Mythology - The Meaning Behind the Marketing

In Tough Times, A Powerful Value Prop Rings True

I couldn't help noticing the effectiveness of Southwest Airline's most recent series of commercials. They hammer a very simple, appealing message: "Ya know all those rinky-dink charges other airlines tag you with for an extra bag or calling to reserve a flight? Well, we don't do that."

Southwest has always been a powerful marketer. Not because of the cleverness of their ads, which have historically been pretty effective, but because they understand simple, powerful value propositions. In an industry where customer satisfaction is ungodly low and where you seem to get zapped with a "privilege" fee for breathing their recirculated air (don't they realize it's a privilege that we ride on their plane?), Southwest has been consistent, clear and powerful in what they offer the traveling consumer.

Southwest has always been a market-leader in the low-fare category. But I suspect they will begin to capture additional market share during these tough economic times. They, like many other companies who don't panic and maintain a strong, simple value to the customer, have many opportunities to shine during economic downturns.

However, Southwest doesn't have to tout price cuts in this scenario. The simple value proposition of not making customers feel screwed can be a powerful proposition. It's one many banks should heed.

Get Focused Before Getting Creative

Over the last few months, we've been engaged with clients who felt pressure from senior management, board members, and even investors to "do something" with their marketing. It can be a huge challenge to push back on impatient constituents who see competitors running glitzy ad campaigns.

Add the fact that almost everyone thinks they are an expert on advertising, and you have a tough situation for marketing professionals who know better than to rush something out the door for the sake of "doing something."

The costs of developing a marketing campaign without understanding some fundamental basics are huge. At Mythology, we describe these fundamentals as the Ten Pillars of Meaningful Marketing, and we advise clients with all our might to follow them. It's a rare effective marketing team who can maintain the discipline to take care of first things first.

Without a deep understanding of customer felt and expressed needs, message development can only be guesswork. Without message testing, the guesswork is expensive indeed in the form of lower response rates or awareness levels. Without prioritizing which customer segments are most relevant, marketing messages tend to be too broad and fall flat in a world where each consumer is hit with 3,000 messages a day. Even the purchase of direct mail lists can go way off kilter without answers to basic questions on who you are truly targeting.

So before you cave under the pressure, or get excited by the creative process, take a step back. Review the Ten Pillars and challenge yourself to nail some basic questions before you go down the campaign development path.

We have a simple assessment tool that might help. If you're interested, just drop us a line at info@mythologymarketing.com.

Marketers of the Year - What? You're Not on the List?

Ad Age has announced their candidates for "marketers of the year," which, as you can expect as long as the title of their magazine is Ad Age, has several big names who advertise a lot. But there are surprising political and viral marketing leaders as well.

The nominees are:

Apple

Coors

McCain Campaign

Nike

Obama Campaign

Zappos

Take a look at these Ad Age videos. Learning from the masters is a low-cost, effective way to strengthen your own advertising and marketing. In terms of next generation, conversational marketing, pay particular attention to Zappos and Obama. Zappos generates up to 75% of their revenue on repeat business and has focused almost exclusively on delivering a "wow" customer experience vs. investing in traditional advertising. Obama has taken grass roots, viral, word-of-mouth marketing to new levels in the political realm.

Top B2B Web Sites

BtoB Magazine shares their list of top ten business-to-business web sites.

"B-to-b sites are all about effectiveness," said William Rice, president of the Web Marketing Association. "You need to find the quickest way to get potential customers to understand not just about your products but what the real issues are in their industry and how those products can solve their problems and challenges. It's also crucial to build a long-term relationship rather than simply hawk your wares."

Well said, but I would also add: business decision-makers are people too (well, most of them). They are influenced by what they see on consumer sites and are expecting similar levels of quality in the design and usability of a B2B site.

In addition, I personally believe that infusing some appropriate personality into a business site can provide much-needed differentiation. Let's be honest - most B2B sites are drop-dead boring. B2B marketers seem afraid to offend, or else they assume the folks on the other end of the PC are so "just the facts" oriented that they will be turned off by any sense of originality.

But let's not forget - humans make decisions based on emotions and facts. It's been shown that many (most?) humans make an emotional decision first, then try to justify it with "research." Is your B2B site delivering an emotional as well as logical experience for your customers?

 

Meet Your New Creative Director - Joe Customer?

What is the most effective way to develop a brand or campaign message today - top-down, centrally-controlled or broadly democratized and community-driven?

The era of customer collaboration is in full force. This freaks some marketing executives and ad agencies out a bit, while others are waiting for the fad to fade. But the world is becoming more connected and collaborative, not less...and that's not likely to change anytime soon barring global disaster.

Microsoft's Gears of War launch is a great example. The original award-winning video ad, designed from the beginning to be shown in theaters and television, featured a great song (Mad World by Gary Jules) and compelling imagery. But as Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Mich Matthews explains, the gaming community took the clip over and "mashed up" their own versions. The result was 700 "community versions which lead to over a million additional pass-along impressions within the gaming world.

We've seen a more managed approach to this customer-as-creative-director trend. Chevrolet famously ran a student contest with the winner's ad being shown during the Super Bowl.

What does this mean for marketing strategy? It means that a primary focus of your strategy and campaign planning must focus on the "pass-along" element. What element of your brand mythology or campaign messaging will "stick" with a passionate core audience who will want to pass it along to their circle of influence?

