By Adam Wakefield
Place tackled the topic of all that glitters is
not gold at the
Mobile Marketing Association SA Forum, held in Durban during
Loeries Creative Week in August, beginning his speech about how the digital era meant everything is now measurable.
“If I spend this, I get that,” Place said. This is the beginning of the story of digital.
“Then what happens? Digital gets cheaper and more measurable and, frankly, it’s cooler. Everyone here wants to be cool. So that’s how the story of digital is often told. Bottom line, it is the miracle cure for brand problems. You’ve come here to find out the miracle cures for your brand because of the miracle cures like this one.”
Consumers love mobile, consumers matter to brands, and, therefore, mobile matters to brands. However, according to Place, the love of mobile and the love of brands in mobile aren’t the same thing. They are completely different things, and when measurability is thrown into the mix, Place said it is very easy “to be bewitched”.
However, for most South African brands, and brands around the world, the fact is there are more customers; more real-life, living, breathing customers out there than there are people interacting with a particular brand in a digital context.
Sometimes, the best engagement with a brand is through tactile engagement, the packaging of the product being one such area.
Place then turned his focus to a problem the entire marketing and advertising industry face, a problem which they probably do not talk about: millennials.
“They don’t really exist. They aren’t really a segment and they consistently fail homogeneity tests. No one can really tell you what a millennial is because the definition changes,” Place said.
“At a qualitative level, they’re largely the same as Generation X, Y, and Z.”
At best, millennial is a useful buzzword to describe youthful people.
Returning to digital, Place said marketing professionals are trained to look for “shiny new opportunities”, new tools and platforms that purportedly will make an impact on the bottom line of the product or brand they oversee.
However, what invariably happens is the tool they purchase in year one is not as effective as first thought, but wait, there is a new tool available in year two which they can try, but again, it does not work.
“You keep selling to them and it always keeps changing and it doesn’t work. They will soon get tired of buying these things. What should be this wonderful new era of marketing becomes quickly jaded,” Place says.
There is a massive difference between media and marketing, Place said, but if you take a look at the general content most brands are putting out there, “there is a massive misunderstanding between what is media and what is marketing”.
“Marketing is art and science, based fundamentally on persuasion. That has nothing to do with the digital era whatsoever,” Place said.
“Media, it’s the race track, it’s not the race car. You will never ever, ever compensate for poor marketing regardless of how innovative the media platform is.”
To succeed, brands need to get their marketing right before they decide which medium to use.
“You will never solve a marketing problem through a medium. Never,” Place said. “It’s about having a product with a relevant point of difference.”
Brands and marketers must understand who their target customers are, and what they currently believe about your brand. This requires science, and they must not stop there, though in Place’s view most marketers do.
They have to create the optimal position for their brand for these consumers, which requires imagination. This is the hard part.
“So where are we now? Where’d you like people to be in relation to your brand? Go make something. Develop a creative idea which persuades customers of your optimal positioning based on a singular relevant point of difference. This is incredibly difficult,” Place said. “We’re so busy measuring public opinion we forget that we can mould it.”
It is not enough to be imaginative and have lots of ideas. You need the facts to leap off from. Only then can you find the best media to deliver that idea.
“I’m not saying that digital media is bad but digital media is digital media, and marketing is marketing,” Place said. “A well-positioned brand is always, always, always going to out-punch novelty media.”