A new kind of marketing is making its way into our lives, and it's hoping to win your heart.Picture this. It’s early morning, and we see a young girl waiting outside her house for a coach to pick her up and take her to a football game.
The camera cuts to an old man, waiting in his armchair for the start of the same game.
We see the coach again, delivering the girl and fans to the stadium, and cut back to the old man – but now we’re seeing him 30 years earlier – he’s arriving at the same stadium with his son.
We watch the fans, in the past and in the present, passionately watching their team. They're on the edges of their seats, they're living the highs and lows and they're doing it with dedication and commitment - rain or shine, win or lose. Love and loyalty of fans captured in an emotional 90 ninety seconds.
This is Barclays – Barclays Premier League to be precise – celebrating the dedication of football fans in a film to mark the start of the new Premier League season. Dedication is an admirable quality but not one we usually see as the focus of such high profile brand advertising – especially when we’re talking about the dedication of the public, rather than the brand. What’s going on here?
Austerity has a jostling impact on brands – pushing them in multiple directions when it comes to communicating what they stand for. Yes, consumers have tightened their belts and are not willing to pay over the odds for something, just because it’s framed as ‘good’. But that doesn’t meet they’ve lost their sense of values. Quite the reverse: if anything, we’ve seen consumers reprioritise their values and expectations of brands. Take a look at data released this week by the Sustainable Restaurant Association, showing how the public have reprioritised healthy, nutritious food to the top of their concerns while organic has now moved down the agenda.
Consumers know what they care about, and they expect brands to be caring about the same things.
This is fundamentally what a brand is about – a brand promises a certain standard, it reassures you that you can trust what you’re buying. A brand needs to show its commitment and its loyalty to you, the customer, and your interests – which include a responsible attitude towards society and the economy.
So the scandals that hit various banks including Barclays during the past few years have been doubly disastrous: they fuelled the decline in trust, and they did it a time when the public wanted increasingly more reassurance and commitment from brands.
Barclays’ YouTube and Twitter campaign to ‘thank fans’ for their dedication to football comes hard on the heels of a major new drive by the bank to emphasise its own dedication – to customers. Barclays is trying to align itself with positive social values and tell every stakeholder it’s doing so – from internal memos to employees, to speeches at business conferences, to films to inspire football fans.
It’s not the only brand crafting a position in the values landscape.Take Coca-Cola: recent months have seen a major drive by the company to scale up its commitment to getting people active – most recently through the Grandpa advert promoting the healthier lifestyles of the days gone by.
It’s good to see marketing teams responding to consumer sentiment and a real demand for brands to prove that they stand for something positive.
But are they proving it?
Marketing can be powerful, yes, but this new, savvy, technology-enabled, social consumer is looking for more than messages. They’re looking for proof. They’re looking for action and impact. And when I say looking, I mean expecting to see - because most of them don't want to have to go out there and find it, they want to experience, sense or come across it.
I’d like to see more social leadership programmes by our favourite brands. Programmes that use the skills, assets and brands of a business as a force for good in the world, creating both commercial and social impact. They come in all shapes and sizes, from Gucci’s landmark Chime for Change movement supporting women’s empowerment around the world, to Telefónica’s Think Big commitment to put young people at the heart of the business. In fact, Coca-Cola’s support for the Special Olympics – which is being significantly scaled up this year to create a ‘stronger brand’ for the event – is a nice example of doing it through sponsorship.
These are the kinds of activities that marketing teams can and do get excited about when it comes to communicating values. They’re designed to say something powerful about what a business stands for, what its values are, what impact it wants to have on the world. That’s when brand values mean something real to consumers – when they’re doing, not saying.
So I like the football fan film: why not celebrate the commitment of fans? Barclays and the Premier League are a good match, and getting personal with fans is an effective route to help make the most of an expensive sponsorship deal. But it'll do less in terms of halo effect for the brand's new positioning around commitment to customers. Until the brand does something powerful, inspirational and meaningful to show its own values in action, I’m left feeling that the football fan wins in the dedication game.
