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February 14, 2023 | Report
One of the good things about getting old is that you gather experiences along the way, even if that is sometimes all you have left to offer. Many of you may not have lived through a recession but I have lived through several, and I want to share with you three big things I have learned about how to keep building brands in these times.
I have worked in agencies, start-ups, and consultancies. I have worked in marketing for two very big global consumer product companies. Between these two worlds, I have been lucky to contribute to a host of fantastic brands, three of which I will draw upon for these insights.
The one fundamental principle that has applied throughout each downturn is to have a real sense of what your customer is going through. To have empathy.
In my Chambers English Dictionary from 1994 (on the left), empathy means "The power of entering into another's personality and imaginatively experiencing his or her experiences.'’ Interestingly, this word does not appear in my similar dictionary from the Great Depression in 1931 (on the right).
As we go into this recession, know that the experience of one downturn is not the same as another, and the experiences of each customer will differ. Those with wealth might experience it in a host of different ways to those struggling to make ends meet. One of the most potent things the marketer can do during these times is to constantly assess the attitudes and actions, the beliefs and the behaviors, of their current and prospective customers.
Digital tools can make this fast, accurate, informative, and actionable in ways that were not possible even a decade and a half ago during the last downturn.
The notion of varied experiences is also true of marketers. So, what are marketers experiencing now?
We all like to know what others are thinking, especially when they are the bosses of us. We explore that in our latest survey of C-suite executives.
This is what is on the minds of CEOs and CMOs. Growing through the miserable months ahead will come from digital transformation, new product development, and “marketing & promotions.”
So, marketing has a big role to play. How best to play that role? You can make your own mind up, but here are three things that I learned over my time working with some of those great clients that went through similar periods of challenge.
Firstly, I thought back to the 1970s—oil, unemployment, Licorice Pizza, etc. Every recession hopefully ends, and we return to living our lives in the pursuit of happiness.
George Lucas knew this. In 1977 he launched Episode IV, "A New Hope." Yes, even in 1977 he called it "Episode IV." Rumor has it that in the early seventies, during this tumultuous period of economic uncertainty, this genius called George Lucas outlined all nine episodes of his epic tale with a long-range vision for what they could become.
Lucas was the first filmmaker to really think of his properties as brands and to consider their lifetime value. He launched them, marketed them, and delivered great experiences through the first three films and all the collateral that surrounded them.
The hiatus between the films stretched almost 16 years: the videos came out, the DVDs surfaced, the action figures gathered dust, and the would-be Jedis grew up.
Lucasfilm kept the franchise going. They very cleverly engaged the next generation through cartoons, Lego sets, and video games.
Same brand, same story, same values, same purpose, but new methods. All this set the platform for the launch of three new episodes to keep the franchise growing. It helped Lucasfilm acquire a whole new generation of customers and spread the force to a range of new markets, like China. This bridging strategy must have worked well. Episode I was reported as raising revenues of just over $5bn all told.
I was lucky enough to work on the global communications strategy for Episodes I, II and III beginning in 1997 and was able to see the power of this approach coming to life.
Great long-term thinking. Always imagining what is next. Constantly delivering on the promise. And always evolving the engagement. You should think the same way.
There are troubling times ahead, but ahead of those times your brands still have a whole world of opportunity waiting to be mined.
Of course, you should be doing this all the time, but it becomes even more important during times of an economic downturn. Roughly 1 In 18 CEOs currently say they will cut marketing and advertising budgets in the year to come to tackle the downturn, and even more CMOs say they will reduce these budgets (one in seven). A big part of the CMO's approach could be harnessing paucity to foster innovation.
How do you think about changing your mindset and capitalizing on the current economic situation to make leaps in your marketing approach? Here is one tale that expands upon one way this can be done—thinking in the direction of owned, earned, shared, and then paid.
This is a story I learned from my days at The Coca-Cola Company. We were coming off the back of the 2008–2010 recession, and money tightened as digital was beginning to expand. This presented the opportunity to be courageous.
In Australia, the challenge of recruiting teenagers into the “Real Thing” was a puzzle that no advertising seemed to be able to unlock. Several years of great film advertising, in-store promotion, and sponsorship had maintained the brand's position, but prompting new users to “open happiness” and drink was proving very difficult. Then a couple of agencies and a brave client came up with a staggering idea: “Let’s not use advertising. Let’s use the most precious thing we own and give it away for free to the consumer.”
Yep, they took the logo off the bottle and stuck your name on it. Even back then, this was enabled with digital transformation in the bottling process, the printing process, and even the data gathering to highlight the most important names that needed to go on the bottles.
The uplift was amazing, and it went around the world over the next four to five years as one of Coke’s most successful promotions ever. One in seven teens that had not drunk a Coke in the previous year were reported to have picked one up that summer.
From that came the principle of think in the direction of owned media (your packaging, your people, your places), earned media (social, PR, word of mouth), shared media (partnerships, influencers), and then paid media.
Just try it out and ask, “If money is tight, what else can we do to delight people?”
My third lesson is one that we must not ever forget. Even as technology continues to automate marketing and unleash the power of AI-created, hyper-personalized messaging...we still need creativity.
As a media guy, I always talked about the application of the creativity to the “how” of storytelling—who we talk to, where we show up, how we stand out, how we prompt behavior change etc., but the most vital thing we need is creativity in the “what”of the story itself.
David Ogilvy once said: “Great advertising comes from the most persuasive selling message, presented to the largest number, of the right people, in the right way, at the right time, at the lowest possible cost.” There is lots for the communications planner in there, but the most important thing is the opener: The most persuasive selling message.
That message does not always manifest in an ad made on Madison Avenue by David Ogilvy and his team. In fact, our C-Suite Outlook highlights the fact that advertising is not going to lead the push for marketing—at least in the minds of the CEO and CMO. But no matter what the channel is, there must be a story that is the essence of why people should pick you.
And to finish off, I want to tell you the story of The London Olympic bid.
London had no chance of winning this bid back in 2003. The UK was not in great shape, the economy was recovering from 9–11 and, the dot-com bubble was still bursting. Paris was the solid favorite and Madrid a close second with London a limping third.
Nevertheless, a brilliant story that pulled the first three things I said together—empathy, lifetime value and OESP—got them across the finishing line in first place.
You can read all about this episode in a great book called Perfect Pitch by an old college friend of mine, Jon Steel, and you will see that he used the case history from the London Olympic bid as the summation of his whole book pulling together his thesis on how to make the most persuasive selling message work for you.
So how did they do it?
They found the best people to tell the story: David Beckham, Sebastian Coe, Tony Blair, HRH Princess Anne…but most importantly, a bunch of excited school children from London. They made the story not about them and why London wanted the Games but about the Olympics and why they needed London. They positioned it well into the future and talked about better times ahead. And they wove a beautiful story that recognized how the things from the past and where the Olympic brand had come from still has relevance for the future and how the next generation might embrace the Olympic ideals and aspire to be active.
With that creativity they won the bid against all odds.
In summary, these are the three things my experience has taught me as we look at brand building in the year ahead.
For all of you in the business of telling stories to make people think differently, feel differently, and act differently when it comes to the brands they choose, remember:
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