Upward with Outfront: Elevate your brand

It’s been a minute, and we’re back!

In this newly renamed newsletter we aim to help you unlock your brand’s potential and elevate your marketing game.

First, let’s all benefit from the $$ Hyundai spent on research for their emotional new Olympic ads. Then find a graphic to help you ladder up your messaging, and finally, get your free All Access Pass to explore Outfront’s lists of the Best AI Events of 2024, and AI Tools by Use Cases, plus more.

Let's reconnect,

Time estimate: 2-minute skim, 6-minute read

Let’s kick off with a quote that becomes ever more relevant as we use AI tools.

How emotional intelligence makes marketing more effective

Olympics Winner: Hyundai

Emotional Ads Are Gold

Did you see Hyundai’s recent Olympic ads? They’ve shifted from car-heavy to emotionally heavy. The campaign focuses on moments when kids question whether or not they should pursue a sport (and from experience we can confirm that those conversations take place in cars – so smart!).

The campaign is titled, “It’s OK.” And we’re quite sure it’s a result of a goodly amount of expensive research - and it’s carried out effectively in their slogan: “there’s joy in every journey”.

Cars take a back seat

Why did a car company take this bold move? Because people catch the feels when they watch the Olympics.

It’s smart. And it made us want to tell you a story about our emotional communications experience and how it affects brands, revenue and goal attainment. We’re looking at YOU, brands, agencies and communicators!

The year was 2021 and the pandemic was in full swing...

We’d been giving hundreds of webinars to help people understand how to communicate so they could keep selling, keep their employees (or thoughtfully let them go), and preserve their market position.

We were asked by one of the world’s largest communications companies to help them develop a brand strategy, position and messaging.

Agencies operate in a highly competitive environment. Selling creative services and differentiating in the agency category is hard enough – but now in a fraught environment, the job got much tougher.

It was just the type of challenge we love.

We’ve been producing positioning and messaging for some of the world’s largest organizations (and the world’s smallest!) for years. We helped Accenture launch its technology division. We helped Peak Games position for global expansion.

Our methods helped Booz Allen Hamilton figure out what content to produce as it transitioned its prodigious defense data capabilities to the world of marketing.

We also launched cannabis drinks, luxury accessories and pop culture brands and helped the department of defense learn where, how and how well it was spending money on communications.

We’re practitioners who have done pretty much everything in communications over the years.

This was different.

This wasn’t just a highly competitive environment. Not just a historically challenging category. But also, at a time of tremendous global uncertainty.

The way we go about brand strategy and translating it into positioning and messaging has always been through a PESTLE analysis. We invented it for ourselves two decades ago, but it turns out Francis Aquilar, an expert in strategic planning, did a great job of naming and describing it in the 60’s.

PESTLE is a framework for analyzing a variety of factors that impact a brand:

• Politics: Government policies, leadership, trends, taxes, regulations, etc.

• Economics: Growth, interest rates, jobs, unemployment, globalization, etc.

• Social: demographics, consumer sentiment, population growth, culture, etc.

• Technology: innovations, disruptions, new capabilities, etc.

• Legal: standards, consumer rights, product packaging, etc.

• Environment: scarcity, sustainability, etc.

We use this type of analysis for content marketing and brand strategy. After all, we’re not going to spend $100,000 on a New York Times insert before feeling certain that we’re talking to the right people about the right things in the right place. The PESTLE analysis has helped our clients stay smart for two decades.

But now we also use a new technology that makes us smarter, better, faster, and more accurate.

Yes, it incorporates AI (you probably know that AI has been around for more than a decade - just not in generative AI form).

We’ve used this tool on almost all of our assignments over the past 10 years to reveal the topics that matter most to people. 

It provides insights that power your entire go-to-market mix.

That’s what happened for our global communications client.

Yes, we found topics that people were not only searching for, but also engaging with.

Yes, it provided insights into what topics would perform best in which media.

Yes, it could guide go-to-market, content, SEO, PPC, social, email, out-of-home, radio, etc.

And yes, it gave tremendous insights into how to strategically position the brand.

Even better, it told us how our stakeholders were feeling. 

Our audiences were in trauma. Employees had been let go. The ones left behind were suffering, too (and overworked). People were scared, confused, adrift.

 We adjusted our language to communicate in a way our audiences could identify with.

It shaped how we told our stories.

When you’re working on your brand strategy, developing a campaign, producing content, or planning your go-to-market strategy, try to recognize all the forces that are playing on your audiences.

Dust off your emotional intelligence and envision the reality your stakeholders are operating in. It dramatically affects how they’ll receive your messages.

Knit together your communications story so that it makes sense and is consistent across channels. And remember that not all messages work in all media.

Like Hyundai, understand your audience’s mindset AND how they feel.

And if you see the value in having a 360-degree view of your stakeholders across geographies – regardless of demographics and without violating anyone’s privacy, contact us. We’ll explain what it could do for you.

Use This for Positioning and Messaging

Our positioning and messaging experience shows that too few brands understand the connections between features, benefits, value propositions and emotional resonance. This Brand Benefits Ladder from communications gurus Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane is a great tool. Use it! (Kotler literally wrote the book on marketing management.)

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