the fruits of imagination

Brand Strategy. Really?

Increasingly, more and more theories, buzz words and approaches to brand strategy are being created as a means of differentiation, attraction and salesmanship by companies in the marketplace. And similarly, this very same dynamic is flourishing within client cultures and manifesting itself in conversations awash with buzz words and vogue terms. The unfortunate offspring of this dynamic both externally and internally has become a far greater degree of valueless complexity, lack of clarity and uncertain direction. What needs to be discussed with far more courage and tenacity around any given table is the fundamental purpose of strategy. Three simple thoughts i find useful in setting up, evaluating and questioning strategy in broadest level are these: think of them as a master check list applicable to any and all brands and categories.

1. strategy is about making choices and not compromise. it is the very practice and application of distillation: going wide in thought, analysis and creativity, then making firm decisions about what to keep and what to leave out. if a strategy isn't pointed and prejudiced it's likely vanilla. the more accurate, the more concise, the better the idea.
2. strategy is about the basic values you're trying to deliver to people. if the brand can't define itself why would we expect people to define it for us. if that's the situation you find yourself in, then one must really question the validity of the brand itself. people aren't attracted to or merely need more stuff...they are however attracted to and desirous of more stuff with imbued purpose and meaning. that's the fundamental difference between a commodity and brand.
3. strategy is about the courage to be different than your competitors. if everyone is going to the same place - saying the very same things, looking, behaving and talking alike - it causes people to choose on price. you know you're beginning the journey of 'different' if you can decrease the price elasticity of your brand in market and create differentiators of choice that super-cede the category itself.

Get your check list out. i know i did today on these very same issues, and only gave a final grade of C+, but the conversation certainly got far more interesting and productive.

Creative Reach & Frequency

far more interesting than a print ad, far more experiential, far more compelling... and likely delivering the equivalent reach and frequency of a traditional buy. nicely done.

An advertisement by Jung von Matt/Alster for watchmaker IWC. Bus straps have been fashioned from images of IWC’s Big Pilot’s Watch to allow bus travellers near the airport to try before they buy at Berlin, Germany.

a different angle on behaviour

  

The digital explosion we’ve witnessed over the last 10 years may not be the result of technology itself  - the internet and it’s many attendant mobile devices - but an unequivocal demonstration of pent up consumer demand resulting from fundamental shifts in behaviour. The internet and digital devices just happen to be the penultimate media which can, and has satisfied, peoples altered behavioural needs.

WALLED GARDEN TO FREE RANGE:

•    Where only a generation ago, our collective world view was formed within a walled garden of limited media access and selection, yet today we can globally peruse some 22,000 magazine titles across 276 verticals (specific interest areas), tune into 15,464 TV channels, and jump to any one of 5 billion websites globally.

•    For brands this is critical: centrally controlled editorial is extinct and real access to information and opinion exist at will: any time, any where and well beyond the control of the company, brand or marketing.

PASSIVE TO EXHIBITIONIST

•    Technology has given us power… and the time of the passive consumer has past. Today, right now….people are assimilating facts, fallacies and forming perspectives on brands….our brands, and significantly shaping if not controlling the brand's narrative, image and value.

•    People are actively commenting on, co-creating and -re-creating brand equity through the 200 million blogs on typepad, the 4 million entries in wikipedia and 65,000 youtube posts, rants and raves that occur each and everyday worldwide.

•    Where only 10 years ago, people we used to call show offs, grandstanders, big mouths and braggers had but a small town stage on which to play, these same people now known as bloggers perform to a hungry and attentive worldwide audience.

•    This online exhibitionism has become a behavioural condition of the digital explosion to be heard, understood and passed along.

BLIND TRUST TO ONLINE ACTIVISM

•    76% of people don’t trust advertisers to tell them the truth, 64% of people trust companies less than they did a year ago and food specifically is trusted by only 55% of people.

•    With people saying “I can no longer rely on one source of information or what I’m being told’ the masses are turning to their peers online for the real, unmitigated scoop and perceived value found in collective wisdom: 61% of people trust others like themselves…except now those ‘others’ are not local but global ,or few but many, and connected to together anywhere and at anytime placing marketing very much in the hands of others than ourselves.

TELL TO ATTRACT

•    Brands can no longer push out commoditized and functional messages to a supposedly desirous and passive audience and hope to get response.

•    “We’re a society driven by entertainment and in an entertainment culture, everything must compete with entertainment…” which demands that all content ..even brand content, be not only ever changing and but personally interesting and created with the rules of entertainment in mind.