Better yet, how can you involve this passionate core to help create your message? How can you encourage them to modify message in a way that will resonate with others like them?

Yes, this means giving up a degree of control. This is what scares people. We're in a new world where, frankly, we don't have as much control as we think we do anyway. So it's time to think less about brand control and more about brand collaboration with your customers.

However, someone had to get the ball rolling. Someone had to generate that initial cool advertisement, make sure it reflected the goals of the brand and product marketing, and then turn it over to the community. There is still a place for strong creative strategy, it's just that the strategy must now include a place for customer collaboration and pass-along potential.

Gatorade Builds Their Mythology

One of the best current examples of building a powerful brand foundation on a compelling myth is the Gatorade Legend campaign. Of course, Gatorade has always been one of the most prodigious masters of the time-honored tradition of aligning themselves with legendary sports heroes (here's one of my favorites). But lately they've been playing up the science behind their drink and telling the origination story - a classic element of mythology-based marketing.

With narration by legendary college football announcer Keith Jackson, the "Legend" spot does a masterful job of telling the backstory of Gatorade that connects nicely with the overall brand-building focus of science-based performance.

Story-telling is a powerful tool in its own right for getting consumers to care about you and your product. But telling the origination story - especially if it is compelling or especially original - drives the emotional connection even deeper. It is highly effective when it provides the consumer with a credible foundation for believing in your current brand value proposition.

What is your company's origination story? Should it become a primary or secondary part of how you market yourself today?

Relationship Investment ROI

The easiest way to establish a relationship with a prospective customer is to invest something of relational value with them. Seems simple enough. We connect with individual humans based on mutual emotional value - each person gives and receives something of worth to each other. It's the same with companies.

The concept of reciprocity is in play. Reciprocity refers to the in-kind response to a positive or negative action. You do something nice for me, that builds up good feelings that most likely will be returned.

Yet it's amazing how many companies go for the "ask" before any positive emotional buildup occurs.

The key for marketers is to identify what type of relationship investment a prospect would response positively to, how much that investment would cost, and if it would ultimately lead to a positive response in the form of enough revenue to make it worth the investment.

What is your organization doing to build positive reciprocity among the very targeted potential customers you want to build profitable relationships with?   

Schemas of Meaning

So what are the six effective "template" storylines that the most effective ads adhere to? They are:

• Pictorial analogy - Featuring extreme, exaggerated analogies rendered visually
• Extreme consequences - Exaggerated results of not using the advertised product, or extreme benefits of using it (NOTE: The majority of award-winning ads fall under these first two categories)
• Extreme situations - A product is shown performing under unusual circumstances, or a product attribute is exaggerated to the extreme
• Competition - In which a product wins a "bake-off" with the competition; even better if the bake-off circumstances are exaggerated
• Interactive experiment - Where people interact with the product directly to "see for themselves"
• Dimensionality alteration - Shows the long-term implications of a decision, such as not using or using the product

So there you have it. You probably recognize a great deal of these scenarios, and wonder "How then can we be creative and break through using the same old templates?" The secret is the creativity within these scenarios, for example showing off-beat or unexpected consequences of an everyday situation. That gets the viewers attention.

It's actually fun (for a marketing nerd, I suppose) to view various commercials and see if any of them adhere to these templates. See if you can predict which ones will be successful.

Following the Templates of Meaning

Did you know that the most successful ads can be categorized into just six basic categories, or templates? A research team in 1999 found that highly creative, award-winning ads are more predictable than uncreative, less successful ones.

Sounds counter-intuitive doesn't it?

Why is this true? Psychology and sociology tell us that humans process information more quickly, and usually more effectively, by reacting to common schemas. Schemas are a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Basically, it's prerecorded information stored in our memories.

Great advertisements tap into these schemas to relate quickly and powerfully to humans who only spend a few micro-seconds paying attention to one of the thousands of messages hurled at them everyday. They push the envelope of creativity within these schemas to create the most "sticky" messages that burn into the memories of consumers more effectively than others. 

Loyal vs. Committed

For most of us, measuring customer satisfaction has been perceived as a reliable indicator of how strong our brand is, or how well we can project repeat business from a given set of customers.

How wrong we've been.

Research has proven in multiple studies that defection rates can be quite high among a "satisfied" audience. The dynamics to watch for that could drive satisfied customers away include

• A glut of new products or services that offer differentiated value, causing ambivalence in a customer's mind and driving her to begin using multiple brands. For example, the hyper-niche realm of consumer goods products where you can buy a shampoo for almost any imaginable scenario - dry hair, dry hair with dandruff, greasy hair with split ends, etc. 
• The emergence of major shifts in what is considered to be a core part of a value proposition in that category. For example, a disruptive innovation such as the emergence of online banking features changed the game for many banking customers.

Research is also uncovering the difference between behavioral loyalty vs. attitudinal loyalty. Behavioral loyalty occurs when customers consistently purchase a product. However, that "loyal" behavior may only be because that is what is available to them in their geography, or what they can afford. Given a choice, they would defect.

Attitudinal loyalty occurs when the brand is the preferred choice of a consumer. Typically that consumer will actually make an effort to search for their preferred product, or delay purchase until they find it. If they don't find it, they may still buy a competitor, but they would much prefer their choice brand.

The ideal level of customer commitment would be those who are both attitudinally loyal - they want to buy your brand - and behaviorally loyal - they actually do buy your brand. Learn more here.