“The first question you have to ask is: Why are you in this space?” Mark Snyder, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer of Church’s Chicken, told attendees during his session, “The Narrative Arc of Church’s Chicken: Digital Customer Engagement Through the Magic of Video-based Storytelling,” on Tuesday at the 9th Annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Association for Customer Loyalty. Loyalty Expo is slated for May 24-26, 2016, at the DoubleTree Universal in Orlando, Florida.
During his session, Snyder explained the company’s digital strategy and how it differed from the seemingly similar platform, television.
As for his question to the audience, he stated that most brands answer with a simple “because everyone else is in it.” That, insisted Snyder, is not a good enough answer. To be successful, he added, a brand must consider several factors.
To begin with, the audience must be defined. Who are you speaking to? Is it someone a woman in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, or a man in suburban St. Louis? “If it’s both,” said Snyder, “how am I going to balance it in a way that makes sense for both?”
Another component is getting loyalty moving in the right direction as Snyder put it. Digital encompasses a lot of different platforms that funnel down into narrower consumer-facing streams. The Web goes to social media, which can narrow to email promotions. At the end of the spectrum is the mobile app. Video content can live on all of these platforms, but it, and other types of engagement, can be most reliably focused on an app.
A key factor in digital video content is to frontload your content as Snyder explained.
“Traditional TV ads pay off at the end,” he said. “That’s where you get the logo and the tagline. In digital, always frontload the content with the payoff up front. That determines whether the viewer will go forward and watch.”
For Church’s Chicken, finding an audience and dynamic subject began by looking at the data. Church’s Chicken found that it did very well with 18-year-old males. Further research yielded some interesting results.
“This demographic likes watching video content is achievement based,” he said, “where pushing yourself either physically or mentally brings out your personal best. This is the insight we had.”
A movie that did well with this age group was Whiplash, released in 2014, a film about an aspiring jazz drummer and his intense instructor. Snyder and his team were intrigued and wondered if this could be an entry point. Church’s then discovered the World’s Fastest Drummer competition and became a sponsor. It was a natural fit.
“The key to life is shape liked a drumstick” went the tagline. “It all starts with the drumsticks” was another one that was used.
The competition, basically, is centered on a device called a drumometer. It is essentially a pad that records drum beats. Contestants sit before the pad and see how many beats they can tap out in the allotted time. Church’s also became a partner in a documentary about the competition and released it via YouTube in 12 separate weekly episodes. The series gained nearly half a million views and was a huge success for Church’s.
Seeing the whole thing through was a major factor in the success of the campaign. Church’s found the proper platform and learned how to use it. It established a relationship and maintained it. Most importantly, company officials weren’t afraid to learn.
After letting attendees peek at the secret sauce, as it were, Snyder again urged them to ask themselves, before embarking on a digital campaign, “why are you in this space?”