Can advertising alone change your brand?
For years, we’ve been lamenting the over-reliance on mass consumer advertising in hospital marketing, and with it, the exaggerated expectations many organizations have for such a tactic. At the same time, and in the same vein, we’re imploring hospitals to take brand building seriously, focusing on the idea that hospital brands are built and improved through the patient experience. “Advertising doesn’t build brands,” we’d admonish, “the experience you deliver does.” And we’d often trot out cases like the Mayo Clinic or Starbucks as examples of companies that have built world-renown brands without any advertising.
So what do we make of the Old Spice Guy?
You for sure by now have heard of the amazing success of this advertising campaign, both in breaking through with a hilarious ad during this year’s Super Bowl and breaking new ground with a real-time social media event featuring the Old Spice Guy responding to tweets with equally hilarious video spots. (For a nice recap of this success story, see this article in the New York Daily News, or check out some of the videos on the Old Spice YouTube channel.)
Perhaps even more significantly, the Old Spice Guy has utterly repositioned the Old Spice brand. Perhaps you remember the old Old Spice guy – he was a close relative of the Mrs. Paul’s fisherman, or at least that’s how my brain remembers him. (Or maybe there were a lot of cable-knit turtleneck sweaters, I’m not sure). Old Spice was an aftershave in a little pale ceramic bottle, and it was my dad’s aftershave, or maybe even his dad’s. I admit I may have used some in high school, but that’s before I was exposed in college to the real world of fashion and fragrance, and my old-school Old Spice was quickly relegated to the back of my closet.
With this new campaign, Old Spice has become a hip brand, your son’s (or grandson’s) toiletry. So, doesn’t this go to prove that, yes, in fact, advertising can overhaul your brand? Well, yes and no.
Yes, in that the Old Spice Guy campaign, and others like it, do show that the right advertising approach can rework certain brands (and let’s not kid ourselves – the social media component is a brilliant extension of that advertising effort, but is still, all the same, a promotional tactic). One key here is that Old Spice is a consumer product, and so often with a consumer product, the brand is the product. Meaning Old Spice is simply a body wash with a certain chemical composition, a certain smell, and a certain feel. How that chemical mix is positioned in the consumer’s mind is very much up to how it’s packaged, what price it’s sold at, what advertising supports it, etc. In that way, Old Spice and many other consumer brands are dependent on their advertising/promotions to shape their brand.
However, it’s different with more complex product brands or service brands. In these cases, it is very much the experience or offering delivered that shapes the brands first and foremost. If one day Old Spice is positioned as a cheap cologne for old men, and the next it’s positioned as a savvy body wash for young studs, that radical transition is possible with the right supporting packaging. But that’s not as simple with a hospital. If one day a hospital has a brand as a run-down, low-quality facility with cranky staff and mediocre physicians, that brand can’t simply be repackaged and sold through advertising as a cutting-edge, sophisticated medical facility with first-class service. Unless all of those aspects actually change, the brand remains the same. Ergo, unless the underlying truth of the experience changes, you won’t be able to change the brand. For a complex offering such as a hospital or insurance company, it’s difficult to alter that brand truth, and it often takes significant time and money. With a simple consumer product such as Old Spice or vodka, the product is very simple, allowing for many other components to help shape the brand in whatever way is desired. But in the end it comes to down to a simple branding truth: your desired brand position must reflect your actual brand delivery.
With all that said, I’d love to see the Old Spice Guy replicated in healthcare. I can here it now:
“Hello ladies, I’m Dr. Awesomeness. Look at your doctor, now look at me. Now him, now me. If only your doctor was as awesome as me, you’d be happier. I’m on a horse.”
Even though Old Spice attempted to repackage themselves with their new branding, the fact remains: it is still a smelly body fragrance with a similar chemical compound that my grandfather used.
Advertising does not replace or improve a brand – regardless of the company or industry; if it’s a product or a service. Advertising might be able to move a consumer’s mindset, but for only a limited amount of time. Soon enough, the consumer will wake up and smell the…aftershave.