The Better Mousetrap

Brands: Thorny, gnarly, ever-so-twisty

 

Just what the hell is a “brand”? It’s such a lovely, thorny, gnarly, ever-so-twisty, I-double-dare-you-to-try-and-answer kind of question. Jeremy Bullmore, that Living Legend of Adland, offers the following quite brilliantly delicious description:

 

“Brands are fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half-real/half-virtual things. When CEOs try to think about brands, their brains hurt.”

  

Slippery, elusive, real... and unreal, it’s the kind of description upon which myths, heroes and super villains are born. Brands, they dodge like mercury.... and as for getting them to do what you want... hell, you’d have more luck trying to carpet-bag lightning! Branding – clearly not for the faint-hearted.

 

 
Super villains: personal favourites

  

Mystique-building aside, Bullmore also offers up a number of defining parameters:

 

“Products are made and owned by companies.

Brands, on the other hand, are made and owned by people… by the public… by consumers.

 

A brand image belongs not to a brand – but to those who have knowledge of that brand.

 

The image of a brand is a subjective thing.

No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand.”

 

I think the above is hugely helpful, but what therefore remains clearly tricky is that even “in their telling”, brands remain elusive, because it’s not about what a brand says or does but how it is perceived. Brands are therefore quite rightly “elusive” because to most intents and purposes, they are... illusory. Jeremy again...

 

“No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view”.

  

So, how to de-stick the wicket when a brand (and the message it conveys) operates within a Theatre of the Mind, where all minds are different, where the Grand Jedi Bullmore’s descriptors wholly apply: owned by people, the sum total of personal knowledge, wholly subjective? Blimey.

 

The idea that everything is everyone else’s Subjective Solipsistic Reality can... quite simply... turn you crazy. Where does that leave your brand strategy?

 

There is of course always some kind of common-ground collective (nearly) Objective Truth we can shoot for. And in an effort to hold up the roof before the floor gives beneath our feet (huh?), let’s try this:

 

A brand is a bundle of Meanings & Values, but as seen and perceived in the eye and the mind of a consumer.

 

I’ve been using this line for a while. For me, it holds up, keeps me away from the edge and out of trouble. Partly, because it also provides clear "Pass-Go-&-Collect-£200" direction. 

 

Out of perceived (read: Personal & Subjective) meaning, a brand-builder looks to create WANT, to create emotional connection and deep-seated affinity.

 

Very simply, brand building is about WANT CREATION.

 

 

 

A brand’s success is therefore through effectively communicating a perceived point-of-difference, whereby it evokes some clear and winning sense of distinction.

 

Where I believe it’s easy for us all to agree and not go for our semantic guns is in the fundamental role of all brands: to realise their use, value and potential.

 

Any brand’s ultimate potential lies in its power to persuade and prompt action, to trigger behavioural change and personal preference versus any set of alternative purchases.

 

Put neatly, any brand’s success rests in its ability to strike a chord, to convince in practical and emotional terms, to resonate on rational and irrational levels.

 

The singular task of the marketeer is simply this: to build brands of “GREATEST APPEAL”.

 

 

SP.

 

Systemic Thinking... in the name of Strategy

 

“STRATEGY is; A style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of insuring FUTURE SUCCESS.”

Peter Johnson, Author & Historian

 

Most agencies implicitly acknowledge Johnson’s definition of “strategy”... because every agency feels the heavy need for an implementation system, a “Planning Process”, a “tool to call their own”... that they can wheel out in pitches, use to assert how they are different from the pitching field, use to internally train their planning staff... and use to demonstrate how they can both embrace best-practice AND remain permanently on the cusp of innovation.

 

Yes, betwixt the above lines you will have felt a needle of sarcasm, so for balance, let me add this.

 

Best practice is best and having a process is how you get there. But there are also caveats, otherwise (back to Johnson’s definition), all “style of thinking”... ends up losing all style.

 

Planning is only part process, and over-fixation with “The Process” is to the distraction and detriment of desired outcome. And a Desirable Outcome – smart thinking, great work – is the only reason for championing a process in the first place.

 

The Planning Process, or System, or Tool, may well be an acronym. Big organisations, agency and corporate alike, tend to really like acronyms.

 

TCP (Total Comms Planning)...

