What’s bravery?
Some would say the Coogee Bay Hotel serving chocolate mousse dessert is brave, given the tainted ice cream controversy of a few years ago.
If you work in sales, you might think bravery is having a conversation with an adviser that isn’t all about your product.
In advertising, ‘brave’ campaigns are those that are unexpected, edgy, unorthodox.
There’s so many to choose from, but one of my favourites has to be the Cadbury Drumming Gorilla. 90 seconds of a gorilla playing the drums, to the soundtrack of ‘In the Air Tonight’. There was not a bar of chocolate to be seen anywhere. The only mention of Cadbury anywhere was a fleeting end frame. The branding was mainly evident in the Cadbury purple – being the colour of the studio walls.
What made this particularly ‘brave’ was that the reason for creating the ad was to help Cadbury overcome some serious reputational damage that was harming its sales.
I doubt the Cadbury sales team would have signed off on that ad. They’d have wanted a bigger logo, more references to the quality of the chocolate, the history of Cadbury, maybe even supported by a discount or a sales promotion.
Thankfully, Cadbury didn’t take the obvious route, and the advertisement went to air, delivering them an almost 10% uplift in sales (no mean feat when you already dominate a category) and a 20% uplift in brand favourability rating. Not bad.
At the other end of the ‘bravery’ spectrum is the Hoover executive team who signed off on the infamous free flights promotion in the UK in the early 1990s.
This now legendary SNAFU came to pass when the UK Hoover brand – recipients of the Royal Warrant – (not that the Queen probably did much hoovering) was trying to inch its way out of the recessionary times of the early 1990s. Hoover was one of those brands who was so ubiquitous they became the default name for the category – you don’t vacuum, you Hoover, you don’t search, you Google, you don’t rideshare, you Uber.
Anyway, lacking any creative thinking, their solution to earn their way out of their slump was a sales promotion – remarkably they gave away two free return flights to various European destinations to everyone who purchased a Hoover product worth more than 100 pounds.
The promotion was a resounding success. Cue disaster.
In 1992, impressed with the results from the free European flights promotion, Hoover decided to double down by extending the free flights offer to include the USA.
Britons went beserk. Within days, Hoover retailers sold out of stock – specifically their cheapest item over 100 pounds (the 119.99 Turbomaster). Hoover had to operate its factories 24/7 to keep up with demand.
There was only one problem. The maths didn’t make sense.
Hoover had made two fatally flawed assumptions – firstly that people would buy items well in excess of the 100 pound minimum (they didn’t) and secondly, the majority of people wouldn’t redeem their offer (they did).
The profit margin on the 120 pound Turbomaster was 30 pounds, and the flights cost Hoover 600. Meaning they lost 570 pounds for every customer who redeemed the offer. And there was a lot of them.
Horrified by the magnitude of their error, Hoover tried to weasel its way out of many redemptions – claiming thousands of forms had got lost in the mail.
They got taken to court by angry customers and lost.
It was a financial and reputational disaster.
Adding insult to injury, thousands of Turbomasters, purchased just to get the free flights – flooded the second-hand market meaning Hoover couldn’t shift any new stock.
Eventually, Hoover Europe was sold off to one its competitors, and the Royal Family withdrew its warrant (presumably switching to Dyson).
What does bravery look like these days?
Booking banner ads might be considered brave.
I have written before about banner blindness – a well-researched phenomenon that means viewers of webpages tend to automatically block out anything on that page perceived to be advertising.
While the very first internet banner ad – published in 1994 – attracted a staggering click through rate of 44%, and took viewers through to an audio ad featuring the mellifluous tones of Tom Magnum Selleck, banner ads today are largely ignored.
Marketing Week estimates only 9% of banners are seen for more than 1 second, and when it comes to click through rates, according to Google’s own data, the average is a mere fraction of one percent. A tiny fraction at that. Factor in how many people are actually seeing your ad and its likely you don’t even need both hands to quantify responses.
Telstra CMO Brent Smart recently told an audience of marketers that contrary to common wisdom, investing in creative, brand building activity – as opposed to short-term sales focus activity – was actually the safe choice, not the brave choice. Because over the long term, that’s the only course that makes commercial sense.
In Smart’s eyes, those making over-researched vanilla ads are “the brave” ones, because many of Australia’s big brands all look the same in market, have little distinctiveness and carry a higher risk of being ignored.
A drum playing gorilla, according to Smart, is therefore the safe option, not the brave one. It’s safe because it stands out. The brave option is do something that is the same as everyone else.
His words resonated with me because I see many falling into the same trap. Taking a path perceived to be safe, but which is actually a road to anonymity and underperformance.
If you are wanting to talk to financial advisers, is it brave or safe to access them via Australia’s largest digital platform for advisers (with 9,000 + members)?
Is it brave or safe to access them via Australia’s #1 most downloaded financial planning podcast?
Is it brave or safe to access them via Australia’s #1 most attended single day CPD event?
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
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