Now’s the time to ‘Be More Dog’ with your brand and advertising to bounce forward into success

Now’s the time to ‘Be More Dog’ with your brand and advertising to bounce forward into success

Forget the ‘free marketing audit’ that you’ve no doubt seen on offer in your LinkedIn feed. We both know that it’s a ploy to get you to spend money on the obvious that will no doubt get a small return but won’t give you the revolution your brand or products need at the moment.

Forget the bounce-back offer… especially when what you actually need is to bounce-forward and lead the charge into boosting brand awareness and enhancing profits.

So what do you need?

What you need is a non-obvious approach at the moment that will make you stand out and not follow the whole ‘worthy’ approach that marketing and advertising seems to push at the moment.

You need brave marketing packed with creativity, original thinking and dare we say it… balls!

Yes, we said your marketing and advertising needs balls. Deal with it.

Look at your competition for a day. Take some time and actually look at what they are doing, the messages they are going out with. The look and feel of their marketing activity. What are the things you remember the next day? Do you see anything you are jealous of?

We bet the answer is ‘no’.

That’s because to a large extent advertising and marketing has become an ocean of mediocrity. The same things churned out over and over again; when actually the thing that will work is surprising, delighting, shocking, pushing and disrupting the ocean with big bold brand thinking and clever tactics that have the cut through of an armour piercing bullet.

Take a look back at the great campaigns that pulled like a tractor.

Ever heard of ‘The Man in the Hathaway shirt’?

It was an advertising campaign that sold shirts by the truck load. How? Well at the time to sell a shirt all you seemingly had to do was put a good-looking model in a shirt, perhaps in a exotic setting and you had sales. The problem was, everyone was doing this, so everyone’s advertising was the same.

Then along came David Ogilvy. He changed the model to an older gentleman. Put him in a study surrounded by books and artefacts from around the world and then put an eye patch on the model.

Yes, an eye patch.

What this did was say that Hathaway shirts are shirts worn by interesting people. People with character. People who aren’t like others and who make their own rules. And you know what, the people loved it and their shirts sold more than all their competitors.

It was an approach that wasn’t safe. It didn’t conform and it broke all the rules. 

And it was an approach stolen years later by Old Spice.

Brave marketing works.

What about when you’re not No.1 in the market and you have aspirations to be bigger?

AVIS car hire for years had been in the shadows of their bigger rival, HERTZ.

And they recognised that as a business they needed to try harder to attract customers and just do everything that HERTZ does, but better.

But they never shouted about that in their advertising.

That was until Bill Bernbach came along and said that not being the market leader was actually a positive and that taking the underdog approach and how you’re always trying harder was exactly the thing to talk about in your advertising.

With adverts like ‘Avis can’t afford not to be nice’ they disrupted the market with something truly different that pushed their sales through the roof.

You see, being brave and thinking differently and not doing what everyone else is doing has always resulted in brand uplift and a healthy return on investment.

But in this day and age too many brands are afraid to stick their neck out and do something truly different.

And we don’t blame them… it’s a scary thing to do.

Yet, in these uncertain times just ask yourself this. What have you got to lose?

As we come out of lockdown, you’ll find that your competitors start advertising to go after consumer or business spend. Do you want to be the one who doesn’t stand out and doesn’t resonate with your audiences or do you want to surprise and delight and disrupt and reap the rewards that will come with it?

At Think OTB we are experts in brand positioning and response marketing. We’re not offering you a free marketing audit or the chance to bounce back.

We’re offering you the chance to ‘Be More Dog’ and bounce forward with some smart marketers on your side who will take good care of you and your brand and forge you a bright new future.

Tempted?

If so, get in touch.