“Just run ads across every channel and borrow a celebrity’s name, and it’s automatic success — this marketing job is that easy.”
That’s the line that hurts the most whenever I think back on my own marketing work for small and medium businesses. But is that actually a sound conclusion?
1. The story of blanket advertising
“My family has treated this illness for three generations…” Oh, that familiar, tiresome line. Many of you probably feel the same way I do — watching your favorite videos on YouTube, only to suddenly get hit with ads like that.
If it happened once, it wouldn’t be a big deal — but happening over and over makes you want to skip it immediately, even during videos you actually love.
Companies selling traditional-medicine products that keep flooding every channel with the same clips have created a pretty terrible experience for viewers.
On this issue, Big E Co. has its own take and its own solutions for business owners:
See also:
Does running high-budget Google ads actually bring results for a business?
Should you run ads right after launching your business? 2 benefits advertising brings.
Advertising needs to target the right audience, highlight the business’s core value, and use a fitting budget — only then does it bring real marketing results.
For example, in the case of advertising traditional-medicine products, a business could do one of the following:
- Run an ad like the one above targeting people already dealing with joint issues or at high risk (manual laborers, older people and women, office workers with neck degeneration from sitting too long) — not blanket it across every channel like before (including channels for teens and children).
- If the business is confident in its core value being customer care, it could add a 1-on-1 health consultation service with a specialist once customers start showing joint-related symptoms. For healthy customers, the business could publish articles warning about joint conditions, along with diet and exercise advice to prevent them — and even build a landing page for customers to sign up for materials.
- If the business is confident its core value is product quality, it should encourage customers who genuinely have joint issues to voluntarily post about the product’s effects after using it, then reward them with a shopping voucher — rather than hiring actors to stage scenarios that never actually happened, like in the clip above. This helps boost brand credibility, since the friends and family of those real customers can also learn about it.
2. The story of using celebrities to PR your own brand
Most recently, the story of Jack and Thiên An shook public opinion. Nobody knows who’s right or wrong, but the fallout from this drama will, I predict, bring hardship to the brands that used Jack as their face — most notably OPPO, RealMe, and ViVo.
Rewind a few months, and the CEO Phương Hằng and Hoài Linh incident had already been creating a powerful wave affecting showbiz artists.
From there, netizens started uncovering evidence that a string of celebrities had used their names to PR products whose functions and uses they themselves didn’t even understand.
So even after publicly apologizing, once trust is lost, fans find it hard to forgive artists for this kind of behavior — followed by a wave of brand and product boycotts.
When using the image of a celebrity or KOL, a business should keep the following in mind:
- The celebrity must highlight the business’s core value and fit its potential customer base. For example: had there been no scandal with Thiên An, Jack would have been a great fit to promote the VieOn entertainment app, since VieOn’s main audience is young people. VieOn is also aiming at a core value with the mission of being “a leading all-in-one entertainment super-app of Vietnamese people, for Vietnamese people” — and only young people can really make such a super-app come alive.
- That celebrity’s activities need to be genuinely relevant to the business. For example: even before his 13-billion-VND incident, artist Hoài Linh was never a good fit as the face of Shopee ads — the image he’d built, his posts, and his lifestyle had nothing to do with frequent online shopping (Hoài Linh’s style is fairly simple, better suited to brands rooted in the countryside: farm produce, handicrafts, traditional dishes, fish sauce, etc.).
3. The marketing lesson from these two situations
It’s sad to say both of these actions bring major damage to a business. So why do businesses like these still walk down that mistaken path?
And what solution can bring lasting results for small and medium businesses running their own marketing campaigns well?
The answer will be sent to you by the Easy Knowledge Channel team through the handbook “Market or Get Stuck,” Episode 1, Part 1. Tap the book cover to sign up for the ebook now.
Sign up to receive the book for a chance to get an offer worth up to 3 million VND on digital marketing services and the Digital Growth Solution for businesses.
Finally, The Fool and the Easy Knowledge Channel team would like to sum up the marketing lesson for business owners putting together their own marketing plan:
Advertising is still a good way to get a product to customers, but you need to weigh the budget and analyze its effectiveness so you can adjust it to fit your business plan.
Using a celebrity’s image to promote your business isn’t a bad idea. But you need to check whether they actually fit your “core value” and the direction your business has set for itself.
THE FOOL — EASY KNOWLEDGE CHANNEL