Milestone Marketing: Leveraging a Brand’s Heritage
When creating a strategic marketing campaign to celebrate a brand’s milestone, the power of the anniversary’s meaning is what matters most. It shouldn’t be just a reason to celebrate.
What are the steps to developing a successful campaign? Is it enough to add a “Celebrating 25 years” silver embossed label to everything distributed to customers during that 12-month time period?
I say no. Well, yes, go ahead and make the logo, but don’t let it be your entire campaign strategy. Celebrating a meaningful milestone must start with a strategy that encompasses a brand’s external and internal audiences.
What is a good strategy? Well, the answer is going to be different for each brand.
But, before you go away feeling you’ve been duped into reading this far, let me tell you what I think are five good questions a marketing team needs to ask before they put together a milestone marketing campaign strategy:
• Who do we want to communicate to and why does our message matter to them?
• How will marketing this milestone support our long-term business strategy?
• What aspect of our brand’s heritage makes it different?
• What would happen if we didn’t promote/market this milestone?
• What are our desired outcomes and how can we measure the success of marketing this milestone?
If you read the list carefully, you probably realized that these are questions that are (or should be) asked when creating any type of marketing campaign strategy.
And, that my friends, is the point: Marketing for an important anniversary should be just as thoughtfully and thoroughly planned and budgeted as any other marketing effort. Milestone marketing is not as simple as adding an icon to your materials — and that includes foil embossed seals or expensive custom illustrated marks.
So, I implore the marketers of the world to unite: Stand up for thoughtful tactics. The heritage in a brand absolutely can be leveraged successfully. We just have to take the time to do it right.
