Last summer the London-based beverage giant Diageo devised labels for its Brazilian-market whiskey that turned the bottles into a conduit for custom video. Timed to hit shelves for Father’s Day, in August, the labels enabled a gift giver to scan a code and upload a video message for Dad to the cloud. Dad could scan the code with his own phone to receive the recorded good wishes. The videos promoted the brand, tightened social bonds, and allowed the company to reconnect with both giver and recipient for future promotions—events, tastings, offers, and the like. Diageo transformed the most mundane form of advertising—a label with a logo—into an open-ended personal messaging system that could be woven into consumers’ lives.
Advertising’s New Medium: Human Experience
Reprint: R1303E
We live in a media-saturated world, where consumers are drowning in irrelevant messages delivered from the web, TV, radio, print, outdoor displays, and a proliferating array of mobile devices. Advertising strategies built on persuading through interruption, repetition, and brute ubiquity are increasingly ineffective. To win consumers’ attention and trust, marketers must think less about what advertising says to its targets and more about what it does for them.
Rayport outlines four domains of human experience: In the public sphere people move from one place or activity to another, both online and off. In the social sphere they interact with and relate to one another. In the tribal sphere they affiliate with groups to define or express their identity. In the psychological sphere they connect language with specific thoughts and feelings. Savvy marketers think about crafting messages that consumers will welcome in these domains.
Zappos did that when it placed ads in airport security bins (the public sphere)—reaching people whose minds may be on their shoes. Nintendo identified young mothers who were willing to host Wii parties and provided them with everything they needed for these social-sphere events. Yelp’s Elite Squad of reviewers have a heightened sense of tribal affiliation that makes them powerful brand ambassadors. Life is good Inc. is rooted in the psychological sphere: It advertises only through the optimism-promoting logo and slogan on its products.