So I found myself watching Inception, for around the 100th time, over the weekend and besides being a cinematic masterpiece there is actually a marketing lesson to be learned, a lesson of context.
Posted by Matt Rennie on April 8th, 2013
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So I found myself watching Inception, for around the 100th time, over the weekend and besides being a cinematic masterpiece there is actually a marketing lesson to be learned, a lesson of context.
Posted by Matt Rennie on April 8th, 2013
In the wake of the recent horsemeat contamination scandal, corporate reputation has never been higher on the agenda for the food industry than it is today. Now, more than ever, food companies must consider the reputation implications of every operational decision they make, and think carefully about how they communicate those decisions to the trade and consumers. Read full article
Posted by Judith on April 3rd, 2013
Interested to read this morning that the UK is leading the world when it comes to using mobile devices to shop. Reported on the BBC, the average annual UK spend/head is £1,083. (Australia is second with £802). The exciting context of this is the size of the inexorably increasing prize that’s on offer. In 2011, only 8% of total online sales (£68B) were generated by mobile in the UK, up from 4% the previous year.
Posted by James on December 13th, 2012
Plato said “those who tell the stories rule society”. That was more than 2300 years ago. So why is storytelling now seen as critical to modern marketing and why have companies such as Nike, P&G and Motorola hired storytellers to their marketing department and even the board?
It’s largely driven by consumer’s mass consumption of content across platforms. And because without a guiding narrative weaving through your content marketing efforts, your product or service, is just a product or service, it holds no emotional connection with your customers.
Stories give your business meaning, stories are shareable, stories are less likely to be turned off or tuned out from, they’re unique and they can move people to action.
Redbull understands the art of transmedia storytelling beautifully. Its Redbull Stratos stunt saw 8 million people tune in live to its youtube channel to watch Felix Baumgartner hurtle to earth from space. It succinctly distilled its proposition “Red Bull gives you wings”, into a captivating stunt, which in turn garnered millions of pounds of earned media. And without one single product mention or cutaway. And yet in a heartbeat you get the brand.
Where authenticity was once the buzz word, brands should feel empowered to make their fact more interesting with fiction. We’ve been taught to make our comms single-minded, simple an uncomplicated, but now, we should perhaps be a little rough round the edges, adding layers and allowing consumers to co-create and unfold the story themselves.
Great examples include Rayban’s All Tomorrow campaign turning its Facebook fan’s stories into personalised animated films, Hiut jeans adding a unique history tag to its clothing and allowing consumers to upload pictures and storied of where they went and what they did to the HistoryTag website. Even Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album, which has now transcended into a comic, and potentially even a film. Social media is helping to fuel this storytelling revival, and it’s by no means brand-led. Social Samba, a Facebook application allows users to develop their own storylines and then share it with friends to join in the narrative has seen hundreds of thousands of new stories created.
Our role as marketeers is to burn through the indifference of consumers and give them a compelling reason as to why they should choose our brand over the next. The art of storytelling delivered through content marketing is that very tool.
Posted by James on December 4th, 2012
Forget the dodgy Christmas songs on the radio in October – for me it is the ‘Holidays are Coming’ ad from Coca-Cola that signifies the start of the Christmas period. It is the best Christmas ad ever!
The long-running ad campaign was stopped in 2001 (after a new marketing director took over!!) but re-introduced in 2007, after Coca-Cola HQ recieved some pretty heavy public pressure (so it says on Coca-Cola’s Wikipedia page anyway).
My six year old son Joshua saw the ad last night and thought it was ‘awesome’. You could see by the look on his face that it had the same affect on him as it did on me some 20 years earlier!
It just goes to show, sometimes the best thing a new marketing director can do is not make the big change everyone is expecting. It takes a pretty brave person to do that though, because by doing that you are automatically saying your predeccesor got that bit right!
Posted by Greg on November 18th, 2012