IBM (Integrated Brand Marketing)...

IBC (Integrated Brand Communications)...

ICP (Integrated Communications Planning)...

 

All are absolutely harmless, so long as no one goes confusing them with WMD’s.

 

 
WMD symbol variants. Not to be confused with ICP, TCP, IBM et al.

 

Cheap acronym gags aside, all four of the aforementioned are fine and decent planning processes as long as taken with a pinch of humanistic perspective. All are very systemic left-brain carefully-plotted and conveniently linear roadmaps to – and here’s the thing – a fundamentally more right brained, intuitive, zig-zaggy discipline.  

 

Yes, you’ve got learn the rules in order to then start breaking them, but once you know the rules it’s wise to recognise that everyone has the same toolkit back at the ranch, and it’s the Human Dimension that makes or breaks a good piece of communications thinking. Because there ain’t much imagination born of mechanistic thinking.

 

Some agencies go a step further, dodge the acronym pratfall. Planning Systems have been known to be named after volcanoes (no copyrights on "Etna"), winning chess moves, or consciously treated with cheeky Post Modern irony – “The Big Tool” remains a personal favourite of mine.

 

Whatever the volcano, irony, or acronym, a tool is a tool is a tool. And while there’s nothing wrong with a good tool, there’s also a clear bottom line.

 

Use a tool, don’t be a tool.

SP.

“The Brand Organic” (Part I)

 

 

I’m very taken with the much-held idea of brands being organic, as in they are living. Organisms of huge growth potential, but that require the right kind of tending, watering, light, and yes, love. Because the converse equally holds true, perilously true.

 

You can kill a brand.

 

It only requires the wrong kind of external stimulus, the right blend of opposing external forces, some kind of PR tsunami, a lashing culture-quake, and blink, the light goes out.

 

(When marketeers talk abstractly of “brand health” scores, they’re closer to the supermarket-shelf realities than they necessarily realise.)

 

Remember Proctor & Gamble’s Sunny Delight?

 

 

Marketed with the implication of sunburst goodness and a hearty orange juice content (actually only 5%), when Britain’s tabloids started running headlines to the effect, “Sunny Delight will turn your child orange”, there was little scope for comeback from P&G, little way of spinning something that had spun out of control.

 

The tangerine-hued kids in question were drinking more than 1.5 litres a day, over twice the recommended adult intake, and by consequence the (albeit harmless) carotene contained in Sunny Delight was altering their skin pigment. Of course, the scientific whys and wherefores were largely academic.

 

Here was a big American conglomerate peddling syrupy sweet soft drinks to which innocent children were becoming sufficiently addicted as to start looking like Umpa Lumpas.

 

The ad agency ran a TV ad showing a snowman turning orange, though not in some daring, ironic response, but before the fact, which just added to the PR disaster. And little to nothing the ad agency could then magic-up in riposte to the media blows offered any hopeful comebacks. (And rest assured, we tried.)

 

Parents who’d blindly allowed their children to drink so much Sunny Delight didn’t enjoy feeling complicit in the negligence of it all, but side-stepped responsibility by claiming that they’d been sold a wrong-un by an ad campaign that misled through suggestions of “natural goodness”.

 

“Long-short”, Sunny Delight was dead in the water. Drop six letters and "rename" it Sunny D, change the packaging, try and spin it all you want, over is over.

 

So yes, dear friends, you can kill a brand. No question. Public indignation, moral high-grounding, media bandwagon-ing: syringe it all up and you’ve got a shot of something Instant & Evil, with or without any air in the chamber.

 

Sunny Delight was a mid-90’s cautionary brand tale, with all the right kind of high drama, of unprecedented success followed by unfixable failure. But more interesting is how The Story of Sunny Delight is prescient of the way today’s brands, over a decade on, so actively and reactively bob on the pixelated wave of consumer-posted opinion.

 

Sunny Delight is, I think, an Analogue Pre-cursor to a “blog-post-submit world re-order” where brands (and much of their fate) now rests in the hands of a digitally mobilized, comfortably vocal and powerfully influencing public.

SP.

 

Reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3257820.stm

 

Epilogue - Take comfort, “Nobody knows nothing”

 

The screenwriter and Hollywood insider William Goldman is credited with the line, “Nobody knows nothing”.

