How Hard is it to be a Brave Marketer?

It doesn’t take long for us to know if we like or dislike something. I imagine that this is closely linked to the “fight or flight” instinct hardwired into all of us. The problem is that people often don’t agree on what they like and dislike. Mass murderers such as Charles Manson, somehow become very desirable to a small group of women, while they remain figures of loathing to the rest of us. Entire households get divided during the elections, when one member says Labour while the others say National.

Even superb products don’t reach everyone. For example, regardless of how many iPads Apple sells, or how good the product is, there’s always someone who’s not interested and chooses a competing tablet. The problem with marketing is that we all want to believe that the product we're selling is the absolute best in the world when it most likely isn’t. If it was, everyone would have one, but not even Apple has created this perfect product.

No one, and no product or brand, ever gets unanimous approval - it just doesn't happen, not even for Jesus or Mohammed. The sooner we understand this the better. Moving away from the centre is becoming more important than ever before. In fact, clever marketers should be striving to find a way to move their brands to the juicy edges and in turn find ways to get the centre to move towards them. Lady Gaga did this very well, so did Marilyn Manson. Britney Spears tried but failed and ended up looking rather daft, proving that being edgy isn’t as easy as it seems. But what they all shared in common was one thing: bravery.

It takes a really remarkable person to commit an act of bravery, simply because by its very definition, brave is something that not everyone is prepared to be. Standing up to a bully, asking for a raise, immigrating to a new country, getting married, starting your own business, coming out, saying "no" when everyone else is saying "yes" - these are all hard to do, some more so than others. But once done, they’re over and we move on to the next challenge.

Being brave in marketing has become absolutely essential, because there’s just no real scope for anything else these days. Five years ago, alternative approaches to marketing were a novelty but now they’re all that we have left if we’re to have more of an impact than the competition. So how can the element of bravery become second nature to marketers? After all, many of you are in paid positions that look after your mortgages, childcare, credit cards, mortgages, and a need to feed a family three times a day. Bravery isn’t as easy when there’s so much at stake – logic says that no one wants to lose everything they’ve worked so hard for by making a brave decision, which ends up being the wrong decision, that costs you a career.

Bravery needs to be seen as an “up moment” with more to gain than to lose because that is the very nature of bravery. I don’t classify myself as fearless, so you may well be sceptical as to what gives me the right to talk about bravery at length, but you don’t have to be brave to know what bravery is. I can’t see myself standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square but I know that it’s been successfully done before and that fills me with hope that my inferior attempts at bravery can succeed. So in my next blog, I’ll take a closer look at how bravery and marketing can go hand in hand and what it takes to be a brave marketer.

Product Placement King of the Year

Following up on my previous blog regarding the culture of the “celebthletes”, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a closer look at product placement and advertising.

If you’ve ever watched a movie or anything on TV, you would have seen product placement at work. It is a very lucrative business and was well explored in Morgan Spurlock’s fantastic documentary “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” (to give it its full title).

I can remember watching Top Gun way back in 1986 and thinking that Tom Cruise’s Aviator sunglasses were the third coolest thing in the movie, just behind his F14 Tomcat and Kelly McGillis.

I wanted, no, make that needed, a set of those sunnies! And so did a lot of other people - according to Time Magazine, sales of RayBan Aviators rose by 40% due to their appearance in Top Gun. Mr. Cruise has always been a big promoter of sunglasses, with such iconic placements as his Wayfarers in Risky Business and his Oakleys in Mission Impossible 2.

In 2011, Apple was featured twice as often as the next most conspicuous brand. In fact, Apple has appeared in over one third of all the number one movies in the US box office since 2011, an enviable position considering that the fruity logo and associated products appear more than McDonalds, Pepsi and Sony Vaio combined. Apple even goes as far as saying it doesn’t pay for product placement and furthermore, refuses to respond to any questions on the subject. If Apple doesn’t pay, then this seems to be a phenomenal publicity coup when you imagine what all this exposure does for the company.

An American company called Front Row Marketing Services has figured it out. Using their “proprietary product placement valuation metric” (a fancy way of saying “cunning software”), they calculated the total product placement value Apple received from just seven movies in 2011: US$48,9 million! Apple spent more than five minutes on the screen during Mission Impossible 4, which according to Front Row was worth US$23,5 million! That excludes exposure on DVD, video-on-demand, downloads and so forth. Wow.
In the month following Mercedes' role in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, sales of the star model SLS AMG were up 14 percent. By the end of 2011, sales of the Dodge Charger, the star of Fast Five, were up 227 percent! Double wow!

Even here in New Zealand, product placement is starting to go through the roof, with a number of companies specializing in this theme. Auckland-based product placement company Exposure seems to be making quite a living from it with brands such as Ford, LG, Telecom, Bell Tea, Vodafone, Lexus, Mini, Suzuki and dozens more featured on their client list. They’ve hooked their clients up with spots in The Cult, Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune and The Strip to name but a few.

Then there are the other shows which are just sold outright to brands: Hyundai Country Calendar, Chelsea New Zealand's Hottest Home Baker, TradeZone Gone Fishin' and The ITM Fishing Show.

What I like about product placement in the New Zealand market is that it isn’t totally over the top (just yet). By that I mean we can at least be thankful that it isn’t as bad as some of our local advertising. But things could change and who knows - maybe in the next season of The Almighty Johnsons, one of the lads will go to Harvey Norman, buy a new Samsung TV and take it home to his new missus, the Briscoes’ lady? The entire scene could even have the sponsor’s jingles in the background for good measure.