Truth be told advertising has always had a measure of story telling. But the stories too often have been inward looking. They have been about products and why you should love them and buy them. A Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Study of more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries concluded that “there is room for improvement by marketers to make a more personal connection with consumers.”
When considering the audience, marketers must make sure they tell stories that resonate with human nature and at the same time relate back to the brand and reflect company values, says Jim Yu, Founder and CEO, BrightEdge.
The folks at Bryden pi recently asked pepper to work with their marketing team to develop a campaign for their insecticide spray Protox. They were very clear that they did not want another ad showing a cockroach with its legs up in the air. They also went to a lot of trouble to understand how people protected themselves, by talking to lots of them. It was amazing how animated people got about an unsexy product like a spray that kills flying and crawling insects. People were writing and relating stories from experiences going back to their childhood.
This client really went to great lengths to understand the ethnography of which insecticides were a part, so they could be relevant and improve their chances of connecting with consumers. Another challenge was to make sure that the story also made a clear link with their brand.
Time will tell if this new Protox ad works, but a few things support this more emotive, story telling Un-advertising approach:
- If every brand of insecticide is doing “dead cockroaches” then no one is standing out
- People are bombarded with so many messages that when one comes along that’s about the viewer rather than the advertiser, it gets noticed and talked about
- Customers are looking for brands that understand them and therefore feel an emotional connection
- It doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack composed and sung by Solman is delivering a message of love rather than a message of “buy me, buy me, buy me”
The Bryden pi team has invested a lot of time and money in this new campaign and now anxiously wait for the cash registers to ring. I think they will because they have focused on the one thing that matters most.
Their customers.
