Consumers Want More Than Cause Related Marketing from Brands
It turns out consumers want more from a brand than just the brand using cause related marketing to take a stance on a social cause. In fact, they want brands to help them make a difference.
That’s right! According to a new survey done by Futerra of over 1,000 consumers in the US and UK, they found that a very high number (96%) of people feel their own actions, like donating, recycling, or buying ethically sourced goods can make a difference. And over half of those folks believe that they personally can make a big difference in the world. So, why does that matter to your company?
The answer:
brands have a key role to play! Although people think they can make a difference, they want more help doing it. That’s where brands step in (maybe yours?). This same survey found an overwhelming demand for brands to step up on sustainable lifestyles. If your brand isn’t helping your consumers improve their environmental footprint and social causes they care about, you’re pretty much in danger of disappointing almost all (88%) of them. That would definitely not be good.
Over the last few years, brands have become much more confident in trying to change the world themselves. But, just talking about your own values isn’t enough. Consumers want you to help them live theirs, too! Too much of the cause related marketing or CSR activities of brands promote what they are doing, rather than reaching out and helping the consumer to make their own difference. Therein lies the difference.
So how, exactly, do brands do this?
The good news is there is no right or wrong way, and there are literally thousands of ways to do it, you’ve just got to make sure you’re engaging in these conversations with your consumers. Straight up ask them how you can help them make a difference. They will let you know. Whatever you do, ask yourself the right question… Your brand’s consumer has the right to change the world for the better – how are you going to help them?
Brand Positioning & Why it's Important
Brand positioning (sometimes referred to as a positioning strategy or brand strategy) is the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a special place in the mind of the target market, and it’s a big deal!
In fact, proper brand positioning is one of most important things you can do when it comes to your brand management. A brand that’s positioned correctly addresses important consumer benefits in unique, often compelling ways. It also helps to create an emotional connection to your consumers, and provides flexibility and a framework for future growth of your business.
The first step in brand positioning is in-depth research. With this research, you’re looking to learn:
- Consumer insight(s)
- An in-depth knowledge of your competitors and what they’re up to
- An understanding of benefits to you consumer.
After you’ve found the above, dig deeper into the benefits your brand offers consumers. How are the different from other similar brands/companies? You’ll want to single out the ideal benefit, which is the key benefit that has the following three qualities: (1) it is extremely important to the target audience, (2) your organization is uniquely suited to delivering it and (3) your competitors are not really addressing it in the proper way.
There are four key components to brand positioning:
- Target customer – the primary audience your brand is trying to appeal to.
- Brand essence – the “heart and soul” of your brand.
- Brand promise – a promise of differentiating benefits relevant to your target customer.
- Brand personality – adjectives that describe your brand like if it were a person.
It’s kind of like putting a puzzle together! All of these individual components define your brand. When put together, they form your brands positioning statement which provides direction not only for marketing and the brand identity standards, but also for all of your organization’s activities and future endeavors.
Are you interested in brand positioning and other brand strategy for your business? Contact Blue Ridge today and let's see how we can get your brand set up for success for years to come.
Marketing and Advertising are Subjective
Marketing and advertising are subjective in nature, and your target audience probably doesn’t care about how great and awesome your product is.
So how do you connect with them? You might have the biggest touchscreen in the world. The best technology. The most luxurious vehicle. That’s awesome! But the consumer doesn’t really care about these objective factors. They don't stand out in the 'noise' and cut through the clutter.
The truth is we’re not entirely rational beings (which you probably already knew) – and there have been many books and gigabytes worth of the internet devoted to trying to prove this point. In fact, if you want to get technical about it, our brains actually light up differently when exposed to the emotional vs rational... Science!
Research shows us that when it comes to marketing and advertising, “qualities like pleasure and belonging” are heavily linked to people’s brand choices. Here are eight factors that influence more than 80% of consumer purchases (in order of their impact on buying decisions):
Pleasure, responsibility, status, saving, individuality, effectiveness, belonging, and confidence. Notice: all of these factors are subjective.
Even marketing and advertising effectiveness is subject to user experience – take two near identical vacuum cleaners from two different brands and one is actually more effective than the other in cleaning a house, despite virtually identical (rational) specifications. invariably, someone will have the opposite experience and think the other vacuum is better. See – subjective.
While your company or brand might objectively have the best product or service available on the market, the longest-lasting battery, the most reliable engine, or the most qualified professionals – if you can’t or don't communicate these benefits to the audience in a way which answers the question “How will this help me to express and live who I am?”, the majority of customers will never catch on to what you have to offer.
