While many of the 2018 Superbowl ads had us laughing or tearing up, the Tide ads will get us to buy more.
Here’s why and how you can position your B2B to sell more with the same techniques:
5. Tell a Story
If you missed the first Tide ad of the Superbowl, you might have missed the plot of the story. (Which also happens to be our biggest criticism). The first Tide commercial features a series of cliche ad scenes with an omnipresent narrator asking the audience,
“Just a typical Superbowl car [beer, insert anything here] ad…right?”
We learn we’ve begun an adventure where our job, as a participating audience, is to spot future masquerading ads that display in 15-second increments after each quarter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gGXnE1Dbh0
As brands, we must reveal a story, drama or curiosity to keep attention. By dropping new commercials each quarter, Superbowl watchers, whether they had an interest in Tide or not, became interested to see how the story would end. Which ads would turn out to be a Tide ad? Were we smart enough to spot them before the reveal?
How Your Brand Can Tell A Story:
Technology-based services and professional services need to present a dependable and intelligent brand, causing many B2B marketers to overlook emotion and story. Does your marketing story need to be as wacky as the Tide commercials? Of course not. While every brand provides content marketing, your brand should connect with a story to entice your audience to voluntarily return to your brand when they need to find an ending, solve a problem or quench a curiosity.
Other Superbowl brands attempted to tell a story with a CTA to see the ending on their website but didn’t seem to leave enough curiosity or invest the viewer enough before the commercial ended. To avoid the same faults in your B2B marketing, be sure to quickly generate strong emotional attachment and also seamlessly flow your viewer through the story by keeping the core of the story on one platform, whether it’s email or a podcast. Wherever the viewer picks up your marketing campaign, whether email sequence one or twelve, be sure they understand the context and want to keep learning more.
4. Brand Familiarity
Why would a brand choose to pay millions for four big-ticket Superbowl ads instead of one longer ad? Especially when you consider the cost to make each individual ad? Along with a catchy story, the Tide brand pulled of a major brand familiarity win. Next time you’re in a store, whether or not you consciously understand why, you will feel a deeper connection to the orange Tide bowl sitting on the shelf.
Due to a phenomenon called the “availability heuristic,” people tend to favor what comes most easily to mind. Can you remember the name of the other detergent played during the game? For this reason alone, you and everyone watching, are more likely to buy Tide next time you buy.
How Your Brand Can Build Familiarity:
Nearly everything we do as B2B marketers should focus on building brand familiarity. This is why we create emails in a series, frequently post on social media, or feature consistent branding. Every brand wants to be in front of your prospects as much as possible and for good reason, in the end, consistent awareness campaigns pay big. For B2Bs with longer sales cycles awareness campaigns can pay even bigger dividends, where the purchase cycle can be cut in half due to familiarity.
To build brand familiarity, you don’t need a million dollar Superbowl budget but you do need smart strategy:
- Don’t be afraid to repeat a consistent message. It takes your audience time to learn who you are and what you teach.
- Frequency is key – whether email or social media (but you already knew that!). Hire help to make sure these tasks get checked on time and with thought.
- Brand all of your images. When someone spots a social media post in their newsfeed, he or she should instantly know who posted it from the color, tone, style, and Be sure you have frequent access to a professional graphic designer.
- Provide needed value free. What will help your prospect win right now? Don’t be afraid to add an extra punch to your content marketing. Focus on a few key pieces and make them wonder, “If this is what I get for free… I wonder what I’d get as a client?!” Prospects will remember and reference your brand if you wow them with value.
3. Build Associations
This might have been the most genius element to the Tide Superbowl campaign. Stranger Things’ David Harbour, the narrator of each Superbowl Tide ad, told us the key to understanding whether an ad was secretly part of the Tide series was the presence of, drumroll… clean shirts! Through a series of quick scenes, Harbour points to each clean shirt and says simply, “Tide ad.”
“So does this make every Superbowl ad… a tide ad?” Harbour asks, speaking directly to the camera, “I think it does…”
Although a seemingly innocent piece to the story, Tide has convinced you to continue looking for clean shirts in every ad, not just Tide ads. Unconsciously, you will continue to link clean shirts and Tide, Tide and clean shirts. In a sense, Tide just bought a lifetime of free ads every time you see a clean shirt.
Following a PR disaster, like the Tide pod challenges, building new associations can be a game changer.
