At a recent marketing summit, Adam Ferrier of the media agency Naked made an interesting comment. He said that “many brands are like sticky blobs made up of values and personality, but with very little reason to believe in their essence.”
It questions the fashionable idea that a brand should be loved by its consumers. But he is right to question this received wisdom.
Affection for a brand is all very well, but pragmatic consumers need a ‘reason why’ before parting with their money. It can be an emotional reason, and it often is, but there still has to be one.
Recently there has been a ‘communication gap’, especially on television. This separation dictates that as a marketer you must decide whether your commercial will be ‘Branded’ or ‘Tactical’.
I would argue that each TVC should contain both elements to varying degrees. And by separating these two vital ingredients, marketers get television advertising that is less effective and more expensive than it should be.
Today’s ‘Brand’ advertising is often big, bold and expensive. It makes consumers feel good about the brand. But, ultimately, it offers no tangible reason to try or continue to use the brand.
Why?
Brand advertising doesn’t have to be bigger than Ben Hur. Consumers don’t need mini-movies to remind them that their choice is correct or that they need to make a change.
At the other end of the spectrum is ‘tactical’ advertising. For some reason, much of rational communication has been mass produced. Cookie-cutter advertising, where a woman recites a list of product supports while she stands in front of a shelf full of packages, now passes for tactical advertising. These formats are very ‘samey’ and completely ignore other communications that the brand is doing.
Here’s a crazy idea! Why not create TV advertising that balances both ‘Brand’ and ‘Tactic’? Think of ‘Louie the fly’ for Mortien. Louie’s character provides an impossible-to-steal brand property for Mortien. Each visualization builds the brand. However, a commercial Louie is not expensive.
And tactically, each Louie ad can still present facts, such as new formulations, fragrances, packaging changes, etc. It’s interesting that Louie was invented before many of us were born: before a TVC had to be Brand or Tactical and in a time when loving a can of fly spray would have been seen as odd.
