Before "awareness" and "awards" became the ultimate objectives of so called Brand Marketers and their Agencies, the motivation of ATL advertising was to drive sales through "heuristics". "Heuristics" is basically an innate short cut learning / decision making tool based on past perceptions or experiences. In the case of mass advertising, the more a brand shows you how it solves your problems or meets your needs through lots of ads, every time you have that particular problem / need, you'd automatically think of that brand and eventually buy it, of course.
Since all marketers are now probably thinking the same thing, how then can you make your ad stand out from the rest? The Supply Side Marketer will shout, "Buy more ads!" and the Agency folks will be screaming, "Be brave and approve more 'creative' ads so that they grab the attention of the consumer, etc." As a result, marketers have been enticed to trade their priorities of driving sales with achieving awareness…
Since all marketers are now probably thinking the same thing, how then can you make your ad stand out from the rest? The Supply Side Marketer will shout, "Buy more ads!" and the Agency folks will be screaming, "Be brave and approve more 'creative' ads so that they grab the attention of the consumer, etc." As a result, marketers have been enticed to trade their priorities of driving sales with achieving awareness…
As marketers, you can always expect us to post-rationalize our actions: "The road to closing the sale is paved with many steps. 'Awareness' is only just the first step." I know its not easy to measure the effectiveness of ads, but my point is "awareness" as a priority is really over rated most of the time. Budweiser's "Wassup" campaign was one of the most awarded and popular TVC America has come to know but those levels of "awareness" didn't translate to increased sales. Rather the brand had a 8.3% drop in sales, further reducing its market share to 2.5% from 4%. It's sad but not many brands know how to optimize on awareness to leverage for driving / closing the sale. The closest, and only example I can think of now, is the "1984" Macintosh launch campaign by Apple, which only ran once (during the Super Bowl) but elevated Apple to cult status - a result that I suspect was unexpected even if the marketing guys at Apple claimed otherwise.
Whether an ad results in mass awareness that translates into sales (ala Apple) or not (ala Bud), is a mystery. So what do we do? Come up with more excuses and brilliant post-rationalization?
Well, the bzzz in marketing these days seem to be peer-to-peer (P2P) and word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. As marketers realize that their "awareness" ad campaigns aren't working as well as they used to with consumers, they might as well recruit them to do the work. Companies like Tremor (a buzz marketing subsidiary of P&G) recruit moms for the purpose of generating buzz and awareness about P&G's products. To date, approximately 1,000,000 members are signed up to a program of such nature from all demographics, psychographics, etc.
Happy Bzz-ing!
