Working in the World of Communications

PR & Comms is an interesting business. On the one hand you need to get to grips fast with products, services, industries and sometimes the politics within those industries. You also need to understand the passion many clients have for their jobs, what they sell and their beliefs and values. However, you also need to understand that what is an interesting read/watch for their customer so often you have two clients in mind - the client paying and the end user of their product or service. Each piece of content has to be pitched or engaged by someone else – normally someone who isn’t invested in the particular product or service or brand your client is hoping to sell, hence the reason they need your support.

Your role in communications is to make that piece of information interesting, relevant to the reader or watcher and bridge the gap between client and audience – it’s what we call “sprinkling the gold dust”. Although that sounds very fairytale it is actually a lot more complex than it sounds. To understand how to get the gold dust right you need to firstly understand your target audience. Or even audiences. Getting to grips with exactly who they are, rather than who you think they are, including their likes/dislikes, demographics, what they watch and read, where they go, where they shop – and backing those profiles with evidence rather than speculation. Secondly you need to understand how your brand relates to those audiences. Does it help them solve a problem, or does it make them feel better about themselves?

You need to make sure your point of engagement is different than your competitors – so the product you are promoting might clean dishes but why is it better than all the other dish washers in the market? You need to convey these point of differences to your target audiences, in a language they understand. So, if you are working in healthcare, for example, you will call the target audience patients for doctors, service users for social workers and tenants for those working in housing. You might talk about convenience if it is a local store, but value for money if it is aimed at students. Then you need to wrap all this up – the key messages, the target audiences, the customer journey, the gold dust - and ensure you are finding the right platform to promote it on.

Yet it doesn’t stop there. Once you have undertaken a communications campaign, you then need to think of a creative concept to be able to start all over again, saying the same messages, to the same audience, but in a different story, over and over again. Until it weaves into their consciousness.

Unlike other careers, communications isn’t an exact science. Sometimes you can be lucky – you hit a theme that resonates with the audience due to macro issues out of your control – so for example, talking about an online retail innovation as a major department store closes down, can help your story. Sometimes you can be championed by a celebrity or influencer – there are a few fairy godmothers in the world of fashion and beauty – look at the fates of Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen once Isabella Blow took them under her wing.

Start Early – be bold, be brave

My advice to those wanting to get into the world of comms though is to start early and learn your craft. Start writing a blog, have a YouTube channel and get to understand how to engage your own audience first before you offer your services to others. Be bold. Be brave. Don’t worry what others think. Look at local opportunities that you can build into bigger ones. I wrote a travel column for my local newspapers while on a gap year, I took work experience at the news desks of my two local radio stations and slept on friends of friends’ sofas to work at now defunct Look Now and 19 magazines.

I stepped into the unknown by knocking on the door of my student newspaper office and asking Jay Rayner, yes the Jay Rayner, whether I could be commissioned for an article. Two months later I got the job as Joint Music and Arts Editor on Leeds Student. They were heady days and ones which I loved as I felt privileged to be writing something that someone might want to read. And persevere. I didn’t get onto the London School of Journalism (I think I scored about 1/10 on my general knowledge) and I didn’t end up editor of Cosmopolitan (although I did work for them in their marketing department).

Finally, find something you really enjoy and believe in. So if you are passionate about animals out of the office, look to work in comms for an animal charity or a pet store. Being genuine about what you are promoting and putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer is always easier when you feel the product or service is great.

Communications is a great career choice and one that can be massively satisfying but also very underplayed. Be prepared to work hard and find your niche and it can be a flexible, lifetime choice of career.

Capturing a Digital Nomad

Capturing the attention & imagination and the hearts & wallets of a target audience has always been a hard ask. There is no doubt this challenge has got harder as the market has become busier with more platforms to sell, more products and more services – and a nod to “less is more”, austerity and the “need over want” movement.

Clever marketers have used location and environment - through geomapping or hotspotting - to be able to place their customers and market to them effectively. However, what happens when that customer changes their location and their environment weekly, even daily? What happens if their working environment – like me on holiday – goes from an office in Brighton to the ski slopes of New Zealand? When your target customers’ constants are not constant and their needs and wants could be changing day in, day out?

The answer lies in the brand.

