SPONSORED CONTENT
Darren Bishop
Senior Solutions Consultant,
Brand, System + Journey
Heart+Mind Strategies
dbishop@heartandmindstrategies.com
571-926-8852 x313
Can your brand catch a cultural wave?
It’s tempting to try to heighten a brand’s relevance by trying to surf a cultural wave. If your brand catches the wave just right, it can be catapulted into the collective awareness and gain deep relevance. But deciding if and how to surf that wave is tricky. If you don’t catch it right, the wave can crash on you.
A couple recent examples illustrate what happens when brands wipe out on a cultural wave:
- Gillette alienated many consumers with its The Best Men Can Be short film, which addressed social topics including the #MeToo movement, bullying and toxic masculinity. Although it drove social media hits, negatives outweighed positives by almost 2-to-1.
- Pepsi’s Live for Now short film featuring Kendall Jenner also faced backlash, in this case for trivializing protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. This led to words every marketer fears: “There are some concerns on impact to the brand and volumes,” (Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI, quoted in Ad Age 4/6/17).
As culture evolves, companies need to be thoughtful about how their brands evolve with it. To succeed, you must know how your core consumers’ values line up with the stance you’re thinking of taking.
How do you do that? Here are a couple of things to consider:
- Successful brands have deep roots connecting them to their consumers’ personal values – the emotional criteria we use to determine if the brand is a good fit for us.
- Satisfying those values is the end goal and good strategy involves mapping the decision pathways that take consumers from consideration through to the satisfaction of values. There are validated, structured ways to uncover those pathways to create such a map.
- Once you are able to determine the dominant decision pathway leading to the purchase of your brand, you can test how well a social or cultural issue fits on that decision pathway and meets the values of your most important audience(s).
When a brand takes a stance that aligns well with its consumers’ values, it produces results. For instance, Dove’s long-running “Real Beauty” campaign increased its sales from $2.5 billion to $4 billion in its first 10 years.
Do you know your consumers’ decision pathways? Do you clearly know and understand the linkages between your product/service and the values your consumers seek? Do you measure your programs based on how well they mirror those pathways?
If you are not confident you know these things, I strongly encourage you to take steps to find out. These are foundational to any brand that is built to last and have broad implications for all aspects of your marketing, including brand strategy development, segmentation, advertising development and your choice of what social and cultural waves (if any) to surf.