Hickory Springs’ EarthCare Challenge is designed to educate consumers about the importance of environmentally friendly furniture. Tapping into the general population’s affection for reality game shows, the campaign will chronicle six contestants as they try to live more sustainable lives.

To qualify, interested participants submit a video online that explains why he or she is “eco-oblivious” or “eco-chic.” The contest takes place solely on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as the company’s own EarthCareInside.com site.

With the EarthCare Challenge campaign, Hickory Springs is building awareness of its products with consumers, a brand new audience for the company. And, in educating buyers about environmentally friendly furniture, the company creates demand for its components when customers start a dialogue with retailers about whether the furniture they sell is made with eco-friendly parts.

The social media marketing campaign also demonstrates to furniture manufacturers that consumers value “green” furniture, thereby creating additional demand for Hickory Springs components among its existing customers and (hopefully) obtaining some new customers in the process.

As a social media marketing campaign, EarthCare Challenge succeeds at something greater, talking about a topic broader than its own products. In promoting the benefits of living an environmentally conscious lifestyle, Hickory Springs avoids one of the typical social-media pitfalls that has stumbled many a company – gazing at its own navel.

Hickory Springs has created a campaign that not only benefits the company but also its customers and consumers. (Did I mention that the winner of EarthCare Challenge receives a collection of eco-friendly furniture, valued at approximately $5,000?) Everybody wins – even the environment.

For email to remain a relevant marketing tool, it needs to become “social” as well. Whereas email was merely a means to delivering a message, email is now a way to interact with and engage your customers. For example, an email from Starbucks promoting its new VIA Ready Brew invites customers to tell the company what they think of the new product—in writing, with a photo, or on video.

In 2008, 40 percent of email participants used social sites to collect product-related information and recommendations. There’s a natural intersection occurring between email and social media. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, etc., then you should be promoting those in your emails. Interestingly, only about half of online retailers are including links to their social media presences in their email campaigns.

So, it’s no longer enough to simply include a “forward this message” link in your email messages. You need to make them shareable. If you consider that the average social networker has between 150 and 200 friends, then combining email and social sharing means your message is reaching a much wider audience and resulting in increased click-throughs.

Warning – this article features a number of linked images and campaigns that are, as the title implies, shocking and NSFW. Click through to the links accordingly.

Shock campaigns, including the use of gory, disturbing, and unsettling images and scenarios, work as an attention grabber. Whether it’s Volkswagen’s “safe happens” campaign of a few years back or the U.K’s “texting while driving” PSA, shock and awe messaging have been an institution in connecting with motorists since the “Red Asphalt” driver education films debuted in 1964.

Outside of the automotive realm of selling us safer cars and preventing us from taking driving too lightly, shock marketing has been put into action to keep us off drugs (Faces of Meth and the more recent Montana Meth project come to mind), as well as encouraging us to buy condoms and practice safe sex (see recent French and German ad campaigns depicting sex with disturbing partners ranging from giant scorpions to Hitler).

When the shock wears off

So what’s the point of these campaigns? If it’s to start a Facebook conversation on a topic, and your topic involves sex, drugs, or automotive gore, then the path to success arguably begins and ends with capitalizing on that innate human fascination with all things morbid and taboo. Rubbernecking by ad proxy, as it were.

But if you were to expand the shock message to include the patently absurd, thereby pulling in just about every viral and subversive campaign fit to be highlighted on industry sites (like Adrants) that cover this beat, as marketers, we are left with this question: “You have our attention, but so what?”

For sex, drugs, and cars, maybe the attention is enough. But how can you take the attraction to powerful images and concepts and translate that into more meaningful impressions around a consumer brand? How do you engage and retain the audience’s attention long after the initial shock has worn off?

The boldness of Benetton

For guidance, we can look to one of the pioneers of the genre, Luciano Benetton, and his eponymous clothing brand. His ad campaigns in the early 1980s with then-creative director Oliviero Toscani depicted disturbing but beautifully rendered images of race, poverty, religion, refugees, AIDs, capital punishment, war, and corruption.

