Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

August 16, 2016 · 9:37 am

How Not To Get Fired By Consumers

When one of my managers would hire a new person, I always tried to sit that new person down for a few minutes in the middle of their busy (and probably scary) first day. The purpose was to welcome them aboard and to let them know that there was only one thing they could do (other than to break the law or the HR rules, obviously) that would cost them their job. That one thing was lying. In my mind, lying – to me, to their manager, to their co-workers – causes a lack of trust, and that mutual trust is what sees the team through all the challenges of the workplace.

That sort of thinking is what makes me wonder why marketers seem happy to lie all the time. I’m not talking about violating the law and mislabeling products. I’m talking about something much more common which is branded content. Now you might moot thing of branded content as lying, but your customers do. This from the folks at Citi (via Business Insider):

Looking at branded content — specifically as it relates to Facebook‘s opportunity in the space — Citi found that 48% of US internet users felt deceived upon realizing an article or video was not a piece of news or commentary, but was in fact a commercial.

I’m not talking about something like a review guide that was funded by a brand being reviewed as long as it was truly an independant work and properly identified as having been funded by a brand. That is content that is created for the audience and has value. I mean a glowing review, seemingly from a reputabile source,  that is clearly created to promote a single brand. Most of the time there is a little label someplace that mentions it’s an ad, but not always and not always prominent enough for a consumer to notice.

Are you creating content for the consumer or for yourself? Is the content deceptive in any way? Ads disguised as content is lying, and lying will get you fired, even if you’re a brand. You agree?

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August 10, 2016 · 12:09 pm

Influencing The Influencers

If you’re a baseball fan of a certain age (OK, if you’re really old), you will probably recall Yogi Berra drinking Yoo-Hoo in commercials. In fact, he was synonymous with the brand (some people thought he owned the company). People loved Yogi, Yogi loved Yoo-Hoo, ergo, you should love Yoo-Hoo too. That’s pretty much how celebrity endorsements work, right? A famous person lends their brand equity to another brand, transferring positive attributes to the brand and for which the brand pays.

(Complete digression) According to his autobiography, Yogi was answering the phones at Yoo-Hoo one day and a woman calls to ask if Yoo-Hoo is hyphenated. His response: “No ma’am, it’s not even carbonated.’ “(/Complete digression)

I’ve written before about the modern digital equivalent of celebrity endorsements which is called influencer marketing. Some of the digital celebrities have huge followings even though in comparison to the older definition of celebrities – sports or entertainment stars – their audiences are niche. That hasn’t stopped many brands from paying the influencers to say nice things about their products. The problem is that unlike seeing the old kind of brand endorsement in a commercial the consumer can’t know for sure if the endorsement has been a paid insertion or whether the influencer just really likes something.

I bring this up because even though the FTC has some pretty strict rules in place with respect to disclosing payments for endorsements to prevent consumer confusion, new data from influencer marketing and media platform SheSpeaks shows that one out of four influencers has been asked not to disclose their commercial arrangements with a brand. That’s bad and self-defeating.

A while back I tweeted nice things about TSA Pre-check but the TSA didn’t ask me to do so. The folks who saw the tweet (and anything here on the screed while we’re on the topic) can rely that it was my honest opinion and not the result of money changing hands. Why would a quarter of  brands want to hide the payments? Do they think the message contained in the post on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat is compromised if it’s known money changed hands? I think we all knew Yogi said nice things because he was paid but we also assumed he liked the product. Most endorsers I know don’t just cash the check to endorse any old thing. They realize that the brand is also a reflection on them. Either side hiding the payment works to the detriment of both.

This problem isn’t going to go away as influencer marketing continues to grow as a platform. Endorsements haven’t gone away over the years and won’t. Actresses will be given free gowns to wear on red carpets. Jocks will drink Gatorade. One can only hope that all parties involved keep it transparent and above board so it doesn’t become yet another good idea that was disrupted by a few bad actors. You agree?

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August 4, 2016 · 10:06 am

Rethinking Brands As People

If you’ve ever spent any time working in marketing you have probably participated in a couple of exercises. One is where you work on “personas” – models of personality. One is for the brand and there are others for various customer segments. It’s an attempt to humanize the brand and to make the customer less of an abstraction. It’s the former exercise that’s our topic today, and there is an element in the brand persona process that some research shows is overlooked.

I’ve sat in meetings where the room tries to figure out our business’ personality traits. What is our attitude? Where do our values lie and what are our strengths and weaknesses? A brand does this to make it easy for customers to relate to and bond with us. That persona is then used to create everything from messaging to packaging to customer service scripts. There are a couple of areas that are common to any brand, or should be according to some research by the folks at Edelman. They released The 2016 EARNED BRAND study, which is a global online survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries that examines the consumer-brand relationship across 18 brand categories.

The study found that brands globally and across many categories were failing to connect. Part of that might be reflective of the things the study measured: how the brand embodies a unique character, builds trust at every touchpoint, and invites sharing, inspires partnership. Generally, most brands come up very short on those traits and that prompted a thought.

Maybe instead of just figuring out what our brand is we ought to spend time trying to really humanize it by behaving in ways that a good friend ought to. Think about your closest friends. The three characteristics enumerated above and among those measured by the survey are probably things you’d say about your close friends. In business, it’s not just about who were are as a brand but how we present ourselves and treat our customers. As brands, if we want to be “people” perhaps we ought to start acting as good people do. Listen more, be memorable, do good things in our communities, and build trust.

Make sense?

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