There’s a new type of condo marketing on the horizon and it flies in the face of many of today’s traditional marketing philosophies. It’s a step away from the fully planned out rigid marketing campaigns that many major brands swear by. Instead, this is marketing that moves at a faster pace—marketing that has the flexibility to change and adapt at a moments notice. It’s always-on marketing and it is becoming the new norm.
Baba Shetty and Jerry Wind, members of the Wharton School’s Future of Advertising Program, remarked in an essay on the Harvard Business Review blog that, “The rigid campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction.” They went further to say “For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that’s prolific, agile and audience-centric.”
To see some examples of always-on marketing, just look at this year’s Super Bowl. It’s the biggest marketing event of the year. An event where brands pay a premium for seconds of on-air exposure and an enormous audience of consumers tune in specifically to watch advertisements.
Likely to be remembered more for the blackout and less for the game, this year’s Super Bowl quickly presented many brands with a huge opportunity. With an enormous audience just sitting around, practically begging for more content, it was an Always-On Marketer’s dream. Oreo cookies didn’t waste their chance. They sprung into action quickly release a tweet “Power out? No Problem” with a link to an advertisement with a headline that read, “You can still dunk in the dark.” By the time the lights came back on and the game continued Oreo’s message had been shared more than 12 000 times.
The Backlash Challenge
Although N5R fully believes that an always-on marketing strategy is the next wave of condo marketing, it’s important not to forget the importance of good taste and a trusted staff. In the past some brands that have used this technique and been burned as a result. The baked goods giant Entenmann's, for example, was using always-on marketing when they tweeted "Who's #notguilty about eating all the tasty treats they want?!" following the "not guilty" verdict in the Casey Anthony murder trial. There was a huge backlash and Entenmann’s was forced to apologize for the insensitive tweet that left their customers with a bad taste in their mouth. Whether your content is relevant or not, if it’s offending people your business will suffer.
Feasibility Challenges
There are other setbacks when it comes to always-on marketing. The major one being that the ability to create clever and relevant content in response to current events would require a team of creatives working around the clock. For most condo marketing teams that simply isn’t feasible. Sure, with an event like the Super Bowl going on it’s easily worth it for a brand like Oreo to keep a staff of creatives close at hand, responding to events in real time with the right brand tone, but what condo marketer could afford that kind of staffing on a daily basis?
Well the truth is you can’t, at least not for now. That fact is, a switch to always-on marketing techniques will never happen over night. More likely it will be a slow evolution. Keep the always-on marketing strategy as a goal moving forward and look for new and improved marketing strategies that can move you closer to that goal. Keep tweaking your procedures, but always keep your 5 core elements of marketing in mind. These 5 elements must work well together in order to succeed
- Consumer understanding and segmentation,
- Brand stories and content,
- Paid media,
- Community management and grassroots response,
- And measurement
Understand, manage and balance these 5 components and you’ll be equipped to begin realigning your strategies and investments to suit an always-on condo marketing world.
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