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By Polly Peng, Head of Marketing, Avaya Greater China
Guided by the concept of “Internet Plus”, we have entered the era of “Innovation 2.0”. Different from the past, people nowadays pay closer attention to the value and quality of online life. Amidst a rapid digital transformation, businesses are also exploring different marketing approaches and methods that are more in line with today’s lifestyle characterized by a high degree of informatization.
What can we do to best achieve our marketing objectives while maintaining our long-term departmental plans and goals? This is a question we at Avaya’s Marketing Department have been trying to answer. After much exploration and practice, we have concluded that the key element of a successful marketing strategy is being “light”.
Light Branding: “Moistening like a drizzle”
In traditional marketing campaigns, the name and the logo of a brand are given the upmost importance. Each company seeks to have the two presented in every possible place. Each also tries to let its own corporate brand dominate offline events whenever possible. But, as we observe in our everyday marketing practice, such a cramming way of marketing does not work. Repetitively and simplistically showing the name and logo might backfire and cause brand fatigue.
Today’s consumers care about customer experience and usage scenario more. If these two areas are well executed, we can afford to focus less on the brand. How do we practice minimalism in marketing and implement a “light branding” strategy?
Let’s take an example in Avaya. In one of a recent campaigns, we purposely reduced the amount of exposure of our brand. We simply “set up a stage for others to performance.” It may sound counterintuitive but worked to our advantage.
Each year, Avaya organizes a conference, named Avaya Experience, hosting hundreds of customers and channel partners. In a recent conference, Avaya deliberately reduced the amount of exposure of its brand name and logo. For example, in the conference theme, invitation letters, and panel displays, we downplayed Avaya’s presence and encouraged our customers and partners to come up with exhibition displays on their own. The speeches did not directly touch upon Avaya-related contents either. Instead, our technical experts served only as moderators. With this new approach, we wanted to let our customers and friends in the ecosystem know that the conference was not Avaya’s self-promotional event but an industrial event attracted many famous KOLs in the communication industry. As a host, Avaya oversaw the setup of the platform and invited our customers and partners to “perform” on it. We did not put on a solo show, but a shared party enjoyed by all participants.
This new concept was widely acknowledged and became very popular. Not only did many opinion leaders from our enterprise customers accept our invitations to share their thoughts, but we also attracted a dozen ecosystem partners to sponsor the conference. Meanwhile, even as the registration was about to close, the number of registrations continued to climb, at more than 100 registration per day, causing the registration number to far exceed the conference’s capacity. During those days, most of the phone calls the marketing team received were not related to the event’s operation, but from our sales and partners asking for additional seats at the conference. The official conference hotel was fully booked, and Avaya’s employees gave up their rooms to customers and stay at a different hotel further away. We did not anticipate such a great turnout and jokingly called it a “happy problem.”
With the “light branding, shared platform” practice, Avaya gained trust and respect from our customers, many of whom participated in our events with a sense of ownership. Since we did not excessively showoff our brand, we avoided causing brand fatigue among our target audience.
Secondly, when we set up the stage, we purposefully designed a runway stage that extended into the audience section. This allowed our speakers to engage the audience in a more intimate manner through eye contacts, facial expressions and body languages, thus encouraging more interactions between the two parties while giving the audience a more immersive experience.
During the campaign, we also used a stage play to build in different usage scenarios, an essential part of the conference. The play featured a main character named Xiaomei who encountered various common problems in life, such as leaving her cellphone behind, having a car accident when driving, etc. These minutes-long dramatized scenarios presented conflicts that led our guests to share their best practices under the circumstance on stage. The stage play entertained the audience and demonstrated to them the convenience of our devices and solutions. Again, Avaya brand was not mentioned in the play. It was the story of an ordinary person that captivated the audience.
A long time after the conference, participants still remembered the details of the stage play vividly. When speaking about it, they naturally thought about Avaya, the host of the event. Therefore, at a time when content is king and experience is everything, instead of repeatedly emphasizing an abstract name and logo, as traditional marketing methods would do, it works more effectively to leave the audience with a memorable story and allow them to associate it with our brand. As a Chinese poem suggests, “On the heels of the wind, a drizzle slips secretly into the night; silent and soft, it moistens everything.” Light branding works like a drizzle. It influences our audience in a gentle way without causing any negative feelings in them.
