People usually wonder what makes a particular marketing campaign successful and others not so fruitful. The difference is that a successful one has the consumer form an emotional connection to your brand. By first liking the product and after that when you have additional campaigns that he or she enjoys, and then this relationship can develop further into brand loyalty. The key is to move the consumer in an emotional way, as he or she will then spread the word about the ad, and the brand, to his or her family and friends.
The best thing about word of mouth promotion is that it is free promotional information that comes to new potential customers from a trusted source, their friends and family. That could not be a better Christmas gift for the marketer, or the Brand Manager, as the Brand Manager always wants to spend as much as possible on campaigns and other forms of brand promotions. However, top management normally wants to keep costs low and some organizations cannot see the value of advertising so they try and keep those costs down as much as possible. If they can get free advertising in terms of having the customers going around to their friends telling them about the brand, its products and why they are so good, the Marketing Manager will definitely take it because that means her or she can spend the budget on other things.
So how can the marketer move the customer with advertising? The marketer can move its target consumer in a number of ways; like showing people in distress, by showing compassion for fellow human beings, or by being outright funny. It can use popular images or videos of moments in time, symbols, playing a song or jingle to move people, as people can easily relate to those things. As long as you affect the consumer in an emotional way, then the consumer will pay attention to your message. If the campaign manages to do this then the person in charge of the advertising has done his or her job, as they have engaged the consumer.
One ad that I think has been extremely successful in getting its message out to the world about their product and company itself is Dirt Devil. Dirt Devil ran an ad that takes place in the setting of the movie “The Exorcist”. The movie’s story line is about a troubled little girl that has been possessed by the devil and a priest tries to drive the bad spirits out the girl, but strange things keep on happening to her. The ad itself has become immensely successful and has been named by a few as one of the funniest ads in time. If you have not seen it already, you should do it right away because in the next section I will explain the details of it so I do not spoil any of the details for you.
The exorcist starts out with that creepy scene where the priest is walking up to the room and he hears strange noises and screams from the bedroom. You can see his trepidation and the sweat building on his forehead, the music playing is a creepy violin that plays faster and faster until he finally walks in the room when everything goes quiet. He sees the girl stuck to the celling screaming like a demon while moving back and forth stuck on to the ceiling and acting like she is from another planet. The camera then shows the priest, which seems petrified and is frozen in his tracks, before moving up through the ceiling to the next level, like you would do when you are looking into a doll house. The funny thing is that up in the apartment above, on the next floor, there is a little old lady wearing a bed jacket and hairnet and she is vacuuming the floor that is right over the spot where the girl is stuck to the ceiling downstairs, meaning that the vacuuming machine is so strong that it sucked up the girl and that is why she is going back and forth across the ceiling! The girl’s parents and the priest all believed she was possessed by the devil himself.
This ad is supposed to show the extreme suction power of the vacuum machine, but in the beginning the audience thinks that it is a scene taken out of the movie The Exorcist and you do not know who the advertiser is until the end and that it is in fact an ad for Dirt Devil.
What some marketers do not usually know is that when some ads are particularly good or funny, people notice them and pay more attention to them. Even though they might be fast forwarding through the commercial breaks when they are watching TV, they might see a short glimpse of an ad that makes them stop, reverse and watch it just because they think it is so clever, good, or outright funny. That is the power of a really good ad; you will get your money’s worth out of it ten times. This is true because not only consumers of the brand will pay attention to it, but the message will be spread by the viewers to their friends and family through social media. Also news sources might pick up the story and spread it to their audience as a form of comic relief which is happening on a regular basis with news outlets like CNN and many other news organizations. Although, great ads might be expensive to produce, one should not discount the fact that they can pay you back tenfold.
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