Take it from the best to learn how you can market your business
Marketing is a wonderful way to convey the inner workings of your brand to your potential customers.
Some businesses are able to create an effective marketing campaign with humor; working the angle of self-deprecation or using hoaxes to catch the attention of their audience. Others use clever tactics to entice audiences to engage. Either way, it can be a delicate balance; showing enough of your business to make a connection with your audience, but also holding back enough that you aren’t shelling out trade secrets.
There have been some companies that have managed to achieve just this, the so-called delicate balance. You have probably heard of some of them, and some, you will just be impressed with their marketing strategies.
#1 – Bank of America’s partnership with Khan Academy
Think about it: large bank partners with an education company to help clients become better off, financially. It seems almost counterintuitive, but it isn’t. Sure, banks stand to gain money from credit card and loan interest made off of the debt of their customers, but, the more money customers have to invest, if they are happy with their connection, they will keep their funds within their financial institution.
Bank of America (BoA) started this marketing campaign with an email campaign which started to pique the interest of its customers-, with information regarding the Khan Academy partnership.
This was followed up with a series of videos showing real people in real-life careers talking about their experiences. The vignettes featured, among others, a hair salon owner, a teacher, a firefighter, a customer service representative, and an architect.
The first thing that BoA did intelligently was to borrow from various socio-economic groups. If you didn’t identify with the teacher or the hair salon owner, you could almost certainly find a connection with any one of the other people featured.
Secondly, each of the people featured has a different life experience. One is a parent, trying to balance policing with raising a family. One is a pilot, who is in a financial position to help family members with bills. Another is paying off student debt while working his first ‘real’ job.
Each speaks of a different goal or hurdle. You can learn about the monthly income of one person, budgeting from another, and the benefit of internships from someone else. BoA (and their partner, Khan Academy) recognized their customer demographics and realized that customers who check their email frequently or do online banking would be a great target audience.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
The customer demographic in the videos covers a diverse group. As stated above, if you don’t connect with one of the videos, you will certainly find something you can find value in. When considering a career, or just entering the job force, you may have wondered how much you were going to make, or how long . Online searches give a broad salary range, but hearing it from people in the field is invaluable.
BoA saw an opportunity to expose young clients to relatable people speaking about hot topics like finance, debt, and careers, in exchange for brand loyalty and financial success. BoA revenue in 2020 was $22.5 billion dollars, and they stand as the number two bank in the USA.
#2 – Burger King trolling McDonald’s
Burger King has been using humor and wit to market its fast-food brand to a target demographic since the mid-2000s.
First was an offer to their competitor, McDonald’s to combine the iconic Big Mac with the equally famous Whopper. Burger King ‘penned’ an open letter to McDonald’s that spanned all types of media, to offer the partnership (McDonald’s declined)- and with that, caught the eye- and tickled the funny bones- of the audience.
Burger King followed this spoof up over the next few years with various plays at McDonald’s (and McDonald’s customers.) In 2018, Burger King offered the Whopper for $0.01- the catch? The customer had to order from their app, within 600 feet of a McDonald’s.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
Burger King and their marketing team have taken the humor of marketing to a new level. With their hoaxes and jokes, they have created microsites that drive traffic to their main site, creating engagement with their target audience, and create chatter.
There was a canceled Whopper hoax, called Whopper Freakout. This led to a Google Home triggered-ad “Google Home of the Whopper.” This campaign lasted one night and aired during the Super Bowl.
Burger King took advantage of connected homes with the Google Home system – and their budgeted time- by having the actor playing an employee ask, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” A question as simple as that set the marketing world on fire.
This question prompted the Google Assistant in homes across America to begin reading from the Whopper’s Wikipedia page.
In fifteen seconds of air time, the ad:
- Showed the iconic burger
- Announced that the burger was too amazing to be described in that period of time
- Allowed Google to finish advertising for them
Yes, some Google Assistant owners were not happy about the system being manipulated, and Google immediately sprung into action to try to curb any further hijackings, but Burger King’s ad had worked. People were talking. People were ENGAGED. We call that perfect marketing.
#3 – Dove’s “Real Beauty” Campaign
In 2004, Dove, known for decades as the maker of gentle soap, began its newest marketing campaign, which was deemed the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.”
This award-winning campaign, boiled down, aimed at women of all ages centered on empowering by fixing self-esteem rather than fixing bodies and faces, and celebrating differences. This was a change from almost any marketing aimed at women. There were billboards featuring ‘real,’ diverse women, of all ages with an invitation to vote on, for example, if the model was “Withered or Wonderful.” The billboard would immediately change according to the results of the vote.
