Let’s make advertising (occasionally) stupid again.
Humans aren’t as rational as we like to think. (For ref see entire sport of wingsuit jumping). Marketeers know this. We know that it’s actually emotional messaging that really connects to audiences over the long term; happiness, sadness, and yes, occasionally being a bit daft.
Making people have even the tiniest emotional reaction to your brand helps them remember you, and builds a little link in their minds to who you are. However, rational messaging is far simpler to understand and buy. If you’re say, a small start-up brand making lightweight road bicycles – you should just tell everyone how lightweight they are, right? Brands can get some fantastic quick results from rational messaging. If our hypothetical lightweight bike brand were to just whack a decent shot of their product up on a paid facebook campaign, caption it ‘revolutionary lightweight bike’, and carefully serve it to the right people at the right time, they would get some success. So job done, yes? Well, sort of. It’s actually only half the job done. Rational works in the short term, but it doesn’t grow your brand on its own. It takes both emotional and rational messaging working together in a very structured way across your communications strategy to grow your brand over the years.
The benchmark evidence for this is here. (Warning: contains charts). And if your mind is feeling open, and you have a good few minutes to spare, this brilliantly rigorous post from Martin Weigel examines the problems of short term-ism in far greater depth – “Has advertising lost its personality?” (Spoiler: it has). We applied thinking on the ‘long and the short of it’ to our first campaign for performance clothing brand Tog24.
“Ah, the great British weather. What ‘fun’. Dark. Wet. Cold. Wind. Bleurgh. So how do we all get through it? Well, Autumn is no match for decent clobber and the British sense of humour. Whatever happens, if we can see the funny side, and grin and bear it, we’ll be fine.”
To create an emotional connection we captured and communicated the truth of surviving the colder months with a sense of humour. And to further convince our target audience rational performance based messaging followed. Have a look at some of the campaign over in our case study. If you’d like to chat about striking the balance between creating long term brand equity and short term sales growth, get in touch.
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