KILLING SACRED COWSHow renegade marketing thinkers question everything you thought

you knew about our discipline

Johann Wachs Planning Director CEE

Agenda

1. Differentiation2. Engagement3. Participation

DIFFERENTIATION

Brands don’t have exclusive image attributes,

but share them with other brands

Brand knowledge is not held uniformly by all buyers

50% of all brand knowledge is concentrated in only 20% of buyers

The other 50% of brand knowledge is spread thinly across 80% of buyers

People’s views of brands are not stable over time – they change

Most people don’t think brands are unique or different

People don’t regard evaluating brands as very important

‚Low involvement processing’

Brand don’t attract different kinds of users

Brands don’t have exclusive customers

Communications may work very different

from what we have assumed.

Why do we fetishize the one-sentence brand benefit?

Why do we agonize over the precise phrasing of the brand essence?

Why do we fiddle with brand personality adjectives?

(HP Balls)

(Meerkat)

(Evian Babies)

People don’t have to think of a brand as different to buy it.

They just have to think of it at all.

Advertising that contains

no message, proposition or benefits

is not necessarily deficient

Salience & fame

Make brands interesting

Creative Publicity

The real goal of communications is the creation of vivid memories

that are present at the moment of purchase

Be interested in what people are interested in

We need to recognize that most people in the real world are just not that interested.

This is the real barrier to our

success.

„We spend too much time on what we want to say, rather than what people

want to hear.“

ET

ENGAGEMENT

Engagement is an intermediate measure –

not the endgame

It’s not whether we interrupt or not. It’s whether we add value.

Because engagement is not just a behavioral response,

but also a cognitive one.

Cadbury Gorilla

TV works

Not everyone wants to participate

Does engagement have intrinsic value?

Do people buy a brand because they’re fans –

or are they fans because they buy the brand more?

Do people care deeply

about brands?

‚Low involvement processing’

Engagement is not a metric

PARTICIPATION

Participation Inequality

Most people don’t buy your brand very often

Most people aren’t exclusively loyal to your brand

Most people don’t know your brand very well

50% of all brand knowledge is concentrated in only 20% of buyers

The other 50% of brand knowledge is spread thinly across 80% of buyers

Growth comes from new users – not loyal users

Marketing goal should be penetration, not loyalty

(a missionary)

Paradox

The people LEAST likely to engage deeply ...

... are the MOST important for growth

The Participation

This means 2 things: 2. Fans are actors, not the audience

1. The battle is for attention – not loyalty

Paradox

The people LEAST likely to engage deeply ...

... are the MOST important for growth

The Participation

Reach still matters - Participation is merely niche marketing, unless it is overheard and witnessed

by the mainstream.

So build talk value into the participation-idea

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Canon