Recently I came across a campaign feedback from an European parliament candidate on the election last month. The feedback was quite good from someone who considered that this candidate had done a great campaign by its clever integrated communications strategy and presence in key places. After revising myself the campaign, I noticed one key fact. There was nothing within the candidate. She didn’t stood for nothing rather than “a new face for Europe”! There was a lack of ideas behind the candidate and simple key explanations on why I should vote on her and what in fact did she stood for? this lack of determined attributes was within all communication materials and website.

I am amazed by the money spent in political campaigns which turn out to be substantially worthless in terms of results, and deeply questioned by how good was in fact this campaign, where it could have been well planned, but never engaging.

The difference between awareness and engagement is wide, and the story goes on with companies that still hope its sole spend in “awareness” will drive results.  Today you can spend millions advertising your brand, interrupting people on the media and on the streets, but that never means people will eventually buy it. On the base of a brand pyramid there is awareness, and indeed you need to build brand awareness and take you word out to your defined market, though, on the other end (top) there is engagement, and in between there must be a clever mix of rational attributes (benefits) and emotional attributes to build up your way to engagement. Most probably your sales will go up if your product or service is really worth buying, if you bought so many ad space that is inevitable for people to become aware of your brand, and also if your campaign remarkably communicates your brand essence.

Still, today rules changed, and instead the web enabled that the gap between awareness and engagement shrunk in time. The speed your brand can travel between the base of the pyramid to the end of it is so fast that it becomes imperative you think clearly on your brand essence and cleverly build up your way with consistent benefits and emotions; simple key ideas amazingly built up internet brands as youtube, facebook or twitter in a couple of weeks.  Within a traditional advertising driven thinking, I believe there should be a shift, one that you can spend millions developing your product or service to make it much better than it is, and then spend a lower percentage of that millions engaging your brand with a clever integrated, creative and interactive campaign that spreads. People will listen and talk and interact if your brand is remarkable, and if you cleverly connect with your audience by understanding it, you’ll probably get much more results than spending all those millions just to interrupt people on the streets with flyer’s and poor TV ads without any sense behind. Awareness gets your word out indeed, but engagement makes your word staying in a conversation.

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