Please don’t burn us at the stake for admitting this, but we at Contagious consider ourselves to be heretics. Not religious ones – we profoundly object to the dogma that marketing needs to follow a set of conventions.
That’s why we champion brands unafraid to do things differently. These are the brands that don’t shy away from heretical questions – questions that Contagious lead strategist Chris Barth and co-founder Paul Kemp-Robertson describe as the ones ‘that would chill the air if you brought them up in a meeting of senior stakeholders’ in their piece in our latest magazine. Barth and Kemp-Robertson argue that asking these very questions leads to discomfort and dissonance, but also to remarkable creativity.
Our entire issue is, in fact, peppered with brands that have asked such questions. We dig into the outcome of a brand asking itself, ‘What if we publicised the fact that people hate the taste of our beer?’ If someone tweeted that your product tasted like ‘the bath water that your nan died in’, no brand manager’s instinct would be to promote it, but that’s what Carlsberg did. This counter-intuitive approach saw it sidestepping the advertising clichés of the lager category.
While Carlsberg’s campaign was about confronting people’s dislike of its product, in his op-ed, our editorial director Alex Jenkins investigates what happens when people really dislike your advertising. The blasphemy here lies less in the question,‘Should we make people hate our ads?’ and more in his answer: a nonchalant shrug.
There’s more heresy when we explore the result of a slew of brands asking, ‘What if we admitted this is an ad?’ Turns out, giving up the charade with campaigns that are both entertaining and authentic can better appeal to young people.
