How do the most successful brands get us thinking about them?
Effective communication and engagement works by creating value and positive beliefs/feelings for your audience
Engagement involves building belonging, affinity, and emotional resonance, and is all about creating an emotional connection.
The objective is to instil a feeling that the customer is connected to the brand and shares an affinity with the values of the brand.
BT Sport realigned brand positioning to achieve goals
At its heart, marketing is driven by the objectives of the organisation. Positioning the brand in the marketplace and in the mind of the consumer is a part of that but can be a double-edged sword for planners.
During the research phase of campaign formation, a planning and evaluation function will try to understand how the consumer considers the brand compared to competitor brands or other relevant offerings. This helps to identify what beliefs need to be formed or shifted to achieve the desired position for the brand.
Brands often need to establish channel strategies that support and reinforce their established position, but these may not always be the most cost-efficient options available. The best brands will carefully evaluate what messaging and marketing channels will resonate with their audience best to achieve their specific goals.
This is perfectly illustrated by our DMA Awards 2020 Grand Prix Winner. BT Sport asked their agency Wunderman Thompson to find a way to match the previous year’s sales figures, with a fraction of the media spend. Wunderman Thompson needed to find a way to cost effectively put BT Sport in the minds of football fans, superseding their competitors, in order to achieve their sales targets.
Wunderman Thompson’s approach to doing more with less budget, in association with Essence and Pitch Marketing Group, brought together the biggest minds in data - Google Cloud, Opta and Squawka - to do the unthinkable: write the script for the entire 2019/20 season using Artificial Intelligence.
In this short video you will get a flavour for how BT Sport & Wunderman Thompson successfully managed to create a brand affinity with the TV sports audience in time for the new football season.
Influencing consumers’ buying behaviour
Increasing the involvement of your brand and products in your customer’s everyday life can be a way to build utility, engagement and belonging. Take Marmite, for example. They are known for their “Love it or hate it” campaign, but they have also developed a campaign designed to remind people that Marmite should be on the breakfast table and not in the cupboard.
With our BT example, the campaign became part of football fans’ everyday lives as a result of Wunderman sending the report to pundits, players, influencers, journalists - and the nation - before a penny was spent on advertising.
Part of the fun of a football season is supporting your team and the camaraderie with competing supporters. Wunderman created a 60-page dossier that ignited a global debate like nothing the football community had seen before. It significantly contributed to the entertainment of debating the seasons outcomes from national TV to Twitter and everywhere in between, supporters were debating BT’s 60 page AI football script.
Important emotions to influence buyer behaviours include feelings of:
1. Trust and appreciation
BT built trust and appreciation with their audience because they had put so much thought and effort into producing content which would capture their interest. It added additional enjoyment to the football season, by stimulating debates around team performance.
2. Feeling valued by being personally recognised and appreciated
Every major football team was featured in the report, leaving the audiences of each of those teams feeling as though it was a piece of content personally relevant to them.
How are you helping your audiences?
Contemporary marketing theory states that the aims of providing ‘help’ to your audiences should be:
• Answering questions (also referred to as handling objections)
• Making people feel at ease and trust your brand
• Generating a sense of being cared for
This model of helpful utility is at the core of all content marketing. Being useful is an important long-term relationship and loyalty driver. Help links to the service dimension in marketing and can be powerful in assisting the development of ideas, relationships, and sales activation. Also, for many brands, help is a form of product experience.
The product experience for BT was propelled through the most famous influencers discussing the script on TV and social media, even the footballers themselves were discussing the script. The same script that was available to all football fans to access and discuss, making all football fans feel involved and engaged.
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Would you like to learn advanced marketing theory from the best in the business? Join DMA membership to get 50% off the IDM Postgraduate Diploma in Intelligent Marketing, where the theory for this article was sampled from.