CAMP Festival 2016

2016-09-27 00:00:00 2016-09-29 00:00:00 America/Toronto CAMP Festival 2016 CAMP Festival is two solidly packed days of cutting-edge creative technology, art and design, with hand-picked speakers from around the world coming together in Calgary. Calgary FITC Calgary

Presentation

Brand Bravery: Taking Lessons From The Little Guys
Business
Innovation
Strategy

Overview

As creatives, our recommendations tend to test the boundaries of our brand’s or client’s comfort zones. Many brands live in constant fear of rocking the boat. They are following industry best practices, and they are sticking to it. Doing what they’re doing got them to where they are now, so it’s a sure ticket to future growth as well. If you’re reading along and nodding your head in agreement, you probably work with brands who have large customer bases and long histories.

If you’re not familiar with the struggle I’m describing, you must be working with young, scrappy brands – the kind I like to take inspiration from. True acts of brand bravery aren’t campaigns or stunts. We aren’t talking about KFC making chicken flavoured nail polish (ew), but Domino’s tossing their pizza recipe after over 45 years and starting from scratch. Brand bravery can mean extreme transparency, honing in on a niche target audience, totally reinventing the brand or offering and more. While different brands call for different acts of bravery, they are all going to need them at one point or another. Our role as creatives is encouraging brands to take necessary risks through powerful storytelling and strong data.

Objective

Emphasize the value of risk-taking through transparency, reinvention, niche focus and more, and provide examples that the audience can take to their brands or clients as ammunition in the fight for brand bravery.

Target Audience

Brand managers, agency partners (account managers, creative directors)

Five Things Audience Members Will Learn

  1. Brands need to take risks to stay relevant and get noticed.
  2. A campaign or stunt is not a risk – a true act of bravery that will have a lasting impact is one that is implemented to last.
  3. Only calculated risks will get approval to be implemented – be sure to have the data to back a brave recommendation up.
  4. Successful brands need to stay scrappy to stay in the game. Disrupt or be disrupted.
  5. Brand bravery can take many forms such as: extreme transparency, honing in on a very niche audience, reinventing the main offering all together, or visibly supporting a social cause that is far from mainstream.