Optic’s SnapChat filter.
Here’s the challenge: build a brand in an era of total brand clutter and advertising noise. It’s a tall task in the current market environment, but it is mine in my day job. Success or failure of that task lies almost entirely at my feet, because I’m given a free reign and budget to try just about anything. Trying anything and sometimes stretching the limits of superiors’ tolerances has become the name of the game of brand building for me. However, some of the most effective measures have occurred when the focus is on anything but the very brand I’m tasked with building.
Discreet branding is a thing. I recall reading about it in MBA classes and more recently in HBR. Most of the case studies on it are from very large firms with significant brand equity already in the bag, so when I attempted it with our new, local brand it was purely experimental. So, my tactics.
In recent weeks nearly all of my middle-aged co-workers have hoped on the SnapChat train. We had a little SnapChat 101 in the office one day, which included everyone using the app to sweep their contacts to see what other adults were on there. Scandalous. At any rate, I had already got the company on SnapChat and like a proper Millennial, I’ve been using it personally for awhile for some good and bad stuff [don’t ask my friends about the sleeping pill incident].
Nonetheless, our local county fair was a few weeks ago. Given that everyone from my own Mother on down is using SnapChat on a daily basis, I thought, “What if we put a fair-themed filter on there for the week?”
Fast-forward six hours and our creative agency had already designed a geo-filter and I already had it purchased. The theme was regional and our logo was fairly discreetly placed in the bottom of the filter. It was geo-fenced to the fair grounds because I quickly found that geo-fencing the whole town was probably going to max my company credit card.
My expectations for this little endeavor were fairly low. To my knowledge no local/regional company had ever used this medium, so I was lab-ratting this with Optic. Then the first night of the fair I saw tweets from people way younger than myself…about our filter!
Then I started hearing from employees that their kids or their friend’s kids were using the filter and talking about it. Okay, so at this point I’m getting kinda amped up about my experiment.
Feeling good about this, the second night of the event our company was serving beverages (read: beer) at the fair. Because honestly, if you want to build a brand you sell beer, right? This in itself was a form of discreet and an all around positive PR gig for a team in which serving alcoholic beverages is an ironically appropriate task.
While bartending we tried another one of my experiments. This year we handed out 120 free t-shirts (beer, free tee’s…I’m really unoriginal). Only these weren’t company t-shirts. Like the SnapChat filter, they were dialed back and seizing on this recent trend of regional/state themed attire. In our case, they were Southeast Kansas (SEK) themed. Our company logo was small on the back of the shirt.
As the team and I were handing them out we had multiple people ask for a larger size than they needed because they assumed it was going to be the typical free tee with our brand slapped all over it. We’d hand them the tent size they asked for, they’d look at it, then they’d ask for the proper size because…they actually wanted to wear this free tee!
Needless to say, the shirts disappeared quickly. In hindsight, I should have bought more than 120. Next year I’ll up my game.
So, results. Like I said, my expectations for the SnapChat venture were nonexistent. It was $160 so I didn’t really care how it ended. Then I logged in after the week was over and looked at the analytics.
Our filter that was geo-fenced to a 14,000 sq-ft area for a four-day event that was slated to attract *at most* 1,000 people….got nearly 11,000 impressions. Color me geeked! I was completely shocked and elated with the results. But more important was the fact that our brand was getting in front of 12-20 year olds…a demographic that baffles even this 26 year old when it comes to marketing to them.
The day after pulling the SnapChat results I was shopping in Target to resupply my diet of yogurt and Oreos. As I’m strolling down one of the food isles, I run into someone wearing one of our shirts from the fair. Admittedly it was difficult for me to contain my excitement, but I didn’t want to come off stalker-ish.
Bear in mind this Target is 30 miles from where the fair was located. Nonetheless, my brand was proudly displayed on the back, just as it was on that SnapChat filter nearly 11,000 times for about seven seconds a pop.
Given the average attention span is only seven seconds, do I really need more as a marketer? Arguably, no. It’s our job now to build a brand within those seven seconds and use them wisely.
So for now, discreet marketing efforts are a little more than just an academic topic or reserved for mega-brands. My next discreet experiment is going to be a capital investment – more on that later.
Nick D. Saporito 