Launched last year, this content marketing initiative is built on the premise that the first 28 days of a child’s life are extremely important and hygiene plays a crucial role.
The initiative pivots across two demographics. To reach the lower SECs, Lifebuoy collaborated with 31 neonatal clinics across Pakistan, co-opting women health workers with the task of educating mothers about the importance of washing their hands to ensure their child’s health. To target the upper SECs, photographs of parents from all walks of life with their newborn children were taken by Arif Mahmood, Tapu Javeri and Malika Abbas. The photographs were then used across three different platforms; they were posted on Dawn.com as part of visually-rich immersive photo essays narrating the experiences of new parents; published in expensive coffee-table book format; and displayed at an exhibition at the Canvas Gallery, Karachi.
“Lifebuoy is no longer a carbolic soap, and the formulation is as good as Lux. Through the exhibition and book launch, we wanted to increase the brand visibility of Lifebuoy among the higher SECs,” explains Ammar Mohsin, former Brand Manager, Lifebuoy.
Perhaps as importantly, ‘28 Days’ highlights how online publishers (in this case, Dawn.com) can help build a brand narrative. “There are huge opportunities for brand and editorial partnerships. They [editors and writers] know what story angle to take and how to present it,” Mohsin adds.
The HR challenge
This brings forward another question: what are the skills required to conceptualise and execute successful content marketing campaigns?
According to Salma Jafri, Content Marketing Strategist and Founder, Salma Jafri Media, “for online campaigns, it is crucial to hire people who have the technical expertise to use content curation, creation and measurement tools.” On the creative side, knowing the art of storytelling is mandatory for content marketers – whether online or on traditional media.
For this reason, many international content marketers, including Joe Pulizzi, founder of CMI, believe that journalists are ideal content marketers because they know how to tell engaging stories based on research, have industry contacts, and are aware of ethics and legalities associated with procuring and publishing content. However, in Pakistan, content marketing is still not considered a worthy sub-discipline of marketing, which is the reason why there are no dedicated content marketing agencies, let alone content marketers. Nevertheless, like in the case of digital agencies which have cropped up in the last decade following the social media wave, this is likely to change.
A question of changing mindsets
Before one can think of finding ways of overcoming the HR challenge, there is an even more important factor to keep in mind if content marketing is to be seen as an initiative worth investing in, and that is changing mindsets within the industry.
Amir Haleem Syed, CEO, KueBall Digital, points out that “it is the agency’s job to push their clients to embrace content marketing, and reap the rewards it can offer their brands.”
Syed also emphasises the challenges involved in doing so. “We have to educate our clients, because they are averse to the subliminal branding that defines content marketing. We have to persuade them that putting the brand in the background is the way to go.”
Clearly, if brands in Pakistan want to take advantage of content marketing, they will have to change their mindsets and remember that effective content marketing initiatives require them to be more subtle in terms of branding and shift the product to the backseat, letting content drive the communication. This will, in the long run, create lasting brand recall among consumers and lead to increased brand equity – and, of course, sales.
For feedback, email aurora@dawn.com