•     And of all media, it is digital's fundamental ability to provide endless, instant and timely hyper personal entertainment - inclusive of information and education presented correctly -  that begins to explain increasing levels of internet penetration, time spent and astounding mobile adoption.

•    Digital then in essence is the one media hope that can most effectively arm current consumers with the most personally relevant tidbits to tell the best stories…. And brands whose consumers tell the best stories in the age of entertainment….win.

        This ‘new reality’ is markedly different than the fiction many brands continue to speak and live today - the way in which they market themselves to their respective consumer. The digital explosion is a result of an unexploited need and a fundamental shift in behaviour, which until digital remained dormant and inactive.

   

conversations with ourselves

Alternate media. Traditional media.  That both marketers and agencies refer to any media that falls outside the realms of TV, print, and outdoor as ‘alternative’ suggests at best an inward looking and dangerous perspective.

Q: Alternative to whom?
Q: Unconventional by whose standards and whose behaviour?

The pressing reality for most brands today is that product differentiation can be erased overnight and brand messaging easily duplicated. But the creation of purpose driven acts that deliver layers of the brand experience may be a last source of differentiation. What many call ‘alternative’ media today  - and what I might call a brand act - has in been in play since 2nd century B.C. The circus maximus was buzz marketing, conversation creation and stunt writ large for brand Rome. The first known example of guerrilla marketing is to found in Ephesus (modern day turkey) in the form of graffiti advertising a brothel. Place based media in the form of architecture has at its best, implied much more than mere form as in the case of Beijing: Contemporary Superpower. Alternate media…how about a conversation about context as a media in and of itself.

Being nicer

I was bitching about a client last week with a few other people.  I know this may come as some surprise to the young and innocent among you, but this happens in advertising sometimes. 

This time, something interesting happened: the conversation turned to why we complain about clients, and what that does to us and the relationship.  And we realized something: it's not good, and we want to stop. 

So I'm saying it here: I'm going to stop.

Why?

Because it's negative, and negativity tends to encourage more negativity.

Because I don't want to say things behind people's backs that I wouldn't say to their face.

Because it's a small industry and you never know when a comment will come back to haunt you.

Because by focusing on the frustrating parts of the relationship, rather than the good parts, it just sets the stage for more frustration.

Because it makes us stop seeing them as other people, with their own set of pressures and fears and perspectives and ideas.

Because it sets up an us versus them dynamic, instead of one where we work together to solve a problem.

Because it's a cop-out, where we resolve ourselves of any responsibility: "It was a brilliant idea, but the client just couldn't get it."  Well, if they didn't get it, isn't it our responsibility to find another way to explain it, or to figure out where that lack of understanding lies?  (Or heaven forbid, maybe to accept that the idea wasn't actually so brilliant after all.) 

Because every person that I've ever complained about I've also learned something important from, even if what I learned was how to deal with someone difficult.

And because even the frustrating ones are paying our salaries.

Image from Toothpaste for dinner 

Sharing success

I was working with a client a while ago who was leaving their brand after a hugely successful run.  They were very smart, had turned this brand from nothing into something, and had made it famous and profitable.  But having decided to move on to better things, they had no interest in helping the people who were left to run the business to continue to be successful.  They seemed to assume that whoever took over next could never be as successful as they'd been, and that they would mess it up.

Sure, it was arrogant, but it also made me think about what constitutes success.  And I realized that in my book, the true measure of success isn't just being smart and having great ideas.  For me the true measure of success is the ability to make everyone else around you smart and to help everyone have great ideas.

It's often said about Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky or Zidane that they were great not just because of individual talent but because they could elevate the level of an entire team.  But I'm also reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great British Prime Ministers and political rivals William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.  The story goes that a woman who had eaten dinner with both men was asked what her impression of them had been, and she replied, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England."

AdVerbatims

This has been making the rounds the last few days, and it's so worth checking out.  AdVerbatims is a site dedicated to cataloging all the dumb things that people in our industry say.  I'm sure many will sound familiar.

"Can you make the design 17% better?"
(Client, giving feedback to Account Executive)

"These ads are all good. This one in particular is quite intriguing. But we’ve found that intrigue doesn’t work for us."
(Client, giving feedback)

“It lacks branding but we can solve that with a voice over saying the name of the brand.”
(Agency, Account Director, commenting on a jingle whose lyrics consist entirely of the name of the brand, sung 7 times, and the word “grapefruit” sung 4 times.)

“We’re a serious company. You can’t use the international symbol of the vagina on the cover.”
(Client, Area Manager, looking at the image of two hands framing a photo)

Here's my contribution:  last year in a creative presentation, I had a client say: "Wow, that's a really big idea.  Now, do you have anything smaller?"

