Increasingly creative approaches to marketing are being employed by companies desperate to find new ways of reaching consumers.
In stark contrast to the ease with which consumers could be targeted in the days when terrestrial TV was king, advertisers nowadays have to come up with ever more ingenious ways of reaching their audience.
Some of the methods advertisers have hit on seem breathtakingly clever: in a
recent example of what could be called ‘extreme marketing’, Nestle’s marketing company deliberately jackknifed a lorry full of its client’s chocolate, spilling boxes of the bars into Covent Garden where it is estimated that some 70,000 passers-by – all potential consumers - helped themselves to the apparent bounty.
Such methods are also breathtakingly risky, from a PR point of view. Daring stunts like that necessarily rely on an element of luck, and you would need to be ready to leap into crisis-management mode in the event that luck wasn’t on your side – imagine the potential PR disasters that could have followed injuries to other road users or to passers-by! A client needs a strong stomach when contemplating advertising by these methods, especially if their brand has previously suffered from
poor publicity.
Of course, there is always the danger that your public won’t admire the stunt, once it is revealed for what it is. It seems that there is a still a strong swell in public opinion that appreciates honesty when it comes to branding, and that companies that are prepared to be transparent in their dealings reap the rewards.
If traditional advertising lacks credibility with today’s consumers, I’m not convinced that stunts like the one Nestle pulled will ultimately succeed in improving the situation, because consumer credibility can only last as long as the deception exists. Once consumers know that they have been duped by a stunt, however clever, any credibility may be lost.
