Are brands, like Valentine’s Day, on overload?

I was killing time the other day thumbing through the Valentines Day cards at a local grocery store. (I say “killing time” because I’m cynical … and because I have no need to purchase a card since there’s no one other than my dog and he has no use for paper cards, regardless of the “holiday”.)

As I was reviewing the plethora of cards, I took notice of the various headings separating them. For Him; For Her; For Husband; For Wife; For Dad From Kids; For Pre-teen Boy… And it struck me: How many ways do we need to say Happy Valentines Day? On the whole, it’s all so overwhelming and “noisy”. Valentines Day, as a brand, has gone overboard! But then I realized, in the context of a single card, in an envelope in my own hands away from everything else and the message is more digestible, easier to understand. I realized, there’s a marketing lesson in this love-overload experience.

In my work, I’m often challenged by ads that want to say everything in one creative execution, presumably to make it “work harder”. It appears as though the company is looking for a silver bullet that delivers their entire pitch instead of building the conversation one selling point at a time. Like the wall of Valentines Day cards, they’re trying to force their brands to be all things to all people – at the same time.

Brands and even products are umbrellas for communications.

Features and benefits, the selling points, become the subjects of individual creative executions, not support-points shoehorned into one ad. Consider the iPhone commercials, a product that seemingly is all things to all people.

In the first year, we saw variations on a single theme: One device for all your needs. Sure the spots showcased the picture functionality, the email, contacts and, of course, the phone; but the single focus was the same: one device for all your needs.

As the public became familiar with the device’s capabilities, we saw more specific spots focused and drilling down on key features and benefits such as the Internet or more recently the App Store.

Again, the new spots showcase a diversity of applications in action, but focus on the one overriding message of the ad – the App Store, a unique benefit to the iPhone, provides endless convenience to the user.

In fact, if you go online and search for iPhone commercials (be careful, there’s some spoofs out there), you’ll find there are tens and hundreds of individual executions, each singly focused on one key message point, distilled to be understood almost universally. Clarity of message – a single focus, a feature and benefit fully explained to its basic and universal conclusion – is more effective at engaging and penetrating an audience than giving all the reasons to buy a product up front.

To make an execution work harder is to narrow the message to a pin point, not widen the scope and diffuse its potency. In this case, the message is, “Happy Valentines Day.” Expressed either as a pre-teen rockin’ V-day or just a simple, “with love…”

The message doesn’t change, how we say it might, but the take-away rings clear.

[Photo: photo credit: Damian Cugley]