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Blog posts tagged brands
Marketing trends: lessons from the Cannes Advertising Festival
July 02, 2009
I’ve spent the week at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival Like many delegates this year, I wasn’t there to party or pick up an award, but to learn about how marketing is evolving and how brands of all size need to adapt in today’s fast changing and fragile economy.
An impressive list of media, agencies and brands were there to spread words of wisdom through more than 50 seminars, workshops and masterclasses. Here are my top line takeaways from Cannes 2009 – of importance not just to big brands, but all the millions of small businesses out there, too.
Digital creativity: Without doubt the key theme running throughout the week was the rising importance of digital as the primary means of engaging consumers. There was general agreement that the recession had accelerated migration of spend to digital, as consumers seek value when making purchases.
It seemed clear that traditional advertising is unlikely to return to the heady heights of 2007. This is partly because consumers can no longer be talked at, interrupted, annoyed or even tricked into watching adverts – including banner ads online and heavily-branded websites.
Central to digital creativity is the need to think less in terms of linear campaign planning and more as an ongoing ‘on-demand’ marketing strategy, reacting to consumers’ conversations in real-time. Small businesses are some of the most prolific users of Twitter, suggesting that they may well be ahead of the curve on this trend.
Brands as publishers: In his book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky claims that content is not king, but conversation is. Consumers are absolutely leading this trend through their own social media and networks, requiring brands to follow. There was a key message running through the week that brands must build useful content in order to be part of consumers’ conversations in their own habitats.
iPhone applications have become highly successful for this very reason – they provide some form of utility to consumers’ daily lives. In such an environment, the brand is becoming a publisher. Video, audio, social tools like blogs or widgets, images and, of course, text are all key tools in the information era. Because production is cheap and accessible, small companies can use these tools as profitably as large businesses.
Embracing the cloud: If content creation is on the rise, where will it all live? A number of speakers pointed to the ‘cloud’ - key areas on the web where content lives and consumers hang out. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, FlickR – they are all cloud-based services, so the chances are your business is already in the cloud to some extent.
But the rise of the ‘social web’ is making these platforms more and more important, not just as a place to share content but to communicate. Businesses of all sizes have a chance to participate in this cloud ecosystem. Arguably, smaller brands have a bigger chance of success since building a small following may be easier than the masses larger brands will need to reach.
The future is undeniably going to be digital for brands across the board. As 2009 unfolds, budgets may continue to shrink, but in this digital landscape, the ‘long tail’ of businesses stand a greater chance of flourishing. There they have a much richer set of tools and opportunities to market their brands. Perhaps that is worth celebrating.
The funny thing about brands
April 30, 2009
Funny things, brands. As this BBC news story explains, the value of the world’s top 100 brands has increased in the last year, despite the fact that we’re being pulverised by the worst recession since – well, ever, probably.
Generally, the Brandz survey is fairly predictable: our lovely sponsor Google is a non-mover at number one, with a brand allegedly worth a so-much-its-silly $100 billion. Value-for-money retail brands are up, car manufacturers and financial companies are down; mobile phone brands are collectively outperforming everyone else. There’s no sign of the Marketing Donut (current brand value: £1.50 and two bags of Haribo), but I reckon we’ll be knocking on the door next year. Ahem.
So anyway, it strikes me that increasing your brand value during a recession is a pretty clever trick to pull. We’re used to casting brand experts as slightly sinister magician types pulling off clever deceptions (more David Copperfield than Paul Daniels, I would suggest) - but how the hell are they doing it?
My reading is, broadly, that the list confirms that trusted brands provide us with an anchor in stormy waters. As the waters swell around us, so we cling more strongly to what is familiar and dependable. The brand owners may not increase their revenue during a recession, but firms such as these can certainly consolidate their reputation – and this means they can make serious money when the upturn begins.
So if it’s all so obvious, why am I bothering to blog? Because the BBC has picked up on three brands whose good performance seems to defy easy explanation. None of McDonalds (+34% in value), Marlboro (+33%) and Budweiser (+23%) can really be called a necessity and you might think they would be among the first things struck from the shopping list when money is tight. What’s more, these brands are under attack as public campaigns against junk food, smoking and boozing take root in our culture. Logically, all three brands should be experiencing a decline.
But of course, brands are not logical – their value is strongly influenced by their emotional resonance. Each of these three are experiencing either increasing sales or steady sales – remarkable when you might expect the typical McDonalds, Marlboro or Budweiser customer to be munching fewer Big Macs, smoking fewer cigarettes or downing fewer Buds. What does this say about us as consumers?
Certainly, that we don’t necessarily make rational or predictable choices. It also says that we continue to treat ourselves when times are hard and that we value our treats more than ever. It might also be saying that we’ve decided to forget the future and throw ourselves collectively to the four winds, indulge our pleasures more than ever and let the fates decide where we end up. Seriously – that’s a possibility.
So really this is a story about consumers and not about companies. It’s about the rational and irrational impulses that drive us to endow something with value. I reckon there are three simple lessons we can draw from the BBC article about the Brandz survey:
1) We are more likely to turn to trusted brands when money is tight
2) We value what they have to offer more than ever
3) We do not necessarily make rational choices.
Funny things, customers.
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