Another inconvenient truth

How a lot of marketing today is like global warming:

1. People realize that the way we currently do things doesn't work very well anymore, and that we will be in trouble if we don't start experimenting with new solutions
2. While many people agree on this, there is a lot invested in the current system, so those ultimately in control are resistant to change
3. Besides, things still sort of work, and the changes are happening slowly, so it might not get really bad for years
4. So it's easier to pretend nothing's happening, keep doing things the same way, and secretly hope that someone else figures things out.

The strange power of bubble wrap

True story:  I was walking downtown one day and passed a group of panhandlers asking for money.  The first one said "spare any change?"  The second one said "spare some money for a coffee?"  The third one had a large sheet of bubble wrap spread out on the sidewalk in front of him, and was holding up a sign saying "Jump on bubble wrap: 50 cents." 
I gave him five dollars.

Another true story:  we once proposed to a client whose brand was supposed to stand for happiness and optimism the idea of creating magazine ads made of bubble wrap, or just giving out strips of bubble wrap on the street for people to pop.  We said it would increase general happiness.  They said they didn't see how it would sell their products.  Needless to say, they didn't do it.

Failure

A good post on Brains on Fire today about playing it safe made me think about something I've been struggling with for a while.  I posted a comment there, but it made me want to write something here as well.

In my experience in this industry, it seems that most people are driven more by the desire to avoid failure, and more specifically to avoid blame for failure, rather than a desire to acheive success.  Most people would rather have safe 1% growth on their brands than aim for 50% or 100% growth and changing the category, because that entails risk of failure (if it was guaranteed, everyone would have done it already). 

This is partly driven by the inherently conservative nature of people - people who have kids and mortgages and so on - to not want to put their neck on the line.  It's partly driven by a cultural belief that failure is bad and demeaning, rather than an opportunity to learn and grow (if that sounds like trite new age wisdom, consider that the New Coke disaster, often cited as one of the biggest business failures, was the best thing to happen to Coke - it refocused them and showed them the real meaning of the Coke brand after they'd lost their way in the early 1980s, and led to the successes of Coke Classic and "Always").  It's also partly institutions and economics - most companies compensate people based on short-term growth, rather than long-term vision, and stigmatize failure.   Nobody wants to be the person who lost a chunk of shareholder money.  Really, how many organizations actively encourage risk-taking and challenging convention?  Not a lot.

This is why so many decisions are not made by individual judgement, but by committee, or by research.  These are structures that mitigate individual responsibility for a decision.  I've seen people approve something which no one really believes will work because "the research said people liked it" - even if everyone kind of knows the research was flawed.  But they approve nonetheless, because if it fails, they're blameless: "the consumers told us to do it."

But isn't this a tragic shame at a time when the world of media and brands and culture are changing so much?  "Safe" has diminishing returns and is itself becoming risky.  It's time to experiment. It's time to challenge the rules. It's a time to take calculated, strategic risks.

It made me think about something else: blogging is easy, the real world is hard.  A lot of you probably believe in the stuff above.  But how many of us are doing it everyday?  I'm not.  It's easy to say that we need to experiment and change the rules when it's here in the abstract, without a specific client and a room full of sceptical people sitting in front of me.  It's easy to do when there are lots of really great, supportive, like-minded people reading and blogging and participating in these conversations.  But it's harder - a lot harder - when faced with a room full of people who don't share this point of view, who don't want to talk about risk, who think that using the same media plan as the last 5 years is fine, who aren't looking for debate, who just want to get out of the meeting and check something else off their list.  And so it's easy to back down in those situations, to say "I'll pick my battles" or "this isn't the right client to have this discussion with."  I've done this.  Lots.  And I regret it afterwards.  It's like the feeling I have when someone makes an offensive remark and I let it slide.

I love the blogging community.  I believe that the best, most forward thinking discussion in the world right now about brands is going on in places like here, here, here, and here (and lots of others).  But I also see  a danger of a different kind of complacency - a complacency that comes from spending a lot of time with like-minded people and not enough time doing.  So here's my challenge to myself: to argue for more of this stuff, to demonstrate its importance to even the biggest sceptics, to find ways to make experimentation seem less risky, and not to compromise or back down for the sake of expediency.  Yikes.  Did I just say that?

I guess what I'm saying is takes a brave individual to speak up in an organization and argue for changing things, especially in defiance of conventional wisdom or company politics or research.  That makes it a rare individual.  But these are usually the people who change the world.

Well, that turned into a bit of a rant, didn't it?