To find our purpose, ours and our audience’s, we must create movements. That means using our influence to create a social good. We win by all of us winning.
Engagement as a metric has been largely misused as a simple act, no matter the act, as an indication of commitment. An interaction with a banner ad, whether intended or not, this is engagement. Curiosity by shock, attention by near nudity, these would be considered engagement by most models. But this is engagement in the ephemeral, not the beginning of a meaningful alliance.
Engagement that matters is about caring. It’s the feeling an underdog might experience after pulling an upset. It’s the audience leaning forward with a communal want.
These experiences can’t simply be created by price points or USPs, and advertising’s big ideas are mostly far too small to cause these social movements that are defined by real behavioral changes. People believe in the authentic. People believe in things they feel matter, both personally and culturally. To expect them to believe in you means you must obsess over more than bottom lines and share their thirst to leave behind something better than came before.
A professor at the London Business School, Patrick Barwise, simply said, “Often our biggest mistake as managers is believing that, in general, customers care a lot about your brand. They do not.”
This is our truth. People don’t generally care about brands. They don’t care much about what we say, the logo or the color of the stationary. But they could care very much for what we do.
With Evolution, Dove expanded sales by exposing the falsehoods around model culture, but also funded real efforts to change what young women saw when they looked in the mirror.
When Haagen-Dazs supported the movement to save the Honey Bee, they didn’t just make ads, they created new products and went to the senate floor to plead their case.
Our goal is not simply to move more products in the name of moving more products, but understanding a brand’s cultural relevancy, creating stronger relationships through social movements and ultimately accomplishing business objectives by enriching the people we serve.
