Message? What message?
Posted by Marco Geninazza at 1:00 15/08/09
MAKE SURE YOUR BRAND MESSAGE IS CLEAR.
What is the reason for your product or service? Is this obvious?
This is an area often overlooked with start-ups.
You’ve got a great idea for a business, a clear demand for your product or service and you’re ready and set to make the big bucks.
‘A spot of marketing is all it’ll take to get the word out and I’ll have customers at my doorstep before you can say “new villa in the south of France”’.
Surely, all you need is a good product and the customers will come flocking. Well.... No.
Never underestimate the difficulties that can arise if you give out the wrong message about your brand.
We all make mistakes…. At my first job as a Marketing Executive, for a large and well respected chain of restaurants in London, I worked on a direct marketing campaign set up by the bigwigs on the board that were convinced that they had a good understanding of their regular customers. They had a database of customers that had been to their restaurants over the years and, they believed, absolutely loved their brand. They would, once a year, send out vouchers by post (back in the days when email was a scary and unreliable myth) to their database. The vouchers would entitle the holder to a 2 for one meal throughout the chain’s 15 mid market restaurants. This would work a treat and have all the restaurants buzzing for around 2 months every spring in a period when the restaurants would otherwise be quiet.
They then opened 3 very high end restaurants in fashionable parts of the capital. All with huge, celebrity embraced, PR launches. The restaurants started off well but weren’t ever as full as the guys at the top wanted. So they demanded, against our advice, that we use a similar but more “classy” direct marketing campaign… Again with their beloved vouchers. The vouchers were sent out to the existing database of bargain hunters with the bigwigs convinced that a stampede would ensue. Naïve!!! Very very few people arrived with voucher in hand. Those that did were shocked to find that even after their discount; their meal would come to more than they had paid for their 3 piece sofa.
That marketing campaign succeeded in giving out the impression of desperation early on. Instead of concentrating on the brilliance of the cuisine (which began to deteriorate due to lack of focus) they began to offer promotion after promotion and it soon became clear that they didn’t quite understand what market they were going after and what message they were trying to convey. They also managed to leave a bad taste, at least financially, with their existing customers that often frequented the mid market restaurants. Needless to say, 7 years on, there is only one of these high end restaurants left in London and it’s hardly ever full.
Make sure that a clear brand image is constant and runs throughout your marketing and pr material and is evident in your advertising push. A lot of multinational brands tend to be moving away from traditional marketing methods and stepping into the murky water which is viral marketing. They see it as an easy, quick, cost effective way of reaching a lot of people. How hard can it be to put together a clever or funny video and send it out to a target market in the hope that it will then be passed on to more and more people.
This can work to great affect in some cases such as the Mastercard 'Priceless' campaign. It is still unsure as to whether Mastercard released all the adverts themselves in a marketing master-stroke or whether their tagline was simply adopted just to get some laughs and continued to create and release more and more of the adverts into cyberspace. Either way, by giving the impression that they weren’t involved in all of the adverts, they are free from any negative connotations associated with some of the more dodgy releases. They come off looking cool and funny, and manage to hammer home their company and tagline to a vast and impressionable, young, professional market.
This type of marketing however is a very tricky business when it comes to brand image as messages can often be lost or damaged when trying to achieve the viral qualities (often humor) of the advert.
Have a look at this Microsoft Advert;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB9fhjnJcB0
1) Isn’t that Superman? How much did they pay for him!?!?
2) The advert isn’t that funny so surely it won’t be passed on. At least in my humble opinion. I may be wrong.
3) I’m not sure I feel comfortable watching somebody repeatedly puking.
4) Why would I want my new product associated with somebody puking??
5) Why would I want my new product associated with covering up perverted sites???
To sum up, your brand is your lifeline. What people automatically think of when they think of your brand is vital. The messages you convey when putting together your marketing materials all affect the overall opinion of your product or service. This can directly affect your sales.
Have a look at this article from entrepreneur magazine, it gives great advice when it comes to thinking about brand message; www.entrepreneur.com
Join our page or add our link :