Mia Fileman
Hello everyone!
Welcome to Campaigns for Social Impact!
I know that you are all starting to join me. I’m Mia. I’m your host for today.
I’m super nervous! I’m sharing that now – mostly because of my internet connection which dropped out spectacularly last time I hosted one of these panel events. Rest assured we have contingencies upon contingencies.
If I leave, someone is going to step in for me. If you leave, please wait a couple of minutes and then join us again. We are not going to be going anywhere.
Thank you so much for joining me and this stellar line-up of panellists today!
I would like to begin today by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather to live, learn, and work. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.
I am proudly working from Larrakeyah Country in the Northern Territory today.
I am going to flip over and tell you a little bit about what we are going to talk about today.
Let’s do that. Nothing like some technical difficulties to start the day off right. Okay. Take two!
I am Mia Fileman. I am the Founder of Campaign Del Mar. I will be hosting today.
Campaign Del Mar offers training and mentoring to founders and marketers. Helping me facilitate today is Campaign Del Mar’s digital strategist, Emily Lambourne. She is going to monitor the chat today.
It would be great for you to all introduce yourselves in the chat now. Let us know which country you are working on. There will be an opportunity a little bit later on to share your social media handles so that you can connect with everyone else on this panel discussion today.
We are also going to take some questions from all of you at the end. For now, we would really appreciate if you could keep your cameras on so we could see your beautiful faces. It is so much easier talking when we can see people but keep your microphones off.
I have been running marketing campaigns for 21 years. I am a career marketer. I have worked brand-side, agency-side, and now entrepreneurship. I have run campaigns for Witchery, for (4:42 unclear) for the Darwin Festival, but nothing has been more rewarding in my career than creating impact campaigns.
Most notably, the More Aboriginal Teachers Campaign, a social distancing campaign during COVID, the Witchery White Shirt Campaign. I have worked on two Responsible Gambling campaigns and an Illicit Drugs Campaign. I can say with full confidence that campaigns are the most effective way to build your brand but also to create impact.
Today is brought to you by Campaign Classroom.
We mentor and train you over 10 weeks to create your own campaign. Our next cohort starts March 6 – two weeks away. It is a very high-touch program. You get together with me and only 20 other people once a week. This is for those founders and marketers who are up for a challenge. This is not Marketing 101. This is not basics. This is really tier-two to tier-three education.
Today, we are going to talk about the intersection of marketing and advocacy because campaigns are not just for moving product and services. They have the ability to change the world, so it is with absolute great honour that I introduce you to our panellists today. We have:
Christina Hobbs is the Co-Founder and CEO of Verve Super. Verve is an ethical superfund created by women. They are levelling the playing field for women by giving them back financial power. Their members have ensured that over 220 million dollars of super is invested in areas other than fossil fuels and not in destructive industries.
Patricia Kaziro is the CEO of Impact Business School. Through the practice at Impact Business School, Patricia moves people from cultural cruise control to respectful cultural curiosity. She guides CEOs, HR executives, and learning and development professionals to drive systemic change and organisational performance through diversity, equity, and inclusion best practices.
Ruth Haffenden is the Global Head of Brand and Marketing at Boody. Boody is Australia’s first big-corp underwear brand sold and loved in over 15 countries. They are on a mission to change the world just by convincing you to change your underwear.
Tim Snape is the Marketing Director of Heaps Normal. Heaps Normal is an award-winning, best-selling, and best-tasting zero-alcohol beer company in Australia. They are normalising mindful drinking to change Australia’s drinking cultures.
Welcome everyone! Thank you so much for joining me!
I’m going to ask the first question to all of you. Maybe if you wanted to have a go at answering this one first, Christina, but what is the definition of impact in your category?
Christina Hobbs
Thanks for that, Mia!
For us, it is really around building the world for women and closing the retirement savings gap. That is our north star. There is currently a 37-percent retirement savings gap between men and women.
In terms of our business and the impact that we can create, we have identified three areas where we can play. One is around supporting women with their financial knowledge, learning, and building skills and confidence to close that gap; one is around advocacy; and the third one is how we invest – how we collectively use our money to invest – not only in making sure we have got good screens (8:40 unclear) during investing but also making sure that we are investing positively in initiatives that are supporting women.
For instance, part of our fund invests in social housing or disability housing. We invest in women’s microfinance in the region. Really using superannuation money in a different way. We have got different impact indicators that we track under those three key areas of influence that we think we can have.
Mia Fileman
I love that! Knowledge is absolutely power but then you are also putting your money where your mouth is – literally. I love that!
What about for you, Patricia? How do you measure impact in your business?
Patricia Kaziro
Thanks, Mia! Thanks for the warm introduction!
I wanted to share a little bit of about the story of how Impact Business School was founded because it was really through my own experience of studying at a business school here in Sydney that compelled me to set up Impact Business School, and I didn’t go into a business school thinking I would, by no means.
Basically, I got in there in my mid-30’s. It was a real boys’ club. I had previously studied in an arts environment, in an education environment – very female-friendly learning environments.
As an educator, this was a glaringly obvious problem – that I could come in at that age, having already set up a community service in Sydney, having achieved things in my career, and I was being treated in a way that was really inappropriate – in some ways, sexist. There were a few different dimensions that made it a really toxic learning environment.
I said to myself, “Well, how can this be done differently and better so that nobody else has this experience?” I didn’t limit that to women. I thought, as an educator, anybody should be able to come into a business school and learn about business in a really positive way.
From my experience – and also a capstone project that I was researching at the time about the universal barriers that women in business face – what was becoming obvious is that cost, affordability, and access are the issues that are problematic in an education space.
From a casual observation, I could see that there were no mums on the program. I thought, if you had young children as a woman, you wouldn’t be able to come into this business school and study every Saturday and Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights. It was very intensive.
There were men on the program with young kids who were doing that. I thought, “We need to reengineer this to make it accessible for women with kids. Also, people from regional areas.” It will be scheduling our programs during the day.
Cost is another massive factor for me in the education space. I really believe in education for all. Having grown up with an African father who had a lot of opportunities in life through education, that was really drilled into me from a young age – that education opens up opportunities.
From my perspective, I don’t think education as a business should be 50K to do an MBA. I really want to disrupt that notion and make the program easily accessible and affordable so that anyone can have that opportunity to better their life and break some of the barriers that they face for the demographic that they are. Money, cost, accessibility – they are quite big factors where we are planning to make impact by breaking some of those traditional notions of what a business school needs to be.
Mia Fileman
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that story with us.
It’s very, very inspiring. Such a great example for other education-based business.
Patricia Kaziro
Thanks.
Mia Fileman
What about you, Ruth? What’s your definition of impact in your category?
Ruth Haffenden
Impact is such a broad term. I will drill it down to what it is perhaps most known for – the impact on sustainability and the environment. That is ultimately where our business came from and where it has its roots in.
It is probably best explained in our company vision which is to champion a future fit for all. That really stems from the fashion industry is one of the most polluting in the world. It is one of the largest consumers of water and the fast-paced consumer environment that we have gotten used to of newness and freshness and 100,000 skews that drop every week is not sustainable. It can be done differently.
