How to Create Emotional Branding Campaigns that Win Millions of New Customers

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Reed.

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He is a marketer.

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He has been a creative director working with some of the largest and best brands out there, including Burger King and several others.

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He'll tell us about.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks, eric, I appreciate you having me.

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Why don't we start off by you giving us a little bit of background about who you are and what you've done?

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Sure, I started in the marketing world as an advertising copywriter at an ad agency in Chicago called Ogilvy Mather and worked on a lot of brands big brands there Somebody might remember Sears, among other things and then I went and worked in the Detroit area at an agency called Donor and then moved up here to Minneapolis and worked here at various agencies and as a copywriter.

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I really enjoyed that process.

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But, as happens, you get lifted up in the business and my last job at an agency was as an executive credit director.

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So you are like a real life.

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Don Draper right.

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A real madness.

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I've had my share of martinis, for sure.

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Also, why don't you share a story with us about some of the marketing you've done that have been the best marketing you've done the marketing at Rose Prada?

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We'd love to hear a story.

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Yeah, so this is a story about H&R Block and back 15 or so years ago.

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But it's still very relevant, I think, to today and particularly with what I'm trying to do, which we can talk about later here.

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But H&R Block had been an account at the agency I was working at for six or seven years.

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I had not worked on it.

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It was a pretty big size agency and I was working on a lot of other accounts but they announced that they were going to go into review, which means that they wanted to go look at a new resource they were going to.

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I mean, if you watched Mad Men, they're going to fire us but they offered to have us come repitch the business and see if we could still deliver.

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At that point I was asked to come in and be the creative director, to be the Don Draper, so to speak, on that, on that repitch.

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And I felt it is very rare when you repitch a piece of business to to retain it, to keep it, and even more rare is if you pitch a piece of business with a certain idea, it's very rare that idea ends up running.

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They usually like oh, we like the team.

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We didn't really like the idea, but we like the team and we like the way you guys think, so we're going to give you the business, but you have to figure out what our next campaign is.

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In this case, they hired us based on the campaign idea.

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We pitched the insight, and a lot of times people just talk about the idea, but this is critical into how you think about setting a brand and a company and a business up for differentiation and meaning, because it has to come from a human insight.

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And the insight that was offered here by what at agencies are known as account planners or strategists or whatever, was this insight that middle Americans your average middle Americans didn't have someone to take care of their finances.

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They didn't have an advocate that could look out for them.

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And that was, in fact, the strategy statement.

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We are the advocate for the middle American financial outsider.

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So I sat down with my creative partner and art director Art directors and writers work as teams at agencies and we kicked around this strategy and we came up with this idea that when you have H&R Block, you have people, so you have people to take care of your financial stuff as far as taxes are concerned.

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That's the idea we pitched in this review, and we not only won that business back, but they asked us to run that campaign and we ran it for three years and it drove three years of 10% growth each year.

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So for three years that campaign ran and I think people appreciated it because it wasn't just a brand or a company saying we do taxes right.

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A lot of brands were doing that at the time and a lot of companies still do that.

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This is one of the constructs I would offer up is I have a thing called the brand appreciation pyramid and if you picture three separate sections in that pyramid, going up At the bottom is what you say, in the middle is what you do, and at the top is what you solve.

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And then on the left side of the pyramid, you think about rational things, the rational things about the product, the benefits of the product, what you say about how the product is different On the right side of the pyramid and all that stuff has become expected when you say we do taxes right, just look, of course you do.

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That's what I would hire you to do.

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What they don't do, what a lot of brands and companies don't think about, is what is the emotional benefit of using that brand which helps it differentiate itself from all the other competitors in.

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In our case, we said you're not alone, you've got someone to help you, you've got people behind you, which is a nice emotional promise to talk about, and we backed it up.

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If you keep going up the pyramid on the right side, on the emotional, appreciated, unexpected side, we created a tool online that allows you to select your own tax pro and, in the end, what we did at the bigger emotional solution here at the top of the pyramid on the right, if you're following me is this idea that I'm worth something more.

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I, even though I'm just a middle American with taxes, these people care about helping me.

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They want to help me.

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I'm, I'm one of their people or they're one of my people, I should say.

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So.

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That's what.

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That, I think, is what the heart of what this brand drove and, in fact, one of the best things that I ever got.

