Everybody knows that art often imitates life, and other times life imitates art. Sometimes these two opposite phenomena form a dialectic and complement each other in a fascinating cycle.
A notable example of this right now is the way the acclaimed AMC series Mad Men depicts a 1960s advertising agency’s successes concerning brand strategy and consumer engagement (art imitating life), and how today’s marketing industry sees this depiction and successfully adopts many of these strategies in service of contemporary efforts to engage in advertising, brand building, and brand awareness campaigns (life imitating art).
What follows are five such tips that the marketing industry can learn from Mad Men with respect to consumer awareness, building a brand, or just advertising in general.
1. If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.
Having created numerous brand strategy campaigns around products about which the general public was hearing negative things — Lucky Strike cigarettes in particular comes to mind — at one point early in the series Don Draper offered this wisdom to his colleagues and their client, Madison Square Garden, to inspire an ad campaign that “changed the conversation”. The concern was the perception that New York City was full of urban decay and Madison Square Garden would be a symbol of all that’s wrong with big cities.
Draper offered a vision where something big, new, and ambitious like Madison Square Garden would be welcomed by the public if they did some brand building for it that painted the arena as a sign of a fresh, clean, beautiful new beginning for the city despite reality. Draper uses this aggressive and manipulative perception-versus-reality strategy frequently, and it’s clear that it can be a handy strategy for building a brand today around any product that has negative associations in the public’s mind.
Read more about these five brand strategy tips and how you can learn a lot simply by watching Mad Men right here.
