I talked a little before about the “Culture of Comment” and the predicament that brands find themselves in when facing an online world where the comment thread is always going to be longer than the article that sparked it.
It’s one of the things that killed the old model of “Interrupt and argue.” We’re no longer in an era where your brand can merely get in the way of a favorite TV programme or magazine article, state its case and hope to have won you over. Instead we’re in a world where people demand the right to argue back; and where they have the ability to do it. And it’s an unfair fight because while brands are monitored and restricted in their communication (they have to tell the truth or a version thereof) the people that they’re arguing with have no such restrictions.
Of course brands have tried to monitor and control these online debates. They’ve demanded the right to approve all comments before allowing them to be posted, they’ve hired moderators to answer the worst of the criticisms and they’ve hired Blog Lobbyists to ensure that not only is blog content favorable but blog comment is regulated too. Some of it works, but ultimately this is the wild west (or modern Russia) and ‘the law’ don’t go down too well ‘round these parts.
An aside. A friend of mine took some time out to travel. Like a lot of people who did this he took a Lonely Planet Guide. Well the problem that you have when everyone has a Lonely Planet guide is that the bits of the Planet that they recommend soon aren’t that lonely at all. Everyone is there. Add to this a sharp practice by savvy traders – on one street in Tibet there were four cafes all with the same name” – all claiming to be the original one recommended by Lonely Planet. All crammed with backpacks and their dreadlocked wearers.
Anyway he wrote about this on his blog. Two days later he had a comment from a Lonely Planet moderator, paid to monitor the buzz on the brand. They thanked him for the thoughtful way he’d written about the problem and assured him that they were looking for solutions. Unable to help myself I dived in with some solutions of my own – and three days letter got a ‘Thank You’ from the Web Watcher.
A couple of things to take from this. It pays to be watching the comments out there, amid the dross may be some solutions to problems – or better still a highlighting of problems that you didn’t know you had. You need to be careful in how you deal with the people that are writing about you, or they freak out and get all ‘They’re Watching Me!’ and finally when you do decide to intervene make it an invitation to a dialogue, not a ‘cease and desist’
Back to the point though. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops and listened to a 1000 treadmill conversations I’ve come to the conclusion that calling what we have a “Culture of Comment” is a little too flattering. What we actually have is “Amplified Ignorance”
Now those of you who know me will know that I tend to trace America’s hatred of nuance back to an educational system that tells you to circle the letter corresponding to the ‘correct’ answer and ignore the others. It’s a system that deals in absolute certainty, in black and white at the expense of gray and it leads to statements like “You’re either with us, or you’re against us” (try telling that to Sweden, or Switzerland)
In the UK the system tells you to take a side and argue it persuasively. In France to take each side and argue one against the other. I think it’s why the British make such good comedians, the French philosophers and the Americans such good Christians.
But “Amplfied Ignorance” is of course a wider cultural phenomenon. What the internet, comment boxes, twitter, text messages, facebook status boxes and ‘press one if you agree’ polls have done is two things. Firstly they have handed the bullhorn to anyone who wants it. And the people who most want to be heard on an issue are usually the people shouting about it. So it’s governed by the extremes. Secondly it’s condensed the space and time for response, so you can bang out any opinion in seconds, publish it and be pretty much certain that nobody is going to take the time to offer a thoughtful refutal. No harm, no foul you may say. But….
The internet is an amalgamator, what it does is take all of the data out there, weigh it and offer it up to people without editorializing. That’s how Google works, straight numbers. And when you have people shouting at the extremes and at each other, all of the time what happens is that the bullshit rises to the top of the search engine and becomes ‘fact’ – why it’s only a half step away from being on Wikipedia.
It’s this kind of thing that allowed the Republicans to ‘Swift Boat’ John Kerry. The facts were that Kerry was a decorated war hero where Bush had dodged going to Vietnam and may well have actually deserted his post in the National Guard (the records were missing). But through an ad’ that generated comment, that sowed doubt, that generated more comment that became the established orthodoxy somehow Kerry was painted as the less heroic. And he allowed it to happen, because he misunderstood the culture of ‘Amplified Ignorance’… he thought that having the facts on his side would win the argument for him. Big Mistake.
So how do you ensure that your brand doesn’t get ‘Swift Boated’ – that people don’t think that your burgers are made from eyeball and gristle and that the holes in your jeans aren’t individually scratched in by an Indonesian orphan?
How indeed.
I think that you have to start by going back to the basics of a brief. If you remember most good briefs wouldn’t ask “What is it that we want to say here?” instead they’d ask “What do we want people’s take away to be from this communication?” And the two are different. What you say and what people hear can be wildly different – as I found out when I did a campaign for a food that “Kids will love” and got back data that what people were hearing was “Not good enough to serve an adult” and therefore “not good enough for my kids either”
These days the planner has to ask a few new questions
i) “What responses will this communication provoke”
From the point of view of both the Brand Evangelist (out there to sell your brand to every person that they know) and the Brand Arsonist (out there to burn your brand to the ground)
ii) What ammunition can we give Brand Evangelists to help them argue the case online? What can we send them? What can we embed in the communication? Which links should they be cutting and pasting?
iii) To what degree do we want to acknowledge and neutralize the Brand Arsonists? Do we want the communication to address them head on? Do we want it to have a counter-argument embedded? Do we want to deflect them onto another issue?
