Enhance marketing by embracing creativity and disruption to craft surprising, memorable, and engaging campaigns.
Ever heard of Frank’s RedHot sauce? I hadn’t until Eli Manning showed up on my TV promoting it while I was watching Sunday football. The ad was quirky and funny. The advertisers capitalized on several key marketing strategies:
- They utilized a recognizable celebrity, Eli Manning, specifically targeting football fans.
- They placed their product in odd and surprising contexts, such as gardening and fishing.
- They ended the ad with a disruptive and surprising tagline.
See for yourself. In 30 seconds, Frank’s RedHot was surprising, memorable, and disruptive. Google “Frank’s RedHot Eli Manning” if you want to watch the ad. While this strategy is controversial and not for every product or service, there remain key aspects that can be harnessed for less dramatic campaigns.
As engineers, architects, and scientists who design infrastructure and protect our environment, we do not produce commercials or use celebrity endorsements. However, we do create marketing messages and craft a public image of who we are, what we do, and how we do it. AEC firms promote their services in several ways, including:
- Placing advertisements in our clients’ magazines and journals.
- Sponsoring events and conferences.
- Maintaining a website.
- Posting on social media.
- Recruiting new talent.
- Telling the stories of our clients and their projects.
Are we boring ourselves to death? Let’s all just admit that our industry’s marketing is mostly boring. Creativity is not high on our priority list when it comes to public safety and professional design – nor should it be. I would rather not work in a building characterized by creative structural engineering. I want reliable and disciplined engineering that will ensure my safety in a building that will not collapse. But is there room for creativity in our marketing of a conservative profession?
We all know there is not a lot of risk in marketing Frank’s RedHot sauce using disruptive marketing methods – methods that require taking novel approaches with innovative ideas, being comfortable with trial and error, and taking risks. I propose there is a universe of opportunities to use disruptive marketing in our own firms.
BAM! Out of nowhere, an ad jumps off the page. I like to think of disruptive marketing as having three primary objectives: They need to be disruptive (obviously), surprising, and memorable. So, as AEC marketers, we want to consider disruptive, surprising, and memorable marketing activities. Considering our former list of marketing activities, print advertising is a well-known and familiar promotional method. Most of our firms place print ads in our clients’ publications. We do this to support our client organizations and remind them of our services. But we all know those ads tend to look the same. They say many of the same things, make the same claims, and use similar imagery. Again – boring!
What if we applied disruptive, surprising, and memorable objectives to our print ads? Suddenly, as our clients thumb through their familiar journal, BAM! Out of nowhere, an ad jumps off the page (surprise), looks completely different (disruptive), and says something extraordinary (memorable). What if?
From dull to dynamic. Apply disruptive marketing objectives to your other marketing activities. How would your social media posts change? What surprise awaits on your website’s home page? How would a stale proposal turn into a story full of marvel and awe? The idea is to be different. But not different for different’s sake. Be different in order to win the attention of those you wish to serve, so you can position your firm as the solution to their problems.
When crafting marketing campaigns, it is good to push ourselves in a more creative direction. If we can use surprising, memorable, and disruptive strategies to capture attention, we will benefit from great marketing. The effect of better creativity will produce even more dramatic results in an industry that is plagued with sameness.
Gabe Lett joined Prairie Engineers as chief marketing officer in 2024. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