We are entering a world where choice is at a maximum. Whether it’s the choice of what to wear, the phone we use or the coffee we drink or the choice of where we work and how we work. With every one of your customers’ choices comes multiple options from providers offering better deals, different products with different benefits. To be able to make your product or service the chosen one of choice, customers need to know and trust your brand.

Good brand relationships are a bit like good friendships - they need to understand what you are about, and like a friendship, choose to have you as part of their life. It’s about having the same values so that whatever the situation you remain relevant to them – wherever and whenever. It means customers understanding what your brand values are and being clear in your communications about what your brand stands for and standing by it.

Like all the best friendships, you might need some time away from each other for a while – so maybe if that digital nomad is travelling you connect in work mode but not in rest mode. It might be that your brand is relevant across both work and play but like a good friend needs different things from you at different times. In brand terms that could be the phone that takes the best photographs and allows you to download them super-fast, but in work mode means has the capability to connect you to your colleagues on the other side of the world. For a coffee brand, that could mean a coffee cup that collapses so you can take your “keep cup” with you on the go, and a loyalty scheme that works across the world.

It also means knowing your place and not overstepping the line. So, for example, it might mean offering downtime on your phone or encourage less data usage for rest periods. It might mean no adverts during the weekend or after 6pm. It might mean no winter promotional offers for those travelling to hotter climes and vice versa.

There is no doubt that the way we live and work is changing rapidly – and mapping our customers’ lifestyles will become a tactical task, rather than a strategic approach. Understanding the strength of your brand and how you can adapt to their adapting landscapes will be the answer to a truly successful brand of the future.

Telling Stories and a Glimpse to the Future

Spoiler alert – turn away if you are still to catch on iPlayer – the phone implanted into the hand of Bethany, the environmental agenda of Edith, the humanisation of the asylum seekers, the financial downfall of Stephen and Celeste and the political rhetoric of Vivienne Rook – all issues that are too close to home.

What the BBC programme does brilliantly is to capture the themes of the moment – technology, political instability, financial uncertainty and weave around family storytelling. Using four offsprings of the same grandmother, plus their extended families they shed their skins and let us into their emotions, their deepest worries and their fears for the future.

As well as one of the best things on TV at the moment it is also pure storytelling at its finest and one which anyone working in content creation can learn from. There is enough diversity in the narrative for people to relate to – the fall of capitalism, the unfairness of the couple separated by deportation, the loss of jobs from AI, the teenager wanting to erase herself and replace her human shell with a robot. There are real, robust characters to carry that narrative – the middle-aged, middle class family of four, the gay couple, the eco warrier and the single mother of two. There is a pace and dynamism that takes us with it but doesn’t lose us on the way. And there is the nod to technology that will, undoubtedly, be integral into our lives over the next few years.

As anyone working in communications today will be aware, finding a voice in the increasing noisy atmosphere of the media is hard work, especially when there are as many creators of fake news as there are real news out there today. As Muriel the grandmother in Years and Years accepts the “fake news of today”, in real life, we need to sensecheck whether the Pope endorsing Trump as President is really the case? A recent newspiece claiming that US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was against daylight saving as it dramatically sped up climate change had, according to BuzzSumo, more than 21k engagements on Facebook and was shared 68 times on Twitter.

Add to this, the generation of more apps such as Deepfake, a “technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence” which allows the users to seamlessly put words in the mouths that were not spoken. An advance in technology that can change the way we see the world and our interpretation of it. The use of AR and VR and XR (extended reality virtual and real), and immersive exploration means the future really can be beyond our wildest dreams. With Facetech and Hearables already part of our technological development, it won’t be long that we will be able to download our brains and live forever.

What storytelling does well is engage the audience by giving them experiences that they understand, that they have lived. What the makers of Years and Years does is take you one step further and place you and your family and friends in the future to experiences you might live. They make you think, to feel and most importantly to believe – pure genius.

Photo by Jorik Kleen on Unsplash

Have Bloggers had their day?

We all love hearing about other people - whether that’s their lifestyle, their children and how they parent, their work hacks or their fashion finds. However, by April 2018 there was estimated to be over 400million blogs globally. That’s a lot of information in the blogsphere and a lot of reading.