For us, it was trying to understand how do we ensure that clothes are made better – that they are made more sustainably with more sustainable fabrics, that we understand our supply chain, that we treat our suppliers well and the people that all contribute to that end product.
For us, it really comes down to that sustainability element. But, in that champion a future fit for all, it is also around inclusivity and ensuring that everybody first can access a sustainable product – keeping that price point as something accessible – but also from a diversity inclusion perspective.
I am fiercely passionate about ensuring that the people that are in our advertising and marketing materials reflect the people that are buying our products. I would have loved growing up to see people that looked like me in our advertising. It is really marrying those two things together – our sustainability and inclusivity for that future fit for all.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and we are going to show everyone here today your campaign.
It definitely ticks that box in terms of inclusivity and diversity. I saw some comments in the chat about how much they love Boody underwear. I am wearing my lucky Boody.
Tim, what is the definition of impact in your category?
Tim Snape
Our vision as an organisation really is to change and evolve Australian drinking culture and to move it away from that traditional focus on drinking in order to get drunk and all the negative flow-on effects from that – from a public health perspective and things like domestic violence.
What we really want to do is to refocus Australian drinking culture on all the good things – the good parts of it – whether it is hanging out with your mates at the pub or seeing your favourite team play or enjoying a gig at your local.
We see the impact of our brand and our products as really driving and facilitating that change without preaching or pushing and giving people a viable option to help them reduce their alcohol consumption and the negative effects that come from that.
Mia Fileman
I love that. We are going to really get into how you approach this because it is very interesting from a behaviour change perspective not to hit people over the head with it but accept that, as humans, we are fundamentally flawed, we are going to make mistakes, and we are going to slip up, and normalising that that’s okay, and that’s part of the process. I can’t wait to have that chat with you.
Let’s get talking about campaigns for social impact.
Christina, how do we get people excited about super?
Christina Hobbs
Really good question. We never tried. That was how we built our brand.
We play in a really interesting space in the super side where it is a service that everybody pays for but probably more than half of Australians don’t even consider it a service. They don’t consider it something they’re paying for. For many people, they actually don’t consider it theirs, so the amount of people that think that their employer chooses their super.
I guess my back story and why I was so passionate about it was I had worked for the UN for 15 years before starting the super fund. I could see this enormous shift on how capital was being used globally for good, but there wasn’t too much of that happening in Australia yet, particularly on the gender side.
For me, it was really how do we start these conversations. For us, this super fund will only succeed if we can do two things – one is through our coaching, learning, mentoring, and all things that we do on that side, we can actually give people tangible things that they can improve.
People in our fund are mostly women – 95 percent. We do have a lot of non-binary and men as well who support our mission. But if we can really support them to have a change in their life, we know they will go and tell people about that then they will get their friends to join.
The second side was, if we can engage people in all of those stories about what they are investing in, we can make this feel like something really exciting. For us, in the current world we live in at this current time, so many of us are really overwhelmed by a lot of the big challenges that we face.
Being able to position superannuation as this really important thing – that, by the time you are retired, it needs to be hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million dollars – so why not choose where that super is going and then ensure it is somewhere where that money is being invested for good?
For us, it was really about inspiring people about investing in renewable energy projects, investing in some of these microfinance projects, and really engaging our members and showing them about the financial terms that they are getting, but also the impact that they are having.
To answer your question, we never bothered to engage them too much in superannuation itself but rather around the impacts that their money can have and their ability to impact their future through managing their money better.
Mia Fileman
I think that’s great – this whole idea of “don’t worry, we’ll handle the nuts-and-bolts side of it; we’ll focus on the bigger impact” is really a clever strategy.
As a newly minted Verve Super member though, I found that the customer journey with you has been so seamless. You present yourself as a super company unlike any other – really casual language, really friendly. You use Oprah Winfrey gifts. It is very much inviting, as you said.
Patricia, you started your career on the ground level as a case worker in a well-known community in Sydney. What do you think actually moves the needle in terms of creating impact?
Patricia Kaziro
I started my career in Redfern. If you’re not from Sydney, it’s an inner-city suburb that – although it’s been gentrified a bit in the last few years, and you’ve got wealthier people moving in – there are a lot of are lower socioeconomic groups living in the area. It’s been a kind of troubled suburb for many years.
My first experience of working on the ground level taught me a lot about how to create impact. I think we’ve got a lot of fantastic models now – like the B Corp model which is the highest level of certification in creating impact-based businesses.
But what I always come back to is some of the first things I learnt in that year of being a case worker on ground level. To give you an example, I would sit in my little office and see probably eight to ten people a day as an employment consultant.
I would be talking them through how to get a job as a long-term unemployed. They hadn’t worked for a while. They would come to see me – for me to help place them into a job. What would come up through these sessions was that there were actually all these other issues that stopped them from getting a job and staying at a job.
It might be that their housing was insecure. Or the family dynamic – there could have been family violence or issues within the family. Social isolation is a massive issue in that inner-city suburb. Some people have come out of incarceration recently, so they’re not used to functioning in society. Getting a job actually isn’t the highest priority. There are all these additional needs that need to be solved to get them into a job.
The lesson for me there was that I had to work with other service providers in the area and other people creating impact on ground level to jump all these different hurdles, to try and connect them with resources that would end up helping them to get a job and to stay in a job.
For me, that lesson is really about collective impact. We can’t create impact alone – not one of us who has the vision and the passion. If you really want to create true social impact, give people resources, and improve their living conditions, I believe you need to be doing that in conjunction with other people.
The learning for me as I have gone along in business would be teaming up with other impact partners, particularly if you didn’t start your career on ground level with a background in social work or something.
Team up with other organisations who have been tackling social issues for years because you can get so much more done with what you want to do through business and with your vision if you are working with people who are familiar with issues on ground level.
Having a team around you, doing community-based work, and starting these conversations with people out in the community because ultimately that’s where the real change from my perspective happens. It happens in the community. It’s not top-down with politicians. A lot of campaigns have had a lot of power through starting conversations with the everyday person.
Community, connection, and impact partners are what I think really shifts the dial in creating impact.
Mia Fileman
That is such an important lesson about putting collaboration ahead of competition. Also, making sure that you come face to face and on that ground level with the community that you seek to serve.
For the campaigns that I’ve worked on for the Northern Territory government, they were like, “You need to go out to indigenous community and you need to spend time with people there so that you can deeply understand and not just assume we know what people want.” Like you said, it’s quite layered.
Patricia Kaziro
It is. I can give you another quick example.
To your point, last year, I was mentoring a leadership team from a foundation called Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation in the Philippines. I was helping them to create a campaign about their microfinance for low-income and impoverished women.
With my lens of privilege from Australia, initially, I was thinking, “Why would you build a business?” You would build a business so you can create more impact, further in a field, and make more money.
In talking to these leaders who’d worked directly with the women, the learning was that their needs are very simple. They start a business to buy a toilet for the home. They start a business to put their kids through school. It’s a completely different perspective that I would only gain from having the conversation.
