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An interactive tool to increase brand recognition and boost sales.
 Who doesn’t like to identify himself with a hero? Who doesn’t have the fantasy, consciously or unconsciously, to become a hero? And how does this relate to interactive and integrated communication? Well, it seems that one of the more successful approaches in creating interactive& integrated campaigns recognizes this human ambition in many of us, and uses it to reinforce brand awareness, image and values.
If you had a local, midsize rent a car company with a modest ad budget, how would you compete with the big international companies in the high season of touristic invasion to your market? Nelka, a Costa Rican brand and JWT had an original solution. Instead of focusing on the tourist market, they decided to focus on a niche market, the local drivers. One of the issues that the agency has revealed that concerns local drivers is the horrible conditions of the roads in the country. This insight was used to devise a campaign divided into 2 phases. In phase I they opened a blog named costaricaholes.com
This was an independent site focusing on the bad conditions of Costa Rican highways and streets. People could complain about the problem, upload their own pictures or videos of the holes. After only 15 days the site was online, it was placed as one of the top 10 sites of the country, getting around 30,000 clicks and nearly 1500 photos uploaded. That was the time to launch phase II:
In this phase, the blog was turned into the official website of Nelka rent-a-car, with a massive campaign using photos people uploaded to the blog with the head line: if you drive through Costa Rica- do it with a car that's not yours.
The results: 100% of car fleet was rented all through the season, with 95% of it by local clients (and a Cannes Lion award for the agency…)
What the agency creators did here was using a pattern that we call 'fight for a cause'. The idea is to use an insight (in this case the complaints of drivers on the bad conditions of the roads) as a basis for creating a cause, and making the brand fight for this cause, in order to attract attention, recognition and differentiation.
Let's look at another example of inventing and fighting for a cause:
MTV Networks Australia was facing the challenge of giving the brand a local tone of voice, as it was known for producing American TV shows; but MTV also produce a large percentage of Australian content.
The task was to give MTV Networks Australia a personality relevant to its local audience and to create a promotion idea that would make the Australian audience active participants in the channel.
However, the challenge was to do this in a way that was not traditional advertising. This was important given that their young audience is largely cynical when it comes to brands 'understanding' them.
The agency, Lowe & Rivet Sydney, came up with the idea of using a news item: the rapper Snoop Dogg, which was arrested in the US and was being accused for drug traffic. At that moment the rapper had expressed in the media his wish to come to Australia, but the authorities refused him a visa. The idea was to create a cause for allowing Snoop to enter the country, and have MTV fight for this cause. A website was created http://www.mtv.com.au/snoop/
inviting young Australians (the target market of MTV) to join and sign a petition demanding the authorities to allow the guy into the country.
By doing so the petition signers became aware of the Australian aspect of MTV Australia, were exposed to its content and became emotionally engaged with its cause.
AS a result MTV gained three times more subscribers than in the previous year. (And, of course, a Cannes Lion award).
Thus, transforming a brand into a warrior for a cause can be very rewarding, if you can find or create a suitable cause to fight for. This depends on the ability to uncover a relevant insight as a starting point of the process, to align it to the brand vision/ values and see how they match. Alternatively one can look for topics that are currently discussed in the media, news items or public agenda (such as Snoop Dogg's case), which can be used to promote or connected with the brand values.
As we have seen, one can be very creative in creating the cause itself. It can be a controversial cause, such as in Welcome Snoop case, or the Dove campaign for real beauty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
Or it can be a consensus cause, such as Avon's Breast Cancer Crusade.
The cause can be real, i.e. the brand actually fights for the cause, as in the Times of India Lead India campaign,
or the cause can be only virtually supported, such as in Nelka's costaricaholes.com campaign. It can be humoristic or serious. What's most important is that the cause will be bigger than the brand and that the brand will gain its points from supporting and acting for the cause.
Enjoy the process.
Yonathan Dominitz
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