As well as promoting a product or service, marketing campaigns are opportunities to build and grow your brand without the need to redesign your whole brand toolkit. They allow you to promote aspects of your brand that your customers or clients may be unaware of – selling nothing other than your proposition. They allow you to experiment and try something different either by adapting your brand to focus on and connect with audiences in different ways, or simply to see what’s possible. And with digital, in a relatively contained and risk-free way. And for some, marketing campaigns are ways to slowly shift the focus, tone and style of your brand. So, how can you experiment, push the boundaries and shift perceptions without breaking your brand?
Here are six thoughts about using campaigns to build brands.
Social media has driven curiosity around the companies behind portfolio brands. That’s why, in part, big conglomerates have invested in their parent brand, defining what it stands for and giving it more prominence on packaging or in advertising. Think Unilever, P&G, GSK.
One of the most googled adverts is from Pfizer, the Super Bowl 2025 half time slot. This advert doesn’t sell anything. It’s purely about raising awareness of their mission to help fight cancer.
Business-to-business brands do this too. Management consultancy firm Baringa spent 9 months exploring the economics of kindness through a variety of different perspectives. Kindness is part of their brand. They know that kindness in business pays – but do business leaders agree? The campaign debated this idea and, in so doing, successfully raised awareness of the brand with their target audience.
Many would consider Toyota a Japanese car manufacturer. However, over recent years, Toyota has been using campaigns to shift its position towards being a mobility company. Mobility is a much broader concept. It chimes with their vision to lead the future mobility society and allows them to develop innovations that go beyond the motor car to create a more enduring business.
That’s why Toyota has brands like Kento, that connect people to corporate car-pooling schemes or integrated public transport subscriptions. And why Toyota is exploring robotics to solve real world mobility problems, such as assisting the elderly with household chores. And why they are a prime sponsor of the winter and summer Olympics with messages to start your impossible and go beyond.
There’s often a feeling that whilst a brand may not be working as hard as it could be, there’s not the appetite, or budget, for wholesale change. Sometimes it’s worth looking at what’s in the brand toolkit and doing a bit of tinkering to stretch it and make it work harder. And campaigns are a good place to do that because you can test things to see what works.
This might mean adding some new colours to create a different impression or freshening up the imagery style. But often it’s just about using what already exists in a different way. You could use a purely typographic approach to get your message across, or use type in a more visual, unexpected way.
By stretching the visual toolkit in campaigns, the core brand can be maintained and protected. But if something proves to work really well, it can be built into the visual toolkit.
Campaigns provide space to be brave and experiment. They are relatively short-lived, so can be viewed as a contained piece of brand building activity. Perhaps aimed at a specific audience or focused on a particular event.
For Japan Railway’s 150th anniversary they created a campaign that rekindled the emotional connection with rail travel, acknowledging that journeys are not just about efficiency, but about connections with places and a sense of discovery.
Rubber ‘souvenir’ stamps are often found at Japanese railway stations and their campaign built on this tradition and made it digital. They trusted their instincts to create something people would fall in love with, rather than relying on data. And it worked.
They researched all their 900 stations and created a handcrafted woodcut style stamp for each one based on different kinds of stories and connections.
The stamps could then be collected on an app as travellers passed through stations, and they could see how many times each one had been collected, becoming part of a shared experience.
Posters, billboards in stations, stamp books and a whole range of merchandise supported the campaign.
The campaign was so successful it was continued beyond the anniversary year. It encouraged more rail travel as people explored the country collecting stamps. And it created a deeper emotional connection with rail travel and the brand.
Channels are a big part of campaigns, so why not use them differently to help build your brand?
The insurance company Hiscox has always used brand building campaigns and showcase this on their website.
A recent campaign aimed at SME’s highlighted the many risks small business owners face, showing the things that can wrong, and positioning Hiscox as the go-to small business provider.
Whilst their competitors typically use TV, it would have taken a lot to deliver cut through. So, Hiscox chose to use channels in a different way. They focused on out-of-home and every channel was used in a way that was relevant to its placement.
Billboard ads looked like they’d been splashed with mud from passing traffic or had fallen out of their frame. Newspaper ads had missing images and radio ads ‘went wrong’ to stand out in the audio environment.
Though the ads were a deliberate disaster, the results were amazing. Using channels in a deliberately different way really connected with their target audience and strengthened the brand. Awareness grew, and importantly so did sales.
Digital channels are now the most effective tool for brand building. A recent study by Kantar and Marketing Week found that 86.7% of brand marketers surveyed said that digital drives long-term results compared to 80.1% who think the same for traditional media.
For business-to-business campaigns, LinkedIn is a de facto channel. However, has LinkedIn lost its way? What started as a professional network is fast becoming another social network with unsolicited sales pitches and content that’s veered away from business. For some, LinkedIn is also turning into a new wave dating app, using the ability to target individuals based on job and location.
Perhaps the greater opportunity is for B2B brands to think more like B2C, become more sophisticated in targeting potential customers and embrace programmatic advertising.
Marketing campaigns can be used to sell nothing other than a brand proposition or to shift perceptions. They allow marketers to experiment, adapt and connect with audiences in different ways – and via digital, in a relatively contained and risk-free way. And marketing campaigns are ways to slowly shift the focus and look of brands through stealth.
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We understood the firm’s key differentiator, leveraging this insight, we created a new positioning ‘Closer Connections. Exceptional results’
With the ever-increasing importance of employer brand, aligning it closely to your core brand is more critical than ever.
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