This article was also published at OgilvyDo , Marketing Buzzar , and Marketing Magazine Malaysia
Enough has been written
about the miasma of commoditized product offerings in crowded shopping aisles
with increasing retailer arbitrage and reducing margins. Equally, there has
more hard evidence than ever before on the shifting power equation from
omnipresent brands to digitally connected consumers.
The consequent workplace
tensions of being forced to work within old world paradigms to new marketing
issues are a lived agony for many of us. One could well compare these tensions with
conservative and liberal approaches to civic problems, both well intentioned,
but one far too withdrawn into the past, while the other far too speculatively into
the future.
What is then the real path
to progress?
A starting point can be
found in the acknowledgement that conversations, rather than perceptions, are
the new brand currency. I have written in previous articles that, in a content
hungry era, consumers seek engaging experiences that they can share and talk
about with their community. Brands need to find a way into this
‘interestingness’ so that they can be the fodder for conversations between
consumers.
The question remains on how
to go about achieving this?
Enter the ‘Quirky Brand’;
where the day job of every marketer is to embed some unexpected quirkiness into
his otherwise competitive and extremely relevant, but commoditized, product or
service.
At its most ephemeral, it is
the everyday Google Doodle, the customizable name on the Coke Can or the slice
of lime on the Corona Beer Bottle. Equally, it is also the little towel
sculpture left on every Marriott bed by the housekeeping staff of the day, or
the simple scribble by the Starbucks Barista encouraging you to have a good
day.
The author continues to
remember the sheer child like delight in discovering that the door of the
Hitachi refrigerator opened both to the right and to the left, but never
together; a delight that no appliance brand has been able to replicate, before
or after that experience.
And then, who can resist the
sheer temptation of the Toto brand of Japanese bidet toilets, complete with a
control panel, sensor controlled seat warming, piped music, and temperature
controlled automatic water jets, not to mention the chiming ‘arigato’ in a
female falsetto at the end of the experience, while automatically shutting the
toilet seat?
Now more than ever, brands
need to do something surprising, provocative, outrageous or plain joyful at a
personal level to elevate every moment of interaction into an unforgettable
experience.
Quirky needs to do funny, weird,
odd, cute or silly that is also fun, intelligent, smart, witty and awesome. Quirky
comes from the human heart, not from the factory floor. Quirky uses technology
to engage and entertain, not just fulfill its functional purpose.
The advantage? Quirky Brands
create the moments that become material for consumer conversations. They excite
the consumers who are bored and looking to be engaged. And, most importantly, Quirky
Brands push people to reach the hand out to them in the aisle, purely because it
tries harder to entertain them.
While these positives are
desirable, on the other side of the coin, such brands also require marketing to
go beyond the 4P’s of functional fulfillment. It pushes marketing to become
more intuitive, celebrate creativity, take more risks, and potentially, be open
to become the butt-of-consumer-jokes.
Crucially, it catalyzes marketing
to think beyond researching relevance to consumer needs, and think about orchestrating
human delight.
As more brands get enveloped
more often in the fog of ‘sameness’, there is a real opportunity to embrace
consumer ‘interestingness’ through the consistent application of Quirky.
All it calls for is for brands
to become more human and less crassly commercial, to think beyond mere positive
perceptions and developing the quirkiness gene of the brand.
Possible?
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