Brands can no longer get by through simply “advertising” themselves. Brands peddling their wares on Page & Screen to an at best semi-interested audience; it’s little more than touting.
And the message is clear:
The Magic Bullet theory (identify the target, aim, fire... sit back and watch) has little-to-no magic left in it. It’s a dud; an Old Model piece of thinking, goddamn archaic if the gloves are off and truth be told, like putting leaches on the skin to clean the blood.
While audiences are at best semi-inclined to The Commercial Message, they’re no longer semi-literate. In these “Time Famished Times” they’re all-the-way media literate, brand multi-linguists... and they’re busy filtering and editing and plain ignoring the vast deluge of commercial noise streaming at them 24/7.
It’s a New Consumer and a New Tech Order, with little wiggle room left for old world marketing models where the 30” TVC is the marketeers All & Everything.
All meaning, very simply... yes, you got it... everything and everyone has to work harder. Brands have to work harder. Brand planners have to work harder. Advertising has to work harder... because invariably the “advertising” has to pretend it’s something else. It’s not a TV ad, it’s a brand film. It’s not a “commercial message”, it’s content, almost entertainment, that’s just for you Dear Consumer, to have fun with... and maybe tell your friends?
For consumers to love their brands, see them as their brands, there has to be Dialogue & Interaction. There has to be interplay. There’s a social dynamic at work. “Brand” and “Consumer” is a courtship, and “brand-mance” (that I know won’t catch-on) is a relationship like any other; that needs to be continually kindled and stoked. Brand loyalty, brand promiscuity, we use these words rightly enough.
“Straight advertising” has become the equivalent of ignoring your girlfriend over dinner. Branded content and CRM and “co-creation” is the opposite, it’s telling her she’s hot. And there’s nothing wrong with telling someone they’re hot. (Doubly so if they are really hot.)
Which reminds me of this fun little short produced by Microsoft a little whiles back...
And while it’s a fine line between cliché and truism, I’d courteously label this a truism we all know and should lovingly apply:
Behaviours breed behaviours.
More so, behaviours attract behaviours. And they trigger behaviours. And we’re in a game where we want people to preference and buy.
Brands influence, persuade, and succeed through how they behave. If we, in designing campaigns, want to win over consumers, we need to mirror consumers and pre-emptively mirror them, to get in there first and implicitly encourage them to mirror us.
Brands must flirt.
Brands can’t sit back and expect Consumers to skip over to them, for Cupids Arrow to serendipitously do all the work. Brands need to reject those Not-So-Magic Bullets and be their own Cupid’s, fire their own arrows, practice their own conversation starters and opening gambits. Brands need to make all the effort, do all the chasing.
In the Grand Seduction to win market share, it’s not possible to be too keen. Consumers are worth it. Shakespeare may have been thinking more on the fairer sex than Communication Planning when he wrote:
She's beautiful, and therefore to be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore to be won.
William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth (Part I)
But parallels can be drawn.
Consumers are to be won; they’re made for wooing.
SP.
Footnote – subsequent (August 2010)
Here’s a brand that gets it, knows how to woo, open conversations, all that good theory put into practice.
When you see a campaign you’d have loved to be a part of, “you gotta at least raise a glass”. Those guys at Wieden + Kennedy Portland, they nailed it.