a five step guide to creating high-impact marketing · 2020-04-22 · with the hashtag #purplecow....

A FIVE STEP GUIDETO CREATING HIGH-IMPACT MARKETING

We are the gherkin on your Big Mac.

realityhouse.co.uk | 01225 580016

Realityhouse is a Bath based studio that creates brand identities, websites, videos, print work and commercial campaigns for professional service clients and a few other people.

HIGH-IMPACT MARKETING

We’ve all released a marketing campaign into the wild with great

fanfare, only for it to land with a whimper. It leaves you disappointed

and having to massage the figures you present to the Management

Board in a, “43% of people know you can use statistics to prove

anything” kind of way. It sucks.

But what can you do about it? How can you put yourself in a position

where you stand a greater chance of getting people to pay attention

to what you’ve produced?

At realityhouse there are a few guiding principles we follow on every

piece of creative marketing we produce. These are lessons we’ve

learned the hard way through years of planning, executing and

measuring campaigns, as well as designing brands and websites, in

and out of the professional services sector. Some of them you might

relate to and some of them may make you uncomfortable. Who

knows? All we can do is be honest and tell you what we know and

have experienced in the hope you find it useful.

Ok? Let’s go.

WHY?!

A couple of traps to avoid...

TECHNOLOGYThe rate of technological development in the world is

genuinely exciting. The digital revolution has fundamentally shifted

how we live our lives and created possibilities that are bewitching - and

that’s the problem.

Danger #1

Too often we become seduced by technology and we lose sight of

what we’re trying to say. Technology is simply a tool for delivering and

measuring a message. You need to define what you want to say, then find

the right way of getting it out there, not the other way around.

Technology can be confounding, but it feels infinitely more tangible

than the horribly vague and anxiety-ridden creative process. Left to our

own devices, we side-step trying to figure out something interesting to

say – something that’s different and genuinely engaging - and hope the

technology does the heavy lifting. It won’t.

Technology is a just a machine and if you put in crap, guess what comes

out the other end...

Danger #2

If we start putting technology on a pedestal then we immediately limit ourselves.

The reason that there is so much homogenous, generic digital marketing out there

is because people are letting technical conventions dictate what they produce.

They’re following the “rules”. Now, logic dictates that if everyone follows

the same rules, everything looks the same. It’s only by learning the rules,

understanding them and then being brave enough to break them that you

distinguish yourself.


1.

“SIMPLY A TOOL FOR DELIVERING AND MEASURING A MESSAGE”


People love data. Big data. Small data. Data

cleansing. They even ask after it, “How’s your data?” “Oh

my data’s really strong, how’s yours?” They cherish it, protect

it and nurture it like it’s their own child. But here’s the thing,

data by itself never made anyone rich. But creativity and

storytelling have. Creativity has a history of communicating

and imagining things that people buy into. To paraphrase

Henry Ford, “If I’d asked people what they wanted I’d have

delivered them a horse with wheels”.

Tools such as Hubspot, Hotjar, Canddi and Google Analytics

can help you categorise people, monitor their behaviour and

make reasonable assumptions about what they might do. But

let’s work on the basis that everyone in your market is slowly

gathering the same data, if you follow it to the letter you’ll all

end up in the same place, with a possible client getting the

same message from ten different firms, which kind of feels like

where you might be now.

Remember, just like technology, data is a tool. Don’t be

beholden to it and forget to think about what you want to say.

2. DATA

“DAT

A BY I

TSEL

F NEV

ER

MADE

ANYO

NE RI

CH”


Let’s start with the basics. Everything you do in

your marketing should be designed to achieve

difference.

Difference is the definition of brand. A brand exists to

help you distinguish yourself, which in markets that may

be over-serviced, might be quite important.

Now difference is scary because by definition it

means doing something nobody else is doing, or

communicating in a way nobody else is communicating.

Eeek. But if you’re not going to go through that

uncomfortable process then you will be invisible; lost in

a sea of sameness that people just ignore. A good piece

of marketing takes bravery. A good piece of marketing

may even be divisive. But if nobody hates what you’ve

produced, then nobody loves it. If you try to produce

work that plays to every crowd it will inevitably become

compromised, diluted and ignorable.

1.

A few things to consider...

THINK DIFFERENT CREATE NEWS NOT MARKETINGStudents of marketing “guru” Seth

Godin will be familiar with his “Purple

cow” concept. The principle is simple; if you’re

driving down the road and past a field of cows

you’ll probably think to yourself, “Oh, there are

some cows”, or maybe, “Are they lying down

because my mum told me if they’re lying down

a monsoon will come?”. It’ll pass through your

mind swiftly and you’ll move on to thinking about

more important matters, like whether you’d prefer

to have Monster Munch hands or a Hula Hoop

neck.

Now, imagine you’re driving along and you see

a purple cow. What would you do? You’d go,

“Wow, there’s a purple cow!”. You’d maybe take

a photo of it and share it on Instagram, or Twitter

with the hashtag #purplecow. Soon conversations

would be going on about your purple cow

sighting. Merchandisers would start selling, “I saw

the purple cow” t-shirts – and so it goes.

What Godin is saying is that you need to do

something remarkable to get people’s attention.