Mia Fileman
Totally. Absolutely.
Ruth, we’ve been taught in marketing that you should have a single purpose message. Don’t give too many options; they will choose none. But you have two! You have a dual purpose. You need people to buy the underwear, but you also need to communicate all the sustainability and ethical elements of the underwear.
How do you balance both? How should brands balance both?
Ruth Haffenden
Firstly, understanding and acknowledging that balance is probably the first steps. It’s easy to come straight out of the gate with your sustainability message. “We’re doing a good thing for the planet, so you should buy this thing because we should all help the planet.”
Actually, all this research that we see around sustainability, it’s the top priority – certainly for Gen Z. It’s the only thing they’re going to choose. Then, we actually see all this data that says that sustainability probably ranks at number three behind comfort and value.
Do you have to get those things right first? Because, ultimately, people aren’t prepared to compromise enough on the actual product that they end up getting. They don’t care enough. They probably don’t care enough to buy it again if that product is not superior.
For us, it has been about how we find a way to talk around doing the right thing – that one step that you can make that’s extra is as easy as changing your underwear – then communicating that actually it is then on us to make that product so incredible that you will continue to buy it – both because it makes you feel good but also because it is the most comfortable thing that you have ever worn.
Yes, treading that line very carefully, but understanding that they are both as critical to the continuation of the business because, if people don’t come back for more, then we don’t have a sustainable business to be able to move that purpose forward.
Mia Fileman
Yes, that is such a great insight.
That’s not to criticise consumers. It’s just how they purchase. We need to understand that, at this stage, they are not willing to trade of the quality, the fit, and the fashion for sustainability as we are today.
Ruth Haffenden
Yes.
Also, why should you? The consumer has such a demand of expectations on the product, and we are facing tough economic times. It’s hard to make people part with their money. They work hard for it, and they want that product to be excellent and sustainable.
We should be holding ourselves in that high regard. We shouldn’t be talking around sustainability that makes people constantly think like they have to compromise. It’s ensuring there is no compromise – I guess that’s the golden ticket for us.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and that would be the same for you, Tim. It’s like, “This beer has to be the best-tasting beer there is.” I love how you’ve actually put that to the test and recently won an award on the taste of the beer so that you can say, “We can walk and chew gum. We can do both things. It’s not either or.”
Tim Snape
Yes, and that was a really critical ingredient of our process when we started. We had to make beer that tasted like its alcoholic equivalent. Otherwise, we weren’t going to be listened to.
Luckily, we’ve got some really great brewers onboard. They’ve done a really fantastic job of doing that. That has really laid the foundations for everything else that we’ve done.
Mia Fileman
Fantastic. So good.
This is for everyone. Versus other marketing efforts or other strategies that you can use, why are campaigns so effective at getting your message out there?
Do you want to start us off, Tim?
Tim Snape
Sure. I think campaigns mean different things in every business.
For us, it’s really about telling those bigger-picture brand stories that have the potential to drive longer-term growth that, at all levels of the marketing funnel, but particularly at the top, while every individual’s social post or email or digital content or event might help, it’s going to slowly chip away and craft our brand story.
A campaign gives you the opportunity to do something that’s highly focused, highly concentrated by creating a platform, and it really helps drive economies of scale in your messaging impact which I think is the biggest outcome of any campaign.
It’s so important for a small and evolving business like us to have opportunities to bring it all together and talk in a unified voice for a specific period of time so that we can communicate that personality in a really concentrated way.
Mia Fileman
Yes, that is such an awesome campaign definition. I really struggle to define it because, as you said, lots of different people have lots of different views about what it is, but to really reiterate what you said, it’s about that focused effort around one or two objectives, and then that multichannel approach, and that consistency and cohesiveness in message that really makes a campaign a campaign.
What about for you, Ruth? Why do you think campaigns specifically are so effective?
Ruth Haffenden
I would echo what Tim said. It’s that hero moment.
You’ve got all of these communication channels and frameworks. I’m sure everyone’s got pillars all over the place of things that they need to communicate as you have new products and seasonality and “let’s be reactive!” and “there’s a TikTok trend!”
Campaigns allow the whole business to focus on the one thing they want to say and the one thing that they would love the consumer to take away. It pulls back the noise for us and gives us that moment of real reach normally because campaigns get your biggest budget, especially from a media perspective, and attention on something really singular that we would absolutely love the consumer to know about us. If we could leave them knowing that, then that’s a win for us.
That’s how we view them here, certainly. It’s the big message.
Mia Fileman
The big message. The big idea.
You’ve touched on something that’s really interesting about perceptions around campaigns – that they do generally represent the biggest investment that a brand would make in their marketing.
Christina, is it possible to run a campaign on a small business budget – on a bootstrap startup budget? Because I know that, with Verve, you take a very grassroots approach to your campaigns. Can you talk us through that?
Christina Hobbs
Yes, definitely.
In general, we have a very grassroots budget, you could say. Our campaigns reflect that.
From the really early days with us, it was also thinking through how we engage our members and get them to tell their friends through a particular campaign. Many of our campaigns have actually been politically focused campaigns where we have been engaging our members.
We did a really successful one called Make It Free which was all around making childcare free. We led that in partnership with a few other organisations and with Georgie Dent who was a journalist at the time who was writing a lot about this. It was really a way of showing our members – but also to the broader public – that we really stand for something.
We identified a lack of universal childcare and the flow-on effects of that as being one of the biggest issues behind the super gap. It was really aligned to what we were trying to achieve with our members, but it also gave our members the opportunity to jump on to something, to share it, to invite their friends to sign on to the petition, and to track our progress as we pushed that issue into media and as members of this group when I met with different politicians.
Now, as we’ve seen some of these policies come through the Labor Party, it’s been through with the Labor Party being in power, it has given us the opportunity to go back to our members and actually say, “Look at what we all achieved together. We worked hard.” I think that form of campaigning has been really powerful for us. It has helped us really stake our grand claim as being authentic in the space that we operate, but it has also really helped drive some of that conversation.
We got something like that off the ground with really limited budget. It was all about coordinating with other groups to amplify our voice and what we were trying to do.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and I love how resourceful you were with your media channels actually going to your users and getting that user-generated content to amplify that message as opposed to paid media.
Christina Hobbs
Yes, exactly.
Mia Fileman
Do you have any thoughts on this, Patricia?
Patricia Kaziro
I actually love to look at other industries outside of business because I think there is a lot that we can learn in our communication strategy in business from other really established channels.
I have had a go at campaigns with a little eco store that I set up during COVID. That was basically to help people transition to plastic-free living. As an educator, my natural drive when I communicate is to educate. I can’t help it. That’s what I love.
I look at the campaigns in that sense – as a great way to help people to learn because, in terms of behaviour change, part of that piece of the puzzle at the beginning to help people actually take action on an idea is really an education piece.
Through some of the little social campaigns that we ran for GAEA Living, the beauty of it was you’re helping people to transition mentally and understand the process of making the switch to plastic-free living because they’re not going to just start buying your products if they don’t understand what the substitutes are and the reason for doing it, so part of the campaign is really about awareness building.
