We’re back again folks with the second in our series from Facebook exploring how top marketers click with consumers. It’s guaranteed to provide you with a truckload of insights into marketing and brand amplification to make your day just that little bit easier.
In today’s video and podcast, host Jules Lund sits down with TBWA Melbourne’s CEO Kimberlee Wells and Guzman y Gomez CMO Lara Thom to talk about letting your customers speak on your brand’s behalf, as well as the risks and rewards of allying a brand to a social cause.
You can check out the bite-sized highlights in the video below, or go more in-depth with the podcast further below.
Aside from letting consumers speak about Guzman’s brand for it, Thom’s other marketing coup in the last 12 months involved a bit of organic advocacy from one of the company’s biggest fans.
“A young kid by the name of Cal Ryan wrote to us on our Facebook page – a very cheeky email expressing his disgust that he couldn’t get a G y G burrito in London where he had been for six months,” she said.
“At the end of the note he asked, ‘How about you fly me home for a burrito’?
“It was late at night, I was having a bit of a moment scrolling through and I just replied with: ‘If you get 3000 shares and 5000 comments before the opening of our 100th restaurant in Burleigh on the Gold Coast, I’ll fly you home’.
“But then what we did from there – we realised we had PR gold on our hands – and just like the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign that Queensland ran years ago, we were like, ‘Right, we’re off’!”
You can find out how that campaign panned out in the podcast below.
But sometimes, as Thom added, a social sensation can be nothing more than a slice, or in Guzman’s case, a bowl of luck, as was the case when Kim Kardashian snapped a selfie in front of one of its restaurants.
“Yes, she tweeted a photo of herself – she looked hot, it’s on everyone’s screensaver at work, and to her Facebook followers, I think it was a collective, like four bazillion people saw this photo of her outside one of our restaurants in Tokyo,” she said.
“It was an extraordinary moment. You can’t buy that, can you.”
Conversely, Wells’ work at TBWA conversely, saw her at the forefront of the highly-praised GayTM campaign. And while it was applauded near unanimously, there was backlash in some quarters after the launch.
“We are now in year five of that activity. Year one, there was definitely a lot of conversation around the office and with ANZ to say, ‘We need to be really aware of how the community will react’, and banks still are not the most liked institutions in the world, particularly currently,” Wells explained.
“We knew going in that we were going to be a very, very easy target. We were fortunate that with ANZ they already had a very strong internal pride network, so we sought a lot of counsel from them as to how we might be dealing with different things. In many respects we sat back and we watched.”
To hear the full stories in the podcast, you can listen in below, or check them out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify… wherever you get your podcasts from.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition, which features Paraj Panjwani, director of advertising at Optus; and Paul Bootlis, digital creative director at Host/Havas Australia.
