Don’t say, show: Why testimonial marketing needs a serious shake-up

By Belinda McCubbin, director of marketing, SAE Creative Media Institute | Sponsored
 

I have a confession.

When I first sat down with our agency, Town Creative & Branding, to discuss concepts for SAE’s huge new creative branding campaign, my brief was simple and direct.

“Let’s do a testimonial marketing campaign,” I said with certainty.

We talked about how amazing our students and staff were, how incredible their work was, their talents, their ideas and their reputations in their respective creative industries.

Then we had a long, hard look at how we wanted to present that, and I realised a traditional testimonial marketing campaign would do a vast disservice to our brand.

There'll always be a place for great testimonial storytelling but to truly be heard, you must stand out.

While the tertiary education category is a highly competitive and cluttered sector, it takes a noticeably cliched approach to campaign creative.

This category is saturated with testimonial-style campaigns. Have a look around, it's like we've all forgotten how to be unique.

SAE almost fell into the same trap because it felt like a safe option, like something tried and tested.

But testimonial marketing campaigns are overdone, they are not new or unique anymore and the approach doesn’t have the same cut-through it may have once had.

The penny-drop moment for SAE came when Town presented us with a competitor analysis, a series of campaigns side-by-side where everything looked the same.

There was a real moment of clarity that a beautifully designed billboard with a graduate and their job title simply would not resonate with our target market.

At the end of the day, if we could swap out our name and logo for those of a similar institution, then we’d have failed to demonstrate our creative credentials, and our branding campaign would simply add to the clutter.

We realised we couldn’t just tell people we’re creative, we had to show them. We had to demonstrate that we understood the mindset of a creator.

We had to re-engineer the creative platform and disrupt the category to show we were a creative media institute delivering a truly creative campaign.

Talking our campaign goals through with Town, we recognised this was our opportunity to be bold, authentic and truly creative.

We had access to campuses filled with the most creative minds and the brightest of ideas… so why not use them?

The creative industries cover a multitude of disciplines, skills and perspectives but the one unifying thread among the sector is that creators see things differently.

They are inherently wired to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and that’s where we started playing in great creative territory.

Instead of showing the destination – graduate outcomes – we focused on the journey – real skills acquisition.

By eschewing tired testimonial marketing in favour of creative and compelling storytelling, we created a conversation, sparked curiosity and piqued potential student interest.

Going against the grain isn’t easy and pulling together a new creative branding campaign that breaks new ground isn’t a quick process.

To establish what would resonate, we had to pull our brand apart, interrogate what we stood for, take stock of what set us apart and slowly rebuild from the ground up.

It was daunting. We had to disappear down a rabbit hole, unlearn everything we knew and start again.

But we had to go through this labour-intensive process to realise the direction we didn’t want to go in, the well-trodden marketing path we didn’t want to take.

Institutions like SAE don’t embark on major brand pieces often so when we do, we need to invest the time to do it properly if we really want to disrupt the category.

By showing, and not merely saying, a campaign like All for Creators can reinvigorate a brand.

Showing a brand in action adds a new emotive dimension and brand connection by providing meaning and evidence to its brand promise, experience and benefit above and beyond its product or service.

Campaigns with cut-through are those that employ storytelling to connect, inspire and resonate with their target markets.

Campaigns that clearly and fearlessly see the world differently.

SAE’s All for Creators campaign, developed with Town Creative & Branding, is currently in market across digital, social and out of home.

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