🍱 Berliner Philharmoniker's poster game; make ad filters your friends; vocabulary that persuades
Ideas to inspire your marketing
Hello and welcome back to The Marketing Kable, where I'm taking you along on my journey to discover ideas, voices and campaigns that can inspire us.
something to watch
concerts and creativity, a study in contrasts. Concerts are one of my favourite ways to spend an evening. I'm regularly hunting for updates about upcoming recitals, and I have a couple of reliable online sources I always consult when I'm planning my next concert outing.
One is a Facebook page called 'Classical Concerts in Kolkata'. An anonymous Good Samaritan shares concert posters that anybody can access (even those, like me, without Facebook accounts).
While I ADORE the page for its consistent updates, it's also my go-to place when I want to check out really (I mean REALLY) bad poster design. It's 2023 - we have so many free and easy-to-use tools available on the internet, yet, there are people still using Microsoft Powerpoint to make posters. It's downright caveman behaviour.
I don't want to point fingers but go scroll through the page, and you'll see what I mean.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Berliner Philharmoniker's supremely creative 'ReArranged' campaign. In 2018, their Chief Conductor decided to leave, and the orchestra faced an entire season without established leadership.
To reassure audiences this vacuum wouldn't devolve into chaos, and would instead inspire creativity and innovation, the institution designed an artistic intervention using furniture and equipment from the building, rearranging them in new ways to make a sculptural statement about novelty and experimentation in a time of uncertainty.
Photographs of these sculptural installations were integrated into minimal poster design, resulting in a series of posters that conveyed a message of change, potential and invention.
ReArranged is a stunning example of a marketing strategy that does not rely on bells and whistles but on original thinking and strong ideas generated on the basis of existing resources. Its genius lies in its simplicity, and its recall value is ensured by its unique articulation of a universally relevant concept.
something to read
if you annoy, will they buy? We've talked about this on The Marketing Kable many times before: ads are annoying AF. I mean, especially when they're everywhere and badly executed. I hate the sight of already over-populated city skylines littered with hoardings, walls cramped with posters and outer facades of public transport jacked up with a zillion images and graphics.
At least on the Internet, you can use ad blockers.
Even people who haven't installed ad blockers still find online ads to be really annoying and want more control over the types and number of ads they see. And according to a research study by Magna, people who filter out ads actually make things better for advertisers and media agencies! These folks don't block all ads - they just don't want to deal with ads that are too pushy or overwhelming. And they're actually a super important audience for us marketers and advertisers to reach, especially when targeting Gen Z and younger Millennials.
It turns out that ads are more memorable and effective when they're not surrounded by a bunch of other ads (who would've thunk!). Plus, fewer ads on a webpage reduces carbon emissions!
So, what's the takeaway? Focus on creating ads that are respectful and not too overwhelming. This allows us to reach a huge audience of people who filter ads, and, therefore more likely to make purchase decisions based on the ads they see. By reducing ad clutter, we'll create a better online experience for everyone - both advertisers and people buying things!
Me, I'm just waiting for someone to develop ad blockers for the offline world (get on it, engineers!).
something to listen to
tell me how to change your mind. Ever since I dove into marketing strategies and advertising tactics, I've started to imagine the same strategies being applied to me in a specific context. What approaches and tactics have worked especially well with me?
Off the top of my head, when it comes to products - clean design, non-fussy copy, recommendations from trustworthy sources and robust customer care are some of the factors that have definitely led me to be generous with my wallet. But when it comes to services, it's a bit more complicated.
What makes me trust a company that promises to upgrade my internet connection or cut my hair like that Disney Channel character in a sudden fit of nostalgia? Persuading me to opt for a service is far tougher than persuading me to buy a bottle of sunscreen (just say you have hyaluronic acid in your ingredient list, and I'm in).
On Stanford School of Business's Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, host Matt Abrahams interviews Zakary Tormala, a professor at Stanford GSB, about how you can tweak the structure of your speech to grab people's attention. Tormala discusses a bunch of ideas produced by researchers through the years, but the one that stuck out was one (I realised) I've been convinced by many times.
Which is if you're trying to convince a group of people who are usually sceptical or resistant, using friendly, cooperative language works better than being pushy. Instead of saying, "you have to do this," say, "let's work on this together" or "we're on the same team." Language like this makes folks feel like they're part of a group and more open to what you're saying.
I remember a particularly panicky time in late 2020 when this kind of language had an instant impact on a purchasing decision I was making - talking to a bunch of travel agents to see who could help me get on one of the few "air bubble" flights home to India from Germany. The agent who gave me the feeling that we were in this together was the one I chose to work with.
I'm home. Safe. Writing this, so a smart decision.
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