Creating a new campaign is not the question - transforming your marketing is
Ed Bastian, the chief executive of Delta, recently said that if you’re not growing as a business you’re going through slow-motion liquidation. (Just wait until the next airline downturn, Mr. Bigshot.) The rapacious drive for growth that defines late Capitalism–and is likely killing the planet–also seems to shape the prevailing wisdom on creative campaigns. Change lives at the center of digital business, so marketing for said businesses must evolve and change constantly, no?
Well, not necessarily. When I read Jeri Smith’s recent post on The Drum, “Why research shows you’re better off with your existing ad campaign,” I confess that my first thought was of the Baltimore band Beach House. They make what critics call ‘dream pop’, and after a string of critically acclaimed albums that sound pretty similar, guitarist Alex Scally was heard complaining about the constant drive for pop bands to continue changing their sound. “I hate it when bands change between records,” Scally said. “That’s not the way we work.”
Does this same reasoning hold true for marketing? According to Smith, brand teams, like clients, get bored too quickly, and agency teams can be “downright hostile” to existing campaigns, especially when companies blindly fob them off on generations (aka, Millennials) who see the world quite differently than when the work was created. Then there are clients, who can tire of existing work before it has fully ‘burned in’ to the market and created meaningful associations. There’s even an old industry joke on the topic:
Client: I’m so sick of this campaign already!
Agency person: But it hasn’t even launched yet.
Smith bases her case on a research project that looked at 109 campaigns that changed despite research results that showed the existing campaign was still working. Apart from marketplace-driven reasons to replace current work; e.g., a new competitive entrant that threatened to redraw the category, 74 percent of campaigns “were replaced for no good reason.” And yet, by the end of the first year, only a fifth of the new campaigns were doing as well or better than what they replaced.
The author’s advice? Take a page from some of the industry’s longest-running success stories, Dove’s “Real Beauty” (13 years young) or MasterCard’s “Priceless” (20 years and still going strong): Build on your existing campaign and add “enough newness to keep it fresh and engaging,” versus frightening customers away with something new and unfamiliar.
My point about ignoring Smith’s advice is orthogonal to hers. First, most marketing campaigns are so forgettable that changing them up to something more compelling would be an act of mercy as well as a shot in the arm for their brands. The only problem is, you may end up, as we say in agency-land, buffing a turd.
More important, though: why add some new copy or a better imagery direction to a campaign when most are so ripe for complete transformation? To reach today’s toughest buyers, you’ve got to change the way they think about and experience marketing from the ground up.
Marketing today has to work much harder to succeed, especially in innovation-driven markets where buyers may not even understand the value of what’s being offered. If you can’t grasp the scale of patent troll theft, why would a patent insurance pitch appeal to you, no matter how creative? If you don’t understand how bad the global cotton forgery problem is, why would you pay any mind to creative that touts DNA-based tagging of the sheets or clothing you produce?
In the world of considered purchases, campaigns must use the value of the brand to change markets, change culture, and change buyer behavior. Which is a very different call to arms than some new headlines.
With our clients, we address the need for transformative marketing with a simple question and a simple framing device we call a Change Ladder.
How transformative you want to be depends on your attitude, your budget, your timeframe, and your brand attitude. Upsetting a buying process is heavy lifting, but a lot less so than changing a whole industry culture. You have to decide what’s necessary.
What’s clear is that your agency should be working with you to define the gaps in the market against which your solutions should position themselves. It means deciding on a role for your brand to help deliver on the change you wish to see. It means mobilizing the energy of people we call Crazies – people who are crazy about an aspirational mission, their careers, or the growth of their business – to help spread the word and co-create your message with you. And it means not creating this year’s model of marketing campaign, but creative experiences that catalyze and drive change because they are emotionally compelling to the target audience. These experiences can be digital or real world, as long as they work to change your brand’s relationship to your customers and culture. So, are you “better off” with your existing ad campaign? I dislike change as much as the next human, but I’m thinking that the answer for your campaign is probably no.
Hugh Kennedy is partner at PJA Advertising & Marketing