The Better Mousetrap

The Big H

 

DON DRAPER

Advertising is based on one thing:

Happiness.

And you know what happiness is?

Happiness is the smell of a new car.

It’s freedom from fear.

It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay.

(Almost to himself)

You are okay.

Mad Men: Season 1, Episode 1 (2007)

 

 

Don’s right.

 

At least, he is about the first part. Maslow, for one, might want to challenge on what happiness “is”. (It partly depends on how much you like cars and how they smell.) But Happiness, as a central, emphatic pursuit; Happiness as an undeniable, unfaltering, ultimate human goal, I’m very down with that.

  

L to r: Don Draper, Smiley, Matthew Weiner, writer of Mad Men

 

For all of us, Happiness is Our One Ultimate End. Boil it right the way down, reduce all those different motivational drivers, and sitting right there at the centre of our very human hearts, is our yearning to be happy. Happiness is sitting there, knowingly smiling back at us, the reason behind all the things we do.

 

I believe this.

 

Flip it round 180. I won’t stretch it so far as to say that The Human Condition is driven by cowardice... but our deliberate avoidance of discomfort features pretty large and centre stage.  

 

The human condition is smart enough to know that feeling miserable (slightly or acutely) is no fun condition to be in. It’s undesirable because it’s simply so very unpleasant. And no one likes unpleasant.

 

In the presence of The Unpleasant, we physically react. We fight, we flight, we respond instinctively, viscerally, we catch-up mentally, and then it’s a serious mental strain to stop ourselves from turning and running if things look ugly or threaten to turn nasty.

 

Flip it back again, back to the positive.

 

Innately, we pursue happiness. It is the perfect, desirable state of being. For all of us. Masochism? No contradiction here. Masochists enjoy misery. A little pain makes them happy. No need to baffle at the surface contradiction. Just roll with the root motivation.

 

Context & Circumstance, of course, set the scene. Maslow, 68 years on, remains on the pulse.

 

“Happy” is Food & Shelter if you’re Hungry & Cold. Happiness is Benevolence & Giving if you personally have So Much. Billionaire Philanthropists are philanthropic for a reason. It’s once you have everything a Hollywood Movie Star has that you typically find yourself wanting an audience with the Dalai Lama.

 

Existential Angst only tends to follow once your tummy doesn’t grumble and you potentially have a star on Hollywood Boulevard. 

 

So if Happiness is what it’s all about, the Big Question is a rather specific and obvious one. “How do I get there? What’s my line of pursuit? How do I get close, lock it down?”

 

Because happiness can be pretty slippery, damnably elusive, would be quite the dodge-ball opponent. As Don Draper appreciates so very well, this is where “Advertising” comes in, to “Show the Way” - because advertising silver-platters the oh-so-many routes, sign-posts by easy means of pretty picture and seductive word. Advertising is based on happiness - and the one thing therefore that every powerful piece of advertising must imply?

 

Hope.

 

I once pitched a big insurance company that had recently renamed and needed to build some emotional value and high-recall into their brand.

 

Our big idea was beautifully simple.

 

“Own Sunrise”.

 

Associate with sunrise, make the brand, in name, whenever heard or seen, utterly synonymous with sunrise. What better visual device? Pure hope. A new day. Renewal and possibility.

 

Re-frame insurance “in the positive”. Insurance: not a hedge against a worst-case scenario... but “personal future-proofing”, affording peace-of-mind For Today, meaning you’re covered, smart, have done the right thing, are providing for you and your loved ones. “Having insurance” should mean one less thing to worry about, should make you feel happier and free you up to worry less and pursue More Happiness.

 

They loved it.

 

We loved it.

 

We didn’t get the business.

 

It’s still the best pitch I didn’t win.

 

Brands need to be “Happy Hits” of short-lived Feel Good. A Molton & Brown soap dispenser on your bathroom sink; an iPod in your pocket; the feel of a Mont Blanc pen when I first wrote this sentence on a scruff of paper this morning. Brands are made to make us feel better, to help give us what we want.

 

For many, Happiness Defined might be as clear-cut as wanting to be a rock star?