As we move forward with Impact Business School, what actually really interests me is a lot of the political campaigns. If you’re in New South Wales at the moment, you’ve probably started to see Labor pop up on TV and on radio. I was checking the dates about a week ago. I was like, “That’s exactly two months out from the election that Chris Minns and the Labor Party have started running these ads. That’s their lead-in. It’s two months to try and get elected.
If you look at political campaigns in the US which usually run for a lot longer – I believe it’s about 12 months – it’s a fascinating process to actually watch how people project and communicate what they stand for and the issues that they are going to solve with potential constituents.
I think there’s a lot we can learn from that in business because, as Christina said, it’s about showing what you stand for and also what you don’t. I think how that translates to business is “What are your values? Why do you sell these products? What are you doing that’s good? What’s the positive impact?” It’s partially an education process, but as a business, we are also helping people make a buying decision.
You want it to be as good as a product that’s not ethical or sustainable – quality product – but it has all these added features that are positive for the environment or for people. The campaign is about communicating all of that and the time sensitivity is great. It’s a structured process. It’s got an end date. It activates people.
We can look to humanitarian campaigns such as Earth Day. There’s a particular day each year that we switch off our lights to be sustainable, but then there are lead-in events coming up to that.
I think campaigns are really effective to activate people and help them make a buying decision or choose you as a brand.
Mia Fileman
Totally.
There is so much overlap between a political campaign and a marketing campaign. I use that analogy all the time.
The comments that you made around lead time are really interesting because you also touched on something really important which is that, at the heart of creating impact, we need to change behaviours, and we need to change perceptions, and we need to change beliefs. That does not happen overnight.
Some of these beliefs and behaviours are intergenerational. They are baked into our psyche. To get people to change that is going to take time. If you are wanting to create a campaign with impact, don’t just rely on a multichannel approach and going out there with a great message and great visuals.
Also, give yourself enough time to let that happen and let that change occur over time which is why we see campaigns like “Are you OK?” and “Movember” are really hitting their straps five years down the track. They have mobilised a bigger and bigger audience, and we are now starting to see that the narrative is really changing.
Ruth, could you help us break down the essential ingredients of campaigns that capture attention and drive impact? What do we need?
Ruth Haffenden
Sure, I’d say it’s different from every business – depending on size and the message that you are trying to communicate.
For me, the key fundamentals are:
Simplicity of message – you have such a short amount of time to capture someone’s attention. If it’s not simple, they’re highly likely to miss the point.
Creative standout – when we’re talking about creative standout and brand campaigns, we don’t always have to be talking about TV. It could be a social media post. It could be an email campaign. But how is it different? How does it scream that it’s your business and it’s for this campaign and make people stop and look?
I think the statistics on the amounts of pieces of content we see as a consumer every single day is in the tens of thousands, so being able to have that person stop and look does require something to look a little bit different or look a little bit out of place. It’s taking time on that brand art direction and that simplicity of message which means “stop, look, got message.”
The thing third I would say is giving it time. (40:02 unclear) depending on the (40:17 unclear) three or four times – or up to 20 to 25 if you are selling something slightly more complicated – before they are prepared to shortlist you and actually start thinking about you as a possible purchase. It’s thinking around how long you need to be in market before you start getting that level of traction.
Those considerations in place would be my fundamentals and a robust testing framework because, ultimately, if you don’t know whether it’s worked, you don’t know whether to go again, where to go bigger, where to go smaller, or where to adjust your message for that next campaign best.
Mia Fileman
How do you do that at Boody? Do you do focus groups? What does that look like?
Ruth Haffenden
All sorts of things.
Big brand campaign would be brand tracking. That is through focus groups and lots of quants. It’s about the understanding of the people that saw the campaign. “Did the message resonate with them?” “Did they take it away?” “Did they misattribute the ad?” That’s always the most painful one – when they remember it, but they thought it was Bond’s.
“Did we land those core values?” “Did they take comfort and sustainability? Or just sustainability?” That brand tracking piece for us is hugely important, but ultimately, we are also a business, so how did that actually translate to sales? It’s trying to identify the link between, for example, the latest campaign that ran last year. Can we attribute uplift in online sales to key metro areas where we have those billboards?
It’s trying to understand all of those data points that we have within the business and trying to link them together to tell a nice story post-campaign of all the things that might have come together for positive. Also, all the things we might have learnt along the way – chatting to customer service, how many extra tickets did they have, what were those tickets about, where did we move the needle, and how do we feed all of that data and information back in ideally.
Mia Fileman
That confirms something that I say to our customers all the time – that great marketing is just really great listening. Just listen and your audience will give you all the answers to all your marketing challenges. I absolutely love how important that is. Also, how every campaign will teach you something – whether it’s an outrageous success or it barely met expectations. Everything is theoretical until we actually take it to market, but banking all those learnings is so important.
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, absolutely. I would say, if you haven’t learned something from your campaign, it wasn’t brave enough. It was possibly a bit too safe. I absolutely couldn’t agree more on listening to your customers – whether that’s all the feedback that we get online on our social channels.
We have an exceptionally engaged community which I’m hugely grateful for. I have the best insights. As a marketing team, we frequently sit on the phones with customer service. The insights there are absolutely incredible.
Absolutely listen in absolutely anywhere you can. Some of the best product innovations have come from our customers.
Mia Fileman
When I joined both L'Oréal and BIC, I think it was week two. It was like, “Great! Here’s your email address. Here’s a T-shirt. You need to go and hang out in price line for a day. You need to go and hang out in office works for a day because you need to see what it’s like at the ground level. You need to watch people as they approach the category, see how they make the decisions, answer their questions.”
They’re like, “Which one’s felt tip? Which one’s gel tip?” and really get on that ground level. I absolutely love that.
Tim, an essential ingredient for campaigns is the brief and really starting with the campaign brief. What do you think makes a good brief?
Tim Snape
I think it’s one of those magic questions in marketing.
For me, it’s all about understanding and having a great relationship with the creative or whoever is responding to that brief and really understanding their skills, their strengths, and their weaknesses so you can craft an brief that finds that sweet spot between being prescriptive enough so that the outcome is clear but giving that person enough creative freedom to come up with something brilliant.
We work with a whole bunch of different freelance creatives and individuals and agencies to a lesser extent, and we have a couple of in-house creatives as well. Understanding their skill sets, where they can really flourish and take a brief and build on it is one of the key things when it comes to creative briefing.
I think the other thing is setting really clear objectives and distilling a brief down to that one thing that you are trying to say and that one thing that you are trying to get the audience to feel or do. Also, being clear on why a creative brief is right for your brand. I think we’ve touched on it before.
If you are not able to articulate why your brand could create a piece of content that no other brand can, the you are missing a trip there. We try and make sure that everything that we do, we can really own as Heaps Normal.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and you do it so well.
I really love what you said about the fact that you in house a lot of your creativity at Heaps Normal as opposed to sending it to an agency to do it. Can you talk us through that at all? What does that look
like?
Tim Snape
That manifests itself in many different ways.