Writer Tom Denari once wrote a great article for Ad Age that brilliantly drove home this point. in it, he wrote:
"No matter what you buy — diapers, clothing, electronics or a can of tomatoes — the brands you select affect how you feel about yourself. The car you drive makes a statement about who you think you are. So does the cup of coffee you pick up in the morning and the mobile phone you carry, even though you’re not consciously aware of it. And while this seemingly selfish, indulgent behavior might seem the sorry reflection of a hypercapitalistic culture, it’s really how we’re hard-wired.
A brand helps people fall in love with themselves by reinforcing or affirming self-image. (e.g. I’m the kind of person that uses that kind of __________.)"
Thankfully, more and more brands are starting to catch onto this idea and applying it to their marketing & advertising work. For some, it will be too little too late. For others, it could be the start of a complete repositioning or a brand revival... Which will it be for your brand? If you need help with your businesses marketing and advertising, we're here to help! Let's chat to see how we can make your brand stand out today.
Building a Brand From Scratch: How Do You Do It?
It is possible to be successful building a brand from scratch. However, it has become a lot more complex, and also a lot easier than ever before (depending on how you look at it).
The millennials are a generation privileged with the upsides of the internet that allow them to bring their dreams alive with relative ease. While there are definitely more opportunities to launch a business today, failing in a cluttered 24/7 environment is actually quite easy to do.
One of the main factors in the success of a brand is its ability to carve its own niche and highlight that niche or difference to consumers. When launching a brand, there's a lot to keep in mind, but, here are some of the key factors entrepreneurs need to keep in mind while they being to launch their dreams:
1. Know and understand your target audience - It is extremely important to understand your target audience to define your brand. Keep in mind their demographics (age, gender, geographical location, income, education, occupation). This helps in crafting the right message and positioning of the brand.
2. Develop a strong key message for your defined audience - The right messaging is critical for building a brand, and only seems to become more crucial as the years pass. Instead of bombarding consumers with too many messages, giving out one key message for them to take away greatly increases the probability of brand recognition.
2. Know what sets your brand apart and stick to that - In order to give a distinct positioning to your brand, it's extremely important to identify what differences you're offering vs. your competitors (or potential competitors). You must be aware of what your competitors are doing in order to have a better hold on the next moves. It is essential to understand your brand and what customers expect out of your brand in the grand scheme of things.
4. Define your brand’s values - Defining your brand’s values helps you to better connect with consumers you want to reach. Humans have emotions, positioning your brand as a supporter of that emotion and the values associated with it gives you the edge to strengthen your brand image. For Example: Being a brand supporting gay rights, which is a topical issue, helps to connect with your customers -- of course, your values should always be aligned with your target market's values most importantly.
5. Listen to your customers/clients - The digital revolution has made it easy to communicate with customers and potential customers. Taking regular feedback from your consumers reduces the chances of any PR crisis and helps create an image of a customer-oriented brand.
Following these five keys of advice will assist you in building a brand with a space for itself in the minds of consumers and set up your brand image. Building a brand from scratch requires diligent work, keeping in mind the end goal to do it effectively, one must be well versed with the market trends and blend them with the brand’s activities and campaigns. It's hard work to build a successful brand from scratch, and takes a lot of time, but it can definitely be done! Need assistance in crafting your brand for maximum results? Contact Blue Ridge today and let's get started bringing your idea to life!
Why Creative Matters in Mobile Advertising
In order for mobile app platforms to survive, it’s critical to continue achieving profitable user acquisition. However, mobile advertising is a constantly changing landscape.
What works for you today might not work for you tomorrow. 95% of your direct response creative advertising fails to outperform the best-performing assets in your portfolio. You are constantly working to find those 5% of successful creatives.
Over the past few years, machine learning on platforms like Facebook and Google has reduced the level of effort by advertisers to manage their ad targeting, bids, and budgets. Automation has leveled the playing field for advertisers, so much so that creative has now become the key differentiator.
Here are some of the latest creative techniques and best practices to keep your mobile advertising creative performing, and continuing to drive user acquisition and growth:
- Do you have a creative brand ‘bible’?
- How strict are you with that ‘bible’?
- What’s your tone?
- Who’s your audience?
It's surprising how few companies have thought about these questions that ultimately set the stage for creative development.
