In marketing it’s all about making connections.  Products and services to messages, facts to value propositions, companies to potential customers these connections are all vital to having you marketing strategies succeed .  Marketers generally assume that the messages they devise will be easily understood by customers and that they will be able to make the connection of why what we are presenting to them should matter to them.  That assumption, without data to back it up, can sometimes be the death of any a marketing plan, no matter how easy you assume that the leap is to make the connection, especially if egos are involved.

Failure to make the connection can also happen when not all of the parties involved are on the same page.  This happens a lot when marketing departments are ‘siloing’ their efforts.  In other words, the PR (pubic relations) department has no clue what the online marketing department is doing and vice versa and they are running separate campaigns in similar venues and the messages are confusing between each channel.  In these situations not only is it confusing for the customer, its damn near impossible for them to make a leap in these messages to make the connections, let alone trust that the company itself understands its own messaging.

Then there comes the situations where companies utilize some sort of spokesperson, be it an athlete, an actor or a musician, they try to harness the start power of a celebrity to their product.  A lot of times it lets the audience scratching their heads trying to make the connection. Think about Ed McMahon who was really know for Publisher’s Clearinghouse and belting out “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” for years, but in the later parts of his life he was a pitch man for some company buying gold jewelry for cash.  The connection was really hard for audiences to make and mostly it cheapened Ed McMahon’s image, especially when you make the connection that his house was in the news for foreclosure and he was in these pretty awful commecials.

This is why it’s important to not only do you audience research, but also to educate ALL of the parties that potentially be involved.  Such is the case with Duracell’s latest campaign on Facebook.

Over the past week, because I’ve “liked” Daughtry (honestly I love his music, not just like it), I’ve gotten an unending stream of ads in different forms of “Like Daughtry? Like Duracell!”.  Most of these images as the rest of ads do not give me a reason to make a connection.  Mostly I’m left with “what the heck is this about and why in the world would I like Duracell if I like Daughtry?”  I even posed this question to an audience I was teaching asking them “can anyone in the room tell me what the connection of Duracell and Daughtry is?”  No one could give me an answer.

What further makes this whole campaign fall off its rails is what Daughtry’s posting to the Facebook fanpage.  There’s nothing mentioned in recent updates about Duracell. Obviously Daughtry’s management forgot to mention in their Facebook postings what Daughtry’s connection is to Duracell.

I’m utterly left with “Why would I Like Duracell if I like Daughtry?”  I just cannot make the leap to make the connection with the ads being presented to me on Facebook.

Duracell does a much better job at making the connection with singers in their commercials when they relate how the singers use their batteries in their shows, if memory serves me right I believe it was Bon Jovi that they featured in those ads.  In those ads I can easily make the connection, however it’s not the same connection I can make with this Facebook campaign.

If you are going to run a Facebook ads campaign that features a well-known individual and aim it those individuals who like them, especially calling out “Like XYZ, Like Us Too!” make sure to give that individual’s audience a clear enough reason to make the connection so that there is no question in their minds’ that “Yeah, I should like them too!”  Don’t rely on assuming that people can make that leap.  Remember what they say about ‘assuming’….. 🙂

……. Addendum to this posting 12/8/2011 …….

A day after this post went live, look at the new Daughtry ads …. coinky dink? I’ll leave you the intelligent reader decide. 🙂