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After this campaign ran I think it was after the first year my client sent me an email that had been sent to the H&R Block support team, and that email was a story about how a woman pulled into an H&R Block and her daughter said Mom, does this mean we have people?

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And wow, like this kid suddenly feels, because of the work we did, like she's worthy, like there's something like there's esteem being built there, which I thought was terrific.

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So that's the H&R Block in a nutshell.

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And why do you think that was so successful?

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I think it is because of that emotional promise.

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I think, of course and I think a lot of companies and brands don't treat people as intelligent or as savvy as they might be A lot of companies might say what do you mean?

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You got people Like we want to talk about how we do taxes better and under that promise, is that inherent understanding?

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It's, of course we do taxes better, we have someone who's going to help you do it.

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It's if Chevy said, chevy, our cars start, of course they do.

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Why would I buy one?

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But they try to inspire with a bigger message, a bigger promise, what I call a unique emotional solution.

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And so, with that unique emotional solution, you have people behind you to help you succeed.

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That's why I believe it drove so much growth.

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That makes sense.

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I've used H&R Block myself before and one of the reasons that I think people use a solution and people like that is because death and taxes are two certain things in life and when you go to fire taxes, I think having people the emotion there might be around.

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People are worried about getting audited and if you have people and something happens, they'll take care of you, right?

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That's right.

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Yeah, I think you know one of the biggest things.

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So H&R Block offers as part of this thing like we'll represent you if you're audited, and I think just saying that alone isn't very emotional, but saying you have people and you're covered is really taps into it a little bit more.

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So I think words matter and that sort of positioning.

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It's interesting that it drives that level of effect of 10% growth a year in such a large organization.

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I think 10% is remarkable a year for a couple of years in a row.

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Yeah, I think the numbers were.

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When we started that campaign, they had around 19 million customers.

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After three years it was up to about 22 and a half or 23 million, so that's a good.

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A lot of people got their bonuses as we helped with this campaign.

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They signed up.

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Millions more customers.

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That's pretty remarkable, yeah, and I think you you had shared that.

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It really electrified the organization.

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Is that just because the emotional message also resonated with the, with the staff internally?

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Absolutely with the staff internally, absolutely.

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They have a hundred thousand tax pros and these guys had been depositioned as these kind of strip mall tax, part-time tax hacks.

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A lot of the a lot of the category was moving to technology because they're like why do I need someone to do my tech?

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Why do I have to pay for that?

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I'll pay 20, 20 bucks for Tax Act or what are the others, I can't remember the names of them Turbo Tax, Turbo Tax is a bit, yeah, but what we did, the idea of you Got People was so galvanizing for this organization because all of a sudden they're like oh wait, I'm not just some strip mall tax guy, I'm like someone's help.

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I'm like someone's help.

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I'm like emotionally, an emotional support person, and taxes are that's a little much of a stretch.

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But taxes are a very personal thing.

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That's your finances.

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It's something you don't really want to share with a lot of people, and so the fact that these guys could feel like, wait a minute, now we're depositioning these technological solutions because you're on your own with those things, and in fact, in the years since we did that campaign, a lot of technology, like the TurboTax commercials, are now about having someone to turn to.

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That's an actual live person.

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That's not the way it worked back then, and so what we did was very it resonated very deeply, not only with customers but with the tax pros, because they felt like, oh, now we're seen, we're part of the solution here.

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I think that's awesome.

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That's a great story, thank you.

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So talk to us a little bit about your new book and the main concept behind it, because I think that'll be very interesting for people because definitely related to the story you shared.

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The book is called Appreciated Branding how to Transform your Brand from Ignored to Irreplaceable and it's based on a lot of the insights that I got from looking back at some of the work I've done over the years and what were their commonalities and what made them so effective.

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And the main commonality, I think, is that they were doing things worthy of appreciation.

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So I appreciate that you see me as worthy of having someone to help me.

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Like you got people and there are other examples of things I've done that seem to have that commonality which I didn't recognize at the time.

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But in looking back at it and trying to come up with what my next phase of my career will be, I wanted to try and do something that was good for the world.

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I wanted to we inherit the world from our children, as they say, and I wanted to try to help make a bigger impact and leave a better legacy.

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And it occurred to me that if you could do things, if you could champion things that people appreciate, you'll get the more attention and more meaningful attention than just interrupting them and saying, hey, our product's great, check out our product.

