Brand Architect

Plain Copying or Jung’s Collective Unconscious

Increasingly we are seen highly regarded ads repeating what has already been done.

The print ad above left was down for the Child Safety Seat Coalition in Toronto by Juniper Park. The ad focus on the “Baby on Board” sticker in the rear window of the hearse, virtually identical to the award-winning execution done earlier for the Alberta Occupant Restraint Program by Calder | Bateman. Very, very similar.

Last month I wrote about a campaign for Mini Cooper that left large boxes made up to resemble the packaging for a Mini Cooper Christmas present around Amsterdam and the fact that Heineken had previously done a similar thing for its walk-in fridge campaign.

The quickest answer is plain copying, but I think perhaps Jung’s theory of a “second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals” or an adaptation of it also deserves consideration.

In 2009 I worked with a talented and original creative team on a concept which, to our great dismay, we discovered that the execution was very similar to one for a non-related brand that launched their campaign before ours but after we had started the creative process.

I was inclined to let our campaign run because I knew it was original, but the creative director knew we would be accused of copying and, in hindsight, correctly changed our campaign.

We live in a connected world where information and concepts are constantly and immediately shared, and where six degrees of separation appears to be two degrees too many. Perhaps then in the deluge of input, our subconscious grabs something that our conscious innocently retrieves later.

The fact that the hearse campaigns happened in Canada and the boxes in Amsterdam possibly supports the shared inputs theory. Or perhaps it supports the creative plagiarism view.

Related posts:
Mini Cooper Boxes Clever

The iPad and the Ad

Amid all the hype about the iPad and its e-reader / tablet peers, one question, long overdue, is starting to emerge in more mainstream conversation. How will the ads fit into this new environment where physical anchoring is jettisoned in favour of context and convenience?  That e-reader ads will embrace multimedia is obvious, but where the ads will be displayed is less cut-and-dried. Answering these questions, or at least, properly scoping the questions is occupying considerable mind space at Sagacite. Branded content will feature strongly but is far from the complete answer. Thinking about the ad as the framework rather than the filler moves us further down the road, but at what cost to journalism. Expect to see more of these questions and answers emerge as the iPad and its brethren reach the hands of consumers.

Insuring Women Over Backward Men

Humour sells and South African agency Black River F.C. uses it to great effect for their client 1st for Women insurance brokers.

The Future of the Media Industry

The future of the media industry is of vital importance to everyone in the communication industry, whether it be news or brand communication. Changes here are going to ripple across all related industries for a long time to come.

Booz & Company recently released their perspective on the media industry and had the following to say: “As 2010 begins, the industry is truly at a Darwinian moment, in which the evolutionary process will rapidly distinguish between winners and losers. The view of Booz & Company’s media and entertainment practice is that the companies that will define the next wave of industry growth will require competencies that are substantially different from those that ensured success during the analog era. Previously, winners were defined by their strengths in content development, packaging, and distribution—all key for an entertainment world characterized by scarcity.

“The digital era is characterized by unprecedented levels of consumer choice, ubiquity, and interactivity. To succeed in this more dynamic environment, companies need to acquire and build new skills. They must excel at developing deep audience insights; building consumer relationships across multiple platforms and user environments; creating targeted content, applications, and advertising opportunities; and managing a mix of monetization models across advertising, subscriptions, and commerce.”

The management consultancy - anyone noticing how management consultancies are increasingly commenting on issues key to the operation of ad agencies - listed 10 key developments shaping the strategies of leading media and entertainment companies. here are a couple of them:

-- Although most companies have cut costs in the past year, ongoing structural changes in the media and entertainment industry will require continued vigilance on cost reduction—even as advertising and retail markets stabilize.

-- The traditional value chain of marketers, agencies, and media companies will continue to evolve, unravel, and be reconstituted in more heterogeneous combinations.

-- Media sales and marketing teams will need to go beyond basic advertising placement in order to drive breakout growth.

-- Media metrics to measure spending effectiveness, with a greater emphasis on results, are evolving across the marketing mix and at all stops along the path to purchase (at home, on the go, in the store).