A quick example. In every US Domestic Car focus group there’s an asshole. He’s full of technical ‘data’ and ‘facts’ that aren’t true, he’s really loud and at some point he WILL say “Found On Road Dead.” or “My Chevy wouldn’t make it as far as the levy” You can show him a campaign that shows that Ford’s are the most reliable cars in America, that they whup Toyota’s ass or that the new Malibu is the best build car on the road and that every independent source says so and he’ll brush aside the fact and restate the stereotype.
Internally agencies working on Domestic Car accounts got tired of hearing this and tended to discount it. But it was actually a huge problem out in the world. Everyone knew a Domestic hating asshole and his harking back 20 years to a stereotype that people knew was actually damaging the brand and stopping it moving forward.
The US companies took the high road here and decided not to attack the guy. Sticking instead to the data, the facts and 3rd party sources and hoping that they would get through eventually.
But it would have been an interesting exercise to look at work that either gave Domestic Loyalists a giant bandaid to slap over Asshole’s mouth or to look at work that took the guy head on – a “Hey Asshole” campaign, or an “Are you a domestic racist?” campaign
It worked for Skoda when they showed people running from the badge. The risks are high, it’s not always the right strategy, but it’s worth looking at.
Not a lot of answers here but something to think about. Whatever you do, someone is gonna hate it. And that hate will be based on prejudice. And that prejudice will fuel a lot of comment venom. You need to decide whether or not you want to deal with that. It needs to be a choice, not an oversight.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
More on Brand Collaboration
Collaboration needn’t be the exclusive preserve of the French during wartime. In a world where people are assembling a patchwork of brands around themselves in a bid to show the world who they are and what they believe it pays to know who you’re being lumped in with – and on occasion to force those connections.
Of course there are different approaches to collaboration between brands, and those approaches depend largely on the situation that you find yourself in.
Model One. Media / Content Partners
Take for example the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and the US post office. Star Wars needs to achieve ubiquity – universal awareness. The post office is part of the fabric of every town in America, it has real estate, it has installations (in the form of post boxes) and of course it has collectibles (in the form of stamps)… what the post office needs is injection of interest and of cash. That can come in the form of exclusive stamps. What Star Wars needs is visibility – that can come from painting mailing boxes as R2D2 and from the PR you get from having your own stamp. Done well it’s a win-win. Post office used as media vehicle and rewarded with profit from a one-off product (stamps) – Star Wars even more entrenched in popular culture.
Perhaps a better example, certainly one that feels more modern was the collaboration between ubiquitous convenience chain 7-Eleven and The Simpson’s Movie. 7-Eleven agreed to totally rebrand a dozen of their stores (I know it seemed like more) as Kwik-E-Marts (the convenience store in the cartoon)… in addition to the rebranded stores all 7-Eleven’s would carry some of The Simpson’s most famous fictional products… Buzz Cola, Krusty-Os, Sprinklicious donuts and Squishees. Throw in exclusively designed point of sale and you have a PR stunt that generates yards and yards of press, a movie that opens ahead of estimates and a store that sells out of all proprietary products and more than 3 million bits of Simpson’s shit. Cool.
Model Two. Blurring the (on)line.
Some brands live online. They have no physical footprint. That’s not an issue, but it does throw out a tantalizing opportunity for brand collaboration. When you throw together two brands, on virtual, one bricks and mortar and add a willingness to blur the lines between virtual reality and actual reality (VR and AR?) you can get something interesting.
Take for example H&M and The Sims. This could have been a case of two brands with a shared demographic coming together and doing a coupon exchange. It would have worked too. Sell The Sims in H&M, advertise H&M in The Sims. What we got instead was a decent blurring of the lines, H&M gets integrated into the new Sims game. You can buy an add on module that allows you to shop in the virtual store, to try on virtual clothes, to meet with virtual friends. This offers H&M the chance to showcase new lines and gives The Sims an anchor store within the virtual world. But then they took it further. If you wanted to you could design clothes within the game, which would be sent to H&M who in turn would make some of the clothes designed in the virtual world and sell them in the real world. Yes it still has the stench of competition about it (why don’t you offer to make anything I design?) but it turns the game into a two way street – and that’s a door worth pushing against.
Model Three. Shared Host, Shared Occasion. Opportunity to Innovate.
Nike and Apple don’t have a whole lot in common. Really. One’s about a celebration of participation in physical activity, the other is about unleashing an individual’s creative potential. One lives on the track and pounding the street, the other in dark bedrooms and glossy graphic design studios.
