Three key qualities characterize the successful campaigns I’ve worked on over the years.
Relevance, Empathy and Value… REV
Relevance. Barring unusual skills, you won’t have much luck selling products when you’re talking to the wrong audience or promising to deliver things that are low on the consumer’s priority list. Making products and services relevant in new ways with new uses for a new audience can be the key to highly profitable incremental business. At Clorox, we developed a very successful “You’ve Got Me, So Why Don’t You Use Me?” campaign targeting a nascent audience of homemakers doing plenty of laundry but also concerned about disinfecting sinks and toilets. Altering our one-dimensional image and expanding our utility brought us new uses and users—and additional sales.
Empathy. Understanding and associating the product or service qualities that mean the most to our target audience—as reflected in the images and icons we use to communicate—is at the heart of effective branding. It’s the key to creating a sense of strong personal identification that’s the hallmark of a great brand franchise.
Pepsi has repeatedly beaten Coke in blind product testing only to have preference reversed once tasters were told which products they’d tried. Hardly a handful of heavy beer drinkers can accurately identify their own brand in triangle testing, and yet that didn’t prevent Gerald Ford and many others from flying Coors Beer back from Colorado when its distribution was restricted by the need for refrigeration. Ed Meyer, the former Chairman of Grey Advertising who got his start working at Filene’s Basement, was fond of observing that hundreds of shoppers pass the original Burberry Store on 57th Street in Manhattan every day and walk another five blocks to buy Burberry coats and scarves at Bloomingdale’s. Empathy is also a singular characteristic of the campaigns that have built great brands in commodity categories, vis-à-vis the Marlborough Man.
Value. There may be no more fundamentally important quality, particularly in today’s price-sensitive environment; think about how the world’s largest retailer hammers home a theme of “everyday low prices.” However, achieving and sustaining success can’t be accomplished simply with low prices. History demonstrates that as markets evolve, price competition proliferates, and there’s always someone willing to sell their product or service at a lower cost. Achieving the optimum balance between cost and benefit leaves customers so satisfied they’re oblivious to price or quick to tell you it doesn’t matter.
Delivering that kind of value requires an understanding of what people really want—not simply what they tell you. When Gardner, the agency I then worked for, helped John Deere introduce their Lawn & Garden Tractor, the engineers at Deere and the consumers we interviewed spent hours talking about horsepower and features. Meanwhile, John Deere salespeople and dealers worried about the substantial premium that was going to be charged. We successfully introduced “The Weekend Freedom Machine” with a campaign rooted in the knowledge that… Yes, it was a Deere…Yes, features mattered… but down deep, our target audience was itching to get on the golf course or watch a football game.
Bill Bernbach, the prime mover in the advertising creative revolution of the 1960s, observed that, “It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill.”
“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature… what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action… if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being,” observed Mr. B.
Ad Age columnist Bob Garfield pointed out that, “Mr. Bernbach's creative revolution was not the overturning of '50s-era ‘motivational’ manipulation. It was simply the most agreeable and effective expression of it… DDB’s great watershed campaign for Volkswagen—epitomized by “Lemon,” the print ad based on the factory’s rejection of a 1961 Beetle for delivery because of a blemished chrome strip on the glove compartment—walked right past the air-cooled engine and 34-miles-per-gallon attributes to make the Beetle the badge of conspicuously inconspicuous consumption for those who wanted to show that they didn’t need to show off.”
Effective account planning can help you uncover the relevance, establish empathy, and build the perceived value that will rev up business. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