Though this campaign wasn’t without controversy of its own, the idea was to empower the women it was marketing to. Dove, owned by Unilever, began the campaign after commissioning a study that revealed that only 2 percent of the women interviewed for the study considered themselves beautiful.
The campaign has since been rebranded; The Self-Esteem Project.
With these sobering findings, Dove found an opportunity to market to a niche subsection but also was making inroads with female empowerment. Dove decided to create a fund that benefits organizations like Girls, Inc., Girl Scouts, and The Boys & Girls Club of America. With goals like creating discussions about online bullying, and changing the ideal of beauty for children, Dove has changed its entire marketing strategy and increased its annual sales to $4 billion from $2.5 billion the year the campaign started.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
Though in 2020, seeing ‘real’ people in ads is more normative, in the early 2000s, it was not. Women were embracing this new marketing scheme and finding real value in it.
When Dove next introduced the Evolution video, which showed a woman being transformed from ‘average’ to stunning with lighting, makeup, hair styling, and digital changes, audiences were shown the inner workings of advertising and how unrealistic beauty in the media is. Evolution won Grand Prix awards at Cannes Lion in 2007.
Without a mention of the price or value of its products, Dove has successfully created dialogue surrounding its brand, engaging its audience and, even more remarkable- the Real Beauty campaign has been going strong for over 15 years.
#4 – Inca Kola
Inca Kola with Arroz Chaufa, Christmas dinner 2017
Anyone that has been to Peru will be familiar with Inca Kola, a sweet yellow beverage served at dinner tables across the country. If you haven’t heard of it, you may wonder what it is doing on a list of great marketing strategies, but we are in awe of Inca Kola for the simple fact that it surpasses Coca-Cola in beverage sales in Peru.
The rivalry between the two brands began after Inca Kola’s creation in 1935. The inventor, Joseph Robinson Lindley was a British immigrant who created the beverage for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Lima. This began the first step in creating a national soft drink.
The flavor is based on lemon verbena and was carefully crafted by Lindley after experimentation with various levels of carbonation, ingredients, and tastes. The drink has been described as very sweet and possibly unpleasant to the untrained palate. No matter what outsiders think, Peruvians love the taste.
Inca Kola used a vigorous marketing strategy based on nationalism, which appealed to Peruvians at that time. Inca Kola established itself as a traditional Peruvian beverage, using indigenous imagery on the bottle and using slogans like “La bebida del sabor nacional” (“The drink with the national flavor”) and Destapa el sabor del Perú (“Uncap the flavor of Peru”).
Inca Kola is bottled and sold in Ecuador, Bolivia, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and New York, where you will find large Peruvian populations, solidifying the notion that Inca Kola is a national drink.
Inca Kola stands as one of the very few brands that outsell Coca-Cola on a national level; only Scotland has its own best-selling beverage, Irn-Bru.
Coca-Cola quickly took note of the popularity of the rival brand and has tried to gain ground forfeited to Inca Kola. In 1999, Coca-Cola bought 38.5% of the company from Corporación José R. Lindley S.A., but Inca Kola remains fiercely Peruvian.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
Inca Kola, even after the sale to Coca-Cola, remains the number one selling beverage in Peru. This can be attributed, solely, to the marketing efforts of the Lindley company. To supplement the ads, which feature young people eating traditional Peruvian dishes, drinking Inca Kola, the company has secured deals with some restaurants in Peru to only sell Inca Kola.
Interestingly, one of the factors that has added to the appeal of Inca Kola has been its connection to gourmet cooking. Additionally, the close connection to the nationalism of Peruvian culture to Inca Kola has created a perfect combination that saw Coca-Cola joining forces with Inca Kola to get a piece of the pie.
Inca Kola has remarkably continued to be at the top of the soft drink market in Peru since 1935, carving a niche spot in a market ruled by Coca-Cola. Advertising to Peruvian nationalism has made Inca Kola a marketing force to be reckoned with.
#5 – Budweiser’s ‘Wassup’
There was a time, when you could go almost anywhere and hear at least one person, on their phone, saying, “Wassup”. This was the year 1999; boy bands were in full force, the US Women’s soccer team won the World Cup, and Budweiser created catchy and timeless ads for their beer, featuring a group of friends, on the phone, saying “Wassup” to each other.