But the Nike Shoe and the I-Pod shared two things. They shared a demographic and they shared an occasion. The people out pounding pavement were listening to music on their I-pods as they went. Now I’ve worked in Innovation companies and I know that at some point both Nike and Apple will have been approached with this ‘Insight’ (again it’s an observation but in the Innovation world an Observation is worth nothing whereas an insight is a $200,000 project) and told “Nike you should make a MP3 shoe” or “Apple, it’s time for the I-sneaker”
Both ludicrous of course. Apple have no expertise in shoes and Nike none in well designed electronics. But the idea will have been floated.
So it’s to the credit of the companies that they saw the opportunity and decided to go for it together. Nike+ puts a ‘digital pebble’ in the shoes of its runner, the pebble talks to your I-pod, you get all kinds of information recorded – from your speed and distance to your route. Throw in an online community for some competition and you have a collaboration that’s useful to runners, that allows one party to take the lead, that sells additional hardware and that gives both companies more access to their customers (via the website) and consequently extra opportunities to sell (‘hey you’ve done 1000 miles, time for new shoes’, ‘here’s the prefect playlist for your run’)
It’s a delicate balance… and ego could get in the way, but Collaboration for Innovation seems like a place to explore in the future.
Model Four. Trading Credibility and Accessibility.
Your brand has a great product but it’s not taken seriously enough. You want to demo your product. Their brand has a great product but it’s really niche, people don’t know that they’d enjoy it. Time for a brand tie-up.
When HP wanted to demonstrate the quality of its high end printers it got together with the National Gallery. The strategy? reproduce some of the most spectacular National Gallery pieces using HP equipment, and then post those pieces of art all over London, in some really incongruous places. Throw in a phone number by each piece that allows The National Gallery to talk you through it in an accessible way and a website that lists all of the locations of the art and allows HP to talk about the quality of its printing and you have a campaign that brings new people into contact with the National Gallery and gives HP the kind of visibility that it couldn’t buy – especially as the PR cloud turned into a mushroom cloud of chatter.
So – one question to ask when looking at communication on your brand… “Who would we love invite onboard with this one?” and “What’s in it for them as well as us.”
Simple stuff but worth asking.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Orville who is your very best friend?
No brand is an island. It never was and it never will be. But in the past, in the bad old days where the model was interruption and media was used merely as a holding pen (the first part of the Trap and Trip model) brands were defined in opposition to each other.
People bought you because you washed whiter, lasted longer or felt a little bit posher (more upmarket for you non-British folks) than that other guy. You were chosen in opposition to the brand leader / cheaper alternative – which is why taste tests and having Danny Baker show up on your doorstep asking whether your knickers were really as stain free as you might get them with Daz worked.
In ye olden days brands had CLAIMS at their core
But the model is changing. We’re moving from having a unique selling proposition (USP) to a Genuine Reason for Existance (GRE). People aren’t asking WHAT your brand does – they’re asking WHY you started it in the first place.
These days brands have a CAUSE at their core.
That’s a fundamental shift –
FROM ‡ ‘WHAT it does’ (and the manufacturing / marketing version of the question ‘WHAT it does BETTER’)
<- TO ‘WHY it exists’ and the brand / marketing version of the question WHY its existence matters to you
My hypothesis (and I hope that it’s right) is that as brands continue to abandon manufacturing claims and embrace instead their reason for existence the way in which brands relate to each other will also change.
Just as we moved from a model about interruption and into one about engagement so too are brands moving – from a model about opposition to one about collaboration.
One of the questions that we should be asking when we’re thinking about our brands is this – who should our brand be playing with?
Because the way that your brand shows that it’s relevant in the world isn’t by going all Maximus on our asses and destroying the opposition, it’s by finding like minded brands and creating something unique with them.
Sounds like utopia, doesn’t it? Brands being about collaboration and creation, eschewing argument and destruction, having a social purpose at their core – involving the people that love them to most in achieving that social purpose. It should because it could be.
I’m going to go into examples that I’ve loved (and a model that looks at kinds of collaboration) in the next post here but until then just ask yourself ‘Does my brand have more friends than enemies?’ ‘Does my brand spend more time trying to create something than it does trying to destroy something?’ ‘Does my brands have a cause or a claim at its core?’
Friday, May 8, 2009
The brief or the briefing
Today’s coffee shop ramble may well be an exercise in the bleeding obvious.
I’ve long argued against having a creative brief as anything other than a record of intent – an agreed set of objectives against which the client can later judge the work. I’ve wanted the Brief to be a pair of granny knickers – there to ensure maximum ass coverage, to provide comfort and to keep everything decent.
But as a document that is intended to inspire creative people – forget it. Briefs tend to be exercises in filling in boxes. That process has become more ‘collaborative’ with clients, meaning that they get more words of their own in the boxes and given more time to argue over those words. So in most agencies the brief is now a political document, designed to appease each of the parties involved to the degree that creative work can start.
What then happens is that clients and agency alike use the work to thrash out what should and shouldn’t have been included in the brief in the first place and you end up with rounds and rounds of creative work; each round exploring a different strategy, rather than each refining an idea. It’s frustrating – but it’s how things work these days.
