Oh, brands. 🙄🙄🙄
Especially you big, behemoth brands who really have no excuse! 🤨🧐🤨
What is the golden rule of marketing???
KNOW 👏👏👏 YOUR 👏👏👏 AUDIENCE 👏👏👏
AYYYYYYYYYE!!! Sheesh.
Send Noods
If you missed the latest episode of “big behemoth brands who royally screw up,” allow us to lay it out for you.
Kraft (specifically KD Mac and Cheese) ruffled some feathers last weekend when, on National Noodle Day, they promoted a KD giveaway!
What could be better? Fall is here. Yummy mac and cheese goodness. Did we mention FREE??? 🤯💰🤯
The hiccup? Their tagline: Send NOODS. Get it?? Send noods. Noods. Noodles. Word play and all that!
Pretty funny right? Erm, no. 😬😬😬
Moms – the KD brand-buying moms – were furious at the wink wink, nudge nudge of “send noods.” This huge brand missed the mark when it came to who their audience is.
Hint: it’s NOT the youngsters who EAT the stuff. It’s the Moms who BUY the stuff! And the Moms were PISSED.
Want to try edgy humour? Start commenting on current events or hop on the latest trend? You HAVE TO know 👏 your 👏 audience 👏 – people are stressed, and tolerance is LOW!
We talked about this in our latest episode of the 4 AM Report.
Here’s an appetizer!
Know Your Audience
“We wanted to use this as a launching pad to talk about audiences, knowing your audiences, re-examining your audience! who they are who your audience is. The topic at hand is old, but we just have to keep bringing that back up over and over again. In the case of Kraft it came back to the fact that they were doing a really cool thing, highly creative, I mean, when we first saw it we were like ‘This is funny!’ It was funny! Then we thought about audience: The average highly health conscious, hipster mom is probably not picking the Kraft Mac and Cheese. And she is the one who would probably not find it offensive, even if she had kids! She would probably think it was funny. But then the people who are in fact picking the mac and cheese? That’s who you really want to be putting a microscope on right now. If your audience is your sort of middle of the road, highly conservative audience, who’s like, you know, ‘this is the way I was raised and this is the way I’m raising my children [on KD].’ Most of those people are not going to find ‘got noods?’ funny.”
Know Yourself – and Your Values
“I think that a lot of brands right now, if they decide they do want to take a stand on social issues, they do want to be a little edgier and more current, you know, make sure that it’s going to resonate with your 30-40% base out there. If the rest don’t get it, then guess what, you still got 30% of that huge market. And they probably like you even more! Because I think it’s one thing to be like, don’t worry about who you piss off. It’s okay, as long as you’re resonating with who you’re resonating with. But that’s a bit of a mindset thing, isn’t it? It’s hard not to care about who’s pissed off. Like it’s a hard pill to swallow. So how do you cope? One big tip is to drop the defense. If someone comes at you with something, don’t go back with defense – they’re obviously pissed off with you. So, take a conclusive next step sort of action. It really comes back to knowing your values and what you stand for. And if everything you do is being guided by that, or you can justify it through that, if you did your work properly at the beginning to identify and call out these values for yourself, then trust that! That you’re doing the right thing for you. These are our values. This is what we stand for. This is what works for us. So, let’s not change it. If this whole pandemic has done one thing, it’s reminding you of values, and values are not in existence for you to stuff them in a PowerPoint and forget about them until planning season comes along, which by the way is upon us. For example, we believe in the right to free expression. We believe in humor. And if you didn’t get one of our core values of humor, then we’re not a fit.”
Consider Your Audience Has CHANGED (thanks, Covid!)
“The same person who you were talking to before the pandemic, now, mid pandemic, she or he is the same person, but their pain points, their fears, the challenges they’re facing on a daily level, have all completely changed. You need to be emotionally intelligent and sensitive when you’re continuing to market to that demographic, because the psychographics are completely different. Years and years ago, we made that quiz about finding your audience using highly tongue in cheek references. And while it might feel like, oh, I’ve done this exercise a million times, it is almost worth going back and looking at your audience in a new way. We have some tools coming up in the next few weeks to help people who want to plan, called five degrees of simplification. It really is not the most complicated process. What it boils down to, this simplification, is you just keep asking why. Like a toddler. You know, the why why why why why phase. We used that as inspiration to build out five degrees of simplification. Just keep asking why even when you think you can’t ask why again. When you do it, you actually do get down to that some core key essentials. If a two year old can understand your message, then you’re good.”
Ugh. There isn’t a parent in the WORLD who misses the “why” phase. 😂😂😂
We hope you’ll have a listen, because there’s lots more “cheesy goodness” (<<< see what we did there?) in the whole episode!
If you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at c+p digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