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And this is actually much more resonant with older category products that that don't necessarily have some kind of new technological innovation.

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They've been around, they've been taken for granted.

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I call them.

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They're on what I call the plateau of indifference.

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Oh, there's 20 of these.

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I could choose which one's cheapest.

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I'll choose that and one of the best examples of this.

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In India, there was two laundry detergents.

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I didn't do this work, by the way, I should caveat.

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I found it and I thought it was fantastic.

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Two laundry detergents, and one was called Ariel and one was called Surf.

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One, ariel, was a PNG product.

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Surf is a Unilever product and they spent every year.

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They spent millions of.

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I don't know what the currency is in India, but they spent millions of it Rupees.

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Rupees that's right.

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That's right Trying to get people to switch over, either because, hey, we're discounting it or hey, we've got some new special crystals or whatever.

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So Ariel had a team and they came up with this idea based on a data point, and oftentimes these solutions, these emotional solutions, come from some data point in culture or society that make you go, oh, that's wrong or that could be fixed or we could help with that.

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And the data point was that 95% of people in India still believe laundry was a woman's job.

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And so Ariel came out with a campaign they called Share the Load hashtag Share the Load basically advocating for the fact that women shouldn't be the only ones left to do the laundry.

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Sales went up 76%.

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Wow.

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Brand needs to get noticed and solutions.

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Problems need to be solved.

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What's that overlap where a brand can help solve that problem and earn the appreciation of a customer, a potential customer, and all for the betterment of the world and society?

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that's where I'm trying to live now that's very cool, and things like tax preparation and laundry detergent can be emotional.

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I would say you could probably make most things pretty emotional, right yeah?

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there's opportunities out there, instead of just talking about yourself.

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I call this and I'm not alone in this I call it solve.

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Don't sell.

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Solve first, then people will be more open to wanting to buy.

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And so, if people want to do this, what advice would you give marketers about how to broadly tap into?

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this I would say look for a problem that will earn the appreciation of the people you're trying to attract.

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So there's the other story that a real estate agent was trying to build his business in a neighborhood.

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He could not get traction.

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He bought all the billboards, he bought all the bus benches, he was sending mail Hi, I'm here If you ever want to sell your house or whatever, nothing.

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And he noticed that there was a garbage strike in the neighborhood where he, in the community where he was trying to to build a business, and he decided that he was going to go ahead and take care of removing that garbage for people.

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And this happened and people were like, oh, the strike is over.

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They didn't realize the strike was not over.

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This agent had decided to spend his marketing money solving a problem for them, getting money solving a problem for them, and that earned their appreciation to the point where, within a year, he had a million dollar business because people were predisposed to want to.

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It made him get noticed, it made him get cared about and it made him basically get recommended.

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I really like this idea of solving people's problems, and that's where appreciation comes in.

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At first I was well, what does that?

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What does appreciation mean?

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But I think your clarity around helping people solve a problem and then they'll appreciate it, that's very clear on how you can win people's hearts and minds right.

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Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it because it's it is a little can seem nebulous, but it's powerful.

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It's really powerful once you get into it yeah, just working myself for a lot of software companies over the years, people have struggled to get to this appreciation and even a more emotional thing, because I think typically the thing with software products is you know it will make you more efficient, you can save time and you can earn more revenue.

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Those are the three sort of things you can say, yeah, but those things are not particularly emotional when everybody says them.

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That's right.

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But I think there are opportunities out there, like you were saying, for people to find a way to tap into that, yeah, you have to look at the values and the bigger values of the company and the bigger values of the people you're trying to attract.

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That's the heart of it and that's what I'm trying to get into with this book.

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Appreciated branding.

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Awesome.

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I will link to the website for your book in the show notes so people can easily get to that and learn more for the book.

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Any final thoughts to share on branding and how people can be remarkable in doing their branding?

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I think it's really about being proactive, looking for how you can help people.

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That's the future of branding.

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The smartphone took the daily amount of messages people get from 5,000 to 10,000 a day.

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So if you want to be heard in that cacophony, do things people care about.

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Sounds like a great way to stand out.

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Yeah, all right, reed, thanks so much for being with us today.

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We appreciate your time.

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I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends so they can hear these stories.

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Thank you very.