What has always excited me the most is the briefing. At its best the briefing is where a good planner gets to inspire people around an idea. It’s where they get to relive the excitement of the discoveries along the way, to talk about the brand, its ideas, what it means to people, where it fits in culture and what its ambitions are. The briefing is a session that’s all about instilling an idea and energizing people around it. My briefings tend to be full of anecdotes and asides and bits of trivia that I found along the way and made sense of as we groped towards a strategy. Other people use graphics and music and tours of facilities. It’s a session where you job is to sell the possibilities of the strategy. One word of warning here – it’s also often the session where the planner tends to try to sell what they think the perfect execution of the idea is. Do try not to… it may be a great idea, but it’s not the time.
So I’ve always been anti-brief and pro-briefing… asking why we archive briefs but never record the briefings that led to great work.
And of course I was wrong. To a degree.
Guy Murphy, a wily planner and man who knows good work pointed out that the brief and the briefing - despite sharing a phonetic similarity - are two entirely different beasts. Like Beavers and Diva (perhaps explaining my life-long preference for the latter)
As he said “The brief should be exactly that. It should be as short as possible and contain only the key objectives and points.”
Whereas the briefing “Should be as long as necessary – and contain as many of the stories, anecdotes, diversions, observations and facts as is necessary to excite people about the brand and the task at hand.”
He’s always more succinct than me, that Mr Murphy.
But he set me thinking. If the brief needs only objectives and facts then what should it look like? Here’s my first stab, I’m sure it exists somewhere, all briefs do.
So here’s my version of a brief
THE BRAND IDEA _________________
This is where we remind ourselves that our brand has a purpose and an idea that’s unsullied by the immediate need for action. This idea will rarely change. Nike has always been ‘an exhortation to participate’ because it has always believed that more people should be out sharing in the joy of sports. That’s not going to change
WHAT IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO DO _____________
What’s the task here? Is the brand looking to introduce a new product? Are they looking to charge a premium? Do they want 1% of Londoners to take part in some sort of sporting activity (the brief for Nike’s Run London)… do they want more young women to continue in sport?
WHY HASN’T THAT HAPPENED ALREADY? ________________
What are the things that have held the brand back from doing this in the past. If they want to increase their share of the 18-21 virgins market why don’t they have the share they’re after already? People give up exercise after it stops being compulsory at school? Young women are determined to keep an intact hymen? What’s up? Basically.
WHO IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO ATTRACT?____________
Brands are magnetic, people are drawn to them. Who is the brand after?
In this case it’s those 18-21 year old virgins who have given up on sport ….
HOW DO THEY RELATE TO THE BRAND IDEA?
Just what it sounds like. “18-21 year old virgins don’t see any need to participate in sport, they get all of the exercise they need burning down abortion clinics… and texting each other snide messages about the slutty girls”
WHAT CAN THE BRAND CREDIBLY OFFER THEM THAT THEY FUNDAMENTALLY DESIRE?
This is our ‘human truth’ – the thing that we all have in common.
“They do like the idea of having a slamming sportsperson’s body, that way virginity seems like a choice.”
WHERE ARE THEY MOST LIKELY TO BE RECEPTIVE TO THAT MESSAGE?
Where can this message be most culturally and personally resonant? Is it a billboard, a magazine that they read guiltily and in secret or do we need the local church to endorse “Hot bodied virgins for Jesus”?
WHAT ELSE DO WE KNOW THAT COULD BE RELEVANT HERE
Is there a piece of trivia, a case study, a seemingly loose connection that can make all of this really make sense to somebody looking for a fresh way in. “During the research we noticed that a lot of the girls had posters of _____ on their walls; they liked her ______”
SUM IT ALL UP_______
We’re a brand that’s all about getting more people to play sport.
We want to attract a certain group, 18-21 virgin girls
They gave up on sport after school
But haven’t given up the fantasy of a slammin’ athlete’s body
They’re most receptive to messages from their pastor
WHAT WE NEED________
We need a campaign that gets 50,000 late teen ice queens to take up some form of regular exercise.
Okay – snarky example but I think it works as a brief.
That may of course just be the way my mind works
Or the way it works today
Really need input on this I think.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Planners and the transparent dangling carrot...
And so to the bit where I link planners, Alanis Morrissette, the death of irony, consumer insight and fear of death together in a jumble so loose it seems seemless.
Consumer insight is a transparent dangling carrot. Or rather it's not... but it seems like one. And that's dangerous. We all sense that it's out there. That it's close. That it's worth chasing, That we'll find it. But alas the thing about consumer insight is that it’s so often mislabeled it has become impossible to spot the real thing. Agencies and the planners within them have done to consumer insight what Alanis Morissette did to irony – mislabeled, muddied and made misinterpreted and then pushed out into the world at large.