 

I'll need a credit card

that's got no limit

And a big black jet

with a bedroom in it

'Cause we all just wanna be

big rockstars

And live in hilltop houses

driving fifteen cars

Nickelback, "Rock Star" lyrics

 

   

 

For others, maybe happiness is a simple concept but an opaque target, where owning a new car... or 15... and enjoying their smell just won’t quite cut it.

 

 

 2 mins 36: “It’s good to be happy...”

 

It’s fundamentally because happiness is a whole lot easier said than done that we have advertising.

 

Because Advertising is hope. The largely unsubstantiated hope that everything really will be ok. That before things turn bad, there can be a heap of good stuff. That happiness isn’t about chasing the horizon, but running toward a fixed point. That we are Born to Live, and the objective of any lifetime is to cram it with as much happiness as can be found.

 

Advertising is the offer of hope, that happiness, however temporal and potentially fleeting, is at least touch-able and wholly real. You just have to believe and buy.

 SP.

The Age of the Accelerated Consumer

 

Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus

Virgil, Georgics

 

The long short, Time Flies. Actually, the closer translation is Time Flees (an interesting side bar for those so interested.)

 

"But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around”

 

Flies, flees, same difference. (Neither are insects, which would at least require a misspelling.) The meaning remains, and more than ever before, “Time” does feel like it’s bolted out the gates and building to break-neck. And we are right along with it, no longer wandering, but keeping pace, flying just as a fast.

 

This quote, from a well-known Scottish Psychiatrist called Ronald Laing, who spent a lifetime studying the environmental triggers of mental illness (which is telling in itself).

 

What I think Laing fundamentally means by this is that 21^st Century Life too often feels like a Constant Bewildering Blur. That everything is happening faster and faster. That it invariably feels like Today is already out of date and Tomorrow is already upon us, like we’re getting to the future too soon, that we no longer find any time to stop and stare or contemplate.

 

OK, let’s all breathe. But it does sound rather familiar, doesn’t it? I know you’re with me on this one. I know because I have bar charts to prove it.

 

Really, take a look, these are actually quite good ones.

 

Bar Chart Number 1: The Number of Years taken for Major Technologies to Reach 50% of Homes.

 

It took 71 years for telephones to make their way into 50% of homes. It took radios 28 years. It took MP3 players just 6. The speed at which we embrace new technologies is accelerating. Compared to the increasingly distant past, now we’re all Early Adopters.

 

Bar Chart Number 2: We face a growing Time Famine

 

 

Bar Chart Number 3: Dead Time... is officially dead.

 

 

For me, there’s a stat here that Says So Much. Suddenly given a “spare 20 minutes”, less than 5% of us can find it in ourselves to "just relax". We struggle to switch off, prefer to remain ON, connected, tuned-in. We’re culpable in all of this, all this speed and haste and growing blur.

 

The late great George Carlin paints it best, better than any bar charts ever could, even good ones.

 

 

 

So what does all this mean, what am I trying to say here? I’m bemoaning what exactly?

 

In truth, I’m not bemoaning anything, not giving anything The Big Neg. I’m just saying this.

 

Getting attention isn’t easy. People have less time to listen. In terms of commercial messages, they filter, edit, ignore more than ever before.

 

As Consumers, we’re in an almost permanent State of Acceleration.

 

As Brand Builders therefore, the question becomes:

 

How can our commercial messages carry sufficient weight to stop the Accelerated Consumer in his tracks?

 

Where Consumers are Constant Motion, how can brands become Immovable Objects?

 

Nigel Morris, CEO of Aegis North America, puts it very simply and very shrewdly when he offers this:

 

“Stop interrupting what people like and want. Be what people like and want.”

 

 

I really like this thought. And I like the implications just as much. It means the marketing-communications model is facing an epic overhaul. From PUSH marketing and interrupting people. To PULL marketing, to drawing people towards a brand with content and ideas that are attractive and sexy and curious and the kind of thing they naturally want.

 

For brands, I think the message is loud and very clear. Don’t get in the way of consumers. Get in their cross-hairs. This is how we stop the Accelerated Consumer in his tracks. This is how brands “Create Time”, even in a world where no one has much.

 

Because while so few of us feel we have any time these days, we still find time, where possible, to continue doing what we like and want.

 

"What we LIKE & WANT": it’s something to think on the next time your train is running 20 minutes late. Assuming that is you’re not already doing something you like doing more.

SP.