If you’re living in Trinidad and Tobago, chances are when you read the messaging of a company’s products or services they provide, you don’t realize that you’re interacting with their marketing in comparison to their advertising when observing their designs.
So lets lay the foundation for this discussion by first differentiating marketing from advertising.
In basic terms, marketing is the process of identifying customer needs and determining how best to meet those needs. In contrast, advertising is the exercise of promoting a company and its products or services. -ama.org
Shock value in design looks like the deliberate use of controversial or unexpected imagery, with the aim of getting talked about and distributed as memes on social media locally.
In the past 6 years, companies such as Courts Trinidad and Tobago, Cocolooks, and now St Augustine Medical Laboratory Ltd have all toyed with shock value in advertising to gain the attention of customers. Now sometimes you’re lucky and the personality of your design truly aligns with the brand’s message and the focus of the business. But the reality of being disruptive for disruptive sake, is it’s a cop-out of finding authenticity for most companies.
What Is Great or “Brilliant” Marketing?
“Great marketing is about doing something that makes a customer undertake an action that helps fulfill the objectives of your business.” -Simon Carter, marketing director of Fujitsu UK
I got a popular local LinkedIn sales trainer to sign up to my email list, as well as my second client from a controversial article I wrote in 2018 entitled ‘One Of These Things Is NOT Like The Other!’ Speaking with the client at the time, she shared how after reading my article “she knew why she felt she had to work with me to do her One-Page Project ™.”
That said, now that your advertising made someone “laugh, cuss or feel proud to be Trini”, what‘s next? What’s the objective of your business?
You want someone to pay $1500 for your services, but you haven’t presented your company as one that’s worth $1500 in comparison to everyone else in your industry charging less.
When the fish ain’t biting, this is the opposite of great or brilliant marketing.
How To Breathe Life Into A Boring Industry?
What about when you want clients but your business is struggling to stand out? If shock value is your smoking gun for why someone should choose you, by default, your marketing is getting attention for all the wrong reasons.
Standing out can be as simple as doing or not doing something that’s uncommon or typical for your industry and also double as shock value!
For eg: TheBrandTUB starts each project with TheBrandConductor ™. It's uncommon for graphic designers in Trinidad and Tobago to operate this way when starting projects, but its a perfect opportunity for me to differentiate what I do from what they do. The meeting is foundational to the client’s project. They know this and there are no sleazy obligations. It costs $788TTDS. I’ve spoken about it in a couple articles and have put all my clients to date through this process.
XN General Insurance Ltd don’t sell insurance (despite being an insurance company) because their clients don’t need insurance. Selling a prospect something they don’t need is something they’re very against and transparent about not doing in their day-to-day interactions with clients. Which translates more authentically to prospects through their visual branding.
Then there’s Gretchen, a professional manicurist located on Charlotte Street, Port of Spain Trinidad. I simply flipped all that boring lingo into a voice her clientele recognize and her industry wasn’t capitalizing on: We Offer Handjobs™. And yes, there will be people who don’t appreciate The Mystery Of Your Brand’s Language . The average Joe doesn’t understand how branding works nor would they get why it shouldn’t be based on their personal biases or taste. While its important to be prepared for that when you have a brand that’s different or in some shape or form, irreverent. As I told Cru Nonpareil in 2019…its more important to pay attention to how it benefits what you’re trying to accomplish.
That said, sometimes ‘shock factor’ is taken too far and the ad is straight up inappropriate, like Balenciaga’s holiday ad campaign in 2023 .
Hence why my objective with this article is to demonstrate how shock value can be executed in different ways and be a powerful tool when executed thoughtfully. Outside of that, it only comes across as a gimmick and dishonest when someone interacts with your company and your brand and you aren’t that person your advertising or marketing: you don’t operate or speak like that!
I am the Founder and Visual Brand Strategist at The BrandTUB
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