Tim Pethick: marketing guru explains how to connect brand and target

You talked about providing value to the customers as the foundation of a brand. How´s that?
It is very important to be able to communicate the value of your brand. Some brand owners and managers think their brand is about their identity and the recall of their identity. They are just looking for eyeballs, logo impressions. The values that support what the brand stands for are essential. Let me give you an example. I was at a cricket game and there were lots of advertising banners around. As I was leaving, someone from a research company came and asked me if I can recall some of the brands that I have seen. I told him the few ones I remembered; he thanked me, and that was it. See, a lot of companies don´t bother to know what I know about them, what I feel about them, what matters to me about them.

Value is absolutely inherent in the customer experience. I could like a brand, aspire to a brand, but if I have lousy experience during my engagement with that brand it can destroy my perceptions of some of these brand values. So, I think effective brand marketing is about creating an experience that communicates the branding to the customers.

And how does this apply to events?
In strategic marketing, I can place my brand in an event. And if the communication is about having fun and I put it in the event´s context, people at this event should be enjoying it. The risk here is choosing the wrong event. Picking the right event and defining how it will put your brand in context is vital as most people relate the experience in these events to your brand.

Is the event organised by the brand a solution?
Let me give you an example. For Sultry Sally, our new brand of salt-free potato chips, we did something a little different. We created an all-girl singing group called Sultry Sally. We organised the audition, put the band together, made a CD and a video, organised tours and performances in malls. We created the audience around the girls. It worked incredibly well. Firstly, the girls are all young, beautiful and talented. Our target market is single women so by presenting to them an image of who they might like to be and associating our product with this fun event, we got effective marketing. We created our event, we controlled it. It´s not just about creating a band, it´s all about understanding the subliminal messages that we want to get across via these actions.

And every element and every point of contact that you got with the audience?
That´s right, we organised it ourselves and we didn´t trust someone else to do all of this.  It´s different to just saying that someone has a concert and let´s sponsor it which is a more typical action, but which probably won´t not work quite as well from the point of really selling the brand´s attributes and ideas.

How intensely do you use events?
I would say that probably 80% of nudie´s communication is through events. We participate in other people´s events, but also create our own like that with a hot air balloon.

There will be at least two events a month that Nudie does and the results have been incredibly cool. The reasons are that events are experiential and people can related to the brand and they can enjoy the entire brand experience, sample and buy the product and extend their relationship with the brand.

Events would then be the best way to communicate? One that gives a direct experience with the brand?
Events form a rather huge extent of experiential marketing because in this world where we get bombarded by advertising, we need a way to cut through that clutter and get in deep.

It´s also about shared experience. In most aspects of life, we rely on shared experience to understand better those people whom we have shared the experience with. Events are not any different: if you share an experience with the brand, then you have a deeper understanding of it and will develop a better relationship with the brand. Sharing a positive experience builds the relationship with the brand. Events are very strategic and we have to be very careful with how the experience can be transmitted and shared.

You talked about Emotional Selling Point (ESP) and not just Unique Selling Points (USP), how do you get people to become emotional about your brand?
I think you can build relationship into a brand, even though it is more difficult with some products and brands than others. It´s about visual, colours, cues… Say, some colours are warmer than others. If you want to invoke a warm comfortable emotional connection with the brand then you choose a warm tone. Do a test and ask people how does that colour make them feel and I think when you are building or communicating a brand, you need to think about all the little elements in terms of how they can build an emotional connection.

Like visual, texture, scent…?
Exactly!