Here at
birdsong gregory, our Charlotte NC ad agency has done a lot of conventional advertising and marketing for clients over the years, and we’ve provided the same model that global agencies provide to Fortune 100 brands, i.e., a company has a new product or new message it wants to sell, and so it pays an ad agency to come up with creative ways to reduce complex ideas and brand ideals into a short, single, overarching message.
Think “We bring good things to life” or “Just do it.”
Now, of course, it’s getting harder and harder to grow market share through yesterday’s advertising and marketing strategy. Charlotte, NC companies are increasingly looking to connect with consumers online in deeper, more authentic ways than a few blinking banner ads. But going online and talking about oneself can be risky – not to mention difficult.
Even in the digital age from a brand and marketing perspective many companies (and many Charlotte graphic design firms) are used to and most comfortable with the messaging and branding tactics of broadcast.
But online brand representation is not really an exercise in message reduction; interesting complicated thoughts don’t need to be condensed into a singular message. Brands now have to tell stories and plan activities along parallel pathways. They might even need to tell different stories at the same time and have their audiences filter them out, trusting that they’ll find what they like and ignore what they don’t like.
Let’s use Nike and Blendtec as examples of two extremes of online brands. Nike is a huge company with a lot of products. Its marketing-led brand image is a big part of the value of their products, so they need to do innovative online marketing. There are many brands operating like this, e.g., fashion, car companies, spirits, where marketing is a key component of the brand value.
At the other extreme is Blendtec. You would never have considered buying its $600 industrial blender for your home until you saw a charming guy in a white lab coat asking you, “Will it blend?” This is the more significant extreme: a brand that probably didn’t do any significant marketing until the Internet showed up. Then someone somewhere realized that there is a low-cost medium where you can just be funny or clever and gain a huge audience. Blendtec used the Internet to transform itself from a B2B to a B2C company in barely a year.
What we’re seeing here in Charlotte, however, are thousands of small to middle market companies that have a static website but are slowly waking up to the fact that the Web 2.0 has become much more than a place to park your information and hope potential customers stumble across it somehow. You have to be active for anyone to notice. You have to tell rich stories with a believable, informed, friendly voice. You have to have to take the time to build a conversation with the market – not just throw clever slogans at it. And above all, you have to begin building an effective, believable online brand sooner rather than later. The Internet isn’t going away, and companies that figure out to use content-rich social media to deepen consumer relationships will gain a whole host of cost-effective benefits. If you’d like to know more, please visit
birdsong gregory online or give Jim Cusson a call at 704-332-2299.
From this week's Advertising Age: In an effort to build buzz in select urban markets this holiday season, Target plans to unveil three pop-up stores modeled after a fast-food joint. 
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