-- Social media outlets are becoming important distribution hubs for content, given consumers’ propensity to share content, links, and networks.

-- The rapid expansion of online video, along with new “tablet” devices and readers, will compel media and entertainment companies to regain control of the customer interface in order to better monetize the digital experience.

The New Rules of Brand Communication

There is a lot of advice on the new rules of brand communication, especially in the social media space, going around at the moment. Adding their contribution to the growing list, management consultancy Accenture recently issued a nice wrap-up of the environment brands communicate in and offered some advice on how brands can join the conversation.

“You no longer manage the conversations among your customers in which your company or products may be mentioned, often in unpredictable contexts. What’s a brand-conscious company to do? Just shut up and listen,” Kishore S. Swaminathan wrote in Accenture’s Outlook report. “No. But in light of this significant social change, companies need to recalibrate the way they see their marketing, branding and corporate communications.”

Some of the points made in the report:

From “need to know” to “good to know”: Quaint as it may seem, communication used to have a purpose—typically, to convey information that I needed to tell and you needed to know. No longer. Technology now gives me an extraordinary ability to talk a lot about nothing to no one in particular for no reason. As a result, communication today is less a matter of my decision about what to tell whom than it is about your choice of what to pay attention to from whom.

From “tell me” to “show me”: Cheap digital and cell phone cameras that can shoot video plus free distribution media such as YouTube are fueling an explosion in video communication. Want to know how to fix your plumbing? Or learn how to make a Mexican tamale or play the guitar? Perhaps you’d like to see how arthroscopic surgery is done? Today, on the Web, you can find video clips—by amateurs as well as professionals on almost any subject.

From “talk at you” to “talk with you”: Not long ago, when producing and distributing information was relatively expensive, organizations ranging from companies to hospitals to governments controlled, and were at the center of, the communication with their public. By necessity, they talked at you. Today, two-way dialogue is not only possible but almost expected by individuals from these same organizations—especially from doctors and health care providers.

The Ideas That We Have

Ideas exist within organizations, whether we embrace them or not. Management cartoonist Tom Fishburne points out in the cartoon above that the vast majority of ideas in an organization fall in between these two extremes, the Eurekas and the Zombies. The real innovation challenge, Tom writes, is to “guide ideas to a progressively better place”. To learn from the lessons of setbacks, adjust thinking and come with new versions of the idea. “I think the art of managing ideas is less about generating new ideas than in managing the ideas already in your organization. Less Zombie, more Phoenix.”

Why Men Are Bad at Selling to Women

Women make over 70% of the purchases of discretionary consumer goods and constitute the fastest growing global market - bigger than the consumer economies of China and India combined - and yet male executives don’t know how to sell to women.

The Boston Consulting Group surveyed 15,000 women in 22 countries and concluded that male executives don’t research their female consumer base enough to gain any real insight and then generally collaborate with other men on products and services that women buy.

BCG came out with a list of 10 errors that men commonly make in creating and marketing products that are most often purchased by women. Here are some of the 10 as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Ignore the importance of emotional appeal. Senior male executives often rise to their leadership positions through manufacturing, finance, marketing or product development. They are rewarded and recognized for their ability to identify technical and functional benefits, but they often fail to realize that women buy goods for emotional benefits.

Cut price to build sales. When business slows, male executives will typically cut prices or create promotions to make up for a drop in sales, but this often has the opposite effect than the one desired. Women think of lower-priced goods and services as second rate and assume that the offerer has compromised on quality.

Fail to differentiate. Unless they research and refine, companies find themselves blind to womens' needs and dissatisfactions. They offer "me too" goods and wonder why they sit on the shelves.

Communicate clumsily. Marketing is often based on stereotypes rather than insight into the real problems women face . Sales and/or service delivery frequently fails to directly target segments of women and meet their needs exactly, finely, prescriptively.

Ignore the importance of community. A sense of community and empathy is lacking from most male-developed products and services. Personal connection and credibility are critically important to key service categories. One satisfied female customer will bring another nine or ten into the fold.