As humans we often run on autopilot. We process

“normal” subconsciously, so what are you going

to do that will disrupt that? It’s for that very reason

we approached our Sticker campaign in the way

we did. We’ve deliberately designed something to

grab your attention. We want you to turn to your

colleague and say, “Have you seen this?”.

2.


THE VALUE OF A GOOD IDEAAt the heart of any successful piece of marketing is a good idea.

It’s this idea that helps you communicate what you’re trying to say in a powerful way.

Remember that advert for Sony Vaio where they dropped a load of bouncing balls down

a street? That was someone’s idea. That was how they chose to communicate the quality of

the Vaio’s colour screen, by

dropping balls down a street.

The result was they created

something that was different to

their competitors who were too

busy promoting the technical

specs of their products.

Instead Sony created

a beautiful moment that got

people talking. They created

a moment of culture.

For our campaign we

wanted to do something that

addressed the headaches our clients have dealing with their partnerships or management

boards, but we also wanted to make people smile. Every client we spoke to was used to

having to navigate the myriad personalities in the decision making process while trying to

get their latest piece of marketing over the line. We wanted to have fun with that. Give them

something that they could relate to in their lives – show them we understood and could help

them. We worked with a small pool of clients to define the personalities in the sticker book. We

wanted them to feel like they were a part of the process – and finally before we sent out the

campaign we showed the work to that small pool to gauge their reaction. They laughed. The

laugh was what we wanted.

3.


“IT TAKES A LOT OF BALLS TO SELL TELEVISIONS”

Sony Bravia 'balls' campaign by Fallon


approach has its risks. It’s why a lot of firms go on

a race to the bottom on price. But, if you can tell

a story, or sell an idea that reflects how someone

sees themselves, or feels about the world, you’re

connecting with them on a much more meaningful

level and you’re on your way to achieving

something that feels like what marketing types call

brand loyalty.

Now, you might be thinking, “This all feels very

deep and slightly contrived” – and you’d be

right. It is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t something

successful brands do –

In the modern world all brands are to some

degree lifestyle brands. A clever firm understands

this principle and creates campaigns that “sell” an

idea that affects people emotionally and aligns

the brand with how their audience views the

world.

Our sticker campaign is designed to demonstrate

that we understand the challenges our clients

face in getting creative marketing through a

management board or partnership. In really

simple terms we’re saying, “We get it; and now

here’s something that’ll make you smile”.

People have a habit of letting their heart

overrule their head. We live in a world where

Donald Trump is now President of the United States of

America and the UK has voted to leave the European

Union. Whichever side of the argument you fall it’s clear

that in both campaigns one side sold a logical argument

and another sold a story; an emotional argument

designed to connect with how people felt about life and

their own situations. It’s no secret that the Brexit camp

admired and replicated Trump’s methodology. They

even had a slogan up on the walls of their campaign

headquarters that read, “Facts don’t win elections”.

Ouch.

If you sell people the practical value of what you can

offer, they will make a practical assessment of it and

decide yes or no. They’ll measure you against your

competitors and judge you in a clinical way. Taking this

4.

PEOPLE ARE EMOTIONAL

“WE GET IT: AND NOW NOW HERE’S SOMETHING THAT’LL MAKE YOU SMILE”.

Nike ‘Rooney-Justdoit’ ad by Weiden and Kennedy

THE PERCEPTION OF VALUEWe hear lots of firms talk about the need to provide “added value”.

The problem you have is that “value” is relative. What one person finds valuable,

another person finds redundant. What you’re actually trying to convey is the

perception of a value over and above the core service you’re providing. Take

it as read that (and we’re often told this) the service you offer is the same as a

handful of other firms. “You don’t want to keep chipping away at your margins so

you need to create the perception of value and you do this by adopting creative

problem solving”.

The Ted Talk, “Life lessons from an ad man” by Rory Sutherland

explains this methodology in more detail. He demonstrates how creative problem

solving can produce the perception of value more cost effectively than technical

problem solving.

An example; in order to shorten the rail journey from St Pancreas to Paris by

30 minutes, you have a variety of options:

•Technical solution – you spend £50bn paying very smart people to rebuild the

rail line with new materials to speed up the journey, or

•Creative solution – you spend a 1/3 of that budget installing free fibre optic

broadband, which gives people a more pleasurable experience and makes them

worry less about the duration of the journey, or

• Creative solution – you spend 1/3 of the budget paying supermodels to walk

up and down the carriage handing out glasses of champagne and people would

be trying to slow the journey down!

The actual value you can provide someone is important, but

the perception of value is probably more important. On your

campaigns you should think about what how you can communicate

that perceived value. How can you make people ascribe more

value to your brand and your services?


5.

“PEOPLE DIDN’T LIKE SHREDDIES, BUT THEY LOVED DIAMOND SHREDDIES”

WAS THIS USEFUL?

This guide is designed to start a conversation. As we said at the

beginning, you might agree with these points, disagree with them, or want

us to take you through how you can adopt them in your marketing.

Either way, we’d love to hear from you.

Contact realityhouse by emailing:

Mike Fieldhouse, Managing Director

[email protected]

Anthony Mullinder, Creative Director

[email protected]

Or give us a call on 01225 580016.


a five step guide to creating high-impact marketing · 2020-04-22 · with the hashtag #purplecow....

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