Campaigns to admire #1: Birmingham Heroes
People talk about ‘brave’ campaigns quite a lot. But brave can mean quite a few things and - let’s be honest - we’re marketeers here folks, not firefighters.
That aside, for me the Birmingham Heroes campaign is a type of brave. It’s the kind of brave where you go all in on a specific look and feel, where you have to persuade a lot of stakeholders to get on board with your idea, and perhaps most crucially, you break away from the traditional approach to promoting your sector’s product.
The ‘product’ we’re talking about in this scenario is a university’s research offer. And your safe ground here is often a big push around some mind-bending new discovery revealed in a recent paper, or the society-changing impact a project team has had with their last few years of work. I’m not saying those things are easy to promote, but, y’know, some stories can do half the work for you.
So what’s brave about Birmingham Heroes, is that they lead with their people. I mean, just look at this approach – their people are front and centre, their people represent the research themes – your access to each theme is through the individual.
And as an audience member, say a prospective student looking at whether this is the university for me, that’s risky – right? Because it’s easier in theory to grab someone with headline research – ‘the team that’s taking on aging… and winning’ – for example. It’s much harder to get someone’s attention through people they’ve never heard of.
But it works! It really works. The way they present their stories is so intriguing and so accessible, that you can’t help yourself but be absorbed by who these heroes are – why they’re heroes – what it is they’re doing that’s so heroic – and maybe, just maybe, how you can become a hero as well.
I also love how consistent the branding is. Isn’t consistent branding across content and across channels just the absolute best? You could take a warm bath in consistent branding, couldn’t you? I mean, just look at the set-up for their videos, and how it fits with the banner above. Et voilà!
Now granted, I don’t have any numbers to put to this (and if the University of Birmingham wanted to send some stats across I’d very happily read them and very happily tell you all about them), so for the moment I’m judging mostly on the look and feel of the thing. But having worked in the university-sector for a bit, I’m also judging on what an impressive logistical task achieving said thing must have been.
And Birmingham marketing/pr team, let me tell you, you’re heroes in my mind for that alone…
You can check out the campaign for yourself at https://bit.ly/Birmingham_Heroes