Get real to get Schmart

It might come as a surprise to hear it from the mouth of an advertising executive, but honesty is, in fact, the best policy when trying to win over customers, according to the industry experts featured at this year’s Schmart Marketing Conference.

The themes of honesty, sincerity and authenticity stood front and centre at the second annual PMP Schmart Marketing Conference in Sydney this week, with some of the marketing industry’s most renowned thinkers highlighting how honesty in marketing can provide far more leverage than any other strategy.

Keynote speaker, Jeffrey Hayzlett (pictured), who not only served for four years as the CMO for the Eastman Kodak Company, but also appeared alongside Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice, said that honesty and transparency in a business drives positive brand association among the public.

“We need radical transparency,” he said during his energetic keynote presentation. “The elephant in the room, why don’t we just talk about them? They should be pushed front and centre.”

Hayzlett outlined how, in today’s online social marketing environment, the public has taken control over brand image. Through forums and social media posts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, customers now have the power to easily drive positive or negative brand association. “You are not the owners of the brand, the brand owns you,” said Hayzlett.

According to Hayzlett, for businesses to work successfully in this new environment, they need to actively engage in, and offset any negative public sentiment by participating openly with it, and guiding it back to positive messaging.

“Even if we screw up, let’s just do it faster. Make the mistakes, take the risk, tension is what we’re striving for,” he said.

This is a principle that has been embraced time and again by one of Australia’s most successful marketing men, Rob Belgiovane, executive creative director at BWM, the agency behind Telstra Big Pond’s highly successful ‘Great Wall’ advertising campaign.

Belgiovane says that, to successfully leverage a campaign, it is important to tap into community sentiment, and engage with it openly and honestly. “You have to have an authenticity, not only great insight.”

By openly and honestly engaging with public brand commentary, and contributing to it with sincerity, a marketing campaign can attain the potential to go social, without seeding it in a social environment.

“A social idea is not new, the new bit is just that we’ve got social media that allows us to talk about it faster,” said Belgiovane. “Social media is about sincerity. It has to be interesting enough for people to talk about. If you have a great idea, you don’t have to lead it with a social campaign for it to go social.”

As difficult as it might seem for an ad-man to pledge his reliance on honesty, this was a sentiment echoed with resounding frequency by some of the other marketing gurus who spoke at the conference, including author and social media expert, Scott Stratten, who believes that if brands and businesses act like people, with genuine values and authentic attitudes, they will succeed over their rivals in the marketplace.

“Brands acting like people, can drive a personality and lead to awesomeness,” he said. “The less awesome your industry is, the more chance you have of being awesome in it.”