His critics scoffed, citing Benetton and Toscani’s work as a shallow and sensational ploy for the sole purpose of raising eyebrows and causing a stir, but Benetton saw it differently. “The purpose of advertising is not to sell more,” he said. “It’s to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company’s values…” In this statement, Benetton made a striking observation that today’s marketers would be wise to heed. In essence, he points out that it’s obvious to the world that Benetton makes clothes, so if the purpose of advertising is to educate people about what a company has to offer, then telling them that you make clothing isn’t revealing much. On the other hand, using edgy and colorful images to show consumers that Benetton makes edgy and colorful clothes does more to communicate Benetton’s differentiated attribute—the core essence of its brand—than an ad laboriously detailing the breadth of its garments or their (assumedly) impeccable craftsmanship and quality.

Benetton described engaging his audience in an evolving exercise of painting the Benetton brand as one that thumbs its nose at the status quo, one that is self-aware and self-actualized in a turbulent and troubling world. In short, he clothed his brand in a character and gave it personality. In so doing, he pushed one-way media to its absolute limits in the pre-Internet age, creating dinner table and water-cooler conversations from glossy posters in a way that few of today’s YouTube and Facebook virals could ever hope to muster.

His ads were not mere billboards for hawking wares, but a mirror back into his company’s core values, designed to facilitate communication of those values with its intended audience. As Benetton summed up himself, “Communication should never be commissioned from outside the company, but conceived from within its heart.”

Nearly 30 years later, the Benetton brand still conjures up bright colors for a bright and worldly clientele. VW, by contrast, got its 15 minutes out of “safe happens,” but a few years later we’re already wondering this: Did VW’s campaign and the tremendous subsequent viral pickup reach within the heart of what VW stands for? Is VW perceived as any more or less safe than any other car brand today? Benetton took shock and owned it. He launched his brand with it and embraced it as an enduring and representative attribute of Benetton’s core values. Unlike VW and the preachy PSAs, Benetton grabbed us by our starched white collars, forced us to look, and then kept us looking and thinking about his company through that colorful and disturbing lens for decades.

We spoke with Hewlett-Packard Marketing Communications Manager Alex Flagg about the “HP Engineers Say It” viral video campaign he led last year. A longtime Tendo customer, HP conceived the series in response to aggressive competition from IBM. (Full disclosure: Tendo does produce video content but did not contribute to this series.) Learn how Alex combined a process with proof points to successfully execute a viral video series that did more than just entertain.

How did you conceive the idea for the HP Engineers viral video series?
In April 2008, IBM began an aggressive competitive campaign claiming their Power6 products had superior performance on a smaller system over HP’s Superdome Integrity at 93% of the cost. So we organized an overall marketing strategy to come up with competitive proof points against their mainframe, such as superior power savings and superior TCO savings. But we don’t have the advertising dollars that IBM has to be able to blast out this message. We decided that we should do something humorous and aggressive using viral videos—if it gets noticed and gets out there, you get free media.

Was the viral video part of a larger campaign?
Yes, the overall campaign was called “Out-market IBM,” and the other elements included an offer to give NonStop hardware away for free for the first year to those migrating off of a mainframe. There was an internal employee contest that invited people to come up with alternative uses for IBM’s mainframe; the winning one used IBM’s mainframe as an ice fishing hut, which we used in posters for the sales force. We did lots of press outreach. We created leave-behinds for customers—there was a slide rule that calculated TCO of the mainframe vs. HP Integrity, which we used for direct marketing in the United States, and there were announcements at conferences.

What audience were you trying to reach?
The broadest audience was the press, analysts, and mainframe customers. To reach mainframe customers, we needed to rely on communication channels—such as viral video—since they may not be receiving installed-base communications. The second-level audience was current Integrity and NonStop customers—we wanted to be able to reinforce the value that we are giving to them. The last audience segment was HP employees and the sales channel. The sales team especially had to feel confident in our product line.

