Stunt Fatigue

What does fish to the face have to do with money transfers?

Transfer WiseAdmittedly not much, however, kudos to the creatives behind this ad for TransferWise. They have achieved the very difficult task of getting cut through, brand awareness and engagement with this very engaging stunt.

The challenge ahead for TransferWise (read: all brands online) will be now that we have liked this stunt and am following the brand (customer or not), how long can they keep engaging us with stunts that have little to do with their offering? Apart from low fees, what is our brand/fan relationship going to be based on? Is there a genuine human journey we can go on?  Or is this stunt the peak of our engagement and then it all goes downhill from here?

To be fair, TransferWise actually do have a very clever, disruptive, connection economy business addressing a real world problem that’s not going away, so I’m confident this will be a brand that’s here to stay for the long term.

Stunts in and of themselves are fine – marketers will likely need to resort to more and more stunts to cut through the noise.

The issue for followers is that continuous, unrelated stunts from a single brand will result in stunt fatigue – we’ll soon get tired of hearing from the boy who crys wolf.

If you are going to pull a stunt, better to make it relevant by showing off a unique selling proposition of your product/service.

I’ve never been in the market for a truck before, but if I was, the bar has now been set at performing precision synchronised reversing.

Though the most famous, the Epic Split was actually one of six stunts filmed by Volvo to take me on a journey I willingly went on, and where each stunt sold me on yet another merit of the product.

End result: No stunt fatigue.

In fact, when the series of stunts finished, I even missed them.

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