5 Reasons marketing campaigns fail
By Zion Rufus
Creating the perfect marketing campaign requires a lot of creativity and experimentation. Oftentimes, the most controversial, most successful, and most creative campaigns are born out of pushing creative boundaries, countless trials and errors, and strict evaluation processes.
However, even some of the world’s biggest brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dove, AirBnB, Snapchat, Adidas and many more have made some really historic marketing campaign blunders.
Why then do some of these well-thought-out campaigns fail?
Speaking in an interview with MARKETING EDGE, marketing communications professional, Lanre Basamta shared 5 major reasons why brands fail in their campaign strategies.
Compulsive need to align with trends
Recently, we have seen brands jump on the bandwagon of trendjacking. In a bid to provide their customers with contents that relate to social media trends they’re interested in while connecting with the brand as well, they come up with innovative campaigns to fit into these trends.
Basamta said: “Some organisations hop on these trends because they want to align with culture. I mean, being counterculture is difficult. Today, brands go on social media, pick a few trends and use that to create communication; however, what they find over time is that, the more things change, the more they remain the same. These brands push to align with culture because the popular trends have already gained some mindshare and they need to leverage on the mindshare of the public culture or what they call ‘pop culture’ so their adverts can gain a lot of mindshare; but then, they end up making a lot of mistakes.”
”The most recent trend on social media is “Who never f*ck up, hands in the air”, and as foul as that is, some organizations are already bending to accommodate it. So, they fuse or upend their brands to accommodate these pop culture so that they can ride on it; meanwhile, sometimes, they end up suffering the consequences.”
Absence of thorough evaluation processes
Creating an efficient marketing campaign also requires an efficient marketing approval process which involves the evaluation of all the creative and marketing assets from ideation to campaign launch and facilitation of coordination and collaboration between the various stakeholders.
“Typically, before an advert is created, there is a creation process. Where a creative comes together with a copywriter to create something compelling; when they do, they are supposed to submit this to the rigors of the process and what the rigors of the process are is that this idea that is created they need to submit it to research and sample how exactly it’s supposed to turn out. What the process is in some organizations is that they have a group that evaluate what the execution is, share thoughts, and then refine the thoughts, do a sort of version 2, and then run that version 2 through their internal approval process,” Basamta explained.
“In some organizations, approval could go to as high as a CMO, who is the executive head in charge of marketing and communications, or even the CEO sometimes. But in a world where the whole concept of advertising is now more dynamic, you don’t have structured adverts like that, everything you put out on your channels are adverts, the things you send as email marketing are now seen as adverts, even down to the things you put in your office to welcome people, all are now seen as adverts. Before is that an organization running campaigns may do one or two adverts in a month, if they are not running a particular promotional or awareness campaign; but today, because the channels are varied, every day, organizations are sending communications out, to their customers, and so, they don’t have all the time, to validate, verify, or research, any advertising work, so few things fall through the crack and quality and standard suffer,” the marketing expert added.
Advertising has changed
According to Basamta, the fact that advertising as we know it has changed has now created a greater propensity for errors, because now, “everything is communication, everything is advertising and there isn’t enough time to research, review, adapt, and adopt.”
“Of course, our work today is more fragmented,” he stated, “the audiences are more empowered. The digital and social media age has given people a platform to speak. So, unlike in the 90s and early 2000s, the audience today has been empowered, they make up their minds in one direction and you find that all of the attention will follow in that direction until somebody or a movement flows into another school of thought and redirects the tide. The awareness and empowerment of the audiences could direct the tide of your communication. So today you’d find that smart brands actually have a beautiful landing for their communications, by rolling out a big execution, they would have recruited some advocates, influential advocates to land the communication very well to give good views so that when it lands people just want to see that it is good and they can’t see anything else. Just like how movie producers get a lot of their influencers in the room when they are doing the premiere, just to land the movie in the hearts and minds of their audiences, brands are now doing the same by supporting their communication with people, acceptance and influencer advocacy to help their adverts land.”
Execution
Another problem identified by marketing guru is execution. In his submission, Basamta pointed that although an advert is birthed from an idea, what people see is the execution.
He said: “Any idea could be great. An idea that is cataclysmic in one instance, if it was executed a little bit differently, can become brilliant. That’s the world we live in. The difference between brilliant and tardy is becoming slimmer by the day.”
He further stated: “If you don’t do the fundamentals, If you don’t connect with your audiences, you might be talking over them, you might have beautiful intentions, have an interesting and colorful execution, but your communication may not resonate right with the people. And that is a big drama, but then, it’s the world we live in. We still need to continue to build experiences, connect with our audiences and speak their thoughts. That’s the barometer for measuring a successful ad, when your audience feels like you are speaking their quietest whispers.”
Brand disconnect
“Another problem that could lead to an advert fail is brand disconnect,” Basamta said, sharing the fifth reason.
“Today, for the big brands, their marketing communications are developed in the boardrooms, or in the boardrooms of their agencies, and you’ll find that what digital media has given us instead of it fusing us with the customer, it has separated us more. What we used to find that in the 90s most of the retail products will typically do their adverts in the open market, and although those ads and communications were not based on facts but many of them mirrored the sentiments of their target audiences, and so it wasn’t very difficult for those adverts to resonate. They were relatable, believable, and people naturally associated with them. But today, adverts are created in boardrooms, strategy rooms, and there is little or no time to do all the necessary research that should have been done because brands today are more disconnected than they used to be”.
More importantly, things fail
In his final submission, Basamta explained that at the end of the day “we are humans, and we are bound to make mistakes.”
He said: “Just as humans make mistake, brands make mistake and it could be for any and every reason, it could be simply because we are humans that we just don’t get it right every-time; that we are hearing the sounds of our own thoughts rather than the yearnings and the desire of our consumers or that we have a process failure; somebody who should understand the sensitivity of the market, someone who should understand balance in communication. So people fail, it’s just to ensure that you have lesser and lesser incidences of such failures or issues so that it doesn’t become an association.”
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