In a fragmented media landscape, rational messaging doesn’t convince or persuade audiences anymore, according to Kellogg’s director of breakfast brands, Will Brockbank.
Instead, Kellogg has shifted the way it promotes brands within its cereal portfolio to drive into the emotion of its audiences.
“The cereal category has been perceived as very rational for years,” Brockbank says.
“We’ve had a bit of a shift with certain brands to looking at more emotional communication, and that’s where we’ve seen more success. I think the days of using rational messaging to convince are really gone.”
Kellogg isn’t stepping away from rational messaging altogether – rather it’s no longer using it as a tool to convince or persuade. Instead, it is using it to validate people’s emotional responses – a strategy that Brockbank says has seen its advertising effectiveness increase “exponentially”.
“You’ve got to consider the way that consumption of media is moving, in that push modelling is no longer going to be touted as norm – it’s going to be more of an on-demand model,” Brockbank explains.
“If you’re constantly working on a rational message, it’s going to be more filtered and more ignored. People are going to use the communication they demand, and that is going to be more emotional, more engaging, and it has to inspire.”
Brockbank was speaking as part of a panel session at the Australian launch of adtech company Unruly’s viral video tool ShareRank, which measures the likelihood of a video being shared online.
Other members of the panel included Bupa director of data and digital Karen Davies; University of SA’s Centre for Digital Video Intelligence director Dr Karen Nelson-Field; MediaCom Beyond Advertising head of content strategy and distribution Tom Robinson; and King Content global head of video Christie Poulos.
Brockbank’s comments chime in with Nelson-Field’s research into online video, outlined in her book Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing.
The key to video sharing, she believes, is having creative with strong emotional content.
“We tried to unpack to see if a particular type of talent [or content] – dog, baby – was actually a driver of sharing, and the reality is that it’s not,” Nelson-Field says.
“So dogs can be successful or unsuccessful. But the core of the success actually depends on the degree of emotion.”
Brockbank also points to the need to balance a reliance on emotion with data, to ensure that brands aren’t “operating in a vacuum”.
Bupa’s data and digital director Karen Davies agrees that creative and data are “two sides of the same coin”.
She says: “At Bupa, we have only three rules, and the first rule is that you have a creative lead and technical lead on every customer problem that we solve and every outcome that you want to achieve.
“We actually reorganised our operating model and brought all of the skill sets together that we needed to achieve a customer outcome.”
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