With traditional tag-along advertising, we force our way into peoples homes, or rather, we sneek our way in by way of real value. This has provided us with good reach by simply paying our way in, but it also has its disadvantages – we have to behave like the uninvited guests that we are.
I would like you to commit to a thought experiment here, and I hope to get some intelligent thoughts from you on the topic in the comments. Let’s go.
The Thought Experiment
Take a look at this film, which was made as a party invitation for Diesel:
Now imagine that this would not have been made for Diesel, but instead had another logo at the end, say Sears (or Åhléns for you Swedish readers). What would that do to this brand?
Well – running it on television, forcing it into peoples homes, would be disastrous. But what if we don’t run it on television? What if watching it is completely voluntary? Would people then be offended and blame it on Sears (or Åhléns)? I think not, because watching it is completely up to you, and anyone who would be offended probably wouldn’t share it to anybody else either.
People who did thought this was cool however would share it with other people who they thought would appreciate it too, don’t you think? They probably wouldn’t share it with people who they thought would be offended (like their parents for instance), right?
So, leaving it open if this would make Sears (or Åhléns) more down with the kids or not (something similar definitely could), I doubt that it would cause negative PR-effects. Wouldn’t this mean that it would be fairly risk free to try it?
What do you think?
Telia (Sweden’s biggest mobile phone network provider) actually did something similar to this when they launched Jacko, a highly graphic character without pants walking around behaving rather… well… you’d better watch it:
Did this cause PR-disaster for Telia? No. Why? Well – because it was voluntary. I think. But I’m not sure.
What this would mean is that you could try to put out different attitudes to different segments, some very very edgy, and have it work great. It’s rather counter-intuitive considering how we’ve always thought in terms of brand identity congruency, but I think this may be a remnant of our blunt and broad instruments of distribution, and that this way of slicing your communication from rated PG to rated R could actually work really well.
It’s late and I’m a bit tired, so I’m sorry if these thoughts came out in a somewhat messy structure, but I just wanted to get these thoughts out of my head before heading out for my evening walk.
Let me know if you think that this made any sense.
Good night.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I like the idea of being more fragmented depending on fragmentation, that Åhlens can mix it up to the younger crowd and be inconsistent in the branding experience my mother gets versus the one i get.
However, and maybe you are just trying to prove a point by poarising, but i know that if my mother would catch a glimpse of the Diesel ad but it was for Åhlens, im sure she would feel betrayed for thinking she new what they stood for and sorry for having done her shoping there for so long. I do think it would work when less polarised and more consistent, i.e. some kind of “fragmented brand consistency”. But i like you am tired, so sorry if it makes little sense
I won’t blame it on sleepiness, but I agree with Karl.
Applying the Diesel ad on Åhlens would be a bit over the top. After all, Åhlens is a wholesome department store for the entire family… Diesel, I would say, is NOT trying to be wholesome, but instead edgy, young and fun – ergo, it’s not really a step away from their overall branding, just a way of pushing it a bit further.
But in general, YES YES YES…
let’s have more companies run with ideas that test various angles of their core branding idea!
I agree with the comments on the Diesel movie, mostly because if you take it too far gatekeeper media may pick it up as a story worth publishing. So, totally depend on social media to spread the campaign within a certain group might be dangerous. It may spread to a wide group of people that don’t appreciate it or even may be loathed by it.
However, I do agree that you could stretch quite far by directing your communication to certain groups. Such obvious references to sexual acts might be to go too far, but I’m not sure the Telia commercial is. That might actually work. My feeling is that people in the wrong customer segments might find it ridiculous but at the same time quite harmless. And it might be less valuable for gatekeeper media to pick up on because it’s more subtle in its humor making it more weird rather than the obvious references to sex that the Diesel ad uses to make it perhaps more abusive.
So it’s a fine line that needs to be analyzed, preferably in advance. Though I do think you touch something very important. You write about sneaking in to people’s houses and I’ve claimed for quite some time now that commercials will have to work its way around that hindrance. The best way of doing so is by offering people value within the advertising. I don’t primarily mean monetary value but a social value, within what I like to call social communication. A social value might be a series of entertaining Jacko movies, customer service through social media, a game (I wrote about a very interesting case in one of my thesis where Microsoft marketed Halo 2 by offering a free ARG game experience – which is pretty much a game played at several social media platforms – to its customers to hype the game’s release) or something completely different as long as it adds value to the customers lives.
It’s a way for trademarks to socialize with the company’s customers. Adding a community to it (and apply some sort of goal for the community) may in some cases also help since that can make the customers socialize with other customers within the trademark rather than forcing them to socialize with the trademark itself. Sometimes that is an option too, but socializing with the trademark I think makes a lot of people suspicious. By offering an arena, a platform for people to gather at has the advantage that people socialize with each other but with the trademark present all the time.
If you also connect the community task to the trademark it will strengthen the connection between customer and trademark even further and it will all be based on the customer’s free will. Such events may include games like the one I mentioned earlier, DIY campaigns (basing the community on voting, competitions and such) or … *tada* gathering Jacko fans and give them somewhere to discuss their (hopefully) new idol. Maybe let them play around with the figure, offer them chances to remix movies, perhaps even make their own movies and so on. (You didn’t think I wrote all this without having a connection to the main topic ready, did you?
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There is of course a lot more to be said, but now it is TRULY late so perhaps I’ll pick up on another post another day and put some more of my thoughts out there.
Like everybody else here, I think you’re definately on to something. One of the great mega trends today is that of individualism and of wanting to be spoken to in your way. So I think using the Internet and the power of forwarding is an ingenious way to break down the walls of uninvited communication.
However, I’ve seen plenty of things in my mailbox and on the Internet that I personally don’t like, so I’m not sure that this hardcore communication that Diesel has created wouldn´t leak and reach people outside of the intended audience as well. And that could end up being a major problem if Åhléns put their logo on the Diesel film. On the other hand, all they have to do is deny ever having had anything to do with the creation of it. I think we´ve seen quite a few examples of that already…
But the basics of communication is still that of knowing what it is that you want to say about your brand and what you want that communication to achieve. So you can´t just change the logo at the end of a commercial, because then you´re just creating attention without really knowing why. Diesel can definately get away with a commercial like this because it fits with the rest of their communication. Åhléns on the other hand… not so much.
Patrik: Good comments. There are especially two things I like to comment further. First, yes you probably can deny you had anything to do with the commercial. Somebody could theoretically have put together a commercial and spread it on the net. However, chances are very big consumers will see through that lie and it’s all thanks to the internet. So the #1 golden rule for a marketing communicator should be “never lie”.
Second thing that I totally agree with is what you say about communication as a whole. Since my background is as a rhetorician and a copywriter I have run quite a few rhetorical analysis’s on different ads in several medias. One of the most common mistakes in advertising is what you bring up. All the advertise does is to create attention, which is step #1 in making a good “speech”.
However, it is only the first of several important steps, among the others are of course to put the attention in context with your product and argumenting for your product. In commercials these steps are often quite subtle, sometimes because advertising often don’t have a lot of time or space to spread its message, but also because of creative reasons. (Which in most cases means the argumentation is mostly emotionally in its nature.)
But in many cases the argumentation also completely lack. Or, to put it in another way, there simply is no argumentation. And in cases where it is the argumentation often fail to fulfill one or both demands for a good argument: it should be relevant and it should be true (though “true” may in many cases of course be subjective). To me this is really a big reason why so much advertising fails.