Light Investment: networking to spread influence
B2B companies usually have a limited budget yet a high demand for quick results, which poses a challenge for marketing personnel. Therefore, at Avaya, we adopt “quick returns on light investments” as our core strategy and implement a full-staff networking tactic to spread our influence and leverage all possible resources.
Accordingly, our marketing focus has moved from offline to online. For example, during the Chinese New Year holidays, Avaya provided technical support for telemedicine for multiple hospitals including Leishenshan and Huoshenshan, enabling remote medical appointments between patients and doctors. The Marketing Department post scenario-based stories on different social media platforms and called upon all staff members at Avaya to join the effort by sharing these posts on their individual social media. Through the network of each employee, these stories reached a larger audience. Within a short period of time, we received dozens of phone calls from our clients, partners, and media organizations.
Caption: An Avaya employee shared an article about Avaya’s case on her WeChat account and the article spread about. Each dot represents a friend of hers who clicked to read the article.
Around this time, we organized more than ten online webinars. To our surprise, about half of the attendees learned about our events from social media, a result of our all-staff networking efforts. This shows that this tactic not only effectively reduce investment but also enabled more precise targeting in the market.
The rapid flow of information, the collaboration of all employees, and our newly added digital marketing platform based on social media, contribute to Avaya’s “light investment” strategy. Even with a small budget allocation, we are able to leverage our networking resources and quickly reach our target market.
Finally, we can use the data retrieved from our digital marketing platform to track and tag our customers, and vertically categorize them more precisely, turning them into our “private-domain traffic” for marketing purposes.
Different from traditional marketing approaches, light investment not only helps us quickly reach our target market and reduce spending, but also allows all staff members to join our marketing effort. The data collected during this process will benefit our next marketing campaign, enabling us to further narrow down our target audience and generate useful sales leads.
Light Crossover Marketing: Integrating complementary advantages and resources
Today’s digital environment witnesses a variety of marketing cases. Among them, many eye-catching ones adopted the crossover marketing strategy, e.g., Mercedes-Benz’s involvement in gaming and esports; Disney’s interactions with retailers; and Palace Museum’s launch of cosmetic products like lipsticks and eyeshadows. The collaboration between seemingly unrelated industries yields unexpected results.
At first, Avaya also partnered up with companies from other industries to appeal to our common target market. While we did find success in doing so, we gradually realized that this type of crossover marketing strategy is costly and requires a long lead time. Can we take advantage of crossover marketing to expand our customer base while keeping the cost down and lead time short? After much exploration, we have settled on the light crossover tactic. Traditionally, crossover marketing emphasizes on collaboration between two brands, aiming to have a “1+1>2” effect. Light crossover, on the other hand, is the integration of marketing two solutions. It seeks to reach customers of the two solutions simultaneously. Focusing on customer experiences and needs, it helps customers solve real-world problems. Being “light”, it takes a shorter planning and launching time, and costs much less.
Here is an example: Recently, Avaya launched the “Ingenuity — Avaya Digital Experience Season” campaign in collaboration with multiple partners, who added their expertise in cloud computing, big data, and AI to enhance Avaya’s communication solutions and services. As such, we were able to integrate complementary advantages and resources with our partners to create and promote content in all channels for marketing purposes.
Online conference is becoming a norm. The main host and co-hosts can quickly organize a virtual conference, while guests can dial in from anywhere. This makes light crossover marketing ever easier and simplifies many formalities compared to offline collaborations.
“Light” and Diverse Experimentations
For businesses, it is “lighter” to go digital and turn to the cloud. These trends simplify and optimize the once complicated workflow, and contribute to the gradual transformation of businesses’ organizational structure. For individuals, fragmented reading, short video viewing, and ready-to-go mini-programs all represent a “lighter” lifestyle. They allow us to get information that interests us quickly and directly.
With our continuous experimentation and practice, we have found that a marketing strategy with “being light” as its core concept works better among today’s consumers who do not wish to be bombarded by excessive marketing messages. Avaya will continue to explore the field of digital marketing and improve our approach to light marketing.
Light Marketing = Light Branding + Light Investment + Light Crossovers
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