Brands intelligence: Increase your sales and attract loyal fans.

Creating engaging and relevant content for brand awareness has become a real headache for many businesses.

In this era, brands want to be heard and want to stand out of the crowd. Brands want people to view their content and become loyal fans. During the Digital Content Summit 2016 occurred last week, a debate amongst some delegates emerged about whether viral ads can increase sales and are good for business.

According to history, not all viral videos led to an increase in sales. For example:

In 2009, Evian made the ‘Roller Babies’ ad, which went viral, even making the Guinness Book of Records that year for being the most viewed ad of all time. The ad, as the name suggests, featured babies dancing on roller blades to the song Rapper’s Delight and was part of Evian’s ‘Live Young’ campaign.

You might think having a viral video that millions of people have viewed and shared would increase sales. Sadly, this was not the case for Evian. In 2009, recession hit Europe and the US hard and Evian lost market share and had sales decline. Nevertheless, Evian did not give up with this ‘Live Young’ message and in 2013 it was ready for a comeback. Evian realizing the popularity of the dancing babies launched the ad ‘Baby & Me’, which features adults of various ages and races dancing in front of a mirror which reflects back a baby image of them.

The video also went viral – however, this time it had the effect of increasing sales. What kind of messages about content can other brands learn from this?  I would say to produce content that focuses on the brand values of the company and is consistent. Evian achieved this by delivering fun and humorous roller babies videos that reflect one of the brand’s core messages: ‘Live Young.’

Although recession hit in 2009, the video was remembered and when the time was right, Evian was able to produce another message consistent with the brand’s values, which this time increased sales.

Getting a video to go viral is difficult, brands that are producing content that is considered trustworthy, based on their values and consistent are creating an environment that might be considered more favorable to buy from.