The Marketing Unicorns Redefining Brand Experience

What is connections planning, and Lay's Groundhog Day 75x ads

Author

Pedro Porto Alegre
February 07, 2024

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Column: The Marketing Unicorns Redefining Brand Experience

The term “connections planning” is a fairly new idea in the world of marketing but that has grown to have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness of any given campaign.

The reason for that is because connections planners see the world through different lenses. They’re not looking at how the bulk of the media dollars will deliver XYZ message. Instead they’re working with rather “experimental” dollars with the aim of getting customers to experience the brand.

“Connections Planning” by John W. Manley (Ogilvy Chicago).

And for that reason, these unicorn professionals typically come from all walks of the advertising world. They need to not only have a basic understanding of media, but also be at the cutting edge of new technologies. They need to have a high degree of sensitivity to what motivates consumers and how they behave. These planners also need to have a high degree of “outside the box” thinking to identify opportunities for a brand to come to life at unexpected moments of the consumer journey.

This combination of skills and understanding is what make connections planners such difficult creatures to find in the wild. As a matter of fact, very few agencies even have connections planners — this important portion of campaign planning is often left for the creatives to figure out at the very end on how to make use of the rest of the media dollars.

This is obviously a waste that strategists have found a way to minimize by devoting a portion of their resources to developing this mythical creature known as a connections planner.

They’re less concerned about interrupting the customer along their journey, and more interested in how the brand might connect with them at bilateral level.

Enter The World of Heinz

One brand that has managed to deliver over and over on iconic connections plans is the ketchup brand Heinz.

At some point along Heinz’ strategy to reclaim market share from private label brands, their planners realized that their customers — young people who love fries and burgers — were running into a bit of a problem.

  • The Problem: These young gamers would play and stream their games on Twitch for hours every week, oftentimes playing for so long that they’d forget to eat. To combat that, they would order food from their local fast-food joint and eat while playing.

The issue with that is that shooting games played by their target audience no longer give you the option to pause your game — you’re playing in real time with players from all corners of the globe. This means that they either had to eat really fast in between rounds, or even worse… eat while playing, risking “dying” in the process.

That’s when connections planners understood something profound about their strategy:

  • The Insight: if players could hide in the game map in order to gain a few additional minutes to finish their burger and fries, that was something worth the hassle.

However, these “hidden spots” were difficult to come by. And that’s when Heinz picked up the phone and called the makers of Call of Duty to help them find these secret spots.

  • The Solution: By sending burgers wrapped in game maps to Twitch influencers that showed where these hidden spots were, they would be able to insert their brand into an untapped moment along the consumer journey.

This obviously ended up spreading like wildfire, eventually making these “hidden spots” not so hidden anymore, but along the process Heinz earned the respect from their audience.

The key here is that Heinz wasn’t trying to sell their ketchup — they were connecting with their audience at a deeper level, like a buddy trying to lend a hand. This brand experience runs right to the core of what Heinz stands for: earning their place at the table by being consumer-obsessed.

How To Find Connections Moments

In hindsight, what Heinz did sounds so obvious. How didn’t I think of that!

Well, my friends, that’s the sign of a masterful connections plan.

Unearthing these key moments along the consumer journey requires a few things from the project team:

  1. A deep understanding of your customers. And by that I mean, being truly obsessed about everything they love and dislike. This will tell you what motivates them, and what their pain points are.

  2. A complete understanding of where they interact with one another. In today’s fragmented media environment, we are all truly living in different world. Ask 5 of your friends what their top 3 apps are on their phones, and you’ll get 5 different answers. Therefore knowing where they spend time online and offline will give you hints as to where you should be showing up.

  3. An unmatched obsession with how they consume your product. Trust me, I’ve seen people put ketchup on steak — sometimes these things aren’t so obvious. But most importantly, how do they order your product, how do they engage with it, how to they talk about it, how do they feel when they consume it. These things will equip you with ideas on how might you either support their habits or flip them on its head.

  4. And finally, when do they engage with your brand. This is a lot harder to find out than one might think, but understanding this key piece of information will open up doors to key occasions. Knowing where to insert yourself into the conversation is just as important as knowing what they’re talking about. This will enable you to show up at the right moment, and therefore meet an unmet need before your competitors.

OK, so we now know that we need to understand 4 things better than anyone else in the world: the WHO, HOW, WHEN, and WHERE. Explore these four key questions and you’ll be on to something.

Bringing It All Together

Now, the tough part.

Truly original ideas are difficult to come by. Oftentimes old ideas are reskinned into modern variations — and these often end up delivering results and winning awards. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you’re looking for something like Heinz’ “Hidden Spots” you’ll need a fifth ingredient: the latest emerging media/tech channels.

These often present the most novel ways to bring ideas to life because they’re new mediums. The element of newness allows marketers to be the first ones to show up in interesting and clever ways.

While Call of Duty was nothing new at the time Heinz ran its campaign, it was a medium that other brands in their category (or any other category for that matter) had not found a way to crack yet.

So, sometimes, newness alone isn’t the answer. But also underserved territories of the consumer journey, or neglected touchpoints. These meaty little spots are tiny but hold immense potential.

Tap into the right pockets of the customer journey, and you just might be the one to unleash a new way to experience your product — or better yet, your category.

Inspiration: Lay’s “Groundhog Day” Ads

Lay’s did the unthinkable on this year’s Groundhog Day: they bought 75 ad slots on ABC on February 2nd and ran 8 sequential variations of Needlenose Ned Ryerson, as a potato chip-buying customer who has his own déjà vu moment in the checkout aisle.

It’s annoying. It’s brilliant. It’s unheard of.

And they did it all in the span of 2 weeks.

Unbelievable.

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