Unilever CMO Keith
Weed says being “choiceful” about which opportunities to pursue and which to
disregard will become a bigger part of marketers’ responsibility as the
industry is faced with so many more emerging opportunities.
Speaking to
Marketing Week at the annual Cannes Lions event, he said: “What [marketers]
need to do is remember what we’re doing. At the end of the day we are serving
consumers and building brands. If you remember those two things it guides you through
what is a challenging time for marketers. Just because you can do everything,
it doesn’t mean you should.
“Fish where the fish
are. There are a lot of interesting things you can do and of course you do need
to experiment but you should look at where consumers are engaging with brands
and consuming media.”
Weed cited an
example of one of Unilever’s brands in the Indonesian market which suffered a
decline in brand equity because there were eight separately created pieces of
brand communications running at the same time. Each piece of communication was
effective on its own but together it was fragmenting the brand.
He says: “Curating
rather than creating brands is increasingly going to be the challenge for
marketers … you’ve got to be careful that more is more, not more is less.”
Speaking on a
separate panel debate, Mark D’Arcy, Facebook director of global creative
solutions, advised brands not to get distracted by all the opportunities
afforded to them.
He said: “[It’s
about] sacrificing things. Looking at all the things you can do but just doing
what actually matters. Not doing everything you can do, but stripping
everything out and focusing on the one thing that matters.”
Speaking on the same
panel, Facebook head of engineering and creator of the News Feed Andrew
Bosworth said despite Facebook building the least functional photo sharing
capability five years ago with low resolution photos and no additional tools,
it grew to be bigger than all its rivals put together within two years because
the one useful function it had was photo-tagging.
He added it didn’t
matter that other services offered greater functionality because “all people
wanted to do was tag and share their photos with friends”.
