Contextual Social-First Marketing
Humans love to connect. We use one another in society as "external hard drives" of information. No one person knows how the internet works or how to get to the moon, but by pooling information and resources and believing that the others on our team hold information that is relevant and helpful, we can in groups achieve feats big and small. This belief stands both for the accomplishment of big tasks, and also in our individualized and intimate relationships - we ask others who we are close to in our lives to hold information and these contextual relationships determine aspects of our personalities and how we relate to the world.
To market to people effectively is to hold in your mind as you create campaigns that drive for human connection and pinpoint what your product fulfills in the consumer. Marketing should utilize and integrate three motivations for communication:
Your brand should "ask for help," this can be indirect or, in light of more brands moving towards planet conscious models, use marketing tactics like Tom's - who effectively ask the consumer for help to solve systemic economic problems by donating a pair of shoes when you buy from them (which of course led to the disastrous consequences and an eventual pivot in their donation model.).
Your brand or product can "offer help" by fulfilling or making a task or aspect of a person's life easier. This is narrative-driven marketing; think "She'll be happier with a Hoover" vacuum ads from the 1950s.
Your brand can use people's desire to share information to increase common ground with their friends - this is arguably best achieved when a brand connects on an emotional level with the consumer, and they use their initiative to post and engage with the brand publically and on social media.
To further explore the concept of pointing and pantomiming within context as a basis for society and a useful tool in marketing, I decided to look to a brand that recently expanded to the United States market. In presenting their product to an American, as opposed to a Greek, audience KORRES had to identify what it was about their product that would connect with a new market segment and cater their messaging around fulfilling that niche need for people. KORRES is a ubiquitous brand in Greece, available at every pharmacy and until recently exclusive to Greece. When shifting their market to the U.S, they used the context (pointing) in their branding language "No Secrets - Just Greece. Because it comes naturally" and "Natural Greek Beauty." This language presumes that an American audience views Greece as a place of natural beauty and as "clean living" inspiration.
The American website is filled with luxurious pictures of the greek landscape, images of farmers and old women happily working together to create the products, and invites the consumer into the fantasy of Greece. Hold this in opposition to the greek website, which by comparison looks far more like a standard pharmacy product site. While the language around the organic nature of their product remains there, it exists in the subtext. At the time of writing this, their first ad first ad read "We love the sun from the beginning" atop their sunscreen collection. This, too, is pointed marketing from a different perspective - the presumption that their target audience wants to spend time outdoors.
Take, for example, the "Our Story" page, which uses the same picture of the founder in different contexts:
Above: The American Website, Below: The Greek Website
The American website focuses on light storytelling and minimalistic visuals that contextually associate with ancient Greece's (actually not white at all) statues in the consumer's mind. The Greek website opens the about us page by saying they "want to share their strongest memories with you," the consumer and goes into the lives and stories of the brand further. Within all of these aesthetic and narrative differences, the product itself remains the same - it is only the language and the context of the consumer being marketed to that has shifted and created two websites that, while being the same brand, have vastly different appearances and functionality to appeal to these two distinct market segments. KORRES is Greece offers everyday functional goods, KORRES in America fulfills the fantasy of living in the Mediterranean. By doing this, they have differentiated themselves from the everyday functional brands they were competing within America and established a customer base whose desires they have a connection to - a mutual love of Greece and Organic Greek Products. They achieved effective marketing for both communities that prioritizes what drives each specific group's motivations to connect and utilize their product. Just to add here really quick - their stuff is really good and I still use it today.
