Marketing inspiration can come from a variety of sources. Sometimes your product or service will dictate the marketing campaign, sometimes it will come to you at night or when performing an unrelated piece of work, it may come during a brain storming session, or it may come from an external agency.
Very few ideas are new. Many times, the same ideas and strategies are reworks of proven concepts. There is no reason why a campaign cannot be similar in flavour to something that has been used before, especially if it is successful. There are examples of this everywhere; if they are clever then you may not immediately notice it, if it is a little bit less thought out, then it is easy to pick.
The reason for this is that there are always competing products in the market place. If a product has been designed to be young and vibrant then all competitors will probably travel down a similar marketing plan – think of energy drinks or cola wars. Each campaign will have its own flavour and unique emphasis points, but once you break it down you quickly find that the message is the same.
Think of this as “Doing what the winners do”.
So where to start?
- Look at a competing and successful business; someone that you wouldn’t mind being like. Look at their marketing strategies and pick out the aspects that you can adapt to your own products and services.
- Look at all marketing campaigns and advertising across all industries. Collect examples of ones that you find appealing and see if you can shoe-horn these into what you are currently offering. Sure it might be difficult to draw parallels between what a steel retailer is doing to maybe a pet shop, but the underlying message might still be relevant. Think of MMMate (used by a local steel retailer) – those of you that are familiar with this direction will see that the brand is promoting mateship, trustworthiness, comradeship, trust. Could this same strategy be used in a pet shop? Sure can, because the underlying attributes would fit all businesses.