So just as the following things now pass as ironic when in actuality they’re no more than unfortunate
- Turning 98, winning the lottery and dying the next day
- A death row pardon two minutes too late
- A black fly in your chardonnay
- Rain on your wedding day
These things now pass as insightful when they’re no more than observation
- Our target will be in the market for a new car
- These people watch more sports programs than most
- These are people who aspire to things
- Yellow is the color for the coming season
Of course there’s not a shred of insight there – but the fact is that there’s more and more resource going into more and more research to get to the silver bullet of a ‘Consumer Insight’ that will ‘change everything.’ And quite frankly I believe that the money would be better spent looking for Unicorn Dung that could be sold to fuel power stations without pollution.
I’m not saying that Consumer Insight doesn’t exist. Or that there aren’t good uses for genuine insight. There are plenty. One of my favorite campaigns, Reebok’s “Belly’s gonna get ya” was based on a very real insight that some people aren’t running for the love of sport… they’re running away from middle aged spread. It was an insight that could have been better used against Nike but it was true and useful and could have led to a brand positioning that would have split the market. So Consumer Insight is out there, but it’s rare and to seems, to me at least that the whole insight industry has gone slightly mad… which brings me to a more practical objection – at least from an agency point of view.
It’s my contention that agencies can no longer afford the search for insight. That’s a relatively new thing, so let’s go back to the days when I was a junior planner again (ripple dissolve to ye olden days).
In ye olden days the insight business was a profitable one for agencies. Every client wanted one, every planner knew how to get one and there was a 10% commission (15% if you did the sums properly) on all of those lovely focus groups. Planners had ‘Research targets’ – an amount of money that they had to make from each client. Clients were happy that they were able to be involved in the strategy, and that the M&Ms were plentiful. In a bid to help strengthen their hands planning directors added a ‘Consumer Insight’ box to the Brief, thus formalizing their importance and making the research an easier sell. “We need an insight for the brief, we need a brief to progress, how soon can we do the research?”
All was good with the world. Insight was an important thing. Clients were spending money finding insights. Agencies were saying that a good Consumer Insight was needed as a springboard for communication. Time and effort were being put in. So of course clients started hiring people to manage that time, effort and expense. Client Insight Managers suddenly started springing up. They were well funded, they were bold and they spent all of their time thinking about this one subject…. which is of course why they wanted to see it evolve.
Very soon the blunt tool of the focus group was being replaced by the more scalpel like Ethnography and that quick and profitable group being done by the planner was being outsourced to a cool ethnographic consultancy (“where there’s money, there are consultants” being one of the key tenants of the business). The role of the planner changed. They were there to help manage, observe and interpret. It meant a lot more time on the planner’s part, but no more money for the agency. Client Insight Managers started to develop rosters and preferred research suppliers and internally approved methodologies and so started to use them more and the agency less. More time of planner, less money coming in. Sound familiar?
Now the whole ethno / culture commando / art hypnotherapy / observed interaction thing is a lot of fun for the planner and some agencies manage to hold on to some of it but by and large the insight business has been outsourced to specialists by people who are one step removed from marketing and agencies are suffering the financial and political implications of that.
But it’s not just affordability that has me looking at consumer insight and (like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Dane and the girls you see chewing as they text) saying “Really?”
My real issues with Consumer Insight are twofold. The first is that it’s very rarely useful, the second is that it’s a rather rickety crutch on which to rest the weight of a brand. Too often Consumer Insight becomes a list of demands “This is what we think it is that people want” and actually bars the door to deeper thinking.
So while Consumer Insight can make us sound very clever and witty and pithy at parties when we explain what we do it’s limited in its usefulness and I think that I know why.
Most insight (and insight research) tends to be focused around behavior. Which means that it tends to be culturally specific. Which makes it pretty useless on brands that are global or that need to span the cultures of a country (or even a city)
An example. When I talked about how I appreciated the thinking behind “Dirt is Good” earlier I meant it. But then I’m a Westerner with access to good sanitation and effective drugs. Were I in the slums of India where dirt harbors tuberculosis and other diseases that will kill a couple of your children then “Dirt is not good” and no amount of money is going to change that.
So here’s what I think, for what it’s worth. Consumer insight is a useful cultural modifier of a bigger idea, but it is rarely big enough to drive a brand by itself. What brands need is something bigger, something more universal and something much more Obama than Consumer Insight.
I believe that brands need to start not by looking at the behaviors that make us different and unique but at the beliefs, fears and drivers that are Universal. That what every brand needs is a Universal Truth (cue Universal Truth Consultancies forming lines outside of major clients) that is then modified locally with a Cultural Insight.
So we start with something big…
People are afraid of infirmity (Olivio)
People are running away from old age (Reebok)
Men are emotionally inarticulate in the presence of the women they love (Diamonds)
And we modify that Human Insight with a Cultural Insight
Olivio gives you a chance at a Mediterranean lifestyle in your dotage
Reebok allows you to dodge the middle aged spread that your friends will laugh at
A journey’s diamond is a way to say ‘Love Grows’
Again it’s a simple point.
What Universal Thing does the brand promise?