We’ve got an internal graphic designer who does the bulk of our day-to-day graphic design work. Luckily, one of our founders is also a graphic designer and creative director by trade, so that helps a lot.
When I speak to a lot of other CMOs, they’re shocked by the idea that I’m often just on Instagram, creating content myself, posting it, and seeing how people react to it. That’s everything from going along to a gig and capturing a can in the hand of someone performing to me ripping a scene out of Wolf of Wall Street, reposting it, and seeing how it lands. Thankfully, it landed really well.
We do experiment, push the boundaries, and do stuff that is a little bit dangerous every now and then. That’s all of us – myself as marketing director, our CEO, our creative director, our graphic designer. We have a lot of fun with it.
Back to that point of being out there with your audience, I spend so much time at the pub, at gigs, at sports events, talking to our communities, talking to bartenders, having alc and non-alc beers, and engaging with people who are drinking them. That’s such an important part of understanding any product and being a good marketer.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and I love how you’ve bred a culture of creativity in your organisation as a result. It’s not siloed.
When I was a brand manager, it was like, “No, you crunch the numbers, you write the boring briefs, and somebody else gets to have all the fun.” Very much we centre externally to our agency. They were the only ones that could be trusted to create ideas, but it seems like everyone can have a crack at Heaps Normal.
Great ideas can come from anywhere, especially from the brand custodians who are coming face to face with the clients every day and who have the insight and the data at their fingertips to help inform this creativity.
Tim Snape
Yes, we don’t work with any creative agencies, really. We do everything in-house – apart from video production and more specialised skill sets. We do pretty much everything in-house. We have a whole bunch of forums we use to generate new ideas.
We have a really solid content and marketing strategy that helps guide a lot of that decision-making, but we really let anyone – from our ops team to one of our brewers to our CEO – come up with an idea for a campaign or a piece of content. As long as they can answer a few key questions which we standardise, in many cases, it gets over the line.
Mia Fileman
That is so cool.
Ruth, what you said earlier about the fact that you can’t just rely on the fact that you are doing something good for the planet as that being the only thing and saying, “But it’s sustainable,” you not only have to have the great product but you also have to push the creative needle and really challenge yourself to come up with something that’s going to capture attention, that’s going to be memorable, that’s going to be emotional or humorous or visually grabbing. It’s a big job!
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, absolutely! It still needs to appear to be underwear that people want to wear and can see themselves wearing – looks comfortable, looks stylish. Ultimately, that is going to be the thing that drives the change in people’s behaviours. The sustainability is the feel-good element.
The other route you’ve got is queueing up the problem. As we talked about, you have to show people what the problem is and then sell them the sustainable solution. For us, that negative real doomsday-esque communication that “the world is ending” and “you must help by changing your underwear” was not going to be the way that we were going to go about it.
In the same way that Tim talks about people reducing their alcohol, it’s not about being negative about alcohol consumption. It’s around just having that conversation around doing one thing better today than you did yesterday. If it’s one step forward and three steps back on your sustainability journey, that is cool – not a problem. It’s just one more thing that you could be doing.
For us, to lean in and tell the horror stories about the world ending and trying to sell a solution there doesn’t feel right and doesn’t feel Boody. The sustainability journey – we’ve still got so much more to do. It felt like the wrong pedestal to be on. It was about making that decision of “how do we do those two things at the same time?”
Mia Fileman
And making it aligned with your brand personality and brand DNA.
That hard-hitting tactic can work really well in certain industries. We see it with TAC commercials for road accidents.
Interestingly, the Heart Foundation did a very hard-hitting campaign where it was like, “I don’t care enough about you.” Basically, it was two family members, “I don’t care enough about you to go and get my heart checked. I don’t care enough about you to go and have a heart screening.” It was literally a mother telling a child, “I don’t care enough about you to do anything about this.” It ended up getting taken down. I feel like that was a real sledgehammer approach that you could have used a little tap.
Ruth Haffenden
Also, they don’t work.
From years of agency history before Boody, I’ve had many of those briefs in from accident commissions and government. All the data suggests that every time they’ve gone with the Grim Reaper approach, it hasn’t changed behaviours. On those rare occasions that someone’s stepped out of their box creatively and done something positively reinforcing, it has actually changed those behaviours.
I think it’s also about looking at consumer psychology. People don’t like to be told that they’re wrong in doing bad. It doesn’t help change their behaviour, so how do we positively reinforce that one good thing? It’s as easy as changing your underwear. Make it feel small, accessible, simple, and a good thing – not “shame on you!” That doesn’t seem to move the needle.
Mia Fileman
That’s such great insight. Thank you for sharing that. It’s super valuable.
Christina, what media channels have surprised you in this process with Verve?
Christina Hobbs
Virtually all of our marketing now is digital. I think that’s been really surprising. Even though we’ve had quite big pieces in major newspapers, we’ve seen that our greatest hits have been often taking that news and repackaging it on digital channels, and then using that to really amplify the message. I think that’s been really surprising.
We use digital – following on from what Ruth was saying – to really drive what those larger expenditure campaigns are going to be. We also manage all of our creative in-house. I think what’s been super useful for us is when we’ve seen Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, some things have worked and then we’re able to be like, “Why do we think this one thing has worked?” and “How do we double down on that?” or “How do we test what’s worked about this?” I think that’s what’s also been super valuable.
We’re in the process now. We’re soon going to launch a new product. We’re gearing up for a campaign that will be a few hundred thousand dollars which will be the biggest amount we’ve ever spent on one single campaign, so it’s really substantial for us, but we’ve probably got a good three to four months’ lead in before that of testing through socials, which ads are getting engagement, which messages are working, which I think is a really great way to think about campaigning as well.
By the time we roll out the boards and that larger public expenditure, we’re not going to be questioning, “Is this going to resonate? Is this going to hit the mark” because we already know that it will.
I think digital for us has probably been more surprising in how we can use it, but probably also from the angle of how quickly it changes. For us, what we realized is it’s not about necessarily having the best creatives on board. It’s about having the best processes for creative.
Our mantra is really that we’ll win when those processes are really tight. When we have quick cycles of getting content out, being quickly able to work out what’s working, what’s not working, why, and doubling down on what is working. For us, it’s really about quick cycles and really having those data-driven processes in place more than anything else now.
Mia Fileman
I love that suggestion of using your social and digital channels as letting off some test balloons to see whether this campaign idea is going to resonate.
This is exactly what I would recommend for people who are maybe going to launch something that they think could be a bit polarising or even controversial. By doing softly testing that through your warm audiences, it can really raise the alarm if there’s anything that seems slightly off, and you can tweak it in time.
Christina Hobbs
The other thing is sometimes you want to spark those conversations. I think the best thing I’ve probably been told from a marketing perspective – I think I’ll probably screw it up – is like just not being noticed. Whenever we’re bordering on “is this a bit too this?” or “should we pull it back a bit?” the greater risk is that actually no one talks about us this month, so let’s get it out there.
Mia Fileman
I agree.
Playing it safe is the riskiest business strategy of all.
