Content might be the new frontier for brands, but simply being in the space is not enough. Philips CMO Damien Cummings said the challenge is to create content in a way to replace traditional marketing, if brands want to boost advocacy.
Cummings was speaking at ADMA Techmix about Philip’s regional ‘command centre’; its content marketing team which brings together its five regional agencies alongside Philips marketers in one bespoke group.
Cummings said the team was designed to solve a key marketing challenge that Philips was grappling with: that the electronics and lighting brand had a 150 year history of innovation, but that consumers didn’t associate the trait with the brand.
Why content? Cummings said traditional marketing doesn’t build advocacy among consumers.
“The challenge is, how do we create in such a way that it replaces marketing?” Cumming said.
“What I mean by that is we’ve historically done some not fantastic marketing: you see an ad, you put a large amount of money and a media buy behind that ad.
“My personal belief is you can never build a brand by doing only advertising. You build a brand by driving advocacy, and an excellent way of driving advocacy is by content marketing.”
The Philips command centre aims to build the brand’s profile by making it a thought leader among five conversations. Speaking to AdNews earlier this month, Cummings said that key to this, is Philips shunning its own social pages – chief among them Facebook – as a distribution channel, with Cummings noting that “the current social media landscape is fundamentally broken.”
Instead, Cummings said the team is using “people” as a way to amplify its content.
One way it is doing this is using the LinkedIn channels of the people within its business to distribute content. Cummings said several C-suite level executives, thought leaders in the business and the top 10% of its sales personnel, have their LinkedIn accounts managed on an opt-in basis by the content team as a way to distribute content.
“There is actually an underlying theme here and it's that we realised that platforms don’t work,” Cummings said.
“I’m going to argue that the current social media landscape is fundamentally broken: the way that we use it and the way that you use it isn’t right.”
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