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
Design thinking is a human-centred framework that uses empathetic, creative, and analytical skills to solve problems.
This methodology has been disrupting the way in which we do business, by putting empathy in the centre of any developing strategy. Empathy (as a tool, not just as a “value”), is the best way to connect with consumers, to understand them deeply, specially by observing and mapping out their behaviours; and therefore, is essential in order to find key insights that will lead to winning business strategies.
Some of the most famous representations of Design Thinking have been popularised by IDEO, an international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto, California; however you can find different visualisation of the process by Design Council and by Stanford d.school.
IDEO HCD process Design Council’s Double Diamond Stanford d.school Design Thinking process
Phases of this process are either diverging or converging. During a diverging phase, you try to open up as much as possible without limiting yourself, whereas a converging phase focuses on condensing and narrowing your findings or ideas. In each of the different phases there are several sets of tools that can be used to empathise, map behaviours, find key problems and propose real and actionable solutions.
Some of the tools we focused on at the community meet-up where:
The Empathy Canvas
DESIGN YOUR OWN LIFE
Finally we dived into the practical everyday life use of design thinking framework. We proposed a 7 step plan covering all major phases of Design Thinking with the objective of “designing your own life”.
This is a summary of what we shared during the meet-up and the steps you can put into action right-away!
Step 1. Keep a Journal of Activities and Feelings
Think about this questions while filling up your journal.
When do you feel completely involved in the activity you’re carrying out? When are you most mindful? Which activities make you happy? When are you working at your peak level? Which activities make you feel calm and serene? When do you feel that you’re in the state of flow? What are you doing when you feel the most animated and the most present?
Step 2. Use Empathy Map
Cluster Personal Data Log; Understand your Pains and Gains
One recommendation is to fill the map putting yourself in the third person. In order to do a better analysis just extrapolate yourself from the writings in your log and complete the map taking a step back and imagining you’re observing someone else.
Step 3. Odyssey plan exercise.
Design 3 different versions of your next five years.
These are trajectories which you could realistically pursue. Your scenario plans the development of your life that is already in route. A desirable one, but closer to what you already have in mind. The second plan is something like a plan B. (What if plan A is not possible?). The third plan is a wilder alternative for your next five years. For this one, imagine that you have no restrictions, you could have all the money and resources in the world.
Step 4. Define your “Design” Problem
What areas need improvement?
Step 5. Ideate
What actions, conversations could you take to improve those areas?
Step 6. Prototype & Test
Put those actions into a calendar and go work in your new habits.
The world is moving fast, summer is coming, and soon half of the year will be behind us. You know how it works, after summer, the year will be over soon and all the plans you made will be behind you, either achieving your goals or failing at them.
Most likely you need the leverage of digital channels in order to achieve your business goals… at least some extent. Therefore, we chose “Top Digital Trends for 2019” as the topic for May’s Community Meet-up.
Omnichannel Marketing
One of the highest trends of 2019 is the shift from multichannel to omnichannel marketing. It refers to a sales and marketing approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone, or in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience will be seamless.
This approach puts the customer journey in the center of the channel strategy, providing engagement where and when needed and making the whole journey effortless in order to complete the purchase and to interact with the brand.
Some of the best examples of a comprehensive omnichannel strategy can be seen in brands, such as Disney, Sephora and Starbucks. On the other hand, some of the biggest challenges that marketers face towards implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy, besides lack of budget, are the lack of know-how, the access to data cross channels, failing to recognize the same customer on different channels and the silos within the company.
Social Media Trends
Facebook
Facebook is coming in with big changes that seem to be making a zoom-pivot of their strategy. Focusing more on groups interactions, launching a desktop messenger app, relaunching the events tab and lessening the importance of the timeline. This year Facebook will roll-out a new design that claims to be fresher, simpler and faster. It also will start testing other features in specific markets, such as “secret-crush” and shipping on the marketplace. When it comes to ads, brands can’t ignore it anymore, while Machine Learning seems to be taking over the optimization process.
However, Facebook seems to be “declining”, showing a huge shift in demographics where the younger generations seem to be staying way from it.
Instagram
This is one of the highest growing social networks; attracting younger generations, showing one of the biggest performances in interactions, and serving as a channel for consumer creators and influencers. One of the biggest changes in Instagram this year will be the shop feature of creators. Whit this feature, users will be able to make purchases directly from the app. This will be a gamechanger for e-commerce and we’re excited to see what happens when it goes global.
Other SM Trends
· LinkedIn keeps growing. · In-the-moment content will win out over highly-produced content · WhatsApp Business API · Brands can no longer afford to ignore social media ads · Creative social ads that are both personalized and entertaining · Rise of social media TV and vertical videos · Long-Form Content Marketing
For deeper quantitative data regarding social media, we strongly recommend you visit the Smart Insights report prepared along with Hootsuite.
