It’s time to start offering something useful
With so many brand messages that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, users can start to become blind to what’s on offer, no matter how gorgeous, compelling or persuasive they might be. Russell Davies discusses how 'Branded Utility' can put you in the spotlight.
Traditional advertising as we know it has rarely proved to be useful for consumers. With digital media, brands have the ideal platform to put their commerical messages to one side and actually provide something of value to consumers.
The best ad in the world, however gorgeous, persuasive or compelling it is, is unlikely to ever actually be useful to you as the consumer.
It might entertain, inform or delight you (though it's more likely to irritate you) but unless it's very lucky with a very specific message that you really need to know about, it's not going to actually help you out with anything practical.
Which is where digital media may start to come into its own.
For the same amount of money you might, as a marketer, spend beguiling and seducing a customer with a marketing message you could maybe build something for them which they'll actually find useful and which says potent and appropriate stuff about your brand as well.
This is an idea, which people are starting to call 'branded utility'. And it's not going to be long before every brand is going to be wondering what services they can offer people online, not just what message they can beat them over the head with.
My favourite example doesn't actually exist, it's a tale of missed opportunity, but it illustrates the idea rather neatly.
If you use flickr and you're using iPhoto and a Mac you'll know that it always used to be a bit of a pain to upload a bunch of pictures to your account; you had to manually seek out files on your hard drive from the browser window. And then someone developed a little uploading plug-in for iPhoto which meant you could just export direct to flickr. Problem solved and yet oppportunity missed as that someone was not Canon or Kodak or Nikon, it was just a random developer guy who wanted to build something handy for people.
But imagine if someone in the marketing department at a camera company was thinking about branded utility rather than message delivery. They might have taken a few thousand pounds from the ad budget and got someone to build a simple software tool with a discrete logo in the corner, which thousands of people would have used, and been grateful for, and which would have delivered the brand name right into the heart of the photography community.
There aren't a lot of real life examples to point at yet but this Halifax Share Price Alert is a nice start. And in the real world Charmin has done a simple and smart thing in offering decent, clean toilet facilities to people in Times Square.