When trying to boost your brand through marketing and advertising, don’t aim to grow the share of your brand's particular category, aim for a share of consumers mind's.
Speaking at the ad:tech conference in Sydney this morning, Pete Mitchell, global media innovations director for snack giant Mondelez International, said that: “To try and resonate with people we try and resonate within popular culture.
“If you only ever concentrate on your category and you only ever think about growing your category and the spend you get in that category, you are only ever going to grow that spend.
"If you think in terms of cultural relevance and what’s happening in the market, you start to occupy a whole different space altogether, which is share of mind, and that is massive conspired to share of category.”
A key part of a brand understanding cultural relevance is tactical advertising, such as Mondelez’s ‘Oreo moment’, and instead of referencing that popular example from his own suite of brands, Mitchell talked about the recent example from The Salavation Army’s South African Twitter account - where the brand jumped on the phenomena of the white and gold/black and blue changing colour dress.
Last week the The Salavation Army’s South African arm posted an image to its Twitter account featuring a heavily bruised woman wearing an indisputably white and gold version of the infamous dress, featuring the words: "Why is it so hard to see black and blue?"
The image then said: "The only illusion is if you think it was her choice.”
Mitchell explained that this was a great example that was able to tap into cultural relevence.
Mitchell also discussed the brand's Mobile Future Program, outlining that while it was obviously to boost its understanding on mobile and what it can do with the platform and channel, however it is also about attracting young talent away from the allure of tech startups.
“Rather than actually thinking how do you work with startups, we also needed to think about how do we bring that culture into what we’re doing, that’s the most important thing to think about,” Mitchell said.
“These people who were involved weren’t just sitting behind a desk at Mondelez, they get to observe something very very different.”
“Those people who worked on this they changed forever, and we don’t want to lose those people, we want to encourage them, raise a new culture where we work and certainly change what we do in market.”
When discussing Mobile Futures, Mitchell said the program would be rolling out to China next and Australia would see another iteration of the program.
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