Why you should stop marketing at your customers

I’ve been here at trnd for a little over a month and I wanted to share an insight into a different world. A world of disruptive ideas and brilliant collaboration. It’s been astonishing.

You see, during a media career spanning almost twenty years, I thought I had seen it all. My time had been spent meeting with some outstanding brand leaders, some I now count as good friends, to create marketing & communication concepts mostly around content - branded content, sponsorship activation & thought leadership - which would aim to position them front of mind for potential clients. It’s a familiar pattern; banks & insurers want to be seen as innovators and progressive thinkers, large corporates are always keen to be the ‘buddy to the small guy’, and if a brand is investing heavily in sponsorship, then I bet my house keys they are struggling for visibility and a solid way to activate.

Content is great at getting brands noticed, right? The most powerful of all weapons in a brand's armoury, number one on the agenda. Well, that’s what I used to think. It's still effective and I'm still proud of the work I've delivered, but over the last month I’ve had my eyes opened and now realise that it’s actually number two… and if not delivered with laser guided accuracy, it has the potential to be an expensive way to shout into the dark.

You see I’ve learnt, over the past month that the genuine silver bullet to cut through the noise, the seemingly magical solution to truly engage with consumers, is to strip away all the marketing fluff, the often thinly vailed marketing driven branded content and the light-touch CSR effort.

Park the sponsorship and dispense with the brand arrogance, simply let consumers engage with your product in their own homes.

Let them actually use, touch, feel or taste what it is you are marketing and share their educated experience with friends & family. Sounds a great idea, right? Activating the oldest form of marketing known to man, word of mouth, to power your marketing objectives. Well, it’s what I’ve been introduced to over the past month and my god it’s powerful - and trnd have harnessed the magic perfectly.

These days, I’m still meeting with brand leaders, marketing managers and stressed out executives with nothing but spreadsheets to keep them company, but my conversations are very different. I’m no longer speaking about how thought leadership from external voices can be used as a brilliant brand positioning tool, I’m now working alongside marketers to deliver tangible hardcore solutions in the form of real measurable brand conversations, online reach (largely social content) and targeted product trial that ultimately leads to a measurable uplift in sales. Objective accomplished.

The scientific and analytical foundation to trnd’s work manages to be both complex and beautifully simple. I’ll give you an example: if we were to deliver say 2,000 boxes of crackers to targeted homes in the UK, we can accurately predict there would be more than 300,000 real educated conversations about the product, with a further online reach of around 420,000 and around 3,000 pieces of UGC. Numbers like that have blown my mind. No piece of branded content or well-meaning PR activity could ever come close. And the beauty is, it can power any B2B or B2C product.

So, now as part of a well-connected and collaborative European team, I’m able to listen to both the marketing and brand objectives from any marketing managers and deliver a robust, trusted, proven solution that directly tackles marketing challenges head-on.

Don’t get me wrong, content and sponsorship have their place, but if you are looking to get people talking about and trialing your product, the results trnd deliver are astonishing. Playing a part in enabling real conversations in people's homes outweighs any amount of cleverly crafted branded content in my book... or, for that matter, any book I may have once suggested was the way ahead.

adam.gallucci@trnd.com www.trnd.com/company

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