Canon’s lat­est mar­ket­ing cam­paign focus­es not on the prod­ucts them­selves, but around how peo­ple are using the brand’s prod­ucts. It makes for an inspir­ing mix of con­tent mar­ket­ing and brand sto­ry­telling that will impress con­sumers, and approv­ing mar­keters alike.

All too often, mar­ket­ing con­tent and lit­er­a­ture can be over­ly didac­tic. Even at its most cre­ative, or most expen­sive, per­haps with the full force of a brands mar­ket­ing might and bud­get behind a snazzy new slo­gan — the mes­sag­ing still essen­tial­ly says one thing: “Look at how awe­some we are, look how great our prod­uct is.” Clever cross-chan­nel ini­tia­tives, share­able con­tent, and a great deal of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tal­ent, means cam­paigns are still often great suc­cess­es, but many cam­paigns still are still built upon one-sided com­mu­ni­ca­tion dynam­ics. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, brands have nev­er been par­tic­u­lar­ly good lis­ten­ers, and this harks back to the fact that it has typ­i­cal­ly been fair­ly dif­fi­cult for con­sumers to talk back, or pro­vide feed­back in years and decades past.

Spreading Customer Stories

In many ways, Canon’s lat­est cam­paign is no dif­fer­ent from many oth­ers. It’s still head­ed by a sleek, inspi­ra­tional, and catchy slo­gan — “See Impos­si­ble” — and it is still based around a brand new microsite as its flag­ship dig­i­tal con­tent. Noth­ing new there. The way the cam­paign dif­fers is in the sub­tle­ty of the brand’s mes­sag­ing, no longer using con­tent as a means of spread­ing core brand val­ues, mes­sag­ing, and prod­uct infor­ma­tion, but to spread sto­ries about how con­sumers are using their prod­ucts. It’s a change that has been inspired, and enabled, by dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, such as social media and video shar­ing plat­forms. More­so than ever before, con­sumers are shar­ing sto­ries about the prod­ucts they are using, gen­er­at­ing con­tent and prod­uct advo­ca­cy that influ­ences the way fel­low con­sumers view prod­ucts. It appears that Canon has been lis­ten­ing to those sto­ries. To give an exam­ple, cre­ative young film­mak­ers have been using high­ly spec’d, but incred­i­bly cheap, Canon DSLRs to pro­duce stun­ning work for a num­ber of years, so much so that the brand will arguably take pride of place as the defin­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of DSLR film­mak­ing cam­eras of the noughties. It’s just one exam­ple of a cus­tomer sto­ry that the brand has ful­ly embraced:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5_LFmQ6eH1I

So it’s the way their prod­ucts are being used, rather than the prod­ucts them­selves that is inspir­ing Canon’s ‘See Impos­si­ble’ sto­ries:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FtS39XS513I

People Rather Than Products

It is ulti­mate­ly a sim­ple mes­sage, but one that should­n’t be under­es­ti­mat­ed. Cam­era and optics man­u­fac­tures have always man­aged to pro­duce incred­i­bly strong, emo­tive mar­ket­ing, dri­ven by the pow­er of hav­ing such an expe­ri­en­tial prod­uct to pro­mote, and Canon’s lat­est cam­paign real­ly strikes a chord in the way brands should be lis­ten­ing and respond­ing to con­sumers today. It’s nev­er been eas­i­er for brands to observe and appre­ci­ate the way con­sumers are using, and feed­ing back about their prod­ucts — it’s only nat­ur­al that this should fil­ter into a brands over­all mes­sag­ing. A Canon press release spoke of the brand’s repo­si­tion­ing as a ‘lis­ten­er’ as well as an inno­va­tor: “Canon is work­ing to lis­ten, adapt, and build a pre­scient under­stand­ing of the chang­ing mar­ket forces it faces today and the oppor­tu­ni­ties they present.” Michael Duf­fett, VP and Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of mar­ket­ing at Canon, expand­ed upon how the cam­paign is help­ing the brand move towards greater cus­tomer-cen­tric­i­ty in their mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty:

“We’re going to use it as a mes­sag­ing vehi­cle, but we’re also going to use it inter­nal­ly to orga­nize and mar­shal our resources in a way that’s much more cus­tomer-cen­tric than just strict­ly approach­ing every­thing from a prod­uct view­point that we’ve done over the years. Our cur­rent Web prop­er­ties do a great job of talk­ing about the spe­cif­ic prod­uct, but nowhere do we have a real­ly good place to say a par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny or a par­tic­u­lar pho­tog­ra­ph­er are using our solu­tions.”

Even a sub­tle change in focus can make a dif­fer­ence to the big pic­ture.