Sometimes best marketing campaigns fail. These campaigns sound great as an Idea in the conference room but when you finally execute it, they can go terribly wrong.
Whether the fault lies in its execution or the way people have perceived that, end-result can hurt your brand badly.
But the good thing is, we can always find reasons why they fail.
There are many speculations on the failure of marketing campaigns such as budgets, wrong focus, the copy, too much focus on sales, and many more. They are indeed reasons for failure, but it can also become a hindrance for doing anything better.
Marketing campaigns are all about getting results. Sometimes it can only be traffic or views and at other times ‘real’ results i.e. Sales.
However, there are only two key factors that decide the success or failure of a marketing campaign. These are –
1. Understanding your target audience
2. Quality of product or services
You get one of these wrong and marketing campaigns will fail, no matter what.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Marketing campaigns starts with the approach of ‘what do we want to sell?’ which is a huge part of any campaign, but the next step is a crucial one.
Here most of the marketers look for their competition and think about how are we better than them and how will they convince their target audience for that?
This is the point where only the product/service has focus and campaign started losing connection with the target audience: ‘what they actually want?’
Marketers may start to claim that they understand their target audience, but they don’t because the focus of the campaign continues to be product/service first.
Marketing campaigns work in a manner that your audience has a problem they want to be solved, if your solution can solve their problem, brilliant. If you can’t you are useless.
The key is to find that area where your product/service and target audience have common ground. That’s when your marketing campaign starts to pay off.
To get there, marketers need to start to understand their target audience first otherwise there are more certain chances of failure.
Quality of Your Product/Service
Many non-marketers believe that marketers, through their campaign, are just there to ‘fool’ them i.e. to manipulate people to buy something, even though they really don’t need it. Well, that’s not marketing, its sales.
However, sometimes marketing campaigns do play a role in that. Whenever you want to market something, that product/service is what defines most of the success or failure.
When you set up the wrong expectations among the people and if the product/service you are offering is not good enough, any marketing you do around it has the highest probability to backfire. You can’t market something that is nothing.
There are many examples of brands that can’t get rid of a bad reputation caused due to some worst marketing campaigns. It also includes some big brands like Coca-Cola, Dominoes, Pepsi, Dove, etc.
The Marketing Campaign that failed on both key factors: New Coke Campaign (Coca-Cola).
In 1985, The Coca-Cola Company introduced “new Coke”, marking the first formula change in 99 years. This “new Coke” marketing campaign failed completely.
The reason behind the failure was explained by Coca-Cola itself – “The fabled secret formula for Coca-Cola was changed, adopting a formula preferred in taste tests of nearly 200,000 consumers.
What these tests didn’t show, of course, was the bond consumers felt with their Coca-Cola — something they didn’t want anyone, including The Coca-Cola Company, tampering with.”
Therefore, for any marketing campaign, it is important to get two things right: understand your target audience and get your product or service to work.
Other than these two key factors, there are two important elements which a marketer should always keep in mind while planning any marketing campaign i.e.
1. Content Messaging
2. Promotion Strategy
These are the pillars of any marketing campaign to perform. Do any of that wrong, your marketing campaign will fail.
Content Messaging
Content messaging is what we say about ourselves, and the products and services we offer. Effective messaging is not about how much volume we get out there.
It’s about whether the content you put out has value to customers – and that what they read makes a difference in how they consider, choose, and stay loyal to a brand.
Last year, Unilever’s Dove ad posted on Facebook was a four-panel image showing a young African American woman removing her shirt over three panels and the fourth one shows a young white woman. Oops!
The Ad Campaign became popular as “Dove racist ad” in google search results. While no agency has taken “credit,” Unilever said the ad was intended to show “the diversity of real beauty.” It got pretty ugly reviews and plenty of well-deserved heat on social media. In the end, Dove apologized.
The Marketer’s takeaway, here, is to consider the implications behind your messaging. In this instance, the campaign is implying that the African American woman is ‘dirty’, and the white woman is clean. While that is not Unilever’s intention, the outcomes are bad.
Promotion Strategy
Promotion strategy refers to the activities that make the brand more known to its audience. It includes advertising, public relations, and sponsorships.
Since the costs performing these activities can be substantial, it is important to perform a ‘break-even analysis’ when making promotion strategies.
Last September, a Russian Domino’s franchise launched ‘Dominos Forever’, a marketing campaign for branding. The offer was 100 free pizzas a year for 100 years to customers who tattooed the brand’s logo on their skin.
The campaign went viral, hundreds of social media posts from inked pizza lovers began flooding in. After this, Domino’s released restrictions such as the size of the tattoo, as well as a 350-person cap on the offer.
The campaign was supposed to run for months, but Domino’s had to cancel it within days to prevent thousands of people from cashing in.
Here, there Marketer’s takeaway is don’t forget to consider the costs. The viral marketing campaign can cost you several billion bucks over the budget.
To avoid campaign failure, brands should think about their target audience and aim to solve their pains and inconveniences with their solution.
To create a good social profile, brands should always do what is good for a customer as well as for the environment. Ask their feedback and consider their opinions while designing their next products and offerings.
Contact us for best marketing campaigns.
