Marketing campaigns seem to be a mystery when we try to analyze subsequently why things worked or why they didn’t. Similar campaigns provide different results, what is considered a home-run for one brand, is proven a complete disaster for another.
Last week at our monthly Community Meet-up, we talked about what makes a marketing campaign a GREAT marketing campaign.
During the event, we shared with the community three study cases, Royal Crown, Febreze, and Dove. Among all of us, we discussed the possible reasons why these campaigns might have worked or what would be the reason behind their success.
Royal Crown
Royal Crown was a cola brand that was losing territory in the market and due to declines in its sales, it was looking forward to closing down operations. As a very last resort, the brand developed a branding strategy through the Czech Republic, changing completely its brand image, their target, and even the recipe of their product, launching a completely new marketing mix for the Czech market.
The launch of the new branding was received so well by the market and the campaign was so successful that the parent company, Kofola Československo A.S. decided to use the same strategy in the different markets and launch re-branding campaigns where the brand was not performing as expected.
Febreze
Unilever faced a problem with Febreze, as the competitors began closing up the product differentiation gap through their commercials, this led to consumers having no perception of the brand attribute. The effect was sales dropping 10 points for the past 3 years before the launch of the new campaigns.
At this point in time, Febreze decided to make a move and the first thing they focused on was making a correct diagnosis of the problem. Unilever and Febreze knew that if they wanted to turn around this expiring trend it had to determine the root of the problem.
In order to do it, Febreze conducted research over a long period of time where they used different methods such as focus groups, in-home interviews, deprivation research, loyalists research and shop-along in order to understand consumer behavior.
After the research, the brand found two key insights that were vital for the development of the new campaign: A messy room doesn’t have to be a dirty room, and you can close your eyes but you can’t trick your nose. With these insights in hand, they set up their objectives as to become the single owners of the odor elimination equity attribute when compared with other brands, and to achieve at least a 71% of correct brand attribution for the new messaging.
This was the creative result:
DOVE
This is one of the most famous marketing campaigns and you have probably already heard about it. Dove reached a point where they had to revive their brand, so they proposed to answer the question “what do we all women have in common”. After tons of research, they found out that there was an underlying potential to celebrate “true beauty”, which has been saturated by non-realistic expectations of what beautiful women should look like, coming both from the fashion and advertisement worlds.
Dove made comprehensive research throughout the world, querying about 3000 women around 10 different countries in order to understand how they perceived beauty and how this could be represented in the brand’s new communication strategy.
The result?
So what makes a campaign be great?
You can call it “research”, you can call it diagnosis, you can call it understanding your target or “putting the customer first”. All of the campaigns that we analyzed followed the same pattern, they dug deep into the behaviors of their consumers, what they say, the way they feel, what inspires them, what they resonate with. For us at advertia, this is the first step of making a great campaign: RESEARCH.
The bases for this claim is that if you don’t understand what the key problem or opportunity is, any tactics or efforts that you put into place will be only noise that doesn’t achieve the desired results.
Whenever we’re tackling a new project or even when we analyze various successful campaigns, our process goes through Research, Strategy, and Delivery. Any great campaign can be narrowed down to these three phases or milestones.
Are you curious to find out more about what makes a marketing campaign great and how we tackle marketing challenges at advertia?
Write to us at daniel@advertia.cz or learn about our next community meet-ups in our community Facebook group On The Edge