Exploring the Brand Experience
Brand experience is a term that I only recently learned, but whose concept is quite old. Brand experience, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the idea that every way in which a consumer interacts with a brand influences the way they feel about that brand. It dates back to before global brands and mass media. If a shop owner lived in a town that was large enough to have more than one store that provided similar products, and therefore had to compete for customers, they would likely have given consideration to brand experience. Selection, quality of service, store layout, décor, and location would create differentiation from competitors that could potentially lead to more repeat customers. Similarly, placing listings in local newspapers could advertise the advantages of one shop over another. As the world changed, and the number of ways in which the consumer and the brand interact grew, these techniques evolved to match. To show how this works in a modern setting, let’s look at a couple of brands that do it well.
Gay Friendly Advertising
Earlier this month, I read Adweek’s list of the top sixteen “Gayest Ads in History,” a celebration of advertising’s best gay-friendly ads over the years. This got me thinking about how homosexuality is displayed in contemporary advertising. Though it remains a hot-button issue for a lot of people throughout the United States, there is plenty of evidence to suggest growing mainstream acceptance of homosexuality. In television, building on the groundwork laid by Will and Grace, Modern Family is consistently one of the most viewed programs in the coveted 18-49 year old demographic. It was such a big success for ABC that other networks developed similar gay-friendly shows to try and compete, such as NBC’s unsuccessful The New Normal. Another ratings juggernaut, Glee, heavily features homosexual themes, storylines, and characters. In movies, both critical and financial success has been found in tackling gay issues, with films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and The Kids Are All Right. Even in video games, companies like Bioware have included homosexual storylines amongst their branching story options in game series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Outside of media, there is lots of data coming in from social networking suggesting that, especially amongst younger users, there is great support for pro-gay causes. So why is it still considered remarkable when advertising features homosexuality?
Bad Movie Trailers: A Microcosm for Marketing Mistakes
Movie trailers are in the enviable position of being a marketing tool that, by and large, do not raise the ire of the people consuming the marketing. Unlike so much advertising, PR press releases, and other marketing materials, people accept trailers as a part of life in a way that they seem unwilling to do with other forms of promotion. Sure, people seek out the best super bowl ads each year to see the best work that top creative agencies in America have to offer, but that is a once a year occurrence. People seek out trailers all year round to keep appraised of new movies they might want to watch. Trailers get traded around on social media in a way that most digital marketers can only dream about. And this flow of marketing happens in that egalitarian way only the Internet can allow. Big franchise films obviously get a lot of attention from their established fan-bases, but I’ve seen plenty of hype build up on social networks about oddball high-concept fantasies like Cloud Atlas or independent emotional dramas like Little Miss Sunshine or The Way Way Back. Despite the fact that trailers have all of this going for them, the system has its flaws. Since this form of promotion relies heavily on excerpting material from the original source, it should be no surprise that most trailers are as good or as bad as the film they are promoting. But not all. There are, of course, trailers made by true artists of the form that make a movie look way better than it actually is, and there are total duds that make an awesome movie look like a waste of time, but there is a third, peculiar category that makes movies look like something completely different from what they are. It is in examining this third category that we can draw parallels to the foibles of other mainstream marketing.
Crowdfunding: The New Reality
Last year I wrote about how crowdfunding was changing the way in which people thought about aggregating capital. I suggested, at the time, that as the crowdfunding world grew bigger and bigger, there would be far reaching consequences as the marketplace adjusted to the new reality. Since then, many of those consequences have come to fruition. For example, I predicted that once organizations saw the power of raising money through crowdfunding, a cottage industry would build up around assisting those organizations with their campaigns. Just the other day, on Craigslist, I saw a listing for a campaign manager at a non-profit for the express purpose of managing a Kickstarter campaign. I also predicted that it might be in the best interests of marketing and communications agencies to position themselves to aid organizations looking to make the most of crowdfunding efforts. I recently came across an agency called Command Partners, out of Charlotte, North Carolina, that lists amongst its offerings “start-up marketing” including a specialty in crowdfunding campaigns. I also predicted that we could see crowdfunding come to Hollywood, with famous directors raising money for their films with crowdfunding when they fail to convince studio executives to back their projects. Enter Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, along with the main cast of the show, including Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni, making an impassioned plea to the show’s diehard fans for funds to do a Veronica Mars movie. Using Kickstarter they aimed to raise $2 million, the largest base sum ever on the site, in order to cover the production costs of the film, with Warner Brothers, the license holder of the Veronica Mars intellectual property (IP), covering the distribution costs in exchange for a piece of the profits. When the campaign was over they had raised just shy of $5.75 million. It was this success, in fact, that got me thinking about the future of crowdfunding again.
Bringing Orchestras into the Modern Age
Recently, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra went on strike in the middle of an East Coast tour. One of the more interesting things to come out of the controversy surrounding the strike was some startling information about the health of regional orchestras within the United States during this recession. In short, the financial backing that used to support the major, and minor, orchestras is no longer as strong as it once was, and many orchestras are struggling to fulfill their contracts, pay their bills, and keep their doors open.
But why? By and large, the arts aren’t struggling right now. Populist art like movies, television, and pop music are all doing well. To be fair, they aren’t as flush as they were a decade ago, which has caused some risk aversion and some (arguably) overblown worry about the effects of piracy. Still, the concerts get sold out, the movies make back their costs, and television continues on with little impact to its quality or cost. Older mediums, such as theater, opera, ballet, or orchestral music, don’t have the mainstream success that populist art has, by definition, but until recently this hasn’t prevented them from getting by. Even in this recession, theater and ballet are still getting by, so what about orchestras is so different? What has happened recently that has caused them this trouble, and what can they, as organizations, do to fix it?
Rivet Global’s Kilcully Scenario
I came across Rivet Global’s summer internship application while researching open positions at their company. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify for the internship because A) I’m not currently a college senior, and B) the San Francisco office is not one of the offices that run their internship program. However, I thought the idea of including a practical exam as part of the application process was interesting, so I decided, for fun, to try my hand at the Account Coordinator prompt anyway.
A summary of the prompt goes as follows (the complete application materials can be found on Rivet’s website at www.rivetglobal.com/pdf/RivetInternApplication2013.pdf):
Kilcully, a microbrew in the Nashville area, is looking to expand nationally, starting with Cleveland, Ohio as a test market. Kilcully has long been the favored beer of the Nashville country music scene, from dive bar gigs to big name concerts. Market research has shown that likely converts in the Cleveland area love beer and love local events. Using this information, complete the application’s three parts.
Part One: Write an assignment brief for the Kilcully account using a given template.
Part Two: Discuss what information seemed missing in the provided materials and what research should be done to address those weaknesses.
Part Three: Since everyone at Rivet is encouraged to participate in the creative process, offer some of your own creative ideas about a possible Kilcully campaign.
Note: Since this has evolved from something to do for just myself into something for my blog, I have included an annotated version of part one, the assignment brief, at the bottom of the post that explains the thought process behind each of the answers I provided.