The CEO of a fintech startup wanted us to explain what marketing is to her team. She wanted us to keep the explanation simple and easy to grasp. Given that the company’s team members were mostly finance professionals, she wanted us to demystify marketing and present it as we would to children.
Well, as a marketing advisory, we are pretty well-versed with this brief. Because, we always believe that every creative idea that we deliver for our clients must pass the six-year-old test. Which is, it must be so simple that even a six year old must be able to understand it, relate to it and act on it.
To us, at firebrand labs (FBL), marketing is expert storytelling.
Now, stories are never boring. But storytellers can bore you to death. Which is why we believe in telling stories that are true, authentic and relatable.
Importantly, we tell them really, really well – expertly.
Let’s explain how we do it.
Recently, an iconic model, actor and filmmaker named Kavita Chaudhary passed away. She famously appeared as Surf’s (a Unilever brand) Lalitaji in a television commercial in the ‘80s in India. That particular advertising campaign for Surf was created by legendary adman Alyque Padamsee. The campaign showed Lalitaji, a housewife, bargaining aggressively with streetside vegetable vendors. Yet, when it came to choosing the right detergent for her home, she said she always chose Surf. Although Surf was more expensive than other brands, she explained, it was superior in terms of quality and performance. So, Lalitaji’s clarion call was: “Surf ki kharidaari mein hi samajhdhaari hai.” Which is, “Buying Surf is always a smart choice.” The Surf ad had a simple, powerful storyline: The lady of the house is smart. She knows when and where to bargain to save the household money. And, of course, she also knows when not to compromise on quality. Which means she would rather buy a high- performance product that is more expensive than settle for something that was cheaper and of inferior quality. The Lalitaji campaign worked wonders for Surf. The detergent’s sales went through the roof. In fact, most Indian housewives prided themselves with buying Surf because it portrayed them as smart people making an intelligent choice.
At FBL, we follow the style of storytelling that the Lalitaji ad campaign championed.
We believe that storytelling is the one key principle in marketing that will never quite change. Any brand, product or service, therefore, must keep their focus on storytelling when planning a marketing campaign. We encourage our clients to answer some simple questions that will aid them with keeping the campaign sharp:
- What are we trying to tell our customers about our offering – our product or service?
- Why must the customer buy our product or service?
- Is our storytelling authentic?
- Does it present the features of our product or service in a simple, easily understandable manner?
- Does our storytelling end with a call to action – preferably a direction to purchase our product or service?
We used this approach with the fintech company as well when they invited us to be their outsourced, extended chief marketing officer/office (ext. CMO).
The storyline we came up with for their campaign was to encourage homemakers to use the fintech firm’s specialized app for monthly payment of bills. We invited homemakers to break free from the challenges of paying their monthly bills for utilities to multiple parties using multiple apps and platforms. We talked about how simple, efficient and safe our client’s app is. Critically, once a payment method was linked to this app and it was set up to pay a bunch of bills each month, all it required was a monthly, one-time approval for bills to be paid. Which is, the app offered a single window payment service.
This meant that there was no need for the homemaker to remember multiple passwords or generate multiple OTPs. Our campaign for this client ended with a call to action and a powerful promise: “Download the app. Pay your bills. And chill.”
Sure enough, the campaign delivered remarkable results for this fintech company.
Clearly, storytelling through a product or service campaign is an art. At FBL, we specialize in this art. That’s what makes us tell campaign stories expertly.