76 / 120
AD-ITIVES
Hello, My
Name Is
IKEA acknowledges
consumers’ true feelings
with a humorous
ad campaign.
If you’ve ever put together a piece of
furniture from Swedish retail giant IKEA,
you know that its products can make or
break just about any relationship. The
same goes for the holidays, which is when
IKEA rolled out a clever ad campaign
that renamed its popular furniture after
the most frequently Googled relationship
issues by Swedish residents.
IKEA’s Retail Therapy website pairs the
problems with a product aimed at helping
solve the issue while also filling a need for
home furnishings. Want to get your man
to say ‘I love you’? Buy him a magnetic
writing board. Is your sister’s stuff taking
over your shared bedroom? Tell Mom and
Dad to buy that storage bed.
If retail products can meet those
personal challenges, imagine what
promotional products do for corporate
clients. Does your cubicle neighbor bring
tuna for lunch? How about some custom
air fresheners? The problem-solving
possibilities are endless.
MARKET SHARE
Come Together
Combine creativity and data analysis
to take marketing to the next level.
In the marketing world, the creative minds and the analytical ones often find themselves
at odds. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Loren McDonald, a marketing evangelist at IBM,
recommends teams turn to something he calls ‘center-brain marketing.’
Center-brain marketing combines the strengths of right-brained individuals
who can help connect brands with consumers through emotions and targeted
customization with the strengths of left-brained data experts who have a handle on
SEO, conversion optimization and technologies such as artificial intelligence.
To make center-brain marketing work for your team, McDonald recommends
implementing the following:
Strategy
—Take charge of the data and insights produced by technology and build a
business strategy around them.
Technology
—Take stock of the technology that best fits your organization’s needs and
can produce or refine the data that helps you gain and keep customers.
People
—Encourage collaboration between creative and analytical teams so that the right-
brained employees let the data drive creative direction, and the left-brained employees
can understand how emotion influences the creative process—and the buyer.
Process
—Working together doesn’t begin and end with a mission statement. Teams
must work together when moving from calendar or campaign-based marketing to an
automated marketing approach.
74
|
MARCH 2017
|
THINK
by
Jen Alexander