I also really loved what you said. Because you have used a lot of PR to increase the reach and awareness of Verve, you are featured in all sorts of different media outlets, but the fact that you then use that PR coverage and use it within your own channels to give that stamp of credibility and authority but also – from my perspective looking in – you’re taking your members on a journey with you.
Every win for Verve is a win for them. They can go, “I remember as Verve was starting out. Now, look at them! Christina is being interviewed on Women’s Agenda for the 15th time!” It’s like more and more people are noticing Verve, and that mobilises your members, right?
Christina Hobbs
Yes, definitely.
There are so many elements, but it does give that sense of “we’re part of something that’s growing.” It is really important for trust and credibility. It also gives your members something to share or talk about – whether it’s something about super like, “The CEO for my fund wrote something on that. Go and read this.”
If we’ve done something more about women and money, we do a lot of pieces on reclaiming stories about money. Those are the kinds of things that our members will then seek out and be able to share it with their girl friends or that kind of thing. I think it works in many ways.
Mia Fileman
It’s so good.
Are there any other tips that you can share about how you’ve gone into turning your members into evangelists? Because I’ve never seen this before. They are so invested – pun intended!
Christina Hobbs
Yes, it’s pretty crazy.
In our industry, the average fund has a negative NPS. Our NPS is about 76. It’s extraordinary for the industry. To be honest, I think it’s probably less about what we do and more about the state of the industry when we started.
Even the fact that it’s called financial services, there’s so few people that actually consider that they’re getting a service. It’s more like, “Let me call up my superfund or my bank and beg for this thing or wait on hold.” I think the service is improving in some areas.
For us, it was starting from the beginning and being like, “How do we create great service?” and actually thinking through the customer experience and providing that service. We are still a small organisation, so I wouldn’t even classify what we’re doing now as great, but when I think of how tiny we are and how much better our service is and race with the big players, I think it’s unfortunately probably more of a reflection of how poor some of that service is.
But I do think the one thing that we’ve invested really heavily in – and not every business can do this, but because we do have smaller numbers and members or users or customers compared to a Boody or Heaps Normal – is that we have really invested in showing personal interest to those members.
You may have known, every time a member joins, we try to give them a phone call. Some people hate it; some people love it. It’s just to say, “Hey! We’re here. Can we help you?” and really trying to be as personal as possible and invest in giving people time although we’ve probably behind on every single industry standard in terms in that we spend on customer service staff. I think that’s been really important for us.
Mia Fileman
I think you care more.
Also, what I’ve noticed when it comes to mobilising your audiences and getting them to share user-generated content, leading by example is a great way of doing that.
The more you’re sharing user-generated content across your channels – which you do all the time – the more members go, “Oh! They would be interested in sharing my story and my perspective and my views!” It sets that example for other members to follow suit because they know that they are not going to waste their time making a video that you are not going to want to showcase or share with the community.
Christina Hobbs
Yes, exactly.
Mia Fileman
I want to go through some examples now. We’ve spoken about the anatomy of a great campaign, the essential ingredients of a good campaign, but let’s talk through some examples. We’re going to talk through two examples – Boody’s official underwear of the entire planet and Heaps Normal’s Normal July/Do Your Best.
I’m going to try this screensharing thing again. Wish me luck. We’re going to play a video and then we’re going to talk about it.
“Humans. What unusual animals we are. Off we search for new worlds with so much still to do on the one we leave behind. It’s a big job making our world a better place, but getting started – well, that’s as easy as changing your underwear. Boody – official underwear of the entire planet.”
Chef’s kiss! I love it! So good!
Talk us through it, Ruth. What did you do there? What’s the magic ingredient?
Ruth Haffenden
I’m hoping that all hallmarks of good campaign planning are present and evident.
I think the main (61:43 unclear) that sits behind this was really the insight that consumers really (61:49 unclear) too much around sustainability often in apparel. We had our B Corp status, but the research suggested that people don’t really know what that means.
It’s so hard to unpack the issues with fast fashion, the way we do things different, why bamboo is different, and renewable resources. You can imagine this brief turning into this unwieldly thing that you can never communicate succinctly and singly.
Really, the strategy was as simple as – rather than unpack all of that for people – who epitomises sustainability? Who would bring credibility to this just by having their name and face associated with it because they have that level of integrity that is undeniable nationwide?
Hence, we landed on Dr. Jane Goodall, and went through a rigorous amount of testing with her in terms of being up to that standard. She’d never worked with a brand before, so it was very rigorous before she agreed to work with us and put her name to our brand and our product.
It really was that simple – if we can’t unpack it, then how do we instantaneously have that recognition from the Australian consumer that goes “Boody, sustainability, got it!” It really was that short and sweet.
I guess the other piece is the art direction. It’s not very underwear ad. You’re not entirely sure what you’re watching at the beginning. For us, it definitely had that creative standout that made people feel inquisitive enough to watch through to the end or stop and take notice of the billboards.
Mia Fileman
I love what you said about how the messaging can come across through other cues. It doesn’t have to be through saying it, shouting it, putting taglines on it. It can be through actually letting the power of the ambassador strategy or influencer strategy that you used to here to hit on some of those communication messages in a really compelling way.
Also, I was reading a lot of articles about this and that this was a big creative swing. As we’ve spoken throughout this panel discussion, this is really breaking away from the category. As you said, this is not a typical underwear commercial. I think that that’s what stops people going, “Hang on. This is different.”
Ruth Haffenden
“What did I just watch?”
Mia Fileman
Yes.
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, absolutely.
I think it’s really only when you look at those mood boards. We do it every time we do a shoot, every time we plan for anything. “Let’s have a look at what else is out there.” If we’re mistakeable for that, then this isn’t worth spending our money on.
I have a similar mantra of “be noticed for whatever reason that is.” It’s much better than going unnoticed. Choose bravery, really.
I think the critical part of this as well is that because there is so much to unpack, obviously, those big hero assets are one thing, but the content strategy that sat underneath that to actually unpack that for people and to actually break down what we are doing, what this all actually means, underneath all of that was also critical because you can’t really come out swinging with big lines like that without actually unpacking it across your other channels and working with your communities and advocates to start advocating and spreading the word for you as well.
Mia Fileman
Yes, that’s such a good point about the fact that campaigns have that one overarching hero message, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t unpack that for them in supporting channels. Writing blogs that go into “why do we consider ourselves the official underwear of the entire planet?” and “who is Dr. Jane Goodall?” and “what does it mean that she has lent her credibility to this?”
It’s one hero message but with a lot of detail that then goes and backs up each of that. That needs longevity. That needs more than a flash in the pan, seven days, and we’re done.
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, and it’s that detail that I would say is probably the most important bit. That is ultimately what’s going to shift. It’s all of that that’s sitting underneath it and ongoing, laddering up to what you’ve just seen in a big billboard, and it’s often forgotten. You plan the hero campaign, and the fundamentals actually go by the wayside.
Mia Fileman
Totally.
There were some absolutely fantastic results for that campaign, but we’ll move on to Heaps Normal’s “Just Do Your Best.” Let’s go again with the screensharing.