  

William Goldman - Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, 2-time Academy Award winner ( Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men ), and without whom, no Princess Bride.

It takes a guy as smart as Goldman to so accurately nail it, and while he was talking pointedly of the movie industry, the line applies pretty much across the board.

Of course, the more strict observers of to-the-letter English will note the double negative and suggest Goldman therefore infers that everyone knows at least something.

No, that’s not what Bill means; maybe further underlining his point.

Goldman means that no one knows anything for sure, that foresight is a hunch, that everyone is making it up as best they can, and that life’s winners are those who smile at the truth of it and can cut a wake through a Sargasso of ego, guesswork, bullshit and chance.

Short a bear market, go long in a bull market, either play, you do it on a hunch, harbour a whole lot of hope, then sit back and try not to bite your nails. As City Analysts occasionally say, “It’s a Specs Paradise”. And it really is All Speculation. Confidence, loss of confidence, “More Cristal!” peaks and “Sell the Aston!” troughs, all making for a white-knuckle paradise in as much as if you can ride the trends and pre-empt the twists and turns then you’re liable to do very nicely indeed.

So it’s time to start feeling reassured.

 

Yes, really.

While Goldman made few friends in Tinsel town by suggesting everyone’s hustling and bluffing, I’d say that tremendous opportunity derives from the reality that most folk, in whatever they do, are simply blagging and just aren’t that great at whatever it is they do. 

The majority, in all things, are “mediocre”. This is a fact; I’m not being mean, it’s nothing more than statistical truth, albeit a little brutal. Most people are “average”, populating by greater and lesser degree, the big hillock that is the Bell Curve - meaning quite Major Opportunity lies in positioning yourself the “right side” of the curve. Because aside from the likes of building jet engines, decommissioning atom bombs, and conducting cardiothoracic surgery, there’s huge scope for honing your given expertise above a pretty large safety net that declares that no one knows anything categorically, and if you do get it wrong, no one’s going die.

The line holds and it always will; “It’s not life and death, it’s just advertising.”

Common sense, clarity of thought, single-mindedness, force of personality, non-delusional self-belief, conviction, concision of purpose – all hugely powerful tools that allow almost anyone’s performance to soar above the mainstream and the mediocre. If you’re packing even half of the aforementioned, you’re 90% there already.

I say this. Never be the norm, because “The Norm” is Unacceptably Average. Be “The Exception”. Be Exceptional. And in case you haven’t already started, then by exception to Goldman’s Rule know this, it can start now.  

SP.

Prologue - The Better Mousetrap

 

 

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

So said Ralph Waldo Emerson in toast of the Innovative Spirit and the rewards that (should) follow. I guess “Build it and they will come” is an abridged riff on the same. That is, assuming “It” is any good. And that’s always the trick.

I take “The Better Mousetrap” to be a compact little metaphor for consumerism and the “Creation of Want”, that bad-wrap discipline called “Advertising”.

 

Unlike Emerson who comes over rather chipper, E.S. Turner was clearly having an off day when he uncharitably penned...

“Advertising is the whip which hustles humanity up the road to the Better Mousetrap. It is the vision which reproaches man for the paucity of his desires.”

The Shocking History of Advertising, 1952

 

E.S. wasn’t an ad fan. Well ok, you can’t please all the people...

I’ve worked in advertising for a decade and half. What I know of advertising is this. It keeps the Capitalist world turning; it pays my bills and allows me to buy stuff. I know, it kinda sounds like I’m responsible for my own hamster wheel, so let me also add this.

Advertising is the inevitable output of a world we choose to live in. Maybe we don’t even have a choice. Our world is a reflection and statement on our nature, our need to be individuals, our need to belong, our need for comfort, our need for things, our need to want. I don’t see this as ugly or small. Paucity doesn’t apply. It is as it is, but it’s also bundled up in our very Big & Ambitious need to progress, to hunger and drive for More & Better.

Advertising is a lot about Emerson’s mousetrap, and only “bad advertising” applies to Turners proposal of punishment. But the punishment isn’t born of small desires, it’s deserving of limited imagination and invention.

I think advertising can be great. Great advertising, that is. That’s my goal. I love brands, and I delight in some of the work I’ve played a part in and some of the very smart people I’ve worked with. My role? I try and build better mousetraps.

SP.