This sign has bothered me for a while. And today I decided to apply Scamp's marvelous Rule Of Dicketts' Finger. Seems to do the job.
assignment 14 - taking on starbucks
John and Paul are hosting/conducting a fantastic conversation over at Brand Autopsy about what Starbucks should do following Howard Schultz's recent memo. You should have a look.
But given the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature of our world I thought an interesting assignment would be to think about what all the Starbucks competitors could do to take advantage of their apparent woes. So the task is this:
Pick a Starbucks competitor in your market. (If they're not in your market yet, imagine they're coming, because they probably are). Could be a big chain, could not be. Then write a 10-point action plan for how to respond to Starbucks as a competitor. I'm looking for 10 specific and doable things (and each point must be less than 30 words). You can talk about the store experience, the products, communications, anything. And don't just rip-off the stuff that John and Paul suggest Starbucks should do, I'll be looking for that. I'm going to be marking based on the quality of the idea and how persuasively it's expressed. (But no pictures please, just words.) And I'm going to try and find a suitable guest judge and an appropriate prize.
Get your entries in by March 20th. 10pm GMT. russell at russelldavies.com. thanks
sacrum is onto something
My only question for Sacrum, what if there are two consumers, one negatively charged, one positively charged, what should the brand do then?
badges of rank
Inspired by the Order Of The Science Scout badges Anthony has created these splendid badges for those who went to Faris's Beer Evening. I wish I'd gone now, I love a good badge.
And it reminded me of a pet stupid theory of mine, which I thought I'd written on here, but which actually I think I wrote up on a long defunct homestead page I once had. It's this;
Agencies should have uniforms.
Everyone should have boiler-suits and the different departments should have different colours. Or maybe the planners should have white coats instead. (Because we might as well embrace the stupid cliches.)
There should be a system of stripes on your sleeve to signify your rank, so clients don't have to waste time talking to anyone too junior. This would make meetings shorter.
And you should have campaign medals on your chest indicating what you'd worked on in the past so people would know if you knew what you were talking about. An independent committee could be appointed to rule on any disputed cases and finally determine just which people are entitled to say they worked on Wonderbra.
This is the kind of stuff the IPA should be working on. Not mucking about with remuneration and 'the future'. Come on. Let's introduce agency uniforms. Get a bit of discipline back in the business.
reading
I get a lot of people asking what they should read if they want to get started in planning. And I always say Eat The Big Fish and Truth Lies And Advertising. Because they give you a sense of what planners do. In advertising agencies at least.
But that's not a lot of use unless you also understand the context planners operate in. Which is why (having just finished reading them) I'd also recommend MadScam and The Houdini Solution. Because, they give you great thoughts about how the rest of the business works.
I'm not sure I need to say much about MadScam, George has already said it all. And, as you'd expect, it's a clear, very-readable, nonsense-free guide to how to do your own ads and maybe, how to hire an agency. It's aimed at small(ish) business owners but the advice is good for everyone, because advertising isn't that hard and the principles that apply for Stan's Stunning Sarsaparilla ought to apply to the Coca-Cola company. The only reason they don't is all the people that get in the way, but no-one knows how to deal with that. Anyway. Read MadScam, it'll tell you how to do advertising. If you can then find away to help with some planning on top, you've got yourself a profession.
The Houdini Solution is similarly straightforward and good. It'll tell you how to have decent ideas. And again, Ernie probably explains it better than I could. (Reviewing books by bloggers is easy. They do it all for you.) Having good ideas is the hardest thing in advertising. Most people don't bother. So you should read everything you can about it. (Especially James Webb Young's Technique For Producing Ideas, written in the 30s and still one of the best things you can read about ideas.) The admirable thing about The Houdini Solution though is the emphasis on work-rate and practicality. This isn't designed for ivory tower folk, it's for people who want to work at ideas until they create enough good ones that one of them will be great.
Anyway, both good books. Get them both.
less advertising
Here's last week's Campaign thing:
Like all institutions the advertising industry is obsessed with self-preservation. Anything that hints at a trammeling of our expansion or reach is decried as unnecessary, anti-competitive and not good for consumers. Our trade bodies have knee-jerk press releases ready to go at the slightest hint of legislation controlling where ads are allowed to appear - almost always mentioning the likely Death of Children's Television and the resulting End of Western Civilisation. But maybe we should stop worrying and learn to love the fact that there'll just be less advertising and less commercial media in our futures, but that if we're smart it can be the rubbish that gets binned, not the high-quality stuff.
It's clear from every 'ad avoidance' study that if technology allows us to steer clear of advertising we're going to do so. (Even the terminology betrays our prejudices; 'ad avoidance'? as though avoiding ads is the aberrant behaviour and the normal thing to do is seek them out). And, to me, it's equally clear that society at large is asking for some rebalancing between commercial and private spaces. Bans on junk food ads may be clumsy tools but they demonstrate a societal desire to push back the extent of commercial interruption in our lives. And as traditional channels fragment clever media people are going to find new ways to barge into people's attention, just making the problem worse. How long before the posher villages and towns start to consider outlawing posters? How long before the EU tries to ban DM? It's easy to dismiss these people as nosy bureaucrats meddling for the sake of it, but they're undoubtedly reacting to some significant tides in popular sentiment.
And if there's less advertising then there's going to be less commercial media. It's inevitable, but is it necessarily a disaster? Concern over kid's TV might be fair, but outside that area, if there were only three ITVs and only eight sections in the Sunday Times would that really presage a new cultural dark age? I don't think so. Mostly because it won't be the high-quality content that will disappear, it'll be the rubbish that'll go. We're entering a new age of attentionomics where high-quality content can find it's audience relatively easily and it's the low-quality pap that's left with no business model.
So how should we react? Well perhaps not by always lobbying for the right to bug people, but by preparing ourselves for a world where we'll have to be actively invited into people's lives, which means making content that's more entertaining or compelling than any other reasonably convenient option.
huntington and earls on assignment 13
Given the level of difficulty on the last assignment, and the difficulties of the submit and comment process, I thought it might be useful to get a couple of planners in a room and ask them what they would do when confronted with the same problem. So that's what I did. Said planners are Messers Richard Huntington and Mark Earls. Big thanks to them. Discussion inevitably ranged fairly wide and we probably spent more time talking about how to approach the imagined meeting rather than how to generate the content. But I still think there might be some useful stuff in here. Apologies for the rather loud air-conditioning noises, we recorded this in a nuclear submarine under the polar ice-cap and the scrubbers had to run at full power.