No formula, please
What works right once might not work at all the next time. It is critical to keep reinventing with a fresh approach
The most amazing thing about marketing today is that you just cannot and should not attempt to put it into a formula. What communication style and messaging may work for one brand at a certain point in time may not work for the same brand the next time, leave alone work for other brands in the category. The consumer is spoilt for choice and decides what communication to consume, where to consume it and when to consume it, and if at all to consume it in the first place. With so much clutter in terms of offerings, messages, media bombardment, there is always the challenge for every brand to stand out — and most importantly, resonate with the consumer. The minute an attempt will be made to consciously put this into a formula or into a trend, it could become like millions of other messages and immediately run the risk of being lost on the consumer.
The need of the hour is to therefore continuously reinvent oneself, to look for the next big idea even when the previous one seems to be working well. Too often we are lulled into believing that since the latest piece of work did well, we must continue in the same grain. And we painfully realise that the consumer was bored of that route already and was looking for something “fresh”.
The decoding of this word “fresh” is to my mind one of the biggest challenges for marketers today. As by definition, it means that one has to continuously attempt new things — even if the previous ones are working well. There is a sudden spate of advertising of late where category after category is attempting humour, irrespective of how serious the product benefit is. Similarly, if there is a large cricket tournament that catches the fancy of the consumer, almost every marketer in the country believes that he must ride on it.
And hence there are non-stop commercials and promotions offering free tickets and chances to meet the teams and so on. If a movie does extremely well, then the buzz line of the movie is used by multiple marketers in multiple creatives. The amazing part is that almost every piece of work runs the risk of looking like each other, leaving the consumer confused on which brand associated itself with what. That advertising recall does not imply brand recall is a cruel lesson that many of us have learnt the hard way.
No doubt that humour, use of celebrities, promotions evolving into interesting creatives rather than being plain vanilla announcers, in-film and out-of-film tie-ups, bizarre tonality even for serious categories have all seen an upswing in the last year. But I would hesitate to slot them as trends as it is critical to keep reinventing oneself with a “fresh” approach and tonality, to remain connected with our consumers. Being “fresh” does not imply making reckless shifts in strategy. The challenge is to deliver something new while being true to the core strategy of the brand.
The fact that the consumer today is everywhere but the tube is being spoken about in every single forum. As to how social networking, gaming, mobility, ground activation are critical and will be so much more critical in the years to come is not lost on any marketer. The intriguing part is that most marketing and creative partners are still almost singularly focused on the traditional media. And that results in very little cutting-edge work in the emerging media.
The nature of these media vehicles is such that they are not very metric-oriented, which leaves most marketers really wondering if they are spending their time, efforts and money in the right direction. Besides, the success rate of initiatives in these media is much lower than mass media initiatives. Which would mean that most marketers need to allow a lot more flexibility to themselves for making mistakes.
Thus the ability to “unlearn and forget quickly” will be almost as important if not more important than “learning quickly”.
Lastly, too often we are all only looking at trends which impact the consumer. And tend to ignore how these trends impact the role of the marketer himself. Increasingly, the role of the marketer would need to evolve from being a brand specialist to becoming a brand integrator — where he literally owns the brand P&L, and is not just focused on creating consumer demand.
This will involve a different set of characteristics — resilience and the ability to understand and coordinate across functions being one of the most critical ones. A much better understanding of finance, technical and technological functions would be needed to create a much better offering, and then to have the ability to deliver it to the consumer outside the core area of marketing.
It is only fair that the marketing team also looks at its role with a “fresh” set of eyes, and continuously challenges everyone in the organisation and its external agency partners to do the same.
To end in the famous words of Thomas Jefferson: “I am captivated more by dreams of the future than by the history of the past.”
The author is managing director, Perfetti Van Melle India