‘Desirable brands have authentic conversations’

Kicking off what was dubbed ‘the branding session’ on day two of the MRS Annual Conference today, Damian Symons, managing director for Europe at Clear UK, said that research has proven that the most desirable brands have the most “authentic” conversations.

“There is a huge proliferation of marketing messages out there,” he said. “You need to have powerful, emotional conversations.”

Pointing to an ad for perfume brand Chanel No.5, featuring Brad Pitt making some pretty lofty claims, he described to delegates how the ad had backfired, with The Guardian, for instance, describing the campaign as “the smell of disaster”.

“Often brands have lost touch with reality and are no longer connected to the category. Consumers turn off from this type of emotional fluff,” he said.

Richard Bates, Samsung’s European insight director, claimed that the technology firm has made a decision to focus on the touchpoints where consumers experience its products, segmenting consumers according to how they make decisions, and “what drives them in life”.

Comparing Samsung’s promotional activity unfavourably with some of Apple’s, Symons added: “Let’s bring the conversations back to reality. Consumers have lives beyond what we’re selling.”

Presenting at the same session, Dr Ali Goode of Linguabrand pointed out that 54% of what companies say tends to use “generic” rather than “distinctive” language. And market researchers, he said, are particularly guilty of this blandness of approach – with 62% using the same language as their competitors or peers.

“There’s a huge conversation going on across social media,” he said. “You can actually start defining brands by what people are saying. Language can be thought of as big data, too, and if you reflect the language that people are using back to them, you create a natural connection.”