What other approaches did you consider for achieving your objective?
We discussed a “Myth Busters” idea. This would have been good because it captures the scientific-analysis vibe in HP’s data-driven engineering culture, but it required us to design a real experiment that we didn’t have time for. We needed to do these quickly.

The video concept we landed on was more of a process than a script. We held a casting call and invited every engineer in the Bay Area to audition. We got about 140 responses and invited 50 people to read, just to get the funniest engineers possible. The reason we wanted to use real HP engineers with no script was that we wanted to capture the HP culture. We wanted to get the offbeatness and social awkwardness of having engineers star in the videos.

What did they do during the casting call?
Each one played a character and read a script from the “MythBusters” idea, and we evaluated them based on their energy, their persona. From that, we chose 15 engineers to videotape.

We then came up with six simple proof points about the IBM mainframe, like “the IBM Mainframe z 10 uses 8,000 watts more than the HP Integrity Superdome.” We simplified it even further by telling the engineers the proof point and asking them to show how they’d demonstrate 8,000 watts in power and cooling savings. We gave them a week to write their own scene using whatever materials they wanted. We also asked them to send us their idea and tell us what they were planning on doing a few days before the shoot itself.

Did you give the HP engineers any incentive?
We gave them a small employee award if their video was one of the seven or eight that we selected.

What part of the process contributed most to the success of the videos?
Let’s first define success, because it was successful in some ways and not so in other ways.

It was very successful in capturing the HP culture blended with the TSG (Technology Solutions Group) look and feel, and also tying the videos back to actual proof points. A lot of viral videos forget that they’re marketing tools and tend to be more movies or entertainment. What’s the point of doing that?

Many of these tech viral videos go for entertainment over messaging, so you need to strike a balance between how viral and entertaining you want to make it and how much you tie it back to the business. If you go too far to the entertainment side you forget about the message. Putting the competitive message in the foreground was important. From that standpoint, the videos were successful.

They didn’t become million-view videos, but according to some metrics, seven of the eight videos achieved 20,000 views total over a period of four months. It’s not bad for corporate marketing videos in our category.

Another thing that we did right was have more videos rather than investing in a single video. It spreads the risk, and collectively you get more views because each one feeds off another.

We also tried a new measurement technology, working with an agency called Zocolo (a social media agency specializing in measurement methodology). We measured the height, the width and the depth of the digital footprint. The height is the volume of discussion around the videos on blogs, or how many views are being generated; the width is the overall scope of influence of the social content, measured by incoming and outgoing links to other networks and videos; and the depth is the level of messaging and tone toward the brand—whether it’s negative, neutral, or positive. They create indices for each one of these and then aggregate them to get a metric.

Where we were fairly successful was on messages. We put the videos on YouTube, HP’s video site and Viddler, and we created a microsite to host the videos. And we invited bloggers to check them out. But the most successful distribution vehicle was HP employees, their friends and their social networks.

Did the video series accomplish what you’d intended?
Overall, the videos were successful from an executional standpoint. We’ve been able to repurpose them and use them at conferences and in press articles. They were successful in taking our proof points, isolating them, and making them simple and accessible.

Rather than go for pure entertainment and have it be very light on marketing, we decided to go for something in between “Gatorade Girl” and a PowerPoint presentation. In doing so, we had a good volume of quality views within a targeted audience. It’s hard to tie them to a message and have them be wildly entertaining. We don’t have a product like Apple that’s naturally exciting—we’re talking about high-end servers and mainframes.

The most success we’ve had is gaining confidence from our HP sales force and employees, who say, “We should be doing more of this sort of thing.” It fires people up and makes them want to fight IBM.

How long did the whole process take, from conception to posting?
About a month and a half for the videos only. And then the website was about six to eight weeks.

Any other advice for corporate marketers experimenting with video content?

