No one said being original was easy. Coming up with something new, fresh, and dazzling? Seldom the consequence of a walk in the park, proverbial or green.
In answering the call to originate, create and conceive, how do you pick up the gauntlet, put it on, and come out swinging?
James Dyson argues the Inventors Endeavour is NOT born of trying to meet an existing need. I heard him speak a few years back, where he happily admitted that no one was crying out for cyclonic suction. His invention was the equaliser to a personal frustration. He hated his vacuum bag filling with lots of lint and hair and suckable household crap.
Dyson figured he could do better – “Why bother with the bag?”, he thought – and no question, he has.
Invention is born of frustration – a frustration at the way the world is, and an endeavour to try and fix it. Invention is a positive, out of a negative. Dyson’s start-point is The Negative.
The same is often said of Great Comedy. Comedy is born of anger. Most comedians are angry people. They’re angry and Truly Miffed at the way things are. They need to “call it”, to mock and usurp it. Comedy and Invention are the consequence of every “Don’t you just hate it when...?”
Denis Leary - Everything Was Better In Former Days (Part 1)
I think "Originality" may be curiously interpreted as a simple shift in the frame of reference. A matter of “Reframing”. Originality doesn’t have to be about wholesale genesis. More so, it’s simply “a build”, an added layer on that which “already is”.
Dyson is still all about vacuuming. They just debunked the mun’danity of the categories age-old conventions. Vacuuming was previously framed within the housewife’s problem-solution. The contextual frame was one of domesticity, of chore and utility. You could follow a thread back to the most brazen chauvinisms of mid-century advertising.
But Dyson came along and made suction sexy!
Dyson inverted the convention and flipped the energies. They turned negative into positive, “reframed” the Consumer-Brand debate. A design you WANT to own, and functionality that’s superior. “Dyson” – vacuum cleaning products to Covet & Desire! Inventive genius.
And yet, at a brand communication level, Dyson really just “did an Apple”.
In an earlier posting (Colour me happy! – Aug 2010) I toast Apple’s invention of “Tech-Sex Desirability”.
Apple reframed what computers and computing was all about. The category conventions generated advertising eulogising The Spec, detailing the technology on the inside, as sexy to MIT and IT types, all geek with no chic.
“High performance computing” = small copy, lots of bullet points
Apple’s originality didn’t just reframe the computing category. It took a sledgehammer to a set of conventions that were doctrinally held, busted ‘em up real good.
Apple: computers... reframed as a lifestyle (app).
And Apple marketing genius continues in its ability to be a product range that reconciles (the fundamental contradiction of) Tribal Belonging and Brand Badge Individualism. In this achievement of course, they’re not alone.
To a degree, Apple “just did a Nike”.
Rewind to the mid-late 80's, where commercially Nike was being slammed by Reebok and the aerobics craze, where Nike products were a bit too much for hardcore athletes; a dry brand that took itself too seriously.
Then, 1988 and "Just do it" cried out from TV ads with end lines like, "And it wouldn’t hurt to stop eating like a pig.”
Yes, that's what she said. Nike's 'Just Do It' launch spot (1988).
And have that! Provocative, daring, in-your-face creative executions, literally shaming people into working out. Detractors at the time called the ads (of which there were 12) “sociopathic”, possessing a “poverty of warmth”. But in a big way, the detractors were in the minority.
“With its “Just Do It” campaign, Nike was able to increase its share of the domestic sport-shoe business from 18 percent to 43 percent, from $877 million in worldwide sales to $9.2 billion in the ten years between 1988 and 1998.”
Source: CFAR – Centre for Applied Research
“Cha-Ching!”, as they say. What’s the power of branding? What’s the ROI on creativity? For Nike, $9bn plus over 10 years.
“Nike rose about as high and fast in the ‘90s as any company can. It took on a new religion of brand consciousness and broke advertising sound barriers with its indelible Swoosh, “Just Do It” slogan and deified sports figures. Nike managed the deftest of marketing tricks: to be both anti-establishment and mass market.
Jolie Soloman, “When Nike Goes Cold”,
Newsweek, March 30, 1998
Nike, Apple, Dyson – these are “Original Brands” and business über success stories, born of reframing the categories in which they operate.
(We’re on the home straight now, but indulge me; I ask one more swing at this.)
“Originality”, through breaking norms goes by another name. Genre-busting. To which I offer 3 exhibits:
Exhibit A: The Matrix (1999).
I defy anyone to say this is not one seriously cool film. Seriously. Doesn’t matter what you think of Keanu Reeves. Box Office takings of $171m in the US, and $460m worldwide. The Matrix is maybe the archetypal genre-buster. A Jap-anime inspired, kung-fu super-hero sci-fi action romance, against a cyber-punk dystopian backdrop. Now that’s some heavy-duty reframing.
Exhibit B: For pastiche, homage, blatant rip-off, and an all round Post Modern melting-pot celebration of pop culture... Quentin Tarrantino, the referential Reframing Grand Master.
Tarantino even homage’s himself, which pretty much takes it to a place where Post Modernism folds in and over and around itself... and Pop Culture implodes... or explodes... or at least goes pop... or maybe nothing happens at all? Whatever. Either way, go spend 5 fun minutes over at: http://vimeo.com/19469447
“Everything is a remix: Kill Bill”
For Exhibit C: Shakespeare’s canon; 400 years old, and it always will be alive, kicking, and doing the rounds in one form of re-imagining or rebooting or another.
The latest , Prospero as Prospera; part Mad Max, part Gandalf, part Yoda, all Helen Mirren. Go see at: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/12/shakespeare-reboots/ - “The Reboot’s the Thing: 10 Genre-Busting Shakespeare Remixes”.
So I say this. Originality can never die, which is a reassuring thought for us all. Originality is a new take on whatever currently exists; is simply an “add-on”, which may sound rather “small”, but an add-on can be epoch shifting in effect.
And if you’re still here, thanks for staying the course. This one’s been a bit of a tour. Dyson, Apple, Nike, The Matrix, Kill Bill, The Tempest. Finally, comic book writing legend, Alan Moore...
"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
Maybe this is The Other Moore’s Law? And if so I rather like the balance; one for computer science, another for “the essence of originality”.
We divide life into genres, just pigeon holes, so we can make some sense of it all; but that’s not how we live life. And an equal and alternative sense comes through living it, and looking upon it differently, through which we may mash and bust it up.
Happy mashing.
SP.
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