DAGMAR
Is there anything that distinguishes super successful marketing campaigns from the rest? How do they manage to get it right, time & again?
Is it enough to just have / create a great product?
If you look at it closely, the one thing that makes some products great & sets them apart is not in just how they are made but also how they manage to resonate well with a really large sects of people / markets. But then again, that’s usually not the place it all starts from. It could all begin around the way products are able to create an aura with the larger audience & that is:
well before they decide to login
much before they go overboard to create that account
well before they can sign-up
Yes, it has directly to do with the marketing bit. And when I say marketing, as much as it is about the advertising campaigns themselves, it is also about the way they happen to be designed with absolute relevance to the problems that resonate with the sample space, the copywriting blended with just the right quantum of snark so that hits home well.
Addendum note:
“When I started my career with TECH I somehow (and unexplainably so) had a penchant, a desire, an unrelenting passion for marketing (well, back then it was advertising especially), so much so that I happened to put the term [“Ad Critic”] down in my CV under a section called hobbies which is not so common today but used to be about 2 decades back.”
It’s one thing to look at an advert after it is made & then speculate / commentate about what’s right or wrong. But, to get one’s head down, put in a certain quantum of work, collaborate, ideate towards building what could be a winning campaign is always miles ahead the former lot.
So, what exactly is it that goes on to define the success of such a campaign?
Is there something of a magic formula / a secret sauce to get it all right time & again?
Face facts. Many a time one could also feel eternally lost in the chasm of building products that fall in the range of decent-good given how they just don’t manage to take off.
On hindsight one thing that comes out prominently as lacking in such a scenario is good marketing.
When many orgs. may invest a significant amount of time & money on marketing, there is a quaint possibility that they may be off by a good margin when it comes to maintaining relevance, gaining feedback from the markets, factoring it all in & managing to quickly alter their course by gleaning on those insights thus obtained.
So, what do you do? Do you tear up an already launched campaign, scrap / bury it & get on to launch an entirely new one? When that may seem the most desired result sometimes for some orgs. given how they don’t hit the expected results, that certainly won’t be feasible at any org. irrespective of its size.
“What could look mammoth / convoluted does indeed have simple solution & most times it isn’t as much about the end result as it is about the process / approach one takes towards getting there”
DAGMAR
Call it a framework that marketing teams have been employing for years now, it still has relevance & proves to be effective if adopted even in today’s SaaS era. More so, it is something one ought to know, be well aware of as a product manager.
One of the chief teachings that the model underpins is advertising shouldn’t be selling a product directly to the market, it should rather take a step back & focus on the intricacies of the product, its value as relevant to the user base they are trying to target.
DAGMAR the acronym stands for Defining Advertising Goals for Measuring Advertising Results. The model suggests 4 important steps towards enforcing & enabling one to maintain objectivity right through from the ideation / conceptualization stage up to the post-execution / conversion stages.
1. AWARENESS
The objective firstly is to CREATE AWARENESS of the brand, a hint about the BRAND POSITIONING & the VALUE ADDITION. Unless the audience perceives a given brand well they wouldn’t proceed with it, whatever be the product. Building awareness could be looked at as comprising of 2 individual parts:
The Value (the immediate value the product would add to the users from the very time they take to adopting it)
The Brand Positioning (the product & given the value it would add ought to help the audience place the brand & do it well irrespective of whether or not they would convert)
2. COMPREHENSION
Once the basic awareness around the brand is built, it needs to get deeper by another level towards comprehensively establishing what the name of the brand stands for, and I certainly don’t mean NIKE being taken from the Greek words meaning Victory here. The comprehension here ought to be directed towards deeper understanding of the variety on offer by the brand, may be a bit about the markets the brand would be looking cater to, which is to say the MARKET POSITIONING.
3. CONVICTION
Every brand ought to use emotional storytelling towards building a bond with the audience. It may not just be enough to build a positive image here, one ought to go above & beyond mere brand & market positioning. And, that could be done over the use of something like PRIMING or CO-PROMOTIONS.
4. ACTION
The final step over the funnel here would be targeted at evincing a response & hopefully a positive one from the audience so as to add semblance to the whole exercise & be able to reap rich rewards thereof. And nothing better than watching a campaign lead towards the conversions as expected firstly & then proliferating into prolonged sales, word of mouth referrals & the products finding their holy grail that is “MARKET FITMENT”.
Let’s take an example to understand the application of this framework better. And what better than one of the most world-renowned campaigns by Nike.
Nike's "Just Do It" campaign.
Let’s try & break it down now.
1. Awareness
If you look at NIKE’s ads over the years the one thing that comes across prominently is absolute premium quality & nothing short of that, which sticks as for BRAND POSITIONING. If there’s one notion that resonates well with anyone across age groups about the brand NIKE it is how they are a premium brand, nothing short of perfection when it comes to the quality of their products.
2. Comprehension
Take a look at the visuals, branding, copywriting combines to create an impact in the audience’s head of being a premium footwear maker who caters to literally every segment / need / use case there is which is what anyone today would remember over the first instance they ever saw an advert from NIKE, irrespective of the medium (TV / video / banner / internet /magazine) they came across it sorting out the MARKET POSITIONING.
3. Conviction
Nike is known to tie down a few popular athletes towards creating campaigns targeting specific products / or even get down to designing an entirely new product range like JORDANs targeting COPROMOTIONS.
4. Action
If one’s talking of a print medium, the action could be invoked by clubbing the campaign with a small note in there that reads “VISIT YOUR NEAREST NIKE STORE…, TODAY” or something like “VISIT OUR WEBISTE TO KNOW MORE…”. CTA (call-to-action) to encourage viewers towards clicking on a LINK to visiting the website or look for more engagement on social media could be the most viable route given the online medium. But, the ultimatum is leading the audience towards buying those products.