it’s not enough to only be present at places where the audience is, or own a platform. Rather, marketing needs a higher purpose. A number of brands have understood this, and they are now building the fanbases of tomorrow, yet there are many that still have a long way to go… The ‘exploration strategy’ is one proven path to take.