How does that manifest itself in market?
It’s a change and it means clients writing things on briefs that make them uncomfortable. Many seem to hate the idea of ‘negative insights’ but if we can have brands that stand for the big things in ways that are relevant to people on the ground then we have a better chance at building lasting relationships between brands and the people that use them.
It’s not about finding out what they want, it’s about understanding what they need – and how you can best deliver it.
That was a long way for a ham sandwich huh?
Consumer insight is a transparent dangling carrot. Or rather it's not... but it seems like one. And that's dangerous. We all sense that it's out there. That it's close. That it's worth chasing, That we'll find it. But alas the thing about consumer insight is that it’s so often mislabeled it has become impossible to spot the real thing. Agencies and the planners within them have done to consumer insight what Alanis Morissette did to irony – mislabeled, muddied and made misinterpreted and then pushed out into the world at large.
So just as the following things now pass as ironic when in actuality they’re no more than unfortunate
- Turning 98, winning the lottery and dying the next day
- A death row pardon two minutes too late
- A black fly in your chardonnay
- Rain on your wedding day
These things now pass as insightful when they’re no more than observation
- Our target will be in the market for a new car
- These people watch more sports programs than most
- These are people who aspire to things
- Yellow is the color for the coming season
Of course there’s not a shred of insight there – but the fact is that there’s more and more resource going into more and more research to get to the silver bullet of a ‘Consumer Insight’ that will ‘change everything.’ And quite frankly I believe that the money would be better spent looking for Unicorn Dung that could be sold to fuel power stations without pollution.
I’m not saying that Consumer Insight doesn’t exist. Or that there aren’t good uses for genuine insight. There are plenty. One of my favorite campaigns, Reebok’s “Belly’s gonna get ya” was based on a very real insight that some people aren’t running for the love of sport… they’re running away from middle aged spread. It was an insight that could have been better used against Nike but it was true and useful and could have led to a brand positioning that would have split the market. So Consumer Insight is out there, but it’s rare and to seems, to me at least that the whole insight industry has gone slightly mad… which brings me to a more practical objection – at least from an agency point of view.
It’s my contention that agencies can no longer afford the search for insight. That’s a relatively new thing, so let’s go back to the days when I was a junior planner again (ripple dissolve to ye olden days).
In ye olden days the insight business was a profitable one for agencies. Every client wanted one, every planner knew how to get one and there was a 10% commission (15% if you did the sums properly) on all of those lovely focus groups. Planners had ‘Research targets’ – an amount of money that they had to make from each client. Clients were happy that they were able to be involved in the strategy, and that the M&Ms were plentiful. In a bid to help strengthen their hands planning directors added a ‘Consumer Insight’ box to the Brief, thus formalizing their importance and making the research an easier sell. “We need an insight for the brief, we need a brief to progress, how soon can we do the research?”
All was good with the world. Insight was an important thing. Clients were spending money finding insights. Agencies were saying that a good Consumer Insight was needed as a springboard for communication. Time and effort were being put in. So of course clients started hiring people to manage that time, effort and expense. Client Insight Managers suddenly started springing up. They were well funded, they were bold and they spent all of their time thinking about this one subject…. which is of course why they wanted to see it evolve.
Very soon the blunt tool of the focus group was being replaced by the more scalpel like Ethnography and that quick and profitable group being done by the planner was being outsourced to a cool ethnographic consultancy (“where there’s money, there are consultants” being one of the key tenants of the business). The role of the planner changed. They were there to help manage, observe and interpret. It meant a lot more time on the planner’s part, but no more money for the agency. Client Insight Managers started to develop rosters and preferred research suppliers and internally approved methodologies and so started to use them more and the agency less. More time of planner, less money coming in. Sound familiar?
Now the whole ethno / culture commando / art hypnotherapy / observed interaction thing is a lot of fun for the planner and some agencies manage to hold on to some of it but by and large the insight business has been outsourced to specialists by people who are one step removed from marketing and agencies are suffering the financial and political implications of that.
But it’s not just affordability that has me looking at consumer insight and (like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Dane and the girls you see chewing as they text) saying “Really?”
My real issues with Consumer Insight are twofold. The first is that it’s very rarely useful, the second is that it’s a rather rickety crutch on which to rest the weight of a brand. Too often Consumer Insight becomes a list of demands “This is what we think it is that people want” and actually bars the door to deeper thinking.
So while Consumer Insight can make us sound very clever and witty and pithy at parties when we explain what we do it’s limited in its usefulness and I think that I know why.
Most insight (and insight research) tends to be focused around behavior. Which means that it tends to be culturally specific. Which makes it pretty useless on brands that are global or that need to span the cultures of a country (or even a city)
An example. When I talked about how I appreciated the thinking behind “Dirt is Good” earlier I meant it. But then I’m a Westerner with access to good sanitation and effective drugs. Were I in the slums of India where dirt harbors tuberculosis and other diseases that will kill a couple of your children then “Dirt is not good” and no amount of money is going to change that.
