Simone Ciaruffoli is the founder and CEO of Burgez, as well as the founder and creative director of Upper Beast Side, the studio that takes care of Burgez’s creativity and marketing. You wrote “Marketing Luther King” during the lockdown. If it hadn’t been there you would have written it anyway
Yes, for several reasons: because it was scheduled, because I was interested in doing it, because it will be the opening of courses related to marketing. During the lockdown I wrote two more books and set up 2 companies. I tried to use such a negative moment in a positive way. From the very first pages your book is sarcastic, irreverent and above all transversal. In one of the opening chapters you argue that Chiara Ferragni is not an influencer. What do you mean
Just these days I was watching a video of an influencer promoting a credit card. I watched more videos and reviews from this influencer reviewing other credit cards.
Before social media, the testimonial exclusively linked his image to the brand. Today this almost never happens. A company must bond with a brand, not an influencer. An influencer on balance and a real company that offers its product, or image, to those who hire it.
An important company shouldn’t, as far as its awareness is concerned, tie itself to one of the many influencers. In the immediate future, the influencer can bring you more followers, but people are not attached to the person who embodies the figure of the influencer, so they will hardly become attached to your brand with the same intensity. He will follow the influencer and the next brand of which he will be testimonial.
For a long time, brands have forgotten that the best influencers are happy customers. We talk too often about Brand and very little about Lovemark. Can you tell us the difference
All are Brands. Nike is a brand like Adidas, Samsung or Apple. Among these brands, few are also Lovemarks, for example Apple and Nike are. Lovemarks are the ones who go one step further and manage to build a brand so important that any person would want to be part of that circle.
You don’t become a Lovemark by buying followers or making millions a day. A lovemark is like love, you can’t buy it. What are the ingredients to create a Lovemark
I believe they are the same as a leader. Then the charisma, storytelling and storydoing. If a brand manages to build its own important and valuable story, it becomes a Lovemark even without a reference leader. Not all Lovemarks have had a Steve Jobs.In the future we will have brands linked more to quantity (vanity metrics) or to quality (customers who become brand ambassadors)
. Let’s start with the cinema. At some point the democratization of the big screen arrived. Anyone could make a movie. When there was film you had to have a production company behind you, with the advent of digital we can all make a film.
Thanks to digital there has been an effective increase in the quality of films
No. Everyone can make a film but this does not necessarily translate into an increase in quality.The economic crisis is putting a strain on the retail and HORECA sectors above all due to anti-covid restrictions and smart working. Sooner or later this pandemic will end. In your opinion, the restaurant industry will have understood the lesson that we must first eat well and then internationalize a format
What this pandemic is teaching us
I think that initially there will be a death of places. Anyone who had problems before the pandemic is unlikely to survive this period. For those who were doing very well, this period will represent a temporary stop to move the expansion plans by one year. All the others, those who were “pretty good”, are the most motivated to try to stay on their feet, to resist in these difficult months.
Once the pandemic is over, we will be back as before. Milan lives in the cliche of being a European city but has only the appearance of a European city. Let’s say that it faced Europe but remained halfway through. He is in limbo.
We think of the skyline of New York, London or the Defense of Paris. What they have in common
And all enlightened. The Milan skyline is not. The city at night must be like the city during the day, you cannot turn it off. This is already symptomatic, you would like to “be” but you can’t. You are one of the very rare cases, if not the only one, in which you are founder of the communication agency that manages the marketing of your creature Burgez. Other than a tailor made strategy. Startups will increasingly take this direction
I personally did the reverse process. My experience comes from marketing and communication and only later did I set up a fast food restaurant. Switching from communication to catering, and not vice versa, paves the way for you a little because you are the “marketer” of your business: you see (and often foresee) all the effects of what you are doing instead of outsourcing your strategies business.
Let us remember that a restaurateur and always the client of an outsourced marketing, it is up to him to decide whether a post passes or not. The client is worth 50%. In Italy, however, there is no “modern” image culture like that of the Anglo-Saxons. The Italian entrepreneur remained Renaissance. If we do not have great marketing and because there are no clients with an open eye to the world.
