NEW YORK — Duracell continues to be a billion-dollar brand, but as personal electronics have evolved from Game Boys and digital cameras to smartphones and smartwatches, the role of the battery has modified in every day life. For a marketer in a low-interest category like batteries, the challenge is compounded, explained Duracell’s Global Chief Marketing Officer Ramon Velutini.
“An inconvenient truth for us [is] the a part of the brain reserved for excited about batteries may be very small,” Velutini said during a panel at Advertising Week New York on Tuesday. “To make matters worse, the a part of the brain reserved to take into consideration battery promoting is even smaller.”
Velutini has been global chief marketing officer at Duracell for nearly five years, but has spent greater than a decade with the brand, dating back to before Procter & Gamble sold it to current owner Berkshire Hathaway. During that point, Duracell and its agency partners have worked to make battery alternative matter by marketing across the moments when its batteries are doing probably the most good for consumers and culture.
“The thing that keeps [me] up at night … is becoming just like the banana category,” the chief said of his team’s challenge. “If you wander off in consumers’ minds, they begin deeming you less necessary, and then you definately’re liable to the commoditization.”
Brand can’t take a backseat
During the panel, Velutini highlighted a handful of campaigns that saw the brand engage with culture through breakthrough creative, including a 2014 campaign about Derrick Coleman, a fullback that played within the NFL despite being legally deaf. The moving “Trust Your Power” spot told a real, emotionally charged story of how Duracell played a job on the sector, beyond just in headsets and electronic equipment.
“We’re not the official hummus of the NFL,” the chief noted. “We’re actually in the sport, which is a extremely good, authentic tie in.”
A 2015 spot made an excellent stronger pull on consumer heartstrings. “Teddy Bear” shows how Duracell powered a talking teddy bear that played a message from a deployed member of the military, culminating with the tearful reunion of father and daughter. But in each spots, the battery brand was a bit lost amid the emotional storytelling.
“We have tried to create that shift on specializing in selling batteries and ensuring that despite the fact that we’re attempting to elevate the importance of the category or our stance in culture, it is vital that Duracell doesn’t take a back seat to the stories we tell,” Velutini said.
Duracell’s teased forthcoming creative during Advertising Week New York.
Duracell was in a stronger position in two campaigns from 2023. The first, “#BitterIsBetter,” keyed in on the brand’s innovation around lithium coin batteries that present a toxic choking hazard to children. Duracell began applying a non-toxic bitter coating to the small batteries, discouraging swallowing and helping out beleaguered parents. To highlight the bitter coating, Duracell ran video content featuring Lance Bass and offering to present away $1 million in free batteries.
“Our share grew globally with this innovation, and within the U.S., it grew 50% within the last five years, which is loads within the category,” Velutini said. “Consumers were adopting it, retailers were getting behind it, so obviously, that body of labor really worked at rising business.”
The second effort made an excellent greater mark as Duracell found an organic connection to the truth show event of the yr: the so-called “Scandoval” across the break-up of “Vanderpump Rules” stars Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix. Nodding to a clip during which Sandoval mentioned he was “answerable for batteries” on the couple’s home, Duracell quickly left a TikTok comment: “Guaranteed to last 10+ years, unlike Tom.”
Within days, Duracell had shot an ad with Madix, who claimed she was “done with anything basic” and called out Duracell’s 12-year guarantee. The video notched greater than 26 million organic views, greater than 90,000 shares and led to a 25% gain in social following. The earned media that followed led to five.4 billion impressions and nearly $50 million in net ad value, in response to information the brand shared on stage. The success speaks to how brands can navigate latching onto pop culture.
“I at all times use this lens of, are you able to add any value to the conversation? Do you could have any right to have that conversation? The majority of times, the reply is not any — you are a battery brand,” Velutini said. “On this one, we didn’t only have the precise to activate it, but we also added value.”
Lessons learned
Duracell’s next marketing work is due out in several weeks, and can see the brand proceed to “unapologetically” sell its batteries by maintaining that it’s “built different” than its competitors. That and future campaigns will probably be driven by 4 lessons that Velutini shared throughout the panel:
- “Even inside marketing, you wander off within the indisputable fact that you discuss something 24 hours a day, and the consumers discuss it two times a yr. I’d invite you to bring some self-awareness. Say, what role are we playing in consumers lives?”
- “The consumer is feeling the pinch … you are at all times faced with two routes. One is you simply cost save, and then you definately try to maintain it so you’ll be able to try to take care of relevance on this on this area. Or two, you win the hard way, and the hard way is via innovation and via brand constructing. If you do not spend money on the long-term, value creation story… it’s just not gonna last.”
- “It feels warm and fuzzy if you win an award, but I feel it feels even higher when the profit goes up… because that is at the tip of the day what we’re here to do.”
- “Make the work, earn the cash… You might need struck gold with an idea, but for those who don’t spend sufficiently behind it, it is not going to maneuver the needle as much as you would like.”
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