Marketing can be all about fashions and fads, and knowing which ones to follow and which ones to leave well alone will ultimately decide the extent to which a brand will be successful. Moving with the times is crucial for any brand no matter how big or small the company.
There have been some high profile viral casualties over the years where the biggest players have pitched viral wrong.
Marks and Spencer, the leading UK retailer was one such victim in 2001, where their failure to market the right product to the right customer led to plummeting sales.
So in constantly changing times, how do you balance marketing an established brand with keeping up with the times and creating a feeling of vibrancy around your company?
The current marketing fashion is centred around creating an online viral hit, and if your target market is aimed at 18-30 year olds the pressure is on to go digital in order to keep up with your audience.
The question is if you represent an established brand, how do you reinvent yourself to take advantage of the growing trend for social media marketing? Let’s take a look at the exploits of three companies that have successfully moulded themselves into the digital age.
Gillette
With their established image and world famous tag line, “the best a man can get”, Gillette have built themselves into one of the world’s most recognisable brands. Over the years their adverts have featured global superstars in the likes of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, but recently they tried their hand at social marketing and did it with an uncharacteristic sense of humour.
They developed a spoof YouTube ad for their “80 blade razor” which humorously challenged critics of the ever growing collection of blades that appear on their product. The ad linked to their Facebook page which promoted their real latest razor and showed how with a touch of imagination, you can successfully use your established brand and the perceptions around it to create an entertaining viral hit.
Pizza Hut
This is another company that have recently broken from their established brand image to keep up with their audience. Pizza Hut teamed up with Channel 4 to launch a series of exclusive adverts for their delivery service on digital channel E4. In this way, Pizza Hut could break with their “family friendly” image and appeal more to the 18-34 year old market for takeaway pizza.
Although not an online strategy, this is a good example of brands that are breaking from their established image to fit in to the digital age in order to appeal to a new audience.
Foster’s
Foster’s had things easy when the digital age came along. Their recent campaign, featuring their chirpy Aussie duo Brad and Dan, pulls together all of their “no worries” brand image and gives it a natural home across all media. Their characters have over 20,000 Facebook fans, have their own Twitter feed and are an example of how the right brand can transfer naturally across both social media and TV advertising. This is a perfect example of how you can roll a brand out online and keep hold of your existing identity without having to make any changes to appeal to your target audience.
So what can you take away from this and employ in your own digital strategy?
The key thing to remember is that so long as you have a product that will appeal to social network users, you have the ability to create a social hit. In the case of Gillette, where they successfully overhauled their established image to appeal to the online market, they tool a product that many would think wouldn’t be interesting on the internet and made it into a viral success.
No matter what you sell and no matter how established your brand image is, you have the ability to come up with a successful viral hit. Make fun of yourself, use the internet as an opportunity to create a newer, fresher brand image and most importantly, create something that your target audience will engage with and share with their friends. This doesn’t mean overhauling your existing brand, simply developing it for the new digital age.
This is a guest post by Alan Grainger:
Alan Grainger is an in-house B2B web marketer and manages the SEO for The Corporate Gifts Company, a leading UK specialist in the business gifts sector. He writes articles exploring the issues faced by the B2B web marketer, giving an “in the trenches” view from an in-house SEO department.
References:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1071483/fosters-seeks-digital-consistency-push/
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1055447/pizza-hut-delivery-launches-spoof-ad-exclusively-channel-4
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1050447/Gillette-mocks-itself-spoof-ad
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2725809/Trouble-deepens-as-Marks-and-Spencer-sales-decline.html