Just think about all the great feature films, animated movies, and music being produced by Hollywood using a universal language touching millions of people around the globe, inspiring them, making them believe in dreams and encouraging them to think out of the box. Not to mention the power of converting viewers into film lovers for the rest of their lives. Sound familiar? Pretty similar to anything and everything a great brand and its marketers have ever hoped for & worked for.
So how come that Hollywood gets it?! How come they know how to evoke the same, and I mean the same, feelings in everyone and everyone gets it, when global brands are struggling to motivate and evoke emotions in consumers on a global scale. Having said that, thankfully there are numerous exceptions of brands that were able to touch and truly interact with a global audience, winning their hearts and brains over. But by principle I still believe there is a lot to learn from Hollywood, from storytelling, character building and dramatizing to moving images, and executing immaculate and picturesque sights and sounds.
When I'm looking at TV and movie characters who have outlived their original context, making new lives across several fashion, lifestyle and consumer goods categories, with sometimes even greater success, I cannot help but wonder why advertisers, by definition remain more reluctant. Yes, reluctant. Regardless of certain efforts of mind- blowing and over-provoking masterpieces, they produce as those great campaigns’ sustainability fall way behind the sustainable success of any “hollywoodization”
If only advertisers could for once move from the global communications idea back to the global brand idea, and actually believe that finding the WHYS will lead them to succeed in creating the HOWS.
The idea of establishing global brand teams not only focusing on segmentations aiming to collect differences, but creating common denominators out of the segmentation, and leverage these understanding and similarities into contemporary characterization via true and relevant storytelling.
Look at animated movies as an example. < Bare with me > At first glance, by brand definition, arguably THOSE brand teams would have marketed these cartoons to kids and young adults, co-promoted by children products. But thankfully Hollywood got it right and managed to market cartoons across multiple segments, bringing both the young and elderly to the box office, bringing multiple races and psychographics to the counters of department stores, purchasing a piece that resembled the story once told by these cartoons.
Maybe if we could look at segmentation marketing from another angle and not only from its original definition of finding subtle differences as a success factor, but similarities!
Brand developers tend to get lost in the process of hunting differences and gently omit even more powerful similarities which could have been proved right across different segments to reach a common goal and build a story that speaks for all, a story that relates from itself to themselves.
Says who?! Says a guy who loves observing things and sharing them with like-minded individuals, who happen to be readers from different countries with different cultures and backgrounds but have things in common.
PS: Oh and the English-written Hollywood sign which became one of the most recognized symbols in the world that everybody seems to understand. More to come on international names and slogans.
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