The 3 Ways Brand Drives Integrated Marketing Impact
We all know a great integrated marketing campaign when we see one. Some icons of late have included Old Spice’s Smell Like a Man, Man, Southwest’s Transfarency, and Spotify’s Wrapped. These are creative, standout demonstrations of brands sweating the details, driving consistency, and sending a relevant and resonant message to an audience. So the question is, why aren’t more brands doing campaigns this well?
Increasingly fragmented touchpoints, greater prevalence of mobile, and the end of the third-party cookie are all factors that make it even more difficult – yet more important than ever – for brands to engage people. But in a world where ad recall rates under 20% are considered strong and where the US Postal Service can credibly claim to be the most-loved brand in America, there is surely room for improvement in crafting a message and curating a content experience that moves the needle on growth.
Companies whose integrated marketing campaigns I’ve seen perform the best – from reach to impressions to lead gen to recall – are those that use their brand to play a unifying, focusing role in those campaigns. Brand plays the following three specific roles in the most successful campaigns:
Being a “full-funnel friend.” From executing national media buys that build awareness with new audiences to leveraging email marketing to drive growth among ardent loyalists, brand is front and center for the top performers. Personality, voice and tone, imagery, graphic devices, subject photography, and even the shapes of the buttons and the language in the CTA are important to get right. Everything needs to be consistent, reinforcing, and distinctive – creating an intuitive and delightful customer experience that helps people understand the brand and what it’s all about. When someone’s experience across channels, content types, and form factors feels integrated and consistent, it not only builds and reinforces an understanding of the brand’s value proposition, it also creates confidence that it’s a brand people can get to know and trust.
Creating an emotional connection. It’s estimated that as much as 90% of decision making is based on emotion. So it should come as no surprise that brands whose messages create and sustain a durable emotional connection are those whose campaigns perform the best. The emotion can be one of many – it could be the humor of Old Spice, the relatability of Spotify, the peace of mind of Southwest, or a dozen other higher-order anchors. But no matter what it is, every hero image, every tagline, every actor, every touchpoint, every piece of content has to signal and reinforce the emotion the brand is going for.
Standing out boldly. The best integrated campaigns are vehicles for brands to implicitly or explicitly declare what they believe and why they exist. In the Transfarency campaign, Southwest leans into its decades-long posture of challenging convention in the airline category by committing to always providing low fares and never hiding fees, and even coins a memorable word to ensure that its message sticks with travelers. In Wrapped, Spotify utilizes its terabytes of streaming data to craft an annual mosaic that creatively and humanistically celebrates the audio experiences we’ve chosen over the course of the year. And through its partnership with spokesperson Isaiah Mustafa, Old Spice bet big in the “Man” campaign on a strategy of revitalizing brand relevance among a younger cohort by having someone with whom customers could (literally) connect. The key here is not that these companies took unmitigated risks with these campaigns. It’s that they refuted convention in their message, and then innovated in the way they took it to market under the banner of the brand.
When brands inform the full measure of campaign content, strike an emotional chord, and stand out with conviction and clarity, they have all of the makings of an outstanding integrated brand campaign. It will be exciting and instructive to see, hear, and feel what lies ahead for brands and their audiences as the holiday season approaches in 2021.