brands are staying a little too safe
Couple of brand activation ideas that could go harder than a free coffee and merch truck
Looking for a new job in marketing this summer was kind of brutal. Everyone in tech was terrified of layoffs and a recession, and big guys from the dot com boom were tweeting “it’s giving 2008” and “feeling early 2000s vibes rn.” Lots of companies - even the more prominent ones - slashed their junior marketing roles and were only interested in people with 5+ years of experience. It was hard to find something interesting, so what I tried to do was think of every brand that despite the scary recession talks, was still blowing money on brand marketing - subway ads, influencer marketing, billboards, and ah yes…free merch and coffee in Soho.
The way people who don’t work in marketing react to marketing is mind-boggling to me sometimes. Every now and then a marketing manager at a mid to large-sized company prints out “messages from their boss” requesting a last-minute ad, sticks it on a billboard, and people on Twitter and LinkedIn go crazy about it. Every now and then a social media manager makes a joke about legal or their boss not letting them post something, and people keep finding it hilarious. Once original, then iterated, then bluntly copied, these ideas keep bringing a crazy amount of engagement from people whose brain doesn’t pick apart ads every time they get on the subway, save memes in a folder on their phone, and jot down tweet ideas in their notes app.
When Notion did their first pop-up truck with coffee and merch in SoHo, it’s all I heard about for weeks - “why haven’t we done something like this?” and “we should do something like this!” Working from SoHo - the capital of giving away free stuff in exchange for content and brand impressions - didn’t help much. Different companies have different needs, and therefore, different growth strategies. A B2B SaaS brand likely needs a stellar sales team. Influencer marketing works for physical products. Promotions and referrals make consumer products and apps go viral. Yet, everyone wants their brand to be cool and to make their customers feel cool when they buy their stuff. We’ve got banks that want to be the Apple of banks, chicken nuggets boxes that look like streetwear drops, and language learning apps collaborating with top TikTok creators. Even if you are on the deeper level of “cool” where you reject the “mainstream cool”, you still want to be cool within a different, alternative audience.
Having a pop up in SoHo is mainstream cool. Even if it doesn’t really fit within your existing brand story, even if it’s been done a million times before, there are still a lot of people who think it’s cool. Yet, when I hear about free coffee and an ice cream truck on campus, I think about student council events in college and not million (billion?) dollar brands with a healthy marketing budget, sizable team and genuinely cool design-first products. It’s a step outside of the tech and adjacent bubbles into a mainstream consumer space but it’s not as endearing as it could be.
It’s hard to just sit down and come up with original brand marketing ideas on command. Creativity comes from living your life to the fullest and being very observant about it. Shutting down your laptop and going out, meeting people outside of the circles you are familiar with, taking a step back to see the big picture and diving into rabbit holes to understand the details. Sometimes you don’t even know if your idea is good or bad until you share it with someone who hasn’t been thinking about it for days and weeks straight. Also - you have to be very confident in yourself to risk the embarrassment of pitching something you think is cool and creative and not getting the feedback you expect.
One thing about Notion that always stood out to me is that all of their social media handles are not just @ Notion but @ NotionHQ. I also remember their “hidden” office with no address on Google Maps and a no-shoe policy making BI headlines which made me think of a couple of things. First - the recent photo booth by Bryant which he got installed in his home and handpicked influencers that he invited to experience it. Creators were blowing up his phone asking to come take pictures and make TikTok videos in it, and regular people on TikTok were DIY-ing the retro photo booth effect to participate in the trend. It also made me remember the pictures of Selena Gomez and Mark Zuckerberg in the tiny conference room at Facebook from forever ago.
Since Notion is already working with mainstream influencers to promote their product, the HQ is baked into the brand, and the office already has a reputation for being private and different, it could be interesting to build out a funky little HQ space inside the office that’s inspired by all things in the Notion world and let creators and other people they work with visit and make content in it.
Another Notion brand project idea I have is inspired by this video of a guy who made a break up vacation Notion doc to discuss it with his partner. Whether staged or not, it resonated with people and made me think of a couple of broader culture things that this can connect to. Notion has a bit of a learning curve for beginners, so templates have always been a huge part of the brand. A template for all things school-related, a template for meeting notes, a budgeting template, and many more. Since Notion is branching out of the tech and adjacent bubbles into the broader consumer market, I think there needs to be a campaign about Notion templates for edgier, messier everyday things - like break ups, glow ups, hot girl summers, and villain eras. We’ve already watched a bunch of TikToks of people having powerpoint parties with their friends and I want to see someone throwing a glow up plan party for their friend who just got out of a breakup featuring a step-by-step plan in a Notion doc. They are sort of doing it already but in a more dystopian way:
As for Figma, I thought that the multi-player brand project they worked on with Collins was brilliant but it’s not really present in their recent brand activations - NYC pop up and the campus ice cream truck and even the NYC pop-up. “The first shape a good idea takes is never its last” and showing that pieces of art and famous inventions were actually collaborative projects made me think of the recent drop that MSCHF worked on - in which several people own a key to a car and can “steal” it from each other. The first person to use the car was Casey Neistat and the last thing he did before letting the next person steal it was spray paint it. A month later the car ended up looking like this:
I can see Figma getting a cool campaign out of documenting a journey of something physical that’s been in shared ownership and maybe even exhibiting it as a work of collaborative art in their office (Figma gallery!) This concept has been around forever - from letting your whole class sign your yearbook to passing down books and journals, so it is something that has sentimental value but is also directly related to the company’s brand.
Brand marketing is extremely hard to get right but it’s also the most fun part of the job. Young people get their first job in marketing not because they are dreaming of optimizing Facebook ads and hitting Q3 KPIs but because of the art of Super Bowl ads and PR stunts that make headlines. Many things have to come together to make it work: leadership with an open mind, people who are plugged into culture and are not afraid to try over and over again and risk embarrassment, a broader team that won’t give you a side eye for trying something that might not directly affect the bottom line. It’s a trial and error, it’s taking risks, it’s feeling uncomfortable.
It takes a lot of work but when it clicks, it looks effortless.
I liked this. It came out of nowhere. But I liked it.