Now showing items tagged marketing

Earlier this year, a cereal brand faked a whole set of endorsements and got away with it. The reason? They explicitly stated so, right beneath the pretend endorsement. UK cereal brand Surreal’s campaign featured a whole series of ads which all read along the lines of:

“Serena Williams* eats our cereal.

*She is a student from London and we paid her to eat it but the point still stands.”

Each statement came with an asterisk, leading the eye to the ‘fine print’ beneath the endorsement which acknowledged that it wasn’t actually the celebrity who gave the endorsement, but a random individual with the same name that they had paid for the glowing report. [1] The campaign went viral across social media, with the public appreciating the ironic humour and sarcastic self-deprecation.

Years ago, I released a book named Memento that took me way out of my comfort zone. Unlike my previous nonfiction business books, Memento was for a completely new market and required an entirely different approach. It was a giftbook journal featuring a series of questions designed to prompt parents to write down their life stories as a keepsake for their children. Ten months after signing a big publishing deal with Chronicle Books in San Francisco, my family and I packed up and headed to the U.S. for a PR tour leading up to the book’s release.

While the media flurry took the predictable form of radio and print interviews, one appearance that popped into my PR calendar intrigued me. It was to record an infomercial on the Home Shopping Network. When the day of filming arrived, I caught a plane to Fort Lauderdale in Florida. At the airport, I was met by a driver who whisked me straight to the studios for hair and makeup. Little did I know how fascinating the experience would be.

In an era increasingly defined by scandal, hypocrisy and betrayals of public trust, customers are increasingly holding corporations to high standards of integrity. Businesses and brands can no longer afford to cut ethical corners, fall short of marketing promises or fail to practise what they preach. In an age of skepticism and transparency, what customers are craving from their companies is congruence.

In order to build the trust and rapport with customers that has been so often compromised, businesses and brands need clear sets of values that they are committed to upholding. Without clear values to guide conduct and culture, it’s easy to lose our way, lose sight of the things that really count and subsequently lose the trust of those who matter most.

Can you explain the difference between ‘used cars’ and ‘pre-owned vehicles’? What about ‘wire tapping’ and ‘electronic intercepts’? Or ‘impotence’ and ‘erectile dysfunction’?[1]

The difference? Semantics!

Far from being the rationally operating, pragmatic agents we like to believe we are, more often than not our decisions arise from the seat of our emotions. Our sense of certainty in reaching conclusions and making choices is far more connected to our impulses, emotional reactions and bodily sensations than we think. Rather than being quickly overridden by rational analysis, our emotions are a driving force in our behaviour, and are often the surest guarantee of our response.

We all like to believe we put our mind over matter. Overall, we are rational agents with free will who have control over our bodies, impulses and sensations. However, more and more studies are emerging that prove this belief to be far from the truth.

Researchers across disciplines and cultures are showing that our bodies are far more involved in our thinking than we like to believe. Our cognitive processes are embedded in a system that involves various parts of the rest of our body, from our heart to our gut.

We all have our own story of dealing with friction. Hours spent on hold, inefficient systems and arbitrary rules all play a role in making many customer experiences unbearable. The only outcomes of systems such as these are higher costs, confusion and irritation.

For this reason, removing friction and pain points for customers should be at the top of the list of a business’s priorities. Friction relates to the things that make it hard to engage with a business or brand. While flashy slogans and clever advertising can work wonders in drawing customers in, the things that will keep them are well-designed, intuitive systems that make life easier, not harder. As obvious as this may be, businesses all too often neglect this need.

In a world of seemingly unlimited options, it has become necessary for nearly all successful businesses and brands to personalise products according to the customer. Personalisation is now widely recognised as a powerful tool for selling and engaging customers. However, there is a range of contexts in which this same strategy of personalisation can serve just as powerfully.

More than any other point in history, our era idolises the individual. Especially in the West, our ideals, advertising and algorithms place the individual at centre stage of their own lives. Laws, instructions and requests that once would have been seen as serving the greater good are now likely to be interpreted as fundamental threats to freedom and autonomy.

We’ve all heard of virtual reality, and by now we’ve also all heard of augmented reality, but the most recent version of these alternate worlds comes with an entirely new term: synthetic reality.  Bringing with it countless new opportunities for business, this technology is being used in the most unexpected of places – not least of which the recently announced comeback concert of renowned pop group: ABBA.