• Don’t be afraid to try it, but set your expectations low because there’s no formula to making corporate viral videos that tie back to your message.
• Don’t outsource your creation to a vendor and just rely on them to come back with the idea. If you do that you’ll get a slapstick video with no message and no content. Start with the marketing message and proof points you want to communicate.
• Make sure the viral video is a reflection of your brand. Because it’s so creative, it’s easy to have them go too far off brand.

There. I said it. Sound counterintuitive? It’s not. Let me explain.

Too many marketers feel the need to list each and every feature of their product or service, thinking this approach will get their customers’ attention. That mentality plays out something like this: “Hey, look at this nifty product/service we’ve developed. Isn’t it great? And aren’t we great? Don’t you want to buy our stuff because we’re so great?”

Don’t get me wrong. Features can differentiate your offerings from your competitors’ and help your customers evaluate a potential purchase. But list features after you’ve captured your customers’ attention. Even customers who already know that they need a particular product or service are more likely to respond to your communication if you first show them what’s in it for them.

Benefits vs. Features

Focusing your message on product or service benefits comes down to focusing on your customer. But even with the best intentions, it’s easy to get lost in describing all the cool stuff your product or service does. Knowing the difference between the two is an important first step in identifying the benefits that will win your customers’ attention.

Features are product or service attributes. They explain how a product performs or what a service provides. They also differentiate a product or service from competitors.

Features may create certain advantages for the customer, which lead to benefits. But features are not benefits in and of themselves.

Benefits are the results created by a product or service. They solve problems, address needs, and ultimately provide a reason to buy something.

Notice the difference between the features and the benefits in the following mock copy, and how the advantages lead to the benefits:

Rocco’s Rocket Ships

State the Benefits

Your audience should be able to pick out their benefits from your list of features, right? Maybe, but assuming your audience is jumping the gap between your product or service features and the benefits they’ll gain from them is a big gamble in this day of media overload. You need to spell it out. What exactly are you doing for them or their business? What problem are you solving? What makes your product relevant to them? To put it bluntly, who cares if you’re a market leader unless you’re doing something that makes a difference for your customers?

Focusing on benefits to the customer is one way to relate your product or service to the customer’s point of view. It’s turning your focus from the navel-gazing “gee, look at the cool thing we made” to “hey, look at what we can do for you.”

Strategies for Identifying Benefits

Often marketers are too close to their product or service to see past the features. To them, the benefits may be inherent. Here are some strategies for shaking off the marketing lens and approaching your product or service from the customer’s point of view.

1. Paint a picture. Visualize in detail who your customer is and what problem they’re facing. Are they standing in front of an overflowing server closet? Are they sitting in their office daydreaming about a luxury vacation? Once you have a clear picture, put yourself in your customer’s situation. What would help solve your problem?

2. Ask, “So what?” You can find the benefits of most features by simply asking, “So what?” Continue to ask why until you get to the ultimate, underlying need behind creating a product or service in the first place. It might go something like this:

• Crown Bright Strips give you whiter teeth.
• So what?
• Your smile will be brighter.
• So what?
• You’ll look better and feel more confident.
• So what?
• With a brighter, more confident smile, it will be easier to get what you want out of life, like that great job.

3. Be specific. Specifying general benefits like “affordable” or “convenient” isn’t enough. Your customers want context—to know how something is more convenient or how much money they could save. This strategy comes down to knowing your audience. If you know exactly who you’re talking to and what their unique concerns are, you’ll be better equipped to identify the specific benefits that they may respond to.

Use these strategies to transition from marketing to your customers to engaging them instead. Stating the benefits you can provide, or what’s in it for them, shows your customers that you understand their concerns, the problems they face, and their point of view.

With such a volatile array of emotions involved, it’s no wonder people shell out big bucks for the Big Day. It’s not that they actually need their table linens to match the bridal bouquet; it’s that their emotional lives are on the line. And the wedding planning industry cashes in on all this emotional collateral.

