Category Archives: Advertising

Branding in simple words is connecting a name with a product. Companies take various approaches to attain this task. One of the most fascinating approaches is to go for subtle branding. To put it simply, subtle branding is to take on a bigger issue and go after it with your brand in the background. The intent is to identify a purpose and make your brand the driving force behind it which would lead people to associate your brand, consciously or sub-consciously, with that larger-than-product purpose.

Using a creative approach, you can make almost any product to fit the bill. If you are in business of selling bags, broaden the horizon and link it to tourism. If your product is nicotine tablets, make anti-smoking as your purpose. If you are a retail bank, subtle brand it by picking up money management initiative. The basic idea is to expand the canvas. Every product has a purpose…it is there to solve a problem.

A necessary ingredient for this kind of branding effort is persistence. The idea here is to develop trust. You cannot expect people to instantly link a brand to a purpose. Like in any other case, building that trust requires time and a continuous effort.

What’s the most important thing to keep in mind while doing subtle branding? It’s the authenticity. If you are associating your brand with a purpose, make sure you put the purpose before your product. Faking purpose-driven branding is not possible in the long run. Your customers are too smart to identify the fake and such attempts can lead to a permanent dent in the brand image. An authentic subtle branding has a strong impact in developing your brand image, and above all, it will help you as an organization fill in for your social responsibility.

Nike, BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama are the iconic brands we talk about all the time. When we develop marketing plan for our product, we leave several marketing ideas by categorizing them as the ones that work only for iconic brands. This brings about a very important question: how did these brands become iconic? Were they born iconic or the way they were marketed and developed made them iconic?

In 1964, Philip Knight, a track athlete and his coach founded a company named Blue Ribbon Sports that operated as a distributor of a Japanese Shoemaker selling shoes at track meets out of Knight’s automobile. A couple years later BRS opened its first retail outlet and few years after that launched its own line of shoes. In 1978, 14 years after first starting business, BRS renamed itself to Nike. In 1980s Nike expanded its product line through in house development and acquisitions, launched its legendary campaign “Just Do It” (1988) and gained major market share. It took more than three decades for Nike to become “Nike”, the iconic sports brand.

Nike was not born iconic, neither were BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama and for that matter any other company. Starbucks started with one store in Seattle’s Pike Place market, Apple was just another start-up in Silicon Valley in early 1980s and Obama was about 30 points behind Clinton days before Iowa democratic primary. But all of them worked their way through to reach to the top and become iconic. They were able to do one thing perfectly,  and that is linking an idea to the product. They were able to brand themselves as the first choice for a cult, gather a group of mavens and enter mainstream with their help.

So next time when you plan a campaign, try to go for something that can attract a group of dedicated mavens, try something that can help you define a cult around your brand. Nothing out there works only for iconic brands, but there’s a lot out there to help you make your brand iconic.

So you got it all, who’s your target audience, what’s your message going to be and where and when you want to reach them. The last pillar, which in a way brings it all together and at the same time is dependent on all these, is selecting the right medium that fits you the best to have the most impact.

When trying to figure out how to do targeted marketing, advertising plays a significant role. Let’s talk about advertising on traditional media like television, radio and newspaper. Targeted advertising on these mediums can be done by linking your target audience with the target audience of the medium at a given place and time and delivering your message blend in with the medium. Irrespective of targeted advertising, there’s a growing concern about the diminishing impact of advertising on traditional media with the advent of new technologies…be it TiVo on television, satellite radio and Internet music services (like Pandora) on radio and blogosphere on newspapers. Moving on to other mediums for advertising, you can do targeted message delivery on the world wide web, most effective ones being next to search results and other contextual content. Mobile devices are also evolving as a great source of targeted advertising by utilizing the location information for the audience along with other pivots like time of day and interests of the individual. Targeted advertising is gaining traction on new mediums like Internet and mobile due to the ability of marketers to nail down the appropriate individual and delivering their message to them instead of a broader segment as in case of traditional media.

But when you know who your target customer is, what impacts their buying decision and where and when to locate them, you can reach them much deeper than just by targeted advertising. You can leverage this information and latest technologies to communicate and collaborate with your customers. With the growing influence of social media on the people around the world, marketers can participate in the the social communities to interact with their customers. To add the much needed targeted component to this exercise, they can create communities to gravitate people of similar interests.

Marketers need to take a broader perspective when creating these communities. For example, if you are selling nicotine tablets to help people quit smoking, your community should be a network of people trying to stop smoking. The community should motivate people to quit, act like a support network for people and help them stop smoking. This in turn will provide you an avenue to take customer inputs on how to improve your product and will act as the best place for subtly marketing your product. These social communities when used appropriately are in fact the best way to do targeted marketing. Here you have (or can gravitate) the right audience, you can stir the communication to get the right message across and you can interact with the audience right when they are willing to and with their permission…that’s taking care of all the pillars of targeted marketing, or you can say it’s targeted marketing at its very best!