Brands that can become part of the culture have an edge over their competitors. "People don't care about brands, they care about their lives. They only care about advertising when it brings them value," said Darko Silajdžić, Chief Innovation Officer at McCann Prague, at the regular McCann Insights meeting the agency holds at its headquarters. He reminded that today's consumers live in an environment of advertising oversaturation, where they often block and ignore ads. At the same time, however, time spent with media is increasing, which now exceeds up to 12 hours a day, creating competition for attention.
According to Silajdzic, the term brand fame refers to the "ultimate level of a brand" and the state where a brand transcends its category and becomes part of the social culture. "Every penny invested in such a brand is multiplied. The brand becomes a symbol to which society has an emotional connection," he explained.
Silajdzic described three stages of brand development:
- awareness
- active awareness (salience)
- brand fame
"Most brands remain at the awareness level. But it's only when a brand has fame that people not only seek it out but also recommend it to others," he explains. According to him, brands with brand fame grow faster, have lower price sensitivity and higher customer trust and loyalty. "Brands are then not just one of the messages, but are present as something that has a dedicated place in people's heads," Silajdzic described.
An example is the British department store chain John Lewis, which, after moving away from discounting, began investing in strong emotional campaigns. "When they teamed up with agency Adam & Eve, they moved from transactional marketing to image marketing. They became the fastest growing brand in the UK."
According to Darko Silajdzic, the route to brand fame is through exceptional advertising that evokes emotion, is memorable and boldly different from the average. It is also possible to create activation outside the space reserved for advertising, for example in the form of a project that answers a real need of people.
An essential factor in building brand awareness is the size of the campaign budget. However, to get to the level of "brand fame" such a brand needs to come up with an exceptional campaign or project. This is not to say that smaller brands with smaller budgets can't do exceptional campaigns to draw attention to themselves, but they would have to do so repeatedly. "Budgets decide the advertising race in most cases. At the same time, creativity decides and if the story resonates emotionally, it amplifies the investment," he explained.
According to Silajdzic, brand fame can be measured, for example, by the volume of unpaid online searches. "The more people are interested in a brand, the more often they search for it themselves," he explains. This indicator also reflects spontaneous interest, which cannot be artificially bought. Another indicator is the amount of earned media, i.e. organic mentions, shares or discussions that a brand generates with its content.
Brand Fame in theory
Brand fame has been talked about more and more in communication theory over the last year and a half. According to Paul Feldwick, brand fame is a combination of intrinsic appeal, mass reach, distinctiveness and social diffusion, which gives it the ability to permeate across social groups.
Byron Sharp, on the other hand, shows that a high level of mental accessibility of a brand has a direct commercial impact: a brand is chosen more often because people are more likely to consider it. At the same time, brand fame distorts the rationality of consumers, who are willing to pay a higher price because they perceive the brand as more attractive and unique. And if a brand sells more often because of its fame, its overall sales and profitability increase.
But the path to building brand fame is not easy. It requires a combination of emotion, creativity, and cultural relevance. As psychologist and strategist Orlando Wood points out, the right hemisphere of the brain responds to stories, metaphors, and empathy, while the left responds to facts and logic. "For a brand to gain fame, it must speak to emotion, not reason," Wood points out. Creative director John Hegarty agrees, saying that audiovisual media and "moving images" have an irreplaceable place in building brand fame.
It is to the changing needs of brands that McCann has responded with the creation of a new platform, McCann ALT, which brings strategy, creative, data and technology together in one process. Instead of a traditional brief, it is based on the brand values and its real impact on people. A multidisciplinary team of strategists, creatives, technologists and artists look for solutions that can take the form of a film, product, platform or service, depending on what best fits the human need. The result should be a more meaningful creative output that goes beyond traditional advertising.
Source: mediaguru.cz