“We’re getting to that time of the year where everyone starts talking about giving up the booze for a bit, but – let’s be honest – I think we’re all a bit sick of being told what to do. This July, we don’t think it has to be boom or bust, especially when it comes to drinking. Same as we don’t think you have to be sober or not every other month.
Instead, let’s focus on making small ongoing improvements that work. We just want you to do your best – whatever that is. To celebrate you doing your best, we thought about giving away $5,000 of cold hard cash, but it’s kind of been done, so instead we’re giving away 1995’s number one leisure craft – an SPX1000 Seadoo Jet Ski! We’ll give you $3,327 to do whatever you want! Maybe buy another jet ski!
For your chance to win the Heaps Normal Jet Ski and $3,327, go to HeapsNormal.com to tell us a time you just did your best.”
I love it. It’s fun. It’s playful, but it has a serious message. Can you chat us through it, please, Tim?
Tim Snape
Yes, sure thing.
This was really based on an insight that most people who are taking part in these months of sobriety – and I think there’s about six of them now, but this one was for Dry July – they finish off the month with a giant bender.
Rather than preaching hardcore sobriety – which is what we tend away from – we are really encouraging people to do their best by making small positive adjustments to their relationship with alcohol. I think that comes through in a lot of our content, but this was a campaign that was really focused on driving home that message.
What we did is approached it in a way that allowed us to use that insight to connect with that time of year and repositioning Dry July as Normal July and expanding that idea of doing your best beyond even alcohol.
This ad was produced about a year ago now. Coming out of COVID, everyone was sick and tired of being told what to do; sick and tired of being told to be healthier, to meditate more, to exercise more, and to drink less. We were tapping into a wider cultural disdain for being told what to do.
We expanded this idea of doing your best into a bunch of little 20-second vignette videos that had people trying to do their best in various situations and recognizing that doing your best is good enough. It’s not about being perfect, and how that applies to alcohol and drinking.
To add a bunch of additional colour and flavour to it, we thought, “What’s the most ridiculous thing that we could give away to try and grab attention with a very small budget?” I literally went on Gumtree and saw this neon jet ski from the 90’s and bought it then and there for $1,500. We gave away the change from $5,000 on that.
The jet ski ended up being a huge pull for people to get interested in the campaign, particularly through things like point of sale in our wholesale locations. Most beer companies are giving away overseas trips or expensive guitars or picnic blankets and picnic setups. We decided to give away a ridiculous jet ski. We even put the jet ski in one of the Dan Murphy’s locations in Sydney to try and attract some more attention.
It was a pretty bold campaign, but it resonated really well. We ended up getting something like 10,000 entries into our “Do Your Best” competition which relied heavily on channels like Instagram to drive user-generated content and people submitting their own “Do Their Best” stories.
I guess the other point to note in this ad is that it was completed on an incredibly small budget. We shot it in one of the venues that stocks our beer. Every single character in the ad – apart from Gen Fricker who is a friend of the brand – was a staff member.
We always use staff for ads and try and offset some of those costs. We tend to try and do things on very small budgets and focus more on the idea than anything. In this case, it resonated quite well with our drinkers.
Mia Fileman
I love it! So many good points there about doing more with less when you’ve got such a great creative. This is something that you said to me in preparation to this – that you can’t change the culture unless you’re part of it. I love how much Heaps Normal has really embedded themselves in millennial and Gen Z culture.
No one said you can’t have fun while creating impact.
Tim Snape
In the first year, we actually gave away one of the founders’ cars. We chose the jet ski this time.
Mia Fileman
Awesome!
All right. Get your pencils ready, everyone. We’re about to move to question time. I have a final question for our panellists. Patricia, it’s to you.
How do we make sure that our campaigns are inclusive and they speak to those people who need to hear our messages?
Patricia Kaziro
It’s an important question. I’m glad we’re wrapping up with that one. Thank you.
I would say Impact Business School has a focus on creating inclusive workplaces, and – in the vein of what Tim said – not telling people what to do. I’d love to encourage everyone here to think about how they can build their own inclusive team and really bring people into creative decision-making, marketing who are different which is representative of the population.
I think that’s so important because, when you go through the design process and you are connecting to the problem space, you have got an array of people with different perspectives who are from the community who can understand the problem in different ways.
For myself, in my marketing, I’ve had a very small team over the last few years, but I’ve had people from Brazil, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Columbia, and South Korea. I’m about to start working with a lady from Pakistan. All of these different cultural groups have brought so much for my business and forced me on a learning curve.
I’m someone who grew up traveling a lot, but it’s not until you work with people who are very different. It’s not just the cultural diversity. It can be ability; obviously, different gender and sexual identities. I would really encourage you to branch out and bring those people into the business.
On a really practical granular level, thinking through “do you need to add subtitles to your campaign?” or “does your campaign need to be in a different language?” There’s a reason why governments do that with public health campaigns – not everyone’s English is fantastic, but they are still a large segment of the population.
Imagery is really critical. I’ll drop into the chat a website where I source some images for Impact Business School of black people who had natural hair because, on other sites, you might see black people with straightened hair, but I want to see someone who’s got natural hair – as do a lot of black people. It’s about thinking through what imagery you put in.
Also, Mia mentioned before, she was consulting with indigenous people. Even if you don’t have a budget to grow your team at the current time, if you’re in small business startup mode, you definitely need to be doing consultation at minimum and trying to find out who you can chat to, who’s on ground level and understands the community if you want to sell to them, work with them, create impact for the community.
It’s not just putting your own lens onto the problem space. Doing your research with people who really understand different perspectives and who have different lived experience is key.
Mia Fileman
I love what you said about building a team that’s inclusive.
There is a Samsung campaign that launched last year with a woman running at 2:00 in the morning. Did you see that, Ruth? She was out. It was scary to watch. She’s out running in the middle of the night. It got absolutely slammed because no woman is going to go running on her own in the middle of the night.
The main comment that I saw coming out of that is “do women even work at Samsung?” because you could have just asked one and they would have told you that that is not a thing that happens. So bad!
Patricia Kaziro
I’m not going to open that Pandora’s box. You did it justice.
Mia Fileman
While you’re preparing your questions for our panellists – feel free to ask them almost anything – I’m going to do a shameless little plug for Campaign Classroom.
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All right. Questions from the audience.
From Ash, “What failure, mistake, or mishap has taught you the most?” Great question.
Christina, do you want to have a crack at that one?
Christina Hobbs
I’ve got one from when we were very early on that I think is probably a good one for people who might be in a similar situation. It was actually around PR. It was a good one for a couple of reasons.
We were doing a campaign launch. I had actually been offered some free PR support from someone. At the time, it sounded amazing. “Yes, take on all this burden and responsibility. Great!” You can imagine how that went.
Even though this person was quite a respected journalist and worked in PR, they didn’t do the job that they said they would and really left us hanging even though this was to be done with an arrangement that we would then use her services later on which we obviously didn’t.
There were a couple of really good things that came out of this for me. One was that – literally the day before we were going to launch this campaign and we couldn’t change the launch date – we realised we had zero PR. We had nothing.
