How to create award-winning marketing – a tale of two campaigns

I was recently interviewed by a company to share some insights on marketing.

Take care in crafting your marketing. It really is in your hands.

Who am I to have an opinion on the subject, you ask? It’s a fair question! But I do have form. I am a chartered marketer (CIM), and I have spent most of my career in and around marketing, including ten years at WPP, the communications conglomerate, after selling a business to them.

I started my career at one of the ancient marketing monoliths: the Yellow Pages. In days gone by – what I like to call BI (before the internet) – if a company wanted to advertise its services, one way to do it was through a big, yellow telephone book called the Yellow Pages. Effective marketing was trying to get as near the front of the directory as possible, which is why, in the olden days, so many plumbers were called Aardvark, Aaardvark, or even Aaaardvark.

I was incredibly fortunate to see the impact of advertising in the Yellow Pages from the perspective of its customers. And it worked. It really was worth putting in the effort to design an eye-catching advert, and if your company name was Aardvark Taxi, you were more likely to get a call than if it was Zebra Cars.

I also saw the impact of the Yellow Pages’ advertising on its business. It ran a series of commercials with an elderly gentleman trying to track down a fly-fishing book. These J.R. Hartley adverts are still remembered by many of us of a certain age.

These adverts were incredible. They spawned a life of their own, with J.R. Hartley living beyond the TV slots, with enormous media coverage, appearances, endorsements, a book, and even a special Yellow Pages fly—ideal for catching Salmon, apparently. I should know. One of my jobs was collating press clippings for them, and not a week went by without inches of press about the life and times of J.R. Hartley.

The net result was like rocket fuel for the Yellow Pages. It propelled it forward. At one stage, it was reckoned to be the most profitable company in the UK and, thanks to its advertising, one of its best-loved.

Being loved was its mission. The theory was that the more people liked or loved the company, the more they would consider advertising in the directories. Its advertising was an essential ingredient.

Arriving at the J.R. Hartley advertising campaign was more than a lucky guess. It was meticulously planned. Through research, someone, somewhere had seen that “lovability” was the opportunity. That fed into the creative process, and that was brought to life by an incredible creative team.

This experience stuck with me. I learned that marketing success comes with understanding a problem or opportunity and that successful marketing is rarely or never a lucky strike. Inspiration should start with research to identify that “something” that will be the foundation of a brand or campaign. That “something” then becomes part of the brief, which is turned into a story that forms the basis for marketing. And I mean marketing in its broadest sense.

Another example from the banking world is one of my all-time favourite campaigns: HSBC’s “The world’s local bank” campaign. HSBC had a logo and a brand. However, with its acquisitions and increasing stature worldwide, it needed a positioning that matched its aspirations and business objectives. The campaign’s focus was “glocalisation”, ensuring its global stature was understood, but its local relevance was reinforced. And through a stroke of creative genius, the bank realised that an expression of this would be to own the air bridges of all the major airports in the countries where HSBC had a footprint.

I was incredibly fortunate to work with the bank around the time the campaign launched. Talking to Chris Clark, its CMO, I understood just how much research and insight had gone into identifying how this positioning and, in this case, its strapline was arrived at.

This award-winning campaign was so famous that it cemented HSBC’s position. Without it, would HSBC be a globally renowned brand outside the banking community?

Can anyone remember how it was positioned beforehand?

So, what does this mean?

Marketing should be viewed as strategic and critical. It covers everything from creating or enhancing a brand to finding a positioning (story) and ways to promote that positioning. This can be done through social media, PR, advertising, and, now more than ever, a content strategy.

If you are a fintech start-up, my advice is don’t start by copying who you like or admire. And don’t begin with a logo created on ChatGPT or a brief that is a sentence long and uploaded to Fivver. The net result will be a bland brand that looks like everyone else’s.

Looking at the market, maybe I should have given this advice long ago…

Ask yourself, or better still, get someone to ask you why you are doing what you are doing. It is also a good idea to ask others with a vested interest in their opinions. Write up the findings. Then, look at the competition and the market and see what they say. Write that up, and maybe even draw a picture or two. From what you have, pull out the key insights (post-it notes can be very handy for this). Group things together. Re-group them. Have a ponder. Leave it and come back to it. And I promise that “something” will start to emerge. That something is the seed that, carefully nurtured and looked after, will grow into what you need to get you started.

In terms of branding, it will ensure a truly authentic set of values and principles that help drive your vision and mission.

In terms of communications, it will form the basis of the story that will form the basis for your approach to content.

Take care in crafting your marketing. It really is in your hands. And who knows, in years to come, someone writing for a magazine may use your campaign as a case study!

About the author

Dave Wallace is a user experience and marketing professional who has spent the last 30 years helping financial services companies design, launch and evolve digital customer experiences.

He is a passionate customer advocate and champion and a successful entrepreneur. 

Follow him on X at @davejvwallace and connect with him on LinkedIn.