Brand vs. Direct Marketing
Are you a brand or are you doing direct response advertising? CMOs often want to run brand campaigns and adhere to their brand bible with guidelines and restrictions. On the other hand, the UA team is incentivized by performance and will lean toward direct response. There is a way to meet in the middle and get the best of both worlds. It is important to consider that most of the videos and images in your creative will die in less than 10,000 impressions.
If the winning creative happens to be one of the 5% of successful creatives, you can always revisit the creative and iterate to make it brand compliant. Through this process, you will also see the impact of making your mobile advertising creative brand compliant.
Types of Assets to Test
There’s a known approach to asset development of concepts versus variations and why you need one or the other. Concepts are brand new ideas, out-of-the-box thinking to develop something that hasn’t been tried before. It’s very difficult to develop fresh, new concepts. With variations, we’re taking that one in 5% successful creative winner. We know the creative is going to work, so instead, you will tear it apart like Legos and develop new creative assets, which often have a higher propensity to be successful.
Extend the Life of Your Mobile Advertising
There’s a lot that you can do to extend the shelf life of your creative. Here are just some of the ways you can keep your creative fresh through testing variations:
- Image Formats and Layouts: Showcase your product or service in several layouts.
- Video Length and CTAs:Your video ads need to be in the rage of eight seconds or less. Your call to action should be in the first three seconds and it needs to be strong.
- Types of Images: Consider taking your own photos or degrading the quality of the images and videos to make them appear user-generated (more authentic).
- Color Uses in Images and Headers:Test simple and plain backgrounds with soft or blurred out colors or gradients. Allow the viewer’s eyes to focus on bright vibrant foreground colors. Test soft background colors vs bold colors, strong texture vs muted texture, and simple vs clean vs busy and cluttered backgrounds.
Marketing Advertising and Branding... What's the Difference?
In this line of work, I oftentimes hear clients and prospective clients confuse marketing advertising and branding, and they also tend to use the terms interchangeably.
This usually makes me cringe just a little bit, because, while all three of these things may be a part of the bigger-picture plan, using marketing advertising and branding interchangeably like this grossly oversimplifies the deeper meaning and more complex concepts behind an effective marketing strategy. To understand marketing and the difference between marketing advertising and branding, it helps to look at yourself and try to apply each one to you as a person.
MARKETING:
Marketing can be though of as how you see yourself. It is the image that you are trying to present to others around you. In this analogy, things like how you dress, how you groom, and the colors and patterns you chose to wear all play a part. We all have a strategy for this (even if we don’t consciously realize it). Even not having a so-called strategy for your appearance is a marketing strategy in itself.
You choose your image to portray yourself as a business professional, a punk rocker, a tech nerd, etc., and by doing so, you are expressing to others your character, attributes, and in the end, the value you offer to others, all through your appearance.
For a business, a marketing strategy considers how you want others to perceive your company. It should convey the vision and of the business and express it in a way that the public will recognize and begin to associate with your company.
How you “dress” (or market) your company will determine how effectively your message and image will be accepted by consumers you want to reach.
ADVERTISING:
Advertising is how you act in public. While marketing describes how you see yourself, advertising describes how you act around others. Where you hang out, who you hang out with, how you carry yourself, and what you say are just as important as how you look. All of this should be considered with your marketing strategy to assure that you have consistency between your image and your actions (remember: actions speak louder than words)!
Your business advertising strategy is the just like this. If you execute it in the wrong places, with the wrong message and tone, at the wrong times, or to the wrong audience, it will tend to confuse consumers and could turn your audience away (AKA – don’t be a hypocrite.)
BRANDING:
Branding is how others see you, and, the good news is you can help influence this through marketing (how you see yourself) and advertising (how you act in public). If you have a strong brand, you can spend more time building on it. If you have reputation problems, however, you will need to focus on rebuilding or changing other’s perceptions of you.
For example, if your professional network believes you are a ‘fraud’ or a ‘slacker’, then it will require more than just dressing professionally and mastering your LinkedIn profile to change this perception. You’ll need to re-work and re-stratgise your personal marketing and advertising.
When it comes to business, understanding how your audience and consumers perceive your business is critical for how you decide to execute a marketing and advertising strategy. This is why the branding component of this equations is so important.
To sum it all up…
While I just oversimplified complex marketing concepts quite a bit, I find that applying these concepts as an analogy to ourselves creates an effective and simple way to explain how each of these three concepts can and should be applied to your business. Still confused about the differences or intricacies of marketing advertising and branding? We're here to help. Contact Blue Ridge today!