The phrase and ads were based on a film called “True” which director Charles Stone III had created based on a similar scenario using his childhood friends. The short film had an extremely popular run at festivals, and the concept was snatched up by an ad agency, presented to Budweiser’s VP, and the rest is history.
The ads were run for the first time during the Super Bowl, and skyrocketed to infamy. The commercials were playful, youthful, and fun- and the catchphrase was…catchy. Soon enough, ‘wassup’ was viral, before being viral was a thing.
The catchphrase was repeated by famous people, and not so famous people, and became the pop culture phrase of the year. Budweiser’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, won two major advertising awards, a Clio and a Cannes Grand Prix.
Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser scrapped the wassup ads after using them for about two years, opting to end the ads before people tired of them, thus backfiring on the company.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
Anheuser-Busch have created great ads for Budweiser, from the Wassup catchphrase, the ‘Budweiser Clydesdales’ or highlighting the beermakers switching their factory to water packaging in order to help victims of a hurricane.
Poignant, funny, or classic, Budweiser has created some great marketing campaigns. Using a catchphrase, said by friends to one another created an almost ground roots effect to gain brand notoriety, and brand loyalty.
Budweiser showed that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and that it got its audience; how relatable was it? Four friends, watching football, drinking beer, and calling each other to repeat the same catchphrase to each other. Pretty relatable. If you didn’t relate to the football-watching or being male, you surely had shared jokes with your friends.
The Wassup campaign prompted discussion, heard in offices and homes everywhere. People answered the phone, or greeted friends with a resounding “Wassup?”
Even today, chances are, if you were to say “Wassup,” the phrase will likely be repeated back to you if said to someone who was around in the late 1990s. It was simple, short, and fun. It caught on, and had staying power, and there is no better marketing than that.
#6 – Dos Equis Beer- The Most Interesting Man in the World
If you have heard anyone say “Stay thirsty, my friends,” you have either seen one of the Dos Equis commercials, or you are proving that marketing works.
Dos Equis beer, owned by Heineken, began a campaign in 2006 featuring ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’– a handsome, bearded man in his sixties to seventies. He was charming, suave, and had an air of mystery. Sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded by beautiful (younger) women, actor Jonathan Goldsmith showed the audience that drinking Dos Equis would make you rich, strong, handsome, and bring you success in life.
The scenes with Goldsmith would be punctuated with montages featuring a young ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ (played by another actor) in daring exploits. These included shooting a pool ball out of the mouth of someone lying on a pool table, sewing his own stitches into his body, bench pressing two women, and freeing a ferocious bear from a bear trap.
Aside from the perfect casting of Jonathan Goldsmith, the narration of the commercials was far-fetched and funny.
The character is said to have experienced an awkward moment just to feel how it felt, and finding the Fountain of Youth, but not drinking from it because he wasn’t thirsty. Additional commercials spoke of his physical prowess and personality- he slammed a revolving door, parallel parked a train and influencing political agendas using only his small talk.
Finally, back at the table with beautiful women, the actor would state an equally catchy tagline, “I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.” The commercials would end with perhaps the catchiest line of all, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”
The campaign featuring Jonathan Goldsmith ended in 2016, and a subsequent campaign featuring a younger man fell flat.
During its decade-long run, Dos Equis sales increased every year. In a time when beer sales were not thriving, Dos Equis had reached a twenty-two percent increase while other imported beers were down by four percent.
Why is this insanely good marketing?
For starters, the character resonated with the audience. It was funny, outrageous, and focused on entertaining the audience, rather than informing.
For a new generation of beer drinkers that spend a lot of time looking down at a phone, people were enjoying the ads. Instead of fast-forwarding through commercials, people were watching. One needs only to turn to a Dos Equis video on YouTube to be convinced of how popular the commercials are.
The campaign, intentionally, or unintentionally, drew audiences to create their own versions of TMIMITW’s exploits and catchphrase. There were memes and people took to social media to express their own creative expressions.
The brand had viral marketing down pat.
Dos Equis marketed based on ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’ not being a strictly beer-drinking man- beer, of course being the marketed product. This could have backfired, but instead lends to the character’s mystique. This also catered to beer dabblers, implying it is ok to not just drink beer.
The commercials featured the exploits of this character, creating elaborate fantasy-like montages, but always concluded with the brand. The conclusion was the TMIMITW holding a beer, the label prominent, and a statement of the brand name.
Finally, the ads were consistent and really, very good. From the familiar Spanish music introduction to the impeccably dressed TMIMITW, and the grainy fake footage of his exploits, viewers came to expect greatness from the commercials, and were met with just that.