With 60m blogs alone on Wordpress, 441m on Tumblr, nearly 2m on Joomla and another 1m on Drupal and 1m elsewhere, there are a lot of people out there sharing. How many of these bloggers really have influence? And how many are being written and read /watched or are many just typing and talking to their heart’s (and website’s) own content.

So let’s look at the figures. According to the Vuelio Bloggers Survey 2019 about UK bloggers:

• The main reason for blogging is ‘it’s my main source of income’

• Bloggers are posting less frequently with most posting just once a week

• Over a quarter of all content published on a blog is compensated for in some way

• Five supersectors have emerged: Lifestyle, Food & Drink, Fashion & Beauty, Parenting and Travel

• Bloggers are still predominantly female, but the age profile of bloggers is more widely spread

• Lifestyle then parenting are the most popular blogging topics, with fashion seeing the biggest decline in the number of bloggers choosing this as their topic

• Lifestyle blogs are mostly written by females whereas travel blogging is split between men and women equally

• Most bloggers have just one blog which they own and run.

(Source: https://www.vuelio.com/uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/UK-Bloggers-Survey-2019.pdf)

We can add to this Instagram, which boasts 1 billion monthly active users . According to another piece of research, 83% of Instagrammers say they discovered a new product or service on Insta with 600m IG accounts using Stories every day .

Meanwhile, YouTubers continue to exercise their influence. According to more research, PewDiePie has over 96m subscribers at the time of writing this, runner up in second place to T-Series, a Hindi YouTuber with 100m subscribers.

At Antelope, we were recently approached by a brand that believed the only good PR was on YouTube. Their brief was that every other channel had had its day and that with YouTube set to become the biggest search engine that’s where their brand wanted to be at. They weren’t interested in creating a YouTube channel either, they wanted to sit their brand amongst the influencers - to get in with the YouTubers who had topped the charts. Yet, believed that PR was the route - ie. can you influence them to talk about our product without it being a “sponsored” post.

We believe there is a conflict happening in communications at the moment. Between influencers who are monetarising their brands successfully and the viewers/readers who are tuning into those channels. The more the channels become monetarised, the more the influencer becomes like its competitor, constrained by the need to tick brand boxes but within their own tone of voice. How many of us have watched Instagram Stories from numerous vloggers from the same “corporate” press day, or seen the same “(ad)/ #gift” across the various accounts at the same time. Is seeing you are not invited to the party but watching those who are having a great time really the best way to showcase your goods or services?

At Antelope, we don’t think bloggers/vloggers/YouTubers have had their day - far from it. However, we do think that their place in the ecosystem of content is evolving and as with the written word, new parameters will come into play. Transparency is already a given -like the days of stamping “Advertorial” or “Paid content” across the weekend supplement. The balance now is to create genuine, interesting content, have a voice in the crowded marketplace of the blogsphere and yet still generate an income by doing so. Many podcasts do this well by thanking their sponsors at the beginning and end of the podcast, and personalising their experience of the brand sponsoring.

Corporates need to take responsibility for their influence on this too and realise that brand fit is important in their sponsorship and by respecting, rather than exploiting gifted content creators - ie bloggers/vloggers/podcasters - by ensuring that they demand less return on investment and more long term brand building than instant results. As do the influencers themselves. There is not just the ethical reasoning that many of their viewers are still forming opinions and judgements themselves and therefore using these influencer sites as role models, but also think seriously about how they are disrupting the world of publishing by taking readers and viewers away from other content. They need to build longevity into their content to ensure that subscribers do not turn off bored by advertising and promotional footage and we eventually find we are at the opposite pole axis today with no genuine content creators left (as they can no afford the luxury of non branded posts) and we are left metaphorically in a desert of advertising billboards.

Image credit: Image by rawpixel by Pixabay

Let me tell you a story...

Which is funny really as storytelling has been around since days of yore. We all know the stories from Grimm’s Fairy Tales of Cinderella and Little Red Riding to those in the bible of Cain and Abel and Job – storytelling has a history way before content and PR.

However, using stories in a business environment is having a moment. Working the history of your organisation and the people behind the brand are what is oiling the wheels of content.

In our world of omniplatform communications – from socials, to web, to podcasts, to good old fashioned newspapers - everyone needs things to say. And telling it in an engaging way can be the difference between you and your competitors.

And that’s where storytelling in a B2B environment comes in.