So here’s what I think, for what it’s worth. Consumer insight is a useful cultural modifier of a bigger idea, but it is rarely big enough to drive a brand by itself. What brands need is something bigger, something more universal and something much more Obama than Consumer Insight.
I believe that brands need to start not by looking at the behaviors that make us different and unique but at the beliefs, fears and drivers that are Universal. That what every brand needs is a Universal Truth (cue Universal Truth Consultancies forming lines outside of major clients) that is then modified locally with a Cultural Insight.
So we start with something big…
People are afraid of infirmity (Olivio)
People are running away from old age (Reebok)
Men are emotionally inarticulate in the presence of the women they love (Diamonds)
And we modify that Human Insight with a Cultural Insight
Olivio gives you a chance at a Mediterranean lifestyle in your dotage
Reebok allows you to dodge the middle aged spread that your friends will laugh at
A journey’s diamond is a way to say ‘Love Grows’
Again it’s a simple point.
What Universal Thing does the brand promise?
How does that manifest itself in market?
It’s a change and it means clients writing things on briefs that make them uncomfortable. Many seem to hate the idea of ‘negative insights’ but if we can have brands that stand for the big things in ways that are relevant to people on the ground then we have a better chance at building lasting relationships between brands and the people that use them.
It’s not about finding out what they want, it’s about understanding what they need – and how you can best deliver it.
That was a long way for a ham sandwich huh?
Bubbling Under
Clients and the multiple bubble theory
So you have a great idea that you think will start online but your client is looking at you as though you’re mad. You’re talking about going out to a handful of people and he’s got 30 years of norms that tell him that the way to win is to buy a big audience and expose them to the brand as often as you can afford.
If you have a good relationship with your client he might tell you that he’s just not brave enough to bet the farm on something that’s hard to measure and promises deferred results.
If you have a great relationship with the client he’ll probably also tell you that if he was that brave then, in truth, you probably wouldn’t be his agency.
A few people reading this will shake their heads at this point. To you I say, “Congratulations, you are the lucky few, the agencies who can ask clients to breathe deep and trust you. You don’t need a model, you don’t need an argument, you just need your brand.” Those agencies exist, I’ve worked for a few and their reputation is usually hard earned.
But for the rest of us, the people working really hard in agencies whose names act as security blankets rather than bar call brags for clients this is where a model really comes in. Because if you’re in a ‘security blanket’ agency then you shouldn’t be selling the rush of risk and the buzz of breakthrough. You should be selling a safe way in to a new area. And nothing says ‘this is okay’ more than a simple explanation of what it is that makes it safe.
So here’s the way that I think bubble theory works.
The first fear any client is going to bring forward is that any online, ARG, live narrative etc. story is not only going to appeal to a very small number of people – it’s also going to appeal to the wrong kind of people. The objection goes something like this
“You want me to spend the first three months wooing the kind of dungeons and dragons player I’d never want to see using my brand?”
The answer to this is ‘yes’
And the reason for that answer is that we’re trying to create a wealth of content that will do two things.
The first is that it needs to be wide and deep enough to warrant exploration when we finally invite the mainstream in.
The second is that we need enough volume of content to float the idea of ‘something is going on’ to the media.
And here’s the rub. In order to create the volume of content that we need later in the program we have to appeal to the type of people who upload more things than they download.
So these are not a Dungeons and Dragons target – these people are our Upload target.
A qualifier here. We’re not expecting the upload target to be responsible for spreading the word about what we’re doing very far. They only know each other and they all speak Klingon. We just want to stir their passion enough to have them comment on, play with, criticize and play with our idea.
They’re part of our plant and grow content loop.
And their job is to take the content that we push out into the world and generate posts around it. They’re growing the cloud of interest. Nobody need ever know who they are. They needn’t be seen with the brand. We just need to engage them, entertain them and involve them in something interesting.
A couple of things that you should go look at right now are Beta7, Audi : Art of the Heist and almost anything by 42 Entertainment from I love Bees on…
At this point your client will nod and then say “I get that the nerds are going to go ga-ga and fill the world with stuff about this… but the general public aren’t interested in nerd speak, it’ll just be an inflated niche”
At which point you introduce Bubble Two.
Bubble two is where you take all of the content that you’ve managed to generate and you have it validated – via limited distribution and word of mouth.
This is where you start to drop clues and invitations to the content to those people who have contact lists that make you drool. It’s where you send out some exclusive stuff to those blogs who like to see it first. It’s a controlled dissemination strategy and your aim is to chill the word around your content to sub-zero. Bubble Two is where you claim your cool. And Bubble Two is as far back as the general public will usually search – they’re arbiters of cool, filter for content and backstop. Lots of blogs, magazines, music people, social network icons and industry specialists exist in this space. Their job is to validate the cool of your content, add some of their own and expand the distribution some.
Why will they do this? Well they’re hungry for content, they’re hungry for exclusives, they need new stuff to be able to pass on and they’re suckers for a great idea.
