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Brand Awareness
Experience, Engage, and Be “Content”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The most influential emerging trends in
brand awareness include: Experiential Marketing, Engagement Marketing, and Content
Marketing.
Experiential Marketing allows marketers to
create a deeper and more lasting connection
with customers.
Engagement Marketing can help revive a forgotten brand, re-launch it, and get back on
consumers’ radar screen.
Content Marketing generates an ongoing
conversational dialogue with clients using
social media channels to increase website
traffic and brand perception.
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Brand awareness can lead to high sale volume
and strong market share. It allows companies to
stand out from the crowd of competitors. Con-
FURTHER AMA READING
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Hot Chocolate
Release Your Inner Scribe
10 Minutes with…Beth Rice
sumers need to easily associate your brand with
your products and services. The hardest part of
maintaining brand awareness is securing the
right marketing campaign for certain customer
bases. Experiential Marketing, Engagement
Marketing, and Content Marketing are three different paths that all seek to secure and enhance
overall brand awareness.
Sweeten Your Image
Green and Black’s is a free trade organic chocolate brand that wanted to “sweeten” its image
with chocolate enthusiasts (Birkner, 2011). The
problem they faced was that the chocolate marketplace was getting very crowded. Green &
Black’s is a London based company and their
goal was to get the U.S. market of food experts
and devotees to engage more deeply with their
brand. They wanted to go beyond the tried
and true ‘sampling’ market plan. They wanted
a deeper, lasting connection with consumers
described as a “foodie” audience with gourmet
tastes.
Knowing the problem, they got to work on a marketing fix and launched a Taste Discovery tour
from April to October in 2011. At events, several
guides hosted Taste Discovery booths. People
got to experience the product on a deeper, interactive, and more meaningful level. For example,
there were 10-minute seminars where participants learned how to make desserts with Green
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and Black’s products. They were also educated
on the company’s Fair Trade practices and commitment to social, environmental, and economic
development in the countries where the cocoa
farmers lived.
The next step was to cultivate engagement
beyond the Discover tour. Using iPads, consumers took a chocolate taste quiz. Emails and
birthdays were captured along with customer
feelings, dislikes, and preferences. Responses
generated a customized chocolate “horoscopes”
to match their tastes and personality with clever
descriptions. The horoscopes were emailed to
quiz-takers along with a coupon and an invitation
to ‘like’ Green & Black’s on Facebook. Facebook
fans increased from 25,00 to 82,000 at the conclusion of the campaign. All in all, this was a
pretty successful way to sweeten overall brand
image using experiential and digital marketing.
Love it & Leave It
In “10 Minutes with Beth Rice,” (2010) Rice, a
specialist in engagement marketing, describes
an engagement campaign she created for the
clothing company Esprit when they were opening a new flagship store in Manhattan. Esprit
is popular in Europe and Asia and used to be
popular in the U.S in the 80’s but had fallen off
the radar with American customers and brand
awareness was all but lost. The objective of the
campaign was to re-introduce the brand completely.
The first step in the marketing campaign was
to launch a consumer research project to find
out what customers thought of the brand. It
turned out that was virtually no awareness, and
consumers essentially didn’t care about Esprit.
Thus, the next step was developing a strategy to
get people back to any kind of brand awareness.
The ‘Love It & Leave It’ campaign was launched
to get awareness, excitement, buzz, press, and
sales for a brand that was almost completely
absent in consumers’ minds.
The thrust of the engagement campaign was to
simply get people to come into the flagship store
and try on Esprit clothes. If they liked the Esprit
clothes better than what they were wearing, they
were able to leave their old clothes at the store
and they would be donated to the Salvation Army.
The opening of the store found people waiting in
line to get in, and the buzz began and lasted for
two days with people on the streets of Manhattan asking what is going on at the Esprit store. A
website was launched as part of the campaign,
40,000 people were invited, and street teams
of models were formed to cover 10 blocks surrounding the store. The models would carry an
Esprit bag, put it down, take off the sweater they
were wearing, and put on a new Esprit sweater.
Dressing rooms were set up in the store’s windows with models and even customers trying
on clothes. Crowds gathered on the sidewalk
outside the store’s windows. Additionally, the
campaign garnered a large amount of press.
Because of the success of Rice’s ‘Love it & Leave
it’ engagement campaign, every new Esprit store
opening will be done this exact way. It is now a
global, turn-key strategy for Esprit, or any store
that has to re-launch its brand all over again by
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engaging a completely new customer base.
Release Your Inner Scribe
Content marketing is the latest trend in brand
awareness. It is a marketing approach that
incorporates information, education, and conversation using various social media channels. Beth
Monaghan, Founder and Principle of Ink House,
a communications firm specializing in social
content for B-to-B clients, believes that content
marketing is based in conversation (Sullivan,
2012). For her clients, she recommends beginning with a blog. This channel allows a person
in the company to provide thought leadership by
expressing a point of view. Additionally, content
should be tied to solving a problem. Think about
what you do, what product or service you offer,
and why it matters and will matter in the future.
Frame it around thought leadership and social
responsibility. A content calendar is a good tool
to lay out a marketing strategy.
When first getting into content marketing, it is
important to consider how to integrate social
media channels into overall content marketing
strategy. Content dictates which social media
channels to use. For example, content that lends
itself to video should use YouTube as an effective
channel. Blogs are best for thought leadership.
Email and Twitter are great for ‘teasers’ that get
people to go back to a specific blog or website.
LinkedIn is all about content—marketers only
need to post a few sentences to peak interest.
The best part of content marketing is that it
doesn’t take a big investment of money, however, it does take an investment of time. Twitter
is a case in point. It is very effective but it takes
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a while to build up a following. Monaghan suggests a benchmark of 1,000 followers in order to
be effective.
In order to have a powerful and engaging conversation with a target audience, you need to
have great content and a point of view. This
means that you’ve spent the time to think about
the important things that are shaping your industry and you’re sharing that, and you’re opening
yourself up to a conversation that can be so
much more meaningful than somebody just
reading your press release. And, the more that
a marketer engages in content marketing, the
easier it becomes with practice. It becomes habit
rather than one more thing to do in a marketing
campaign. Choosing a Path
When choosing a path to explore when increasing brand awareness, marketers should focus on
the root concern first and foremost. You might
want to create a more interactive experience for
your customers. You might want to breathe new
life into your brand by engaging customers in a
new and exciting way. Or, you might want to take
advantage of social media channels by providing
content-rich material that prompts conversation
with clientele in an informative way that keeps
them coming back for more. Whatever path,
these marketing strategies will keep a brand
where you want it—on the radar screen
Works Cited
Birkner, C. (2011) Hot Chocolate. Marketing
News, 45(16), 12-12. http://www.marketingpower.com/ResourceLibrary/MarketingNews/
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Pages/2011/12-30-11/Problem_solved.aspx
Sullivan, E.A. (2012) Release your Inner
Scribe, Marketing News, 49 (4), 16-21.
http://amaconnect.marketingpower.com/
marketing_sector/b2b_marketing/m/b2b_
marketing_file_gallery/8552.aspx
Sullivan, E.A. (2010) 10 Minutes with…Beth
Rice. Marketing News, 44 (9), 21-22. http://
www.marketingpower.com/ResourceLibrary/
MarketingNews/Pages/2010/7_30_10/10_
minutes_with.aspx
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