Within 24 hours, by contacting all my networks, asking them if they knew any journalists, getting their email addresses, drafting our own press release, we ended up getting a six-minute segment on ABC News the following night. We got the Sydney Morning Herald. We got the AFR. We got the big pieces. That was literally by doing something ourselves.
I think a couple of lessons from us was not necessarily to do your PR yourself but, if you are in a situation where you can’t afford a PR agency, you can absolutely do it yourself. My second thing is I never rely on people doing anything for free anymore.
I think the PR was the best one. I think what we really learnt from that was that, if you’ve got a great hook, if it’s an interesting story, if you can write a half decent engaging press release, if you’re not at the point where you can pay for Mia for PR, you can actually drive your own PR and get it yourself.
Mia Fileman
Totally.
On that end, I know a few of us on this call today have done “Hack Your Own PR” by Odette. I did it and I’ve had over 40 pieces of coverage. I highly recommend it if you can’t afford a PR retainer. As you’ve heard today, PR is an essential component of campaigns. “Hack Your Own PR” is the bees’ absolute knees.
A question from Rochelle. I’ll direct it to you, Tim.
“How do you decide how many campaigns to run?”
Tim Snape
Combination of a lot of factors.
Where we start in planning is looking at commercially how many products we want to release every year. I use that as the foundation for figuring out how many major brand campaigns I can fit in around that. We’ve got a calendar that’s pretty full across campaigns, events, ambassador activity, engaging with the music and arts community, and a whole bunch of other stuff that sits in between.
The school that I’ve come from is that you try and do at least one a year, and where we’ve landed as a business is trying to do a couple of in between two to three product launches, but it’s going to be completely different for every business.
For any business – big or small – you want to be doing at least one major brand campaign a year.
Mia Fileman
I agree completely. Fantastic.
Hareta has asked, “What are the best steps you’ve taken to understand why a campaign may not have landed the way you hoped?”
Ruth, do you want to have a crack at that one?
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, sure!
I think it all comes down to that testing matrix that I talked about at the beginning. When planning that campaign, ask, “How are we going to test whether this is effective?” and doing that in a really honest way. Sometimes, it’s really tempting to spin the very best version of yourselves, especially as marketers. We have to go with our little begging bowl to the FD. You want to be able to go back with that return and say it did really well.
In terms of the steps of understanding the successes of it, it’s channel by channel. Did it set out what we intended for it to do? What can we learn? Ultimately, I think the most critical step in that process is being able to foster that relationship between marketing and commercial.
Making best friends with your CFO if you’ve got one or accounts – however that works. If that’s yourself, just reconciling the fact that you’re open to feedback, but making sure that you are comfortable having that conversation to say, “I know we talked about the sales KPI. We didn’t get there, but here is what we learned about our customer, here is what we learned about our product, and that is still valuable.”
It’s looking at that total return on the campaign outside of your marketing KPIs that it might have brought back into the business.
Mia Fileman
Yes, and it’s so important to manage your expectations around it. As a fashion brand at a low price, it’s $20.00 for a pair of underwear – or even less, potentially – you can run a brand campaign and that can generate sales straight away.
But getting someone to change their superannuation is a big decision, and that can take time. Christina might run a brand awareness campaign that gets people to know that Verve exists and sells them on the mission, and that change to Verve might happen six weeks later or eight weeks later.
Understanding your customer journey and your customer and how long it takes for people to go from knowing about you to getting them to convert can be quite different – depending on your industry.
This question is also for you, Ruth.
“With the rise of greenwashing and businesses being called out for greenwashing, has this impacted the way you approach your campaign? Are you more careful with messaging?”
Of course, it’s from Katie from B Lab.
Ruth Haffenden
Yes, absolutely.
It’s been a big year and big period of change for all marketers. It’s something that we were really welcoming of because there’s nothing more frustrating when you see messaging out there that’s not being portrayed in the right way to the consumer because it just does a bad job for the whole category when there are brands out there with a little green spin and it’s tricky to try and wade in and try to unpack why that’s not correct. Nobody wants to be in that war of words, I suppose.
I guess the stand that Boody has taken from the very beginning is around honesty and transparency. We’re lucky in that we never set out with the tone or the intention to put ourselves on a pedestal of perfectly finished, polished sustainable brands.
We’ve always given people a peek behind the curtain to say, “We’re working towards this. Here’s what we’re trying here. Here’s a new innovation. Here’s what this means.” We’ve had to do less backtracking than other brands.
For anyone working towards purpose or communicating their purpose, having that honesty and transparency of what you are doing, what you are trying to do, and what is a long way off for you to be able to achieve from the very beginning means you don’t end up in this greenwashing pickle at the end of the day when you’re making outlandish claims that you are working on but you are not quite there.
To answer your question, it has definitely made us more mindful of everything that we say and getting that feedback from our consumers of how we word things, but nothing really changed in that communication stance. It is just making sure that honesty and integrity sits at the heart of everything from the beginning.
Mia Fileman
Absolutely.
There are a few more questions coming through. I don’t know if we’re going to have time for all of them because I’m really conscious of everyone’s time.
At this point, I want to say a huge thank you to the panellists – Tim, Christina, Ruth, and Patricia – for being so generous with their time and letting us under the hood of their businesses to really discuss how they create impact through their campaigns. Thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and your insights with us!
As you’re putting your social media handles in the chat so that you can connect with other people here today, we might have time for one more question.
“How are you capturing the customers who might not yet be ready to buy?”
Maybe we’ll direct this to you, Christina. Are you trying to capture email addresses with your campaigns? Or is there anything else that you can be doing to help nurture those customers until they are ready to make that switch?
Christina Hobbs
Yes, definitely.
Being able to capture an email through a campaign is really helpful. I think Tim gave one example. We were able to do it through some political campaign we did, and we used that email to then give them updates.
Also, a simple way of ensuring you can use that email is having some really engaging regular newsletter that goes out so that, once you’ve engaged them to be on the campaign specifics, they can stay in touch with you regularly. They’re getting those touchpoints if you don’t have time or you don’t have the capacity to build out whole user journeys and flows for those people.
I think even on socials, being able to retarget those people as well is really important. Knowing that they might engage with a big brand concept but then they still need that level of social media marketing that is going to be more conversion focused. I think that’s a really big part of a campaign.
Mia Fileman
I love email marketing. I know I shouldn’t have favourite channels because they’re all my children, but email marketing is really right up there, so I completely agree.
All right. I think we’re going to leave it there for today, but thank you so much!
I definitely know that Heaps Normal has some very exciting news that they’re going to be announcing later on this week – maybe early next week. Definitely be following Heaps Normal for that big announcement that a little birdie told me.
I also know that Verve have recently launched a money app. Definitely go and check that out.
Of course, make sure you change your underwear so that you can change the planet.
Reach out to Patricia if you need help with coaching your team and building inclusive teams, embedding diversity and equity into your business.
Thank you so much for giving us your afternoon! It was such a pleasure!
Reach out to me at any time. We’re super friendly at the Campaign Del Mar team.