Once you have this second bubble you’re ready to go mass – to show the people what they missed, invite them in to a late stage and give them permission to distribute the content widely. This is where you start to spend and to direct people toward your story. That’s where the numbers come in, that’s where the phenomenon is born and that’s when you can come in with all kinds of marketing support.
So three bubbles :-
Dungeons and Dragons – there to co-create content
Arbiters of Cool – there to validate & co-create content; add limited distribution
Mass - there to consume, distribute and add to content
Three bubbles then. Create, validate, consume, distribute, add.
Simplistic I know but it makes for a neat diagram – which I’ll draw as soon as the squeaky girl at the table next to me shuts the fuck up. Like really, todally, kinda, okay, we’re like, I would say, through, during, not, you know…
So you have a great idea that you think will start online but your client is looking at you as though you’re mad. You’re talking about going out to a handful of people and he’s got 30 years of norms that tell him that the way to win is to buy a big audience and expose them to the brand as often as you can afford.
If you have a good relationship with your client he might tell you that he’s just not brave enough to bet the farm on something that’s hard to measure and promises deferred results.
If you have a great relationship with the client he’ll probably also tell you that if he was that brave then, in truth, you probably wouldn’t be his agency.
A few people reading this will shake their heads at this point. To you I say, “Congratulations, you are the lucky few, the agencies who can ask clients to breathe deep and trust you. You don’t need a model, you don’t need an argument, you just need your brand.” Those agencies exist, I’ve worked for a few and their reputation is usually hard earned.
But for the rest of us, the people working really hard in agencies whose names act as security blankets rather than bar call brags for clients this is where a model really comes in. Because if you’re in a ‘security blanket’ agency then you shouldn’t be selling the rush of risk and the buzz of breakthrough. You should be selling a safe way in to a new area. And nothing says ‘this is okay’ more than a simple explanation of what it is that makes it safe.
So here’s the way that I think bubble theory works.
The first fear any client is going to bring forward is that any online, ARG, live narrative etc. story is not only going to appeal to a very small number of people – it’s also going to appeal to the wrong kind of people. The objection goes something like this
“You want me to spend the first three months wooing the kind of dungeons and dragons player I’d never want to see using my brand?”
The answer to this is ‘yes’
And the reason for that answer is that we’re trying to create a wealth of content that will do two things.
The first is that it needs to be wide and deep enough to warrant exploration when we finally invite the mainstream in.
The second is that we need enough volume of content to float the idea of ‘something is going on’ to the media.
And here’s the rub. In order to create the volume of content that we need later in the program we have to appeal to the type of people who upload more things than they download.
So these are not a Dungeons and Dragons target – these people are our Upload target.
A qualifier here. We’re not expecting the upload target to be responsible for spreading the word about what we’re doing very far. They only know each other and they all speak Klingon. We just want to stir their passion enough to have them comment on, play with, criticize and play with our idea.
They’re part of our plant and grow content loop.
And their job is to take the content that we push out into the world and generate posts around it. They’re growing the cloud of interest. Nobody need ever know who they are. They needn’t be seen with the brand. We just need to engage them, entertain them and involve them in something interesting.
A couple of things that you should go look at right now are Beta7, Audi : Art of the Heist and almost anything by 42 Entertainment from I love Bees on…
At this point your client will nod and then say “I get that the nerds are going to go ga-ga and fill the world with stuff about this… but the general public aren’t interested in nerd speak, it’ll just be an inflated niche”
At which point you introduce Bubble Two.
Bubble two is where you take all of the content that you’ve managed to generate and you have it validated – via limited distribution and word of mouth.
This is where you start to drop clues and invitations to the content to those people who have contact lists that make you drool. It’s where you send out some exclusive stuff to those blogs who like to see it first. It’s a controlled dissemination strategy and your aim is to chill the word around your content to sub-zero. Bubble Two is where you claim your cool. And Bubble Two is as far back as the general public will usually search – they’re arbiters of cool, filter for content and backstop. Lots of blogs, magazines, music people, social network icons and industry specialists exist in this space. Their job is to validate the cool of your content, add some of their own and expand the distribution some.
Why will they do this? Well they’re hungry for content, they’re hungry for exclusives, they need new stuff to be able to pass on and they’re suckers for a great idea.
Once you have this second bubble you’re ready to go mass – to show the people what they missed, invite them in to a late stage and give them permission to distribute the content widely. This is where you start to spend and to direct people toward your story. That’s where the numbers come in, that’s where the phenomenon is born and that’s when you can come in with all kinds of marketing support.
So three bubbles :-
Dungeons and Dragons – there to co-create content
Arbiters of Cool – there to validate & co-create content; add limited distribution
Mass - there to consume, distribute and add to content
Three bubbles then. Create, validate, consume, distribute, add.
Simplistic I know but it makes for a neat diagram – which I’ll draw as soon as the squeaky girl at the table next to me shuts the fuck up. Like really, todally, kinda, okay, we’re like, I would say, through, during, not, you know…
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