Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Sandra Stojanović, Copywriter, McCann Beograd
The new HBO series that follows the pontificate of Pius XIII, the spoiled autocrat from the United States, describes the shock of the arrival of an anonymous without a lot of experience at the head of the Catholic Church, an institution with a strong marketing and PR department. Pius XIII (Jude Law), in a controversial Let’s make Catholic Church great again style resists the liberal trend of political correctness and with his conservative attitudes attracts the attention that goes far beyond the reach of his predecessors. (Sound familiar?)
The Catholic Church with its HQ in the Vatican bases its business on deep human insights for centuries. However, with active liberalization and industrialization of the market, brand loyalty is decreasing in favor of more practical and instant gratifying concepts such as science. In such circumstances, the young Pope in the very first episode asks the key question: What really makes our brand awesome?
Young Pope opts for what we call the mystery marketing, fully in line with the brand identity for which he is responsible, and offers passive consumers one huge NOTHING. Rather, he is using a strategy of abstinence and anti-transparency. By abolishing his own profile in the public, and controlled mystery he draws the consumers and the media into his story and encourages them to think almost obsessively about the values and the role of the brand in their lives – something they took for granted before. He declares: “I don’t want any more part-time believers,” and those activated by the mystery themselves begin to fill in the blanks and create content. In the conditions of constant exposure of personal information on social networks, and after Snowden and WikiLeaks quite convincingly assured us that privacy is literally luxury, young Pope with his radical and defiantly medieval behavior (No selfies, please!) makes a comment on the moment in which we live and paradoxically becomes the most modern persona in his work environment and the category of services to which the Catholic Church belongs. A similar approach in popular culture, among others, is implemented by the band Daft Punk, which can be seen only in helmets and almost never perform in public. The distance creates the need to reach out and observe closer that which is in front of us, despite the fact that this something is in the sea of content that aggressively shines and sparkles in the hope that we will devote more than 2-8 seconds of our time to it.
The tactic of the young Pope is not to play by the rules and not to care about the expectations, but to create new ones. Similarly behaves Frank Ocean, who ended his gloomy relationship with the music label by placing the album Endless immediately on iTunes, starting thus a schism between record companies and music platforms. Young Pope and Frank have values which they don’t bargain with, and their irresistible self-confidence and courage with which they act instil confidence in what they do. They break the hegemony and surprise us by disrupting the routine in the industry and by clearing the way for new ideas. This can only be done by brands that are confident in their product, have a strong vision and firmly stand behind what they believe – brands worthy of hype. Young Pope is well aware of his best trump cards, his blue eyes, which he is saving for the very end of the teaser campaign.
In a similar spirit like Fanta, whose motto is recently: the product (and image) so good that it sells itself, the young Pope is not trying desperately to be bought or to appeal to someone. He questions all the channels and contact points, rejecting redundant conventions and every kind of default (branded merchandize, handouts? Nope!) and focusing on what is really important for his brand. Like Tesla, he doesn’t lead a brand with a mission, but a missionary brand which is standardizing a mission …
In short, every episode of this painfully cool series is a lesson in marketing, and a PR master-course worthy of soaking in. There is a new Pope now, and this is only the beginning!