Marketing Communication Needs a More Creative Vision

UNCONVENTIONAL CAMPAIGNS PAY OFF TWICE: THEY STICK IN PEOPLE'S BRAINS AND GENERATE DOUBLE THE BUZZ

by Arianna Brioschi and Anna Uslenghi, Dept. of Marketing, Bocconi
Translated by Alex Foti

Who knows exactly when somebody started talking about unconventional marketing, but it has changed the way companies communicate. In advertising, it had long been known that breaking a few rules pays off. It expresses in new forms an old principle, namely that to be effective communication needs to be different, and upturn consumer expectations and industry habits.

In reality, what needed to be broken was the convention of using only traditional media such as broadcast TV and the press for marketing messages, and move toward less orthodox, more unusual and surprising channels. The idea also was that by using alternative media you didn’t have to spend a lot of money. And this has been a major change of vision. Today there’s less talk of unconventional marketing, not because people do less of it, but because it’s become part and parcel of any brand-building strategy. Companies that forego web communication renounce 60% of consumer attention, which means that what was unconventional yesterday has become the new normal today.

New brands are met with a barrier of indifference: the first challenge is to make sure that people view advertising, the second is to come up with something more interesting and entertaining and, why not, more useful than the many other attractive messages that vie for our attention every second. Never like before marketing communication needs to defy convention, since creativity is the only way to overcome that barrier.

Various experiments have shown that the most creative marketing campaigns generate a discontinuity in our experience, because we find ourselves before something we’ve never seen or heard before, something than cannot be immediately decoded, and that’s precisely the reason why they attract our attention and intrigue our imagination, thus fixing themselves in our memory. In this sense, the choice of marketing channel can have a determining role. The reactions engendered in consumers by the unconventional use of classic media, or by the use of alternative media, usually not used for commercial purposes, are the same as those triggered by particularly creative content: unpredictability, attractiveness and entertainment add value to advertising. The same message carried via an original medium looks more attractive than watched on TV or read on a newspaper.

However, the truly relevant aspect for companies is that creativity generates positive sensations (the so-called feel-good factor), which by following cognitive and emotional byways get associated with the brand. Creativity can thus become a spectacular branding tool, capable of making the products offered by a firm intriguing and attractive, in the sea of anonymous competitors offering similar products. Also, from research it emerges that the amount of buzz generated by the most creative campaigns is twice as large as that generated by other kinds of campaigns. And the additional advertising comes at no cost!