For example, The Knot, a wedding planning site, boasts 3.2 million unique visitors per month and more than 3,000 new members each day. And these are loyal and active members. In fact, the founders of The Knot started a similar site, The Nest, for newlyweds, partially to give the former brides-to-be somewhere else to go because they were still hanging around long after their Big Day had passed. That’s a level of brand commitment that would make any marketer drool.

Emotion Sells

Research has shown that emotion plays a major role in consumers’ relationships with brands. The traditional advertising model assumes that consumer purchasing behavior and decision making is based on logic and information processing. Traditional advertising works to persuade that logic by highlighting product features and connecting those to consumers’ needs.

A recent study published in the Journal of Advertising Research examined successful advertising campaigns that detailed very little about the actual product and concluded that “favorability toward brands is strongly correlated with emotional content in advertising, but not with factual content.” A March 2007 report published by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation said, “Emotional reactions not only come first, they facilitate memory and influence actions.”

What’s more, the strategy of pure, logical persuasion doesn’t seem to be effective anymore. According to a 2006 Forrester report (Consumers Love to Hate Advertising), only 13 percent of consumers polled said they buy products as a result of advertising, and a mere 6 percent believe that companies generally tell the truth in ads.

Building an emotional relationship with a brand like The Knot seems simple when its audience comes pre-equipped with a cache of emotion—excitement, dread, or something in between—ready to be invested. But what about products and services that just aren’t all that emotional? How deeply can one really feel about kitchen cleaner or industrial can-labeling technology? The trick here is remembering the human needs that make kitchen cleaners or industrial can-labeling machines necessary.

Get Past the Product Features

Many marketing campaigns are generated from the point of view of the business. They say, “We have these great features on our product, so you should buy our product, not the other guy’s.” Creating an emotional bond means moving beyond descriptions of features and getting at the underlying need for the product.

Take, for example, the Kleenex® Let It Out™ campaign, which features a series of TV commercials with people telling stories from their lives and then getting very emotional. A box of tissue isn’t sexy, and there is little to differentiate one brand of tissue from another. That’s why the Let It Out campaign doesn’t talk about its product features at all. Instead, it addresses an underlying need for tissue: that people cry sometimes. But it goes a level deeper by addressing why people cry. Sadness, joy…it’s stuff we can all relate to.

The Let It Out TV campaign is complemented by an interactive website where visitors can upload their own stories of joy and sorrow. That’s a pretty deep level of engagement for a box of tissue. But by this time, it’s not a box of tissue, it’s a box of Kleenex.

Walk a Mile in the Customer’s Shoes

Knowing what your customer wants is great. But to forge an emotional bond, get to the underlying human factors behind a want or need. It’s not so much what they want, it’s why they want it. What are your customer’s aspirations? What keeps them up at night?

Consumers need kitchen cleaner because they want clean kitchens. But why? Maybe they have small children and don’t want them to get sick. Maybe they don’t want to be embarrassed when guests come to visit. Maybe they’d rather invest in an extra strength cleaner than be constantly annoyed with a messy spouse.

Realizing these underlying needs means really absorbing the consumer’s point of view. Imagine yourself as the consumer. What is your day like? What is frustrating to you? What makes you feel secure or insecure? And why?

Even marketers working in a business-to-business context can find a human perspective. A better can-labeling machine may increase manufacturing efficiency and benefit a company’s bottom line. So how does that affect the person who made the decision to buy that better machine? Do they feel more secure in their job? More professionally successful? More powerful? Identifying these factors can help you find the most effective way of forging a bond with your customer base, whoever they are.

Communication Is a Two-Way Street

We emphasize this point a lot, but it’s worth repeating: You must know your customer, beyond demographic data on a spreadsheet. And that requires real communication—the listening kind. Find ways to solicit regular feedback from your customer base. Even an informal move—like a manager stepping in to speak directly to a customer when a service call goes bad—can provide insight into the customer experience.

Forging an emotional bond between consumers and a brand is all about identifying the human factor. How will you know what keeps them up at night if you aren’t regularly communicating with them and relating to their emotional needs?