A.I. and Machine Learning are on the way to be democratized and productionized, leading it to specific problem-solving software solutions. Some of the biggest applications are seen taking place in ad optimizations used by Facebook and Google that are helping advertisers run intent-driven ads; however, ai is also being used in content curation, lead scoring and customer engagement. That last one being specific to the rise on chatbots. On other fronts, brands are using AI internally in warehouse and production-lines, reducing times for training. It will also disrupt the automotive industry with autonomous vehicle’s speed rising.
The way we see it, there is no need to worry. It looks like for now, at least, advertising and marketing jobs are safe from robot replacement as much of marketing needs the ability of emphasizing and dealing with emotions that make the highest fluctuating.
VR / AR
When it comes to VR there has been a low adoption due to the content-sync and immersion problem. This is probably why VR headset sales have dropped nearly 35% since 2017. This might change with recent developments in VR exploring brainwave user interaction and the talks of neural links. However, this technology seems a bit far away from taking the mainstream for now.
On the other hand, augmented reality is on a rise. This is enabled by the mobile disruption, putting phones in the center of AR devices. It clearly increases both user engagement and brand recognition, while lowering the adoption barriers of VR by using a device more than half of the world already has in its pockets and uses daily. This is a cool trend and we’re looking forward of what brands can do with it. One of the best examples of VR usage by a brand is coming from Ikea.
We recently hosted the first community meet up at our Prague headquarters. Being the first one ever, we were very excited to see the high interest from the beginning and we’re truly grateful with everyone who attended.
As we promised, we kept the event small and cosy, following a conversation format in which everyone had the chance to air their ideas, debate them and find the best strategies to improve our lives through the creativity tools and life-hacks we talked about during the event.
If you came to the meet-up and want to dig a little bit deeper into the topics, or if you didn’t make it and want to learn a bit about what you missed out, here we give you a nice summary of the three main conversation starters.
01 Going Beast Mode — Matouš Králík
The first conversation started sparked by Matouš, was focused on learning how to achieve the balance within the BODY-MIND-SPIRIT framework and how taking care of those three components of our lives can help us unleash creativity.
It all starts with finding out your “why”. The reason “why” you do the things you do, is the base that will allow you to build into your “how”. The why is your fuel and the “how” is the engine that will allow you to move through the world, giving the best of you and achieving maximum efficiency in your daily life as well as your long term goals (more about the importance of your WHY in this Simon Sinek TedTalk).
First you start with why, and then you’re able to make a list of your “hows” and prioritise what are the most important actions that you have to take, both in a micro (short-term) or macro (long-term) priorities.
Once you have set out your priorities, develop the system that will get you through. This part is crucial. Without a system in place you will be leaving all your productivity to luck, and it is fair to say that luck will only take you so far, but the chances that you will be unlucky will be as high. Set up your system, your to-do’s based on your why and your priorities. Write it down on a schedule of daily, weekly and monthly activities and follow through.
If a monthly set of habits seems like a way-too-big task for you, start in the micro, take care of your daily habits; you can start by taking care of your morning. Create a routine that includes some exercise and a healthy, balanced and abundance breakfast. If you start only at least taking care of your mornings, you will be one step closer to having control over your life and you won’t be as affected by external events.
Once you have set out your schedule and you know which habits you want to include in your life, go full on execution mode. Execute, Execute, Execute as Gary Vaynerchuck would say. Try your best to stick to that schedule and to perform the most out of your habits as you can. Don’t procrastinate them. But if you do, it’s OK, don’t punish yourself, just get back on that execution horse and Execute, Execute, and Execute!
Finally, Matouš proposed to include balance in your system, so called work-life balance. If work is all you have, and you’re not taking care of your body-mind-soul, it is guaranteed that at some point you will crash and burn-out. Nobody wants that. If you have experienced a burn-out you know how painful it is and how difficult is to get out of that space. Your body-mind-soul will send you a receipt from the neglect that you give it, and it will be very expensive; so before you let that happen, balance your life, set your priorities and start the journey into becoming a creative, productive beast.
02 Unlocking Sleep Genius — Honza Borýsek
Honza started the conversation asking participants how much 8-hour sleep they have on a regular basis. The response was more or less 50–50. It is not often that sleep is discussed in our culture, we take it for granted and we even neglect it. If you’re a student, an employee or a business owner (or some combination of those), chances are you’ve feel the need to cut down on your sleeping time in order to be able to cope with your projects and deadlines.
This is not good.
Turns out — as everyone who’s had a short sleep night can intuit — that sleep makes for a really, really important part in our overall well being. It is obvious that when we sleep, our bodies rest and we feel stronger to tackle life challenges, but is not so obvious how important that rest is and how it can directly improve our awaken creativity and productivity.
More of REM (dreaming) with more sleep hours!
One interesting fact, for example, is how sleeping helps us through a learning process: when we sleep, our brain goes through our daily activities, repeating them and going through them over and over again. In this process, it starts filtering out the mistakes you did the day before, correcting them in your sleep, so that the next day, you wake up and you’re not making that mistake anymore. Studies say that good sleep leverage the previous day’s experience by 20–30 %!