However telling engaging stories that help people connect with you and your brand, which are credible, and that you have authority in telling, while somehow managing to make the reader think better of you (so at some point they might want to buy from you), is hard.

So how do you do it?

1. Don’t talk about your brand or organisation too much

Imagine you are at a party - you meet someone for the first time, you chat and they ask what you do and you ask what they do. How weird would it be if you then carried on talking about yourself the entire conversation? It would not only be weird, but boring.

Put that in a business context – someone talks to you about your product, if you just randomly talk about all the benefits of your brand without finding out about the customer you will end up most likely turning them off, rather than on, to your product.

2. Find out about them

So it goes hand-in-hand to ask them about themselves. As humans we automatically try and find similar scenarios we can share with others. Someone tells us about an awful job interview, and we tell them about how we called the interviewer by the wrong name. It’s called empathy and it is driven by relating to the situation. To do this you need to ask questions and find out information about the other person.

Doing this in a work scenario means you can relate to the situation and then hopefully solve it with your product or service. So, a customer comes to you as they need some help selling their product. You ask them about their audiences, their past sales & marketing strategy, their messaging, etc.

3. Personalise your response

So once you have found out basic information you personalise your response. Sounds obvious? In everyday life we do this naturally. We start a conversation and we naturally pull out of our mental reserves suitable responses according to the conversation we are having.

However, when we “talk” to our customers with our content, we often fail massively to personalise our response. Stop reading this now and take a look at your website and socials. Have you different content and copy for different target audiences? Or do you broadcast to all what you want them to hear, without thinking about who they really are and what their circumstances are?

4. Make a Plan

Although it might seem strange to plan what you want to say, it is the most effective way to ensure you are talking to your audiences regularly with the right messages, on the right platforms, with the right content. How many times have you said to a friend “Have I told you before…” or “Stop me if I am repeating myself..”? As in normal life we often forget what and who we have spoken to and planning it out helps us remember.

5. Repeat yourself

However, unlike when you talk to your friends be aware some people won’t be interested in what you have to say the first time. With friends and family you already have built that bridge of communication. You have already passed the test that they are interested in listening to what you have to say, by nature of being friends.

In business, you still have that bridge to cross. So you might need to repeat yourself. Tell them again, and again, and again. However, be clever and do it in different ways – which is where storytelling comes in - relating different stories but ultimately with the same message.

6. Have a beginning, a middle and an end

Back to our party. The guest you met for the first time. You didn’t just launch into a story about work, without putting it in the context of what you do. Likewise you don’t stop half way through a conversation and head over to another guest.

Likewise, you need to give your business story a start, a middle and an end.

7. Make it personal

Not just personalise it but make it personal. Why is your company, product, service unique – because of the people behind it. People generally are interested in people, so give those people and yourself a voice. Make sure that voice is one to remember.

8. Don’t make it too personal

Saying that don’t make it too personal – having an opinion is fine. Yet, having a rant is not. No-one wants to listen to someone criticising someone else or another company – unless of course you are a libel lawyer.

9. Don’t be scared

Putting yourself into the blogsphere can be a big thing. Talking in your voice, telling people about things that have happened to you, or your company is one thing. Knowing that by posting that it could go out to a wider reach of people can be daunting. However, remember the reasons why you are writing or recording your content. To get your message across to your audiences.

10. Stay on the plan

Which is why you need to stay on the content plan. Making sure you write regularly, or speak to your audiences regularly is key. Like with friends, if you stop communicating with them for a while, the friendship can easily dry up. Keep content fresh and fairly regular and you can keep that connection with your audience.

Storytelling is a great way of reaching those you might have previously never spoken to. Like the best stories you might just hit a nerve, make an impact and make a connection. And once you have that, you can start the dialogue properly.

Picture credit: Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

The 3Hs, 3Es and 3Is of Content

Hero - stand out campaigns, “must see” videos or “must read” content – eg. advertising launches, new product launches, viral type videos, etc.

Hub – your day-to-day content that you believe will resonate with your target audiences – eg. blogs around industry themes, latest fashion/product trends, etc.

Hygiene/Help – product information, ‘how to’ videos, day in the lives, etc.

