6.5 paths to stand out in your company and your …...and losers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) or the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) – both B2B industry

6.5 paths to stand out in your company and your category

MARKETING & PR FOR INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

For those of us in the marketing profession, the bar is constantly being raised. Marketers are faced with a number of challenges: understanding new technologies, measuring program impact and internal stakeholders expectations for ROI. Amid all of this, standout creative is still the “killer app” for which marketing and communications are valued—and without it, solving the other problems is tougher, if not impossible. Stand-out campaigns move the business; and focusing your resources on them tends to solve for the other stuff. This is a manifesto for marketers and PR professionals who seek a fearless path to achieving differentiation for the brands with which they’re entrusted.

In today’s highly networked world, innovation is so rapid and has become so ubiquitous that significant advancements in product concept or design often will produce a tepid response at best. For many consumers, nothing short of the Cubs winning a World Series seems to merit excitement – that’s how desensitized we’ve become to progress.

To make matters worse, we are victims of our own success. People have come to expect marketing to entertain. If your advertising isn’t Super Bowl-caliber, if your digital engagement isn’t equal to that of the ALS ice-bucket challenge, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve the kind of awareness and viral word-of-mouth that have made many brands shine.

Couple the aforementioned trends with a distracted audience awash in the tsunami of data, information and content the Internet carries to their ever-growing number of connected devices and you have the recipe for the marketer’s singular challenge: stand out. Stand out long enough, in the right venues, with the right message, so that people actually notice and take action.

“Standout campaigns move the business; and focusing your energy on them tends to solve for the other stuff.” -Lisa Vallee-Smith,Co-CEO, Airfoil

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“Winning brands use an “audacity strategy” of one form or another.” -Leah Haran,Senior Vice President, Airfoil

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A microcosm of today’s marketing reality can be found in the winners and losers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) or the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) – both B2B industry events that have a high degree of influence on consumer interest and demand. Attendees are highly distracted professionals; however, they also tend to be influential consumers in their own right – early adopters or aficionados of gee-whiz gadgetry and automotive excellence. So brands that are able to win on this strategic high ground often are doing something right. And the thing about a show like CES or NAIAS is that you can witness it happening.

So how do they do it? If the marketer’s objective is to stand out, what makes a brand stand out in a place like CES or anywhere else? We asked ourselves the same question. The answer we arrived at: Winning brands use an “audacity strategy” of one form or another.

Strategic Audacity – How to be positively impossible to ignoreAudacious means daring, bold, courageous and is often applied when someone does something pretty unusual, like putting on a wing suit and dropping off the side of a mountain. It also can mean challenging the status quo and doing things that most people wouldn’t do, or wouldn’t think of. For the savvy marketer, a little well-timed and calculated audacity is the cure to today’s bland-brand ills. So consider these 6.5 ways to display audacity in your campaigns and singularity in your brand’s position.

#1FEATS OF STRENGTHLast year Paralympian runner Blake Leeper issued a challenge at the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) conference. Prosthetic technology had stalled during the past decade, and Leeper, born without legs below the knee, challenged an elite group of industrial designers to achieve a feat of strength - help him get to the able bodied Olympics in Rio in 2016. Two companies, Altair (known for product design and development) and Eastman (a chemicals and plastics manufacturing supplier), took Leeper up on the quest to devise a series of concepts for next-gen blades. For months, teams from the two companies consulted with Leeper and tweaked their designs, emerging with an “F1” concept--a premium set of blades that are fit for an Olympic athlete. The design was officially unveiled in August, and the roadtrip to Rio is officially underway. Stay tuned.

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#2OPEN PIONEERWhen it comes to standing out, sometimes it’s not the destination that’s interesting and engaging for consumers – it’s the expedition. Leading up to its groundbreaking launch of the first Augmented Reality (A.R.) Drone, Parrot used videos and photos of its irresistibly captivating prototype drones to generate media interest weeks before the final designed product reached the booths at the Consumer Electronics Show. The feeling of being on the verge of a breakthrough product engaged media and consumers alike.

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#3PUNKPOSITIONINGCompanies hate the idea that they may surrender a potential sale because of overly exclusive positioning. But fighting that impulse and creating exclusivity is often a good call. Brands that help people create very distinctive personal identities are frequently among the strongest around. For example, ThinkGeek is a retail site for Geeknet, Inc., a brand that caters to an audience that self-identifies as “geeks.” The company had been producing fake products for April Fool’s Day for many years to help shine a spotlight on the brand with a bigger, mainstream audience—while still remaining true to its core. The annual PR stunt has attracted the likes of George Lucas and the New York Times.

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#4BREAK THERULESMany brands assume the characteristics of their category, but standout brands often challenge these conventions to great success. Take eBay— its Motors category was definitively seen as an online marketplace for consumer-to-consumer vehicle sales – not a popular channel among auto dealers who viewed eBay as com-petition. Nonetheless, eBay brazenly took a message of “you can, too” to the dealer community, offering an alternative point-of-view through engagement with core industry trade publications and exhibiting at events such as NADA (National Automobile Dealers Association).

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#5ELEPHANT HUNTERIn most sectors, we can find things that people just accept. But with a little examination, nearly everyone would agree they are archaic, outmoded or just plain stupid. Stating the obvious can be your brand’s gain. Most men find the cost of replacement razor blades from leading manufacturers ridiculously high – the stuff of Saturday Night Live parodies. But most would agree that cheaper alternatives don’t come close in quality. Enter Dollar Shave Club, a company with a comparable product at a much lower price point. But price alone is not the source of DSC’s success; indeed, the company’s marketing, which targets industry giants like Gillette as price-gouging opportunists, is what powers this brand.

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#6BRAND NUDITYWe’re not talking showing flesh – this is transparency to the extreme. Radical transparency is more than consumers ask for, and earning their trust can earn you interest and a lifetime of their loyalty. Think Patagonia, the outdoor apparel brand that has recently shown the bare skin of the environmental and social footprint of its product line and marketing supply chain as a way of communicating with its customers. Patagonia’s cam-paign, anchored in a website called The Footprint Chronicles, allows consumers to navigate a map of the world that pinpoints every factory in Patagonia’s supply chain, with detailed profiles of key suppliers, along with video and photo tours of how its different products are made.

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*6.5Naturally, not all brands can undertake a campaign as ambitious as Patagonia’s, but brands that take this half a step farther open themselves up to participatory communities and feed their expression.

You don’t need a 12-step program to recover your position in the marketing place. Pursue one of these 6.5 paths—or audaciously navigate a different road less taken—to stand out and stand up for creative excellence in your brand.

To begin carving a path that leads to standout marketing campaigns, please contact David Bailey at [email protected].

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Standing out in an engaging way will move the needle, but it takes guts and determination.

Our proven process propels technology companies to compete and succeed. We build marketing communications programs rooted in insight, gain mindshare by inspiring audience engagement and prove return through measured results. We call this process Higher ThinkingSM and its how we help clients determine the path most likely to succeed, to inform creative, to Stand Out .

MARKETING & PR FOR INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

www.airfoilgroup.com

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