Ever since I got to Granada, nearly a month ago, I’ve been hearing the same song playing in every store or supermarket I walked into over and over again - SloMo by Chanel.
ICYMI, SloMo was the song that Spain sent to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2022 and got to the very dignified 3rd place.
A brief historic detour: Spain is one of the “big five” (along with the UK, Italy, France, and Germany), which means it automatically gets into the finals every year, as well as the country that won the previous year. From 2015 to 2021, Spain sent songs that finished below 20th place (out of about 25-30 songs in the finals every year) and wasn’t taken too seriously. But last year, they sent a song and a performer that drove everyone loco. The performance was so impressive, that I personally think that most of the busiest pop stars in the US today could learn a thing or two from it.
Maybe it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (how we seem to think that the same topic/song/you-name-it that we pay attention to is all around us, even if it’s not necessarily true) - but it really seemed to me like either all of the shops around here are using the same playlist, or it’s the new “Eurovision Fever” that brought it up back again.
(T-4 days until the first semi-final!!!)
Look, I don’t know if SloMo was as popular around Spain before the 2022 finals, but I have a feeling that even if it was, it gained even more popularity after finishing at the 3rd place and during 2023.
And that made me think about ethical marketing.
Ready when you are
Ethical marketing, to me, is all about a healthy balance between long-term goals and quick wins.
That’s why I don’t think one less successful launch means a brand had failed. There are too many conditions, parameters, and moving parts to consider.
Of course, every brand and business wants to sell. But businesses that prefer focusing on short-term gains rather than nurturing consistently and lovingly over time are losing the majority of their potential clients.
Again, I don’t know if SloMo was as popular all across Spain before the contest took place almost a year ago.
But if it “rose to fame” just recently, it means that it took almost a whole year for this song to grow on the Spanish population (or at least on the shop owners in Granada).
Songs, like some offers, are evergreen assets. They can gain popularity years after they were released and on the other side of the world, out of nowhere. If you ever watched the 2012 film “Searching for Sugar Man”, you know what I mean.
Your audience may not be ready for your offer right now. But with the right nurturing, they’ll come to you, whenever they’re ready. No excessive pressure needed.
A good offer isn't enough
There are many great offers out there, great solutions that can help so many people. But even the greatest offer won't be enough if a brand hasn't done the legwork to meet its audience at its appropriate edge and when market it the way the audience wants to be marketed to.
That legwork in good and ethical marketing can be reflected in a few phases of the development and retention: from testing the product-market fit, to interviewing clients and getting their "voice of customer", to be used in the messaging.
The songwriters/producers of SloMo aren't new to the field. In their combined decades years of activity, they wrote songs for artists like Mariah Carey, Madonna and Britney Spears. They had no option but to produce a song that was in a league of its own.
But a great song isn't enough. The performance had to be spot-on - from the outfit and the dance to the staging.
And as talented as Chanel is, that wasn't enough either. She had to work hard to learn the demanding choreography, practiced it for months, and promoted it endlessly (with her team, of course) in the months before the official contest took place.
By the time she took over the stage, both she and the audience were more than ready for her 3 minutes of fire.
Doing the right legwork can be hard, but when it's money-time, it's more than worth it.
Getting the right social proof
The connection between human psychology and marketing is a fascinating topic. It’s even more interesting when you think about the fact that at the end of the day, we’re just very intelligent and social mammals with two opposing thumbs.
And as such, when we see what our peers do, we want to copy them, get what they have, or have their success rub off on us too.
That’s why social proof is one of the strongest and most effective marketing tactics that a business can use, and why so many businesses are using it wherever and whenever they can.
But what kind of social proof is ethical?
These days, more and more businesses are displaying their candid customers’ testimonials alongside the context in which that social proof was given.
Sure, success and growth are relative, and every bit of it is worth celebrating - but a conversion rate of 3%, 10%, and 25% can mean totally different things when you see the sample size (for example, a 25% conversion rate of 4 prospects is nice, but a 3% conversion rate of 10,000 prospects is even more impressive).
Getting in the 3rd place in a contest that had 161 million viewers is very strong social proof. If Europe loved it, why wouldn’t the country from which this song came celebrate its success, even a whole year later?
Is your email marketing going too SloMo? Need to spice things up? Contact me here, let's find you a solution.
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