Although we believe the tenets of the 3Hs make a great foundation for a content marketing strategy, we also believe that it is what every great content planner has been doing for many years. Finding those things that really differentiate a product/service in its marketplace, talking and sharing best practice, industry insight and opinion and giving information about your place in the world and how your product or service can help – surely these have always been the fundamentals of corporate communications?

At Antelope, we find working with clients as varied as third sector to multinational organisations, from local to global, the key is really understanding what content will engage their customers and how to draw the line between their product or service and their customers’ desires or needs.

So, we have created the 3Es of content strategy:

Engage:

This is the thread that weaves your brand into the awareness of the customer or potential customer. It could be a video that is shared by a friend or colleague or that post that pops up on their LinkedIn feed. It grabs their attention by saying “This might be of interest to you”.

This is often the hardest part of the comms puzzle. Finding something that talks to your customer base/s – and remember you might have a number of diverse customer types you want to engage with – can often be hard. That’s why understanding their needs, desires and their customer journey will help you understand what ultimately might engage them.

Excite:

Once you have managed to get their attention, you need to keep it. If the average attention span used to be 8 secs, in today’s modern world where we often ‘three screen’ at the same time, retaining our customers’ interest is key. The need to excite them, to make them believe that your service/product could make them feel better about themselves/their lives better/easier/etc. is the key to generating this excitement.

Entice:

Enticement is the leap between interest and becoming a purchaser. Sometimes this bridge can be too far in one go, so you need to offer free trials, BOGOFs or a promotional device to convert from thinking about it, to doing it. However, if you lose the audience at this stage you have to go back to stage 1 so it’s worth getting the enticement stage right.

When planning your 3Es content strategy we advise you also think about the 4Is:

• informative (I didn’t know that)

• interesting (I am pleased I know that)

• intriguing (I hadn’t thought of that)

• insightful (I am glad I know that).

Following theories can often help add structure and simplicity to a campaign. They can also give you guidance and a creed to live by, which, particularly in large organisations, can bring consistency and continuity to your communications. However, as with all theory, you need to be agile and flexible in practice and ensure that instead of ticking boxes you also have your eye on the final output and that it rings true for your brand, your team and most importantly your customer.

Veganuary, RED, Dry January and beyond...

Well 2019 is definitely upon us and how many New Year resolutions are still holding firm?  Did you manage Veganuary? RED January or Dry January?  And if so, will you take these habits forward to be a better you throughout the year?

Here at Antelope, we love a focus month/week/day – whether it’s helping heighten awareness like Mental Health Awareness Month or Fairtrade Fortnight or something fun like National Pet Day or British Pie Week.  However, we are also about long term strategies and helping companies build brands that have longevity and long term success.

 Who’s in your gang?

To generate long term success we believe you need to understand exactly who you are appealing to, what makes them tick and why you want to be in their gang.  Put simply, know your target audience.  You could decide you have four or five different audiences or maybe just one primary one. But whether you focus in on one particular one or broaden across a number of audiences you need to respect these audiences and remember they are the litmus test of your product or service.

 Getting to know you

Once you have identified who might be in your target audiences, learning a bit more about them is key – where they hang out (digitally, physically, metaphorically), and who with, what interests them, what they read and watch, what they like and don’t like can help you understand their motives to engage and how your brand might fit into their lives.

 Are you talking to your granny or your bff?

So now you know who your audiences are and what they are interested in, you need to establish tailored communications strategies for each audience. Hopefully you will have a company vision, values and purpose, so how do these relate to your individual audiences? Is it a more mature audience you are talking to? If so use language and references appropriate to this audience to describe the benefits of your product or service. Is it a peer? Think how you might talk to your audience in real life and translate this into your coms strategy.

If you are looking to run a media campaign think of the target publications and websites and who their readers are. Look at messaging appropriate to their audiences. So, if you provide services for older people, write about tenants when talking to housing media, service users for care publications and patients for medical media.

 Step into their shoes

Remember you are trying to target customers that might not have been customers for a while or are new customers. Think what it is about your brand that helps them solve a problem or that might appeal to them. Telling them you are the No 1 choice healthcare provider is meaningless. Telling them you can support elderly and vulnerable adults in the community through a network of personal carers and nurses immediately identifies their need and tells them what you offer to support this need.