Coca-Cola’s First Global Viral Effort

Above is Coca-Cola’s first global viral effort designed to connect with teens and young adults outside of TV ads and online games. The video has racked up more than 784,000 views since being launched January 12th on YouTube. Produced by Atlanta’s Definition 6, the video ties into Coke’s global “Open Happiness” campaign and marketing of it has been via a Tweet and Facebook announcement.

“Coke’s hope is that this first viral effort will be deemed successful enough to lead to others.  It may also serve as an additional case study for brands – and an industry – already looking to digital efforts to deliver against targeted objectives at which TV (and its oftentimes distracted audience) falls short,” PSFK commented on the viral video.

First saw the ad on the always excellent 5 Blogs Before Lunch.

Forget About Predicting the Future

The only thing we really know about the future is that it is uncertain, but most brands still rely on a three-year strategic plans that plots the future and its outcome down to the last detail. John Browne knew a long time ago that this type of forecasting was futile. In a speech in 2001 he said “Giving up the illusion that you can predict the future is a very liberating moment. All you can do is to give yourself the capacity to respond to the only certainty in life - which is uncertainty. The creation of that capability is the purpose of strategy”.

The Increasing Importance of PR

Whenever I plan a brand communications campaign I start with the PR component. It seems, based on a recent article in The Economist, that others are taking the same approach.

“According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year.” The Economist reported, adding that  PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage is included. Spending on word-of-mouth marketing increased by more than 10% in 2009.

“PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like.”

The downsizing of traditional media organizations with less journalists in fewer media organization has further increased the importance of PR with the best agencies able to attract the attention of remaining journalists or bypass them all together.

“The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, overseen by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative commentary," The Economist reported.

From Tiger to Other Creatures

Having dropped the philandering Tiger Woods, Accenture have turned to an elephant, frogs and chameleons to communicate their brand message. Pictures of the creatures in  ads, including the surfing elephant above, will continue to use the longstanding tagline “High Performance. Delivered”.

“Battered by the public-relations catastrophe created by the Woods scandal, Accenture is trying to start afresh. At the same time, the new ads have a tone and feel similar to the ones featuring Mr. Woods. The campaign marks Accenture's continued effort to position itself as a company that uses a research-driven approach to help businesses chart a path to success,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

The newspaper commented that the change highlights the risks a company runs in aligning itself so closely with a single individual. “Accenture spent several years and millions of dollars building its brand with a campaign that suddenly turned into fodder for jokes.”

Accenture ended its six-year association with Woods a month ago when news of the golfers numerous alleged extramarital affairs started to surface. The management consultancy said it had not suffered an “economic impact” from the scandal.

Meanwhile, Woods is discovering that slipping often leads to free fall. General Motors has became the latest brand to distance itself from the golfer when it announced it would no longer be supplying him with free vehicles. Associated Press reported GM as saying the agreement had been scheduled to end December 31.

The Failure of the Critical Path

Far too often the path from brainstorming to product launch, known as the critical path in project management parlance, results in a disappointingly different product to that envisaged at the outset. Management cartoonist Tom Fishburne captures the decline perfectly in the cartoon above.

In his accompanying notes, Tom explains: "I've been thinking a lot about why so many new products are mediocre and uninspiring. I don't think they result from a shortage of ideas. Instead, I think that the blame falls on the innovation process itself.

"Far more important than the Eureka moment in the Ideation is what happens back in the office long after the flip charts and markers are put away. The magic is in the process. Great ideas are either watered down or made stronger depending on how they are brought to life

“Far too often, the Critical Path gets bogged down by inconsequential stuff. Too much emphasis gets placed on upfront navel gazing and not enough on actual development.

“The result is that the edges get sanded in development and the ideas (however well brainstormed) become less and less remarkable. This is ironic because ideas theoretically should become stronger by the diversity of thought that goes into them.”

Tom is an advocate of product prototyping which he describes as the “the best way to communicate ideas, dispel naysayers, rally the troops, predict flaws, and spark improvements”. I agree and often use prototyping for clients: the buy-in jump from discussing something in theory to actually holding it is significant and meaningful.

Tom will be speaking at SXSW in Austin in March and his talk is titled "Drawing Board: Innovation Lessons from Cartooning". Well be well worth a listen if you are attending SXSW.