Consumer Products Conundrum 4

The fourth and final strategic conundrum facing the consumer products industry is perhaps the most challenging one.

While it is cliché to say that great marketing is more art than science, it is precisely that artistic quality of great marketing that makes or breaks great consumer brands. Lightening in a bottle happens when advertising delivers its amazing alchemy of engrossing, surprising, unexpected, humorous, even beguiling messages, and then the actual product delivers the promise in both physical and emotional terms.

And, of course, what is so utterly frustrating is that this secret marketing potion has no set recipe. It changes with every iteration.

In the salad days of CPG marketing, this was not a vexing problem. As with great art (i.e., real stuff, not modern garbage), the ability to practice helped. Spoil a canvas? No problem, grab a new one and start again. Ad campaign did not resonate? No problem, think up a new one and shoot new copy.

How the game has changed! Today, the ability to transmit campaigns is growing as difficult and fickle as finding the right message in the first place. In the digital universe grabbing consumer attention has become more difficult than generating foot traffic in an art museum.

How many people actually sit through television commercials? (Or, more precisely, how many busy middle-income families who buy lots of CPG products sit through commercials on their DVR’d sitcom or ball game, let alone watch any advertising at all on their on-demand, internet sourced programming?)

In the good old days, advertising and marketing could deliver its three great missions much more easily.  Those missions are:  Generate awareness; Communicate the brand’s message; and Promote the product.

The hardest, and arguably most important, of these is communicating the brand’s message:  What it does? Why it works? Why it solves your problem? Why you need it? Why you want it?

Make no mistake, packing the answers to all these questions in a 30 second TV commercial is high art. But it does little good if no one is there to see it!

If you are a CPG marketer, it has never been harder to find and reach your target and then stop them long enough to tell your story. Digital, for all its ability to build awareness and deliver promotion, suffers Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) when it comes to content.

Of course miracles happen. Creativity shines through. Every brand has a story of the viral video or wildly successful promotion. Here is one of my all-time favorites in the viral department.

But even these little explosions typically do little to build or sustain brand equity or drive consumer loyalty. I doubt JC Penney saw marked jewelry sales increases because of the dog house video, no matter the millions of views. While clever and funny, and nearly 5 minutes of viewer concentration, it doesn’t really tell the story of the brand.

Bottom line, the realities of our digital age are turning successful CPG marketing into a Herculean task.