Take the POEM approach

Ensure you communicate with your customers in the right place.  Targeting teenagers through the broadsheets generally isn’t a great strategy. Placing an ad for the over 80s in the App store probably isn’t going to raise awareness with a more mature audience.

Don’t jump onto the bandwagon

Back to the themed promotional days.  An awareness campaign can be a brilliant way to get people thinking about your brand or service and engaging them in fun activity along the way. However, choose your bandwagons carefully – be authentic to your values and your mission. Valentine’s Day hand wash says nothing about love. However, love hearts sweets in a tin can just about get away with it. Promoting RED January if you are the British Heart Foundation yes, even if you are a chiropodist, but on the back of a cereal packet? We’re not so sure.

If you really want to be around post Veganuary, into Valentines Day, past Spring and Easter, into the May Day Madness, through the Summer Deals, into September Back to School, October Halloween, Bonfire Night shananigans and into the festive period, you need to take a serious approach to your marketing strategy.

From seismic shifts to tsunamis - has social had its day?

End of the year, heading into another is always the time when the headlines shout ‘Review of the Year’ or ‘Trends for the Year Ahead’. At Antelope we are not about trend led analysis or trend led activity. We are in it for the long term and try to help our clients to be too.

However, as we come to another year closing, there are always seismic shifts we see happening that might have been trundling along for a while and then start thundering at us like tsunamis.

One such one we see happening in communication terms is the use of social media platforms. From a year of Facebook privacy scandals to talk about fake news, many in the communications industry are asking whether social media has had its day.

However, although as a personal platform the social networks grounds are being to feel shaky, it is interesting to see what is going on with them on a professional level. We have noticed three clear developments:

1. Alignment of personal and professional – the whole you

Where social media platforms used to be clearly defined by “personal” or “professional” networks, the integration of content across the different social media sites is becoming more and more frequent, and acceptable. Where users had one profile for their family, personal lives and friends and one for their job and professional thoughts, as we are becoming more “whole” on social, these are blurring into one.

Sharing your business successes with your friends is now seen as acceptable and likewise sharing personal achievements with colleagues is now seen as “bringing personality” into your feed. Obviously there are limitations on both – oversharing your personal life to your 500+ LinkedIn contacts will never be a good communications strategy and likewise forcing a pyramid sales strategy onto friends and family is likely not to make you more friends and influence people, but generally a more holistic approach that implies transparency and honesty about who you are is OK.

2. Use of social media platform to share best practice for sole trader and SMEs

Groups within social media platforms – whether that is a group message in Whatsapp or a closed group set up in Facebook – have been around for a while now. However, the increase of two elements seems to have resulted in a shift to really leveraging these groups. Firstly, the increase in those self -employed – be it in industries like construction and IT or marketing to mentoring. And secondly, the trend to support those within the same industry. We have definitely seem to have swung to the other end of the dog-eat-dog spectrum of the 80s and are seeing more collaborative working, sharing of best practice and an attitude to higher standards and practices across industries in general. Social media platforms allow us to cascade advice, examples of great practice and support to those who might be working in silos or who are not covered by associations, trade organisations or other nurturing bodies.

3. The need for a voice

Which brings us on to the need for a voice. 2018 has been the year of giving some of those suppressed, discouraged or even previously subdued to have their rightful voice. Social media platforms of course have always been a way to do this. Ignoring trolls who hide behind their profiles to voice their ugly thoughts, social media tends to be a great place to rally the troops, have the discussion and even bare your soul for the good of the nation. Closed groups – such as the one Sali Hughes has formed for those with estranged parents – allow those who want to talk to have a conversation in a “safe” social space.

As we head into a year that is bound to bring change – from political developments, to economic highs and lows – using our communication platforms to help us navigate these changes from both a personal and professional point of view, can’t be such a bad thing.

How authentic is your brand?

One giant sweet fest for kids (and kids at heart) and one giant marketing tool for retailers, pubs, clubs and bars nationwide. Tomorrow we will recover the carved up, abandoned pumpkins outside our doors, wipe the white paint and fake blood off our faces, tidy up the “Do Not Enter” signs from the front door to replace with Catherine Wheels, rockets and Guy Fawkes. Over in our local shop, the net of chocolate pumpkins vye for shelf attention with the Christmas elves that are peeking their heads out from the aisles to remind us there is only 8 weeks to Christmas.

