When it comes to new media campaigns, get excited, get creative and get edgy, but don't forget the fundamentals of Marketing 101. See how good buzz can go bad, and how to avoid it.
Boy, there are a lot of new, hip marketing opportunities out there, huh? It's saliva-inducing, all those consumers using all those web applications and devices in all sorts of ways. And a lot of them, especially those ever-important 39 and under demos, are spending a lot less time using things that marketers understand, like television and magazines. Our whole culture is being sucked into the internet and it's impacting our lives in countless ways every day -- even when we aren't online. Discovering how to reach out to those audiences using new distribution channels is at the top of every marketing and advertising professional's mind (and if it isn't, you're in the wrong profession).
But beware: those new, hip marketing opportunities are fraught with peril. Because in a marketing context "new" means untried, untested and unknown longevity or impact, and "hip" means so cool that by the time you're aware of it it's no longer cool. In fact, the conscious decision to try to be hip is in itself the definition of un-hip and can make you look like a fool.
When it comes to new media campaigns, don't let yourself get so pumped up by the exciting ideas that you forget the fundamentals of Marketing 101. We all want to run successful viral video or social media campaigns, but there are factors in play that can make some brands an unnatural fit for them. Our responsibility as marketers is to ultimately create a unique message that resonates with consumers, but to be successful we also have to make sure that message produces results.
We're going to take a look at some new media marketing campaigns that have clunked like the proverbial lead zeppelin to see if we can find some common threads and lessons to learn.
Know your brand… and your other brand
It's critical for marketers and brand managers to avoid insular tunnel vision. It's no longer prudent to simply be aware of what our adversaries are doing; it's necessary for us to know what our parent company's other brands are up to, because we cannot assume that consumers don't know whose umbrella our product is sitting under.
The most notable recent example of inadvertent mixed messages is probably the Dove Evolution campaign. Dove Evolution was a time-lapse video of a perfectly average young woman transformed, after a brutally long session of hair and make-up, lighting, airbrushing, etc., into an incredibly beautiful billboard model. Through deconstruction, it vividly underscores its tagline, "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted." It was followed up by Dove Onslaught, which had a similar theme of female image perception. The spots generated millions of hits, garnered a lot of publicity for the brand, and tied back to Dove’s overarching theme of female empowerment in its Campaign for Real Beauty and the Dove Self-Esteem Fund.
What was the problem? Well, Dove is owned by Unilever. Unilever also owns Axe Body Spray. And Axe Body Spray runs some of the most misogynistic commercials on TV. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so high and mighty that I don’t get what Axe is trying to accomplish with their campaign -- I am, after all, a man, and we all know that sex sells. The ads also are clearly meant to be interpreted humorously. However, they do exploit women as sex objects that have little going on between their ears beyond tearing men's clothing off. While there are certainly a fair number of women who write those ads off as harmless and ridiculous, there are many others who find them offensive. And when the Axe campaign was revealed to be run by the same company that orchestrated the Evolution and Onslaught ads… well, it was all too easy for someone to lambaste Unilever for hypocrisy. Which is precisely what happened.
Dove’s campaign was still, at the end of the day, a highly successful example of effectively using new media to propagate a message. And regardless of Unilever’s other products, it's hard to argue that that message is in any way negative. But the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to pursue an iconoclastic, grassroots or cause-related marketing campaign in order to differentiate your brand (and then utilize a delivery mechanism with a public message board) you'd better thoroughly check under the hood so you can proactively prepare to neutralize potential backlash.
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