We can’t reproduce the entire conference transcript, nor do we have any such ambition. But our Senior Marketing Specialist, Verča, has put together three ideas for you – ones she jotted down herself so she wouldn’t forget them.
Take them as food for thought over a cup of coffee and an invitation to the next Brandstorming.
1/ Do you use terms such as sustainability, ecology and social responsibility in your brand’s marketing? Customers are becoming increasingly sensitive to greenwashing and similar ‘-ing’ terms, and they verify the truth of what your product claims about itself. Moreover, even with the best of intentions, it is sometimes difficult within one’s own company to distinguish the line between when an advertising message is still truthful and when it becomes manipulative.
Michaela Thomas from the agency Butterflies & Hurricanes advocates an approach to business she calls “radical humanity” – and encourages others to stop withholding the full truth about their products from customers.
She has questions she recommends asking yourself honestly from time to time:
- What value does my company bring?
- Why should my company exist at all?
- What if people saw how my product is made? Would they view it the same way?
- What is the real cost of my product if it included the costs of biodiversity destruction or cleaning the seas of the waste its production generates?
Truthfulness, honesty and localism are the key trends Michaela believes in, and she is confident they will grow for the sake of our future.
Her motto is also inspiring:
“The only extremism we espouse is radical humanity. It means being human at all times – whether anyone is watching or not, whether it’s convenient or not.”
2/ The purchasing decision is a complex process that many scientists, psychologists and practising marketers strive to describe. We learn about it from books, videos, podcasts and lectures. There are hundreds of perspectives and hundreds of theories on why and on what basis people decide to buy.
In his lecture, Petr Podolinský from dotcom advertising spoke about how purchasing decisions are many times more complex than we admit in practice. We all suspect this, but perhaps we sometimes forget. Then, in marketing, we may find ourselves working with an idea of how it works that we formed sometime in the past and no longer think about.
And so it is simply good to bear in mind every day that we are working solely on the basis of assumptions and fragments of reality that we know. That we may be relying on an overly linear model of purchasing behaviour that looks something like this,
yet we fail to realise that the reality is far more complex and looks something like this:
It is not only in Vojtěch Prokeš’s talk that one can find plenty of information on how we can learn more about the actual process. But the diagram itself is inspiring – it vividly reminds us that it is always worth looking at marketing from many angles, following trends and trying new approaches.
3/ Vojtěch Prokeš from Behavio Labs presented the simple principles underpinning the customer’s relationship with our brand, which are worth bearing in mind when creating any marketing message. They seem obvious, but seeing them in black and white is a useful reminder for every marketer:
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The feel-good effect
We perceive the benefits and risks of an offer based on the spontaneous emotion we feel towards it.
This is why people with impaired emotional centres find decision-making much more difficult.
A good example is the Ikea brand: 74% of people associate it with positive emotions when shopping. This correlates with sales figures and customer loyalty.
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The contrast effect
We remember things that stand out best. For example, we remember the first syllable between numbers and the first number between syllables. We also won’t easily forget a brand that is different from the rest and knows how to convey that.
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The ease-of-processing effect
We like things more that our brain can process more easily. Simple messages have a far greater impact than trying to say everything. Research has shown, for example, that unfamiliar Chinese characters which people saw more often were perceived as more positive. Even without knowing their meaning.
If we manage to evoke a feeling in the customer: “I know this, it rings a bell,” their goodwill is on its way to us.
And that’s all :-). 3 conference snippets for inspiration from our Veronika.
Will you be joining us at Brandstorming 2021 next time? We’d love to meet you!