As we transition post-pandemic into a brave new world, advertising is having its own existential moment. After-hour circles at agencies and marketing boardrooms are all wondering the same thing; why are good old creatives not cutting ice the way they used to? Why after all these years don’t digital CTRs move beyond the proverbial 0.2%? With more people spending more time-consuming media, why is getting their attention even harder?
Intuitively we can all sense it – that we’re speaking to a generation that simply does not trust or care what brands have to say like before. A recent survey states that just 52% of APAC users classify television as trustworthy and that for a medium that’s been around for decades. In the APAC region, China and HK have the least trust towards advertising with India, Indonesia, and Australia somewhere in the middle with just 35% claiming to trust websites or social media.
Today’s savvy consumers need more than just celebrity endorsements, Instagram-worthy product shots or clever punchlines. They are also wary of brands creeping into their personal spaces using questionable data collection to deliver personalized or hyper-local ads.
So, if neither traditional advertising nor targeted contextual is the answer – what can brands do to market themselves better?
Perhaps the answer paradoxically lies in less marketing.
A Gartner study states that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. According to Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. This flies in the face of marketing gurus like Byron Sharp or Field and Binet who argue for penetration and recruitment as the ultimate goal of brand-building
While the consultants can argue, to us practitioners’ results are what matters.
Take the case of Mr. Beast – with 25 billion views across 6 YouTube channels, his fans are more than just statistics. This was proved when he launched Mr. Beast burgers, which sold 1 million burgers just 3 months after the launch. Or his Feastables range of chocolate bars that sold 1 million in just 72 hours of launch. He may not have the traditional legacy of a McDonalds or a Mars, but what Mr. Beast has are consumers as advocates – super fans within his subscriber base who fuel his expanding commercial empire.
Zoe Scaman, Founder of Bodacious, an independent brand strategy company, famously led the charge on Fandom, arguing that in the future fans will drive brands forward, co-creating, demanding and perhaps even shaping brand decisions.
While not all brands have the cult following of a Nike or a Lego, the writing is on the wall. Consumers are no longer willing to be passive fly-on-the-wall but want to be actively involved in building and sharing experiences that brands can enable for them. The ball is now in the brand’s court to meaningfully convert this into a means for advocacy for life.
Let’s look at a brand like Coca-Cola and their popular campaign ‘Share a Coke’ – it was built on the simple philosophy that a deep personal relationship can be forged only with deep personalization; they replaced the regular wraps of their cans with personalized, names cans reading ‘Share a Coke with….’ Consumers who bought these cans and gifted them flaunted them on their timelines across social media. Subsequently, several versions of the campaign were launched across countries picking on consumer passion points like music, holidays etc.
So, what does this mean for a generation of creatives, planners, brand managers and all the other wonderful talent that’s out there? How do we plan for a world of superfans, lifetime value and brand-led experiences when all the metrics and wisdom talk about awareness and full-funnel planning.
It’s not a question with an easy answer. GenZ is teaching us every day that they want to tell their own stories and work with brands that get them. Can we design campaigns that have this value exchange at the heart of it – a beer brand inviting superfans as tasters or a petcare brand helping dogs with special needs. Starting the journey of building advocates is a tough one – but ultimately will be worth the fight.
(The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com)