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Social media marketing Super Bowl shows brand purpose is king

We do love it when a plan comes together. We just finished a blog series on internal communications and employee engagement, and after moving on to this month’s theme— social media marketing— you can immediately see how things tie together.

Many of our posts last month looked at the importance of brand message from an internal perspective. The rise of the millennial demographic as the key marketing target audience means company purpose is now a priority for sales— if you’re unsure download our millennial marketing guide—but staff also need to be on the same page.

Nevertheless, some firms and organisations still don’t seem to grasp the value of having purpose. There’s nothing like a real world example to prove a point, and this week we have the Super Bowl to help us out.

What Twitter says

Twitter’s #BrandBowl celebrates the most successful Super Bowl tie-in campaigns. This year’s victors included Planters Peanuts, Bud Light, Game of Thrones, Marvel, Frank’s RedHot and Verizon.

That’s all very nice, but what’s really, really significant is the fact the social network giant observed a significant increase in brand purpose-driven campaigns.

43% more companies had a ‘purpose-driven’ message compared with the previous year

And it seemed to work. 88% of tweets about these purpose-driven ads were positive, with women the most vocal (54.85%). Microsoft’s ‘We All Win’ spot was the most successful, claiming a staggering 58% of all tweets about purpose-driven Super Bowl ads.

Here it is…

Clearly it’s a great advert, and it shines a light on an area of equality (and prejudice) that often finds itself overshadowed by issues like gender, sexuality and race.

Of course we predicted this happening just last week. If you missed the latest edition of our newsletter, Smoking Gun MD Rick Guttridge waxed lyrical on the risk of that Gillette advert giving rise to an eruption of brands #manwashing.

By that we mean claiming socially conscious credentials— in that case relating to gender— but not actually taking much direct action. The same risk applies to every social, moral and ethical issue facing the world today.

So don’t believe the hype, then?

Well, no, we’re not saying that at all, but rather how everyone should be aware of the potential for less transparent companies to hijack good, just causes. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to argue that this exponential increase in consciousness among companies is a very good thing indeed. Especially when you consider that just a decade or so ago this kind of shift would have been almost unthinkable.

 

Fancy talking to us about more progressive marketing ideas? Get in touch.

 

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