Building authority with content

Among the ads shown during the 2016 Superbowl was a spot for carmaker Hyundai. A young man arrives at an impressive, modern house to take the owner’s daughter on a date. The father offers him the keys to his own car, a move that looks generous until we see him glance at his smartwatch which shows the location of the car on a map in real-time. Wherever the couple go, the father is able to follow, secretly warning the young man from doing anything untoward with his little girl.

The commercial appears to promote one particular feature of Hyundai’s latest model: the ability to track the location of the car if it’s lent to a child or stolen. In fact, in a commercial that lasts a minute, the Car Finder feature is visible for no more than two seconds. Small print points out that the smartwatch needs to be linked with a smartphone, and the smartphone needs to be within a mile of the car. That makes it far less effective at tracking wayward teenagers than the location feature on their smartphone.

But the ad wasn’t about the car’s feature. It was about the product’s persona. Hyundai was telling its customers—wealthy, middle-aged, parents—that it understood their concerns. It wasn’t trying to persuade them their car was the best; it was telling them they knew them better than other brands. They knew what they really wanted, even the fears they’d be too embarrassed to articulate.

First Build The Trust, Then Land The Sale

The commercial was a piece of content that built authority. It put the company alongside its customers, in the place of a trusted friend so that when a lead visits a showroom or the website, he or she believes the features and benefits that the sales copy or salesperson describes. At the bottom of the Hyundai website, another video shows a baby with an engine in place of a heart who grows into the young man who designs Hyundai’s cars. The video impresses the idea that the carmaker is focused on quality.

Both of those pieces of content build epistemic authority. They’re not designed to sell. They come early in the customer journey, preparing the ground so that the lead wants to continue to the destination and feels good about making that journey. Other large companies build the same process. The website of HMO Kaiser Permanante contains information that ranges from helpful to the practical to the essential but the television commercial promoted at the top of the page places the company alongside its customers at every stage in their life. It builds the authority that creates loyal custom.
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Advertising has always been about creating an impression and building an emotional response to a brand. Content marketing can go even further. In addition to working with emotions, content marketers can appeal to the mind, building authority so that when they present evidence, it persuades, engages… and might even convince a father to lend his daughter’s boyfriend his new car.

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