How Your Brand Can Build Association:
Whether or not you’re selling a physical product, you can achieve positive associations with your brand by linking your service to a trait, habit or desire. For example, Verizon’s Superbowl ad linked their coverage reliability to first responders during emergency crisis along with a heavy dose of emotion. As much as our rational brains would like to think otherwise, ads that generate emotion and association will win reliability persuasion efforts over a statistical network coverage map.
While celebrity associations may seem obvious, the strategy of associating symbols and icons can be even more successful. Symbols and icons, like t-shirts, tend to be familiar objects with a mostly explicit meaning. Just like a stop sign or the battery symbol on your cell phone, everyone can easily recall a picture of a clean shirt and know what it means. Going back to the concept of the availability heuristic, now, when we want clean shirts or see clean shirts our brain will automatically recall what comes easiest… Tide. Not only will we think of Tide first, we are more likely to believe Tide will produce the cleanest shirts whether or not it’s rationally true.
One way to achieve this is to think through the transformation your service provides to your personas and focus on an icon or symbol that’s closely related to the end result of that desired transformation. For example, remember Staple’s easy button campaign? Does it matter what they’re selling a printer or a business printing service? The “easy” button lets us know the end result is a hassle-free way to order. If you present the right brand association clearly and frequently enough to your target personas, you will win more sales.
For more on this concept, we highly recommend 7 Secrets of Persuasion.
2. Use Humor
Humor isn’t easy to produce, but it’s one of the most important elements of brand connection. Humor tends to proceed a shift in assumed perception versus reality. The Tide ads produced humor in each and every commercial by switching the ad from what appears to be the cliche “ad type,” whether beer, Old Spice, or Mr. Clean and turns it on its head. Just kidding… it’s a Tide Ad! It’s even more unexpected because we are expecting exactly that during the Superbowl…a big brand ad play from the likes of a hunky Mr. Clean.
https://youtu.be/qkcZbhTAznQ
How Your Brand Can Use Humor:
Unfortunately, we can’t provide comedic recipes for every B2B to whip up on-demand but we can tell you it’s essential to not always take your brand so seriously. Humor is vital to creating connection and authenticity, yet many B2Bs are currently leaving this out of their marketing mix.
- Some easy and simple methods to add humor:
- Create a blooper reel at the end of your videos
- Capture a funny/real moment at the office as it happens
- Showcase industry-related behaviors that, when highlighted, seem absurd (remember the conference call spoofs?)
- Take serious leaders and showing a less serious side (i.e. Giant players dancing)
Spoofing advertising seemed to be a theme this year, from the Inuit’s personification of YouTube’s “skip ad” feature to Australia tourism’s mockery of the stereotypical cinema ad. Perhaps your B2B can take a note from these wins by my mocking the marketing industry itself and, therefore, sending the message you’re on the same team as your viewer.
#1 And For Our Top Tip…Drumroll…Be Authentic
Perhaps the main reason why the Tide ads worked so well is that it made fun of itself and the charade of big-dollar advertisements.
Harbour describes, “It’s wildly—I don’t want to use the word cynical—but it’s wildly self-aware.”
In this day of advertisement overload, we are supremely cautious and defensive about being sold told to. Your prospect’s guard goes up and doors are closed as soon as they see the ominous form fill. The B2B audience you are marketing to already knows it’s being sold before you’ve even begun and there’s nothing that kills a marketing campaign than an obvious sales attempt.
How Your Brand Can Be Authentic:
As B2Bs grow in size, we increase the tendency to lose authenticity – it’s rare for leadership teams to show up in real-time without pre-planned talking points or marketing content that hasn’t been reviewed by a legal team. So how do we appear authentic?
A few quick ideas:
- Even though you’re B2B, remember your brand is still communicating person to person. Have a real person in mind and speak to him or her through the creative process.
- Show the team behind the brand, whether in pictures, videos or podcasts.
- Highlight brand thought leaders so your audience can get to know them as people.
- As Kendrick Lamar says, be humble. Despite our tendency, it’s valuable for brands to admit they don’t know all the answers, but they’re there to help you find out.
Tide is playing on this authenticity we see so often in marketing and, in turn, associating itself with the truly “authentic” brand. Didn’t see that coming from a billion dollar ad buy, did you? That’s why… “It’s a Tide ad.”
Guess what? This is a form of advertisement too! If you want help creating a B2B marketing strategy that sells, reach out to us. We’d love to help.