Meanwhile “consumers will be increasingly mindful of their purchases” so says Vend HQ Retail Trend Predictions citing that the future generations will choose products that are sourced responsibility and good for their bodies and the environment.

So, how does this dichotomy stack up? On the one hand we have more and more event based marketing opportunities – Caramel Apple Day, National Pizza month, Valentines and don’t forget the Christmas bonanza. On the other, the discerning customer shunning materialism for the better good of themselves and the environment. How does the average marketing manager navigate the line between staying competitive but being aware of its changing customer?

For us at Antelope, it is about authenticity. Understanding your brand and the consumers that are right for your brand and then making sure you communicate your brand with the passion and love you feel for it.

It isn’t about tacky tie ups around Halloween or Christmas. It isn’t about worthy hoo ha-ing about other brands. It’s about being the best brand you can and letting people know what you stand for.

It is easy to think everyone knows your brand mission, your ethos, why you are a disrupter, and want to change the marketplace you serve, the world even. However, most consumers won’t. By understanding which customers are likely to be your sort of people and then talking to them in their language about things that resonate with them, then they might want to engage with you.

So, if you are a local, ethically sourced provider of fruit and vegetables, then Halloween might be your time to invite the locals to a ‘Pick your own Pumpkin’ to show how home grown your produce is. If you are a wooden toy provider decking the halls with boughs of holly in October is going to be acceptable to most.

At Antelope, we help people understand their target audiences. We help them through the customer journey and we shape their customer message so they are authentic and heart felt. This gives them a point of difference, a reason for the customer to choose them in a crowded marketplace. Surely this is the way to build longevity in your customer base rather than attempting to get a bite of every promotional cherry the market has to offer?

Let's talk about you

We talk about personalisation a lot in our blogs here at Antelope. Personalisation in terms of finding your own target audiences, personalisation in terms of creating individual messaging to those audiences and personalisation in terms of how you deliver that message to the audiences.

However, having recently worked on a new client, we realised that many people think of personalisation at the point of communication when in fact it really needs to start from the beginning – being integrated into your strategy. Personalisation is really another way of saying we need to think deeply about our clients or customers.  About really trying to get into their mindset and into their clients’ or customers’ mindset. And then once we do this, communicating a bespoke message to them (or as targeted as possible to them).  

At the same time as watching the fog around the new client clear, we also watched Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk about the danger of a single story. If you haven’t watched it, do it now – as, as with everything she does, it is amazing.

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-1110144

Her message is serious – that a single story can create one narrative and one “truth” which often is actually far from reality. What she says resonated with me on a professional level. One single narrative can create a wave of misunderstanding. It can create others’ opinions to be forced onto others and it can be two dimensional rather than standing out in its true colours.

That’s why we think digging deeper into stories is a good thing. Rather than taking one strand and making that the narrative of the brand we believe in looking at it as a whole. Its audiences (not target audience), its attributes, the team around the product or service, the ethos and its individual place in the market and point of difference (we call it it’s “golddust”). From this we believe we create “rounded and grounded” communications campaigns that show the full technicolour picture, not one single story in black and white. 
 
As with all good things. There is a process we adhere to here at Antelope to help us do this. It goes a bit like this…

1. Identify target audiences

2. Discovery phase

3. Finding the "gold-dust"

4. Personalise the messages

5. Agree platforms.

It means from the word GO we know it’s not about us, but about our target audiences or our customers. It’s about focusing on them at all times, getting under their skin and into their heads. It also makes us remember that customers don’t need to talk to our clients, buy from our clients. They have choices. We need to show them why our clients’ brands fit their lifestyles, their ethos and their values.

So many of marketers or those in the industry we work in start at the product or the service they are promoting and the benefits it is offering, but then try and shoehorn the brand into the lives of the target customers without really thinking why that individual might need or want the product or service. Often the creative appeals to the person signing off the budget rather than the person they are selling to and the agency becomes the middleman (or woman) who facilitates the process, without adding their expertise into it.   The result, not surprisingly is a campaign that appeals to likeminded people but fails to attract new or potential customers. 

As technology will continue to offer us more and more ways to filter our life – through AI and other automated ways of making choices, marketers will need to connect with customers more than ever. What better way to do this than having already thought deeply about that customers and talking their language from the start.