Of Peanut Butter, the Super Bowl and Heart-Felt Storytelling

As Mike Duerksen notes on his blog, Super Bowl advertisers went for the heart this year.

Overall, says Mike, the "ads featured an overwhelming dose of humanity—something cause marketers should pay close attention to.”

Since these are the most expensive ads on broadcast TV each year, what the advertisers chose to focus on tells you “what advertisers think people will respond to,” he adds.

“And when the biggest ad showcase of the year focuses on heart-felt storytelling rather than product features and benefits, we need to listen up.”

This isn’t the first time advertisers have focused on heart-warming storytelling.

In April, last year, the Globe and Mail carried an article about how advertisers are changing tactics to reach millennial moms.

The article focused on how Kraft Canada launched a rebranding of its iconic peanut butter.

Peanut butter is still one of Kraft’s best sellers, but its all-important advertising target market—millennials—isn’t buying as much.

For a few years now, the Globe reported, “marketers have recognized the importance of speaking to this younger cohort of digitally-savvy people.”

But now that millennials are starting to have kids of their own, “this consumer segment is posing a new challenge for companies that have to figure out how to communicate with a new generation of moms.”

The new Kraft rebranding is an attempt to do just that.

It shows a mother giving a teddy bear to her baby; as the baby grows, she takes her bear with her everywhere. Eventually, she becomes a mother herself and her baby gets a bear as well.

The ad purposefully includes very few shots of the product itself or the brand name. It is focused much more on the emotional story.

“Companies that will win in the future are those that humanize their brands,” Leisha Roche, senior director of marketing for grocery brands at Kraft Canada, told the Globe.

“You can’t just push your brand any more.”

Why not? Because people have so many sources of information, and so many brands competing for their attention, that they are tuning it all out.

In order to attract attention, the article went on to say, companies need to share “human content all the time.”

According to Katherine Wintsch, founder and chief executive officer of The Mom Complex, a consulting firm that helps clients market to mothers, the typical ad is a woman talking to the camera “about her cleaning products. It’s tutorial, and boring, and they react against that.”

There’s a lesson here for non-profits. Too often we just share important facts and figures with people—so many poor, so many hungry, so much inequality, so little clean air.

It’s all true, but the problem is that almost nobody pays any attention.

If non-profits want to make real impact, they need to ditch the scary statistics and tell the story of one child, one woman, one family.

As Wintsh notes, moms “can make the connection between an emotional message and a brand, without you beating them over the head.”

“In research they tell us, ‘I want to feel something.’”

What's true for millennial moms is true for the rest of us. Enough facts and figures. Just tell me a story.

Thoughts About Brands

What is a brand?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are brands and people and companies engaged in branding.

For me, a brand is an impression in our brains that can help us remember what we think and how we feel about a company, a product—or a non-profit organization.

It’s a form of shorthand, in other words.

A brand eliminates the need to Google or do research to help us know what we think of Walmart, Toyota, the Toronto Maple Leafs or World Vision.

For each of those names above, you felt something. It might be positive or negative, or even just neutral.

Whatever it was, it came immediately, without having to work or think about it.

For companies, arts groups, sports teams, churches, non-profit groups and many others, creating a positive brand impression is the goal.

It’s hard work. It’s like a train. It takes a lot of energy to get a brand, or a train, rolling.

Once it is rolling, it requires constant effort to keep it going. If you unhitch the locomotive, the cars will keep rolling for a while. But eventually the train, and a brand, will roll to a stop.

(While a brand takes hard work to get and keep going, it can be derailed very quickly—think Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby or Jian Ghomeshi.)

If it was just a matter of catching the attention of your target audience, it would be easier. 

But everyone and everything else is trying to catch their attention, too.

MikeTennant is a brand expert. He is also co-author of the book The Age of Persuasion, with Terry O’Reilly, and worked with Terry on the CBC Radio One show of the same name. 

Mike and Terry tried to figure out how many ads the typical Canadian might be exposed to in a day (TV, radio, print, billboards, the sides of busses, websites, etc.)

If you Google that question, you will get answers ranging from 250 to 5,000. Mike and Terry figured it was about 600 a day.

If that’s the case, that means we see 219,150 ads a year, or 18 million in a lifetime.

And of those 600 ads we see each day, Mike says, we might retain six and remember two.

Into that blizzard of information is your tiny non-profit group, with no money for advertising, which is trying to catch the attention of potential supporters.

What this means, as Mike put it, “is that while your brand looks like a beautiful snowflake to you, it is part of a blizzard to the rest of the world.”

In my line of work—international relief and development—there are 1,600 competing brands, all trying to create a positive impression in the minds of potential donors.

But I’m just not competing against other development groups. My agency is competing against every other product, company, issue, cause, political party, entertainment option and much, much more that is trying to catch the attention of Canadians.

Making an impression is hard work, in other words. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. 

But it does mean you need to target your efforts, keep your message simple, and be realistic about what you can accomplish.