Content is Queen - beyond traditional advertising.

In 1908 a businessman designed a new car for the masses, and with it an approach to mass production that revolutionised manufacturing in all industries, across the globe. In 1928 another businessman drew a mouse on a napkin. Which of these two acts of creativity delivered greater value?

Well, Disney currently has a market capitalisation of $178bn, while Ford has less than half that at $64bn. This is a neat illustration of the relative importance of content versus product in 2015.*

Both Apple and Mattel have featured heavily in the financial pages recently. Mattel have posted ‘disastrous’ results, driven in part by the decline of Barbie https://fortune.com/2015/01/26/mattel-ceo-resigns/ while Apple have posted the biggest quarterly profit in history, driven by a phone that (among other things) plays movies. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31012410. This reflects a wider trend that we’re all spending much more time looking at screens, particularly on our phones https://www.psfk.com/2014/06/internet-trends-2014.html

The fundamental reason for Barbie’s decline is that little girls want Frozen now. In a world where screens are ubiquitous, a blockbuster like Frozen helps Anna and Elsa to occupy a much more specific place in the minds of their customers than the comparatively small, fragmented and occasionally controversial content created by Barbie. https://mashable.com/2014/11/21/mattel-apologizes-barbie/

It’s also very interesting to see that the film Kingsman, just released in the UK, was designed from the outset to have a range of clothing, giving an extra revenue stream for the film. The film is clearly a powerful advert for its clothes – it will be interesting to see whether there’s a good fit between the viewers of the film and the price of the clothes (at circa ￡1500 for a suit). https://www.mrporter.com/mens/designers/kingsman?cm_mmc=GoogleUKc-_-UK+-+Designer+-+Kingsman-_-Kingsman+-+Brand+%2B+Designer-_-kingsman%20mr%20porter-mt:e-sn:g&mkwid=swL5EIepl|42643929817|kingsman%20mr%20porter|e|c&gclid=CPfiruCJ-8MCFeHItAodVgYAHw

This is an even more content heavy approach than that favoured by Red Bull, whose business model is looking increasingly like that of ESPN, and decreasingly like a classic soft drinks company. https://mashable.com/2012/12/19/red-bull-content-marketing/ . In summary, we are seeing both media owners seeking new revenue streams by selling product, and product owners winning consumer attention by creating disproportionately large amounts of content, making traditional marketing seem thin and unconvincing.

So where does that leave us, as normal marketeers in FMCG and service businesses? How can our old fashioned brands compete when new products are marketed through full length movies, and steal market share as a result? It seems pretty clear that last century’s model, of selling a product brand with occasional 30 second TV appearances, has a lower impact than a truly content led model. A brand like Tropicana, where normal (very nice, very smart, very hard working) brand managers in a normal office environment in a normal company will struggle to make lots of great content because they can only do a limited amount of advertising, and struggle to create low cost 'home made' content.

Conversely, content comes easily to a startup business like their closest UK competitor, innocent. This is because in a business like innocent, the brand values are hammered home all the time, everywhere. People are hired for having good cultural fit, and everything from the interior design, to the culture, to the reading material on the loo https://twitter.com/innocentdrinks/status/347408079291314176 reinforces this. Consequently it is easy for a business like that to create very convincing content, even when it’s just the employees doing it for their own entertainment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0S3ZmsENSs creating what Richard Reed describes as a ‘congruent’ brand.

These would be my top 3 considerations for brands wanting to succeed in an increasingly content dominated world:

• Take a fresh look at your brand values, and the values of your business. How should the brand express itself in content? How could you do this on a far greater scale than you do today? What can you curate, and what should you create?
• Understanding the needs and attitudes of your most involved buyers will help you set your content strategy. You can get this information through tracking data, segmentations and direct consumer interactions. Be as targeted as possible. We’ve got some great tools and techniques for this at The Value Engineers if you’d like help.
• Wally Olins famously said that culture and brand are virtually indistinguishable. If you work in a grey open plan office, possibly marketing multiple brands, is it really going to be possible for you to live the values of each brand and create great content? Is there a good fit between the values of your brand, and the values of your business as a whole? How can you restructure your working environment to support your brand and its culture more effectively? It will be harder for the team to create lots of well branded content if they aren't immersed in the brand values.

These are challenging times for traditional brands. Getting back to core values and finding new, more congruent ways to express them, will be the secret to success in the future.

*I may have pinched this comparison from this somewhere else – in which case apologies for appropriating it. Possibly Wally Olins. I can’t remember.