No-one wants to spend too much time with one-dimensional people, so why would customers want to invest any time in one-dimensional brands?
A business can have the most sumptuously designed website, but if customers aren´t finding their way there, its purpose is markedly diminished. This is when a marketing team comes into play – taking a look at the brand through the customer´s eyes to see if the company is as inviting to the target audience as it thinks it is.
Unfortunately for firms, products alone are not enough to drive customers to where they want them to be. Take something like beer, for example. Why would someone want to engage with a brand of beer outside of the weekend?
It might be hard to come up with too many reasons, but that´s exactly what Carlsberg, which opted out of TV advertisements earlier this year, is attempting to do.
The brewer is in the process of centralising is social media content in the hope it will present it as a more interesting and relevant brand and therefore enabling it to appeal to customers on a daily basis.
As part of the project – which forces Carlsberg to “think customers and content first” – it has created an online template, allowing its 500-plus brands in more than 150 markets to build and manage social and web activity from a single content management system.
It´s hoped the platform will encourage brands to to reuse content from other markets and react faster to real-world events, allowing them to present themselves as more than just producers of alcoholic beverages.
“In essence we want to create a place for our brand initiatives to have a home while lifting the entire presence of the brands,” a spokesman for the business put it.
Aly Richards, chief executive of marketing consultancy The Intelligent Marketing Institute, highlighted how content allows brands to showcase themselves as multifaceted.
“It is encouraging to see that the content also covers the broader interests of the audience and not just the beer, giving Carlsberg a far greater opportunity to engage,” she told Marketing Week.
“As such, if this content strategy is pursued then the issue of the audience resistance to branded sites should be overcome. What is not clear from the statements is if this is part of a structured content journey and strategy, or if it is just a channel strategy. In other words, having attracted and maintained an engagement with people on a site, what is Carlsberg going to do with them next?”
Carlsberg says it doesn´t plan to stop there however, and outlined plans to invest more in branded content as well as launch digital tools to extend its reach to more consumers.
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