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Print technology specialists Brother teamed up with agency Grey London for a campaign designed to get users thinking about labels – their own as well as Brother's. Grey's Anna Vogt and Dave Peters of Brother tell Figaro about a multi-channel voyage of discovery
Multi-channel marketing, by its nature, involves taking users on a journey. What begins on YouTube may take in print, TV and a designated microsite before focussing on a Facebook community. For print technology specialists Brother UK and their agency Grey London that journey was literal. Undertaking a 3,000 mile road trip down Route 66 in order to challenge public perception of labelling, the campaign utilised video and social media as well as TV and print, and at its heart were a series of stories about folk living and working along the iconic highway who – in a neat bit of lateral logic - defied conventional labelling.
Marketing relevance
"The brief," explains Anna Vogt, Senior Planner at Grey London, "was to sell more of Brother UK's labelling machines to the home market. When people think about label-makers, they're something we normally associate with an office environment. In fact a lot of the applications are more suitable for the home – for hobbyists, in the garden and so on. We conducted a lot of focus groups and it became clear that in fact people didn't really use label-makers in the home at all. So that was our challenge, to reach into that market and take a product which people perhaps didn't see as being relevant to them, and make it relevant."
"We wanted to challenge ourselves and the perceptions of labelling," says Dave Peters, Head of Business Development at Brother UK, for whom the campaign's ambition was designed to reflect a core brand value. 'Labels are powerful – what does yours say?' was the tagline and, says Peters, "this was a very interesting and positive way to think about labelling. You might say, well, how do you get emotional about a labelling machine? But telling these individual stories was a way of doing that."
"It became apparent very quickly that just talking about the functional relevance of the product wasn't going to get us very far," acknowledges Vogt. "So we needed to go into this with interesting content, not just a hard sell. We needed a conversation that wasn't a top down communication from a brand, but a back and forth dialogue centred round how people think about labels, how they might label themselves, and also to incorporate the message that Brother wanted to get out."
It was at this point, says Vogt, that they began thinking about a trip down the world's most famous road.
"Route 66 was the perfect backdrop," she says. "There are a mass of labels associated with it. Metaphorically the versatility of the road helped demonstrate the versatility of the labels, and the different people we came across helped create that sense of emotional engagement, to take the story beyond functionality and into people's hearts and minds."
So, with director James Gooding on board, the campaign hit the road. Gooding drove solo down Route 66, interviewing potential subjects and listening to their stories. Picking up a crew in Chicago, the team then headed back towards LA, this time with the cameras rolling.
Stories from the road
Among the real-life personalities they interviewed were car mechanic 'Insane' Wayne, exotic dancer and single mum Jessica and Vietnam veteran Ron who has 89 tattoos of Route 66 across his body. "Storytelling is where you get that emotional connection," says Vogt. "Each of those stories generates a different emotional reaction. It's not enough anymore to tell people what the benefits of your product are or what it can do. If you don't do it in a way that's meaningful, unless you really connect with people, there's not going to be that level of interest."
This being a multi-channel campaign, the creative also involved plenty of collateral, from instore stands to competitions but, as Peters emphasises, its heart was completely digital. Interestingly, this was a campaign with twin objectives: to build brand awareness generally, but also to let users know about some of the specific functions associated with Brother UK's label-making equipment. Social media was central to both objectives. So where does Vogt place it within the broader context of multi-channel, and what does she think it's best placed to achieve?
"Obviously the approach depends on your objective," she says. "There are so many channels you can choose from now. Whether it's TV, print, an online ad or something on Facebook, you need to think not just about what you want to achieve, but also about the best channel in which to achieve it. You need to think first about where your target audience naturally gravitate towards, and then about how to capitalise on that behaviour, rather than try to redirect it, which I don't think you can do."
Crossing the channels
So for Vogt, effective multi-channel marketing means putting aside traditional distinctions and focussing instead on user behaviour.
"Rather than thinking about which channels we want to advertise in and then thinking about what the message is supposed to be," she says, "we need to think about the end result – how we want people to act or react to what we're doing. Then we can go back and think about the best way of doing it."
That means, she says, that traditional approaches to specific channels need to be rethought, with implications that might ripple through an entire campaign.
"For example, TV may not always be the right way to do something. We know that if people want to search for video content they tend to go to YouTube no matter where they are directed at the end of the ad. Conventionally, ads direct consumers to a campaign microsite. But if you want people to engage further in the campaign, that isn't going to be enough, because if users want to look at the ad again or get further info, they'll go to YouTube. That's just what we all do to find videos.
"So instead of trying to force behaviour into a different channel, we set up a branded YouTube channel to provide that whole campaign experience. We also created a Facebook competition where we encouraged people to talk about their own labels and about Route 66. This wasn’t included at the end of the ad because it wasn't our primary objective – we wanted people to see all the interviews and understand the versatility of the product and the different characters. At the end of the YouTube clip we put the Facebook call to action, because that's where we wanted users to engage by entering competitions and talking to like-minded people. Understanding where people go and knowing what you want them to do once they get there is what's important. In a campaign like this there's also long-term engagement, so the creative content can live on beyond your media spend and your campaign."
Naturally, that engagement operates as an effective enabler of peer-to-peer communication, locating brand advocates and rewarding them with additional content, but it also serves as a significant learning resource for brands.
"If you have a YouTube campaign and look at the comments – that allows you to adapt and react immediately," says Vogt. "You don't need to wait for tracking studies to come back six month after something's broken. You can come back, counteract, react – that's very interesting from a client's point of view."
Though Peters acknowledges that traditionally Brother UK hasn't been known for innovation within its campaigns, he says the combination of social media, video, online and offline content has proved effective in terms of positioning. "There's a brand engagement which we've never been able to get before." As with travelling on the iconic highway itself, it appears that understanding the journey is at least as important as having a clear destination.
http://www.facebook.com/BrotherPrintersUK
http://www.youtube.com/user/brotherlabels
Article by Jon Fortgang
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