Creative Or Controversial, The 2 Way Street To Brilliant Marketing

I once knew a girl who lied about a random taxi guy raping her just so she could get a lot of retweets on twitter to help advertise a private taxi company she was recommending. Well at the end of the day she did get the attention she wanted but eventually received a lot of backlash for using this extreme medium. Even if the story is a bit exaggerated, the purpose of this is to grab your attention to the power of controversy.

"Marketing is all about creating attention for your product, but brilliant marketing is the only way to retain that attention."

What do I mean exactly?

You need to first keep in mind that it’s not just about putting your product out there, you need to pay the price for customer attention. This price is a form of entertainment because without entertainment every other thing is just background noise.

My 2 favorite Cs in marketing are the prices paid for attention - Creativity and Controversiality.

Before we proceed, it needs to be understood that marketing your product alone doesn’t mean you won’t succeed, it just means you are less likely to be as successful as brands with brilliant marketing. A brand that sticks with just marketing falls among the crowd. Now you don’t want that, or do you?

The Creative Path

Why should you be creative? Between the two marketing Cs, creativity is most certainly a tougher path to follow but most rewarding. Being creative requires a lot of thinking, hard work and raw talent. Hey no worries, if you don’t have the raw talent, you can always develop the skill through a whole lot of hard work. Creativity is the tougher path and it always wins above all.

"There are 3 replies to a piece of work; yes, no and WOW. A creative work always gets the wow, always."

How can you be creative? You are either creative with the product you are selling or you are creative with the brand or if you are so bad ass you could be creative with both. Some product features can be breath taking while the way a few brands are positioned can be mind blowing. However, not all product features can be the former because sometimes production isn’t rocket science, take for example a soft drink or coffee.

There are so many angles to branding. It could be with your ads, the packaging of your products, or the packaging of your organization as a whole. A company’s brand is what the customer has to say about you and this means your brand must be life long evolving. So your company needs to decide what it want’s it’s brand to be known for from day one and run with it. Coke is known for a family brand while pepsi is known for a cool kind of brand.

Most brands go all out on their ads and stay basic when it comes to the packaging of the product. I do urge that we try to be different and creative with our packaging as much as we can because I believe it one of the greatest selling points in marketing.

Ads could in motion [commercials] or just motionless [posters]. Most, if not all creative commercials should tell a story that sticks [remember it has to stick] as opposed to just talking about your product features, while creative posters/billboards have creative slogans that also sticks. Before I go further, we need to understand one rule here which is, expect your product is worth the value then your creative marketing is all smoke.

According to the Heath brothers, there are 6 factors to stickiness called SUCCESs -

Simplicity is about finding the core of an idea and making it so profound; Unexpectedness has to do with creating surprise alongside generating alertness and curiosity with your idea; Concreteness involves explaining our ideas with sensory information which is mostly in form of concrete images as opposed to a lot of boring company mission statements; Credibility isn’t just about being factual but making your ideas carry their own credentials - a "try before you buy” philosophy; Emotion is about making your audience care by making them feel things for people and not abstractions; & Stories is all about telling stories that are relatable and research shows that 90% of what our audience takes away is our stories.

The Tag Heuer Don’t crack under pressure is a brilliant example of creative commercials. I got chills the first time I saw the Ad and it passed the SUCCESS test.

To list a few creative posters that are winning for me;

Take look at this billbaord

or this brilliant spread

The Controversial Path

Why should you be controversial?

According to wiki, controversy is a state of prolonged public debate concerning a matter of conflicting opinion. This means you will always have 2 extremes, either the audience love it or hate it.

Competing with bigger brands can be tough so you need to get people talking and controversy really fuels the heat in commentaries. Controversy is like a two-edged sword and if not done right, it can downplay your brand as opposed to the opposite.

Example of controversial ads ?

The Samsung galaxy note ad

This ad is extremely controversial on almost all grounds but for me I count it as brilliant because it was much more hilarious than offensive.

Final Note: Looking for a long lasting legacy with your brand ? Then take the creative path. Or are you trying to gain an immediate yet profound edge over your competitors? Then you can try taking the controversial path.

Have a Nice Ad, Wura.