Sell your values. Not your product.

BY SARAH HICKEY

Think about your own online scrolling behaviour for just a moment. What’s running through your mind as you go through endless posts from endless sources; the things that hold your attention and seem worth your valuable time. And when we say “valuable time”, we mean the 10 whole seconds – on average – you’ll devote to watching branded content that touch longer.

Generally speaking, unless a product or service has features that you are legitimately hungry for, it’s pretty rare that you’ll stop to watch “an ad”. On the odd occasion, you might if it’s got an element of humour or clever entertainment attached, but often successful viewership tends to rely on something called “value alignment”. That is, engagement through content that speaks to the values behind a brand, often not even mentioning the product or service at all!

So what do we mean by this?

Let’s use a case study to demonstrate ways in which we’ve done this for clients of our own.

This is an example of a content series we pitched to AFLW & Maurice Blackburn Lawyers to showcase the two brands’ stance on inclusivity, gender pay gaps, multiculturalism and other highly current discussion points. At no point was the intention to directly sell the services of the law firm, or promote the AFLW. However, these pieces were highly successful in taking a stance and showcasing the aforementioned “value alignment”.

As a brand awareness campaign, Maurice Blackburn in particular used these power pieces to maintain a moral positioning in the market, and the audience engagement levels (and conversation starters) were much higher than a typical, sleek TVC campaign could ever muster.

Collectively, between this panel series and a connected documentary series (Fair Go Community Series), all were extremely well-received by audiences, and had close to one million views in total. An example of the documentary series engagement can also be seen below.

Value alignment is a tool to attract the right people to your brand, and to actively change the way your brand is perceived. And we love working out how we can use the modern age of social media for the greater good, whilst also benefiting a brand’s need to stand out from the rest.