Now, granted, we’re not sleep scientists but advertisers, so this might sound a bit “strange”… but don’t worry, if you want to learn how this actually works you can check out this Joe Rogan podcast with Matthew Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He can explain it much better than we do. 😁
03 Finding Your Muse — Daniel Loaiza
The last -but not least- conversation starter was focused on defining creativity and busting through some of the myths around this concept that we have currently mind-framed in our cultural conversation regarding creativity and the “creative-types”.
There are many ways in which creativity has been defined, from the most pragmatic definitions: “using imagination to create something”, “the ability to create”; to much more poetic definitions: “building universes out of nothing”, “the ability of reaching out into possible futures, choosing the best one & pulling it back into the present”; to finally the most biologicallyaccurate definition: “pooling from the knowledge that we store in our brains and making connections between different ideas in order to solve problems”.
No matter which definition is more attractive to you, some of the most common myths surrounding creativity are the ones that hurt our creative minds the most, which is why recognising them, being aware of the myths and busting them is so important to create a healthy conversation around creativity.
The myths:
You’re born with it.
You have to be predominantly right brain.
It falls in your lap
You’ve got to be a little bit crazy.
Stepping back in history, we see the first sign of this myths appearing into the conversation when rational humanism in the Renaissance took by storm the arts and the culture. Even though we can be highly grateful for some of the advancements that the Renaissance period has brought to contemporary culture, when it comes to creativity it put all the expectations of magnificent creations in the shoulders of the individual, humans with flaws, fears and self-doubts… how can we honestly define ourselves as creative beings when we are way-too aware of our own individual short-comings? How many stories have you heard of truly creative individuals that couldn’t bare the fame or the pressure and ended up taking their life’s at a short age?
we’ve lost many creative minds… it’s not cool
This wasn’t always like this. If we go back to ancient Greek or roman empire times (before Renaissance), the “creative” was considered to be a magical creature that lived in the realm of gods and goddesses, and that was sent to polish and help the works of the artists. The implications were beautiful: there was no psychological pressures for the artists, there was no distorted egos (look at all the “divas” in today’s pop-culture), no unmanageable expectations about performance that lead to depression due to fears of rejection, criticism and failure.
If your work sucked, it was OK, not your fault, people would think your muse wasn’t very helpful that day. On the other hand, if your work was amazing, there was no need to inflate your ego with it, as people would just praise how lucky you were that your muse was on your good side that day.
The invitation in this part of the conversation starter, was to finally bring light to the “untold” story of creativity. Opposed to the mainstream views and it’s myths regarding creativity, if you look at different time-eras and definitions of it, what is behind every creative endeavour is the individual’s human stubbornness to show up and do the work. In this sense, achieving a “creative” status, is only a side-effect of a lot of sweat, labour, awkwardness and discipline performed by the “creative” individual.
Apollo and the Muses — Heinrich Maria Hess
Whether it is that you’re trying to find your muse, or doing the job so that your muse finds you, the true creativity lays in your hard work and commitment to what you’re set out to create, and any of the tools presented in the meet-up are at your disposal to make your creative journey more effective and anxiety free.
Btw, our second meet-up will be launched soon, so be sure to follow us on our social media!
This week I want to share with you three of the most compelling story telling websites that I have seen in the past month while surfing for some inspiration on the web.
Are you a coffee freak? Then you’re going to love this website. This Austrian brand takes you through the whole process of their product production, starting off with a flight to Brazil, to meet the farmers and farms where the brand’s coffee is grown. Hop on this beautiful adventure and end it with a delicious cup of sustainable coffee ☕
Shout Against Violence is an immersive and interactive experience aimed to create awareness against violence towards women. When I first experienced it I felt some sorts of a horror-movie theme… it really takes you through what some women have to suffer in some of the darkest places of the world.
Even though I’m not a fan of the feelings that surged while going through the experience, I believe that is the whole point of the website, to make you empathise with such terrible situation. Try it and let me know your thoughts about it!
AirBnB developed a mobile only experience where you can explore a traditional Chinese rural village, carefully brought to life with more than 300 hand-painted illustrations. Very beautiful… give it a try, even if your mandarin is not on point, I think you would appreciate its artistry.
This week I want to share with you my favourite top 3 design trends for 2019. If you want to see all of them you can check this pretty cool report made by behance.
Custom Illustrations
A good illustration can definitely bring unicity to any art poster, branding identity or printed collateral., on the other hand, a unique illustration has been measured to convert up to 7 times better than any stock photography… So it gives the best of two worlds: Looks amazing and brings results!
In 2018 designers have used mostly vibrant colors and this trend is just going to grow bigger in 2019. Colors will be even more courageous, with designers using supersaturated tones in their work. Pantone has already revealed their color trend forecast for 2019 so, this year, use bold colors if you want your work or business to stand out.
Typography is starting to get bigger and bolder, making it a trend that we can find in each year’s predictions. The winning combination, when you are using a big font is: minimalism, otherwise the design can be overcrowded and not really appealing.
I want to share with you some of the coolest design I’ve found on the web this week! I hope you find inspiration in the work of this week’s different artists💚 Enjoy.
