Russell Davies

the tyranny of the big idea

               

       

I was at a conference a few months ago and ended up using the phrase ‘the tyranny of the big idea’ in response to a question, without really knowing what I meant.

(I do that a lot, blurt something out and then work out what I mean later.)

But it crystalised something that’s been at back of my mind for a while and recently, I’ve been thinking about it, and talking about it with various people, and have realised that other people are thinking along similar lines. So I've decided to try and tease out what I mean (this is just thinking in progress):

These days, a brand’s first job is to be interesting. And being interesting for most brands, most of the time means new ideas, new things to say, new ways to say it. (There is an alternative ‘slow brand’ model but we’ll come to that another time.)

Big ideas militate against that. Big ideas tend to stop you having new ideas.

But to think about that we maybe need to establish a relative scale of ideas.

Let’s say this:

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the size of Saturn.
• Sergeant Pepper is the size of the moon
• The Sony Walkman is the size of Japan
• Just Do It is the size of Beaverton, Oregon
• The average marketing Big Idea, presented in a pitch, is the size of a car park
• ‘Crumbelievable’ is the size of some cheese

And now let’s examine the characteristics of the Average Marketing Big Idea versus something like Just Do It. Or The Power of Dreams.

The Average Marketing Big Idea is big enough to give you a year or so of OK communications. It’s normally summed up in a tagline and some kind of visual consistency. It’s simple and clear. It’s useful because it lets you integrate all kinds of stuff, from all kinds of suppliers and it’s explicable to the salesforce

If it’s halfway decent consumers can be made to play it back and explain it in qualitative research (once you’ve beaten them over the head with enough focus group stimulus) and they will recall it in your tracking (once you’ve beaten them over the head with enough media exposure). It may or may not increase sales.

So far, so OK.

The downside – ideas of this size are hard to come by. They’re not exactly hard to come up with but they’re hard to get approved, hard to implement, hard to measure. They’re so specific that they’re always wrong somehow and they always piss someone off, so there’s always some politics involved somewhere.

Therefore, once they’re up and running, once the sales meetings have been had, the ads have been made, the three-ring binders have been issued people are incredibly reluctant to give them up. Which means the new ideas which are central to interestingness fall by the wayside because they don’t fit in the confines of the Big Idea. And the brand bores people with its consistency. (Though that’s much less likely to turn up in conventional tracking.)

               

       

Now, let’s examine an idea the size and value of The Power Of Dreams or Just Do It.

First, the words don’t matter much. Just Do It is a brilliant memorable phrase which comes out of real language and that’s great, so it’s a good tagline, but that’s not the important thing. The Power Of Dreams is not a good line (there’s not a lot of poetry or memorability) but it’s still incredibly useful.

Because these things aren’t really Big Ideas, they’re just huge buckets to contain a whole bunch of small ideas. And small ideas are what makes a brand interesting and effective. A constant series of small, new, interesting vaguely-related ideas which move things on, which explore the edges of the brand, which renew the relationships with customers, employees etc.

I can’t quite think of the right analogy for how this works. John Grant is definitely there by combining the idea of brands as a cluster of ideas with an imperative to innovate but his molecular analogy doesn't quite convey the sense of direction and movement. A molecule looks too static, you don't get the sense of new ideas being added at the front and old ones being discarded out the back. That being said I can't think of anything better. Anyone got anything?

(By the way, this reminds me that I haven't written about John's new book yet, which is brilliant. I will try and get around to it shortly, but you should really just buy it and read it for yourself. And I'll add it to the library. Now, that I think about it, it's entirely possible that I'm just recycling John's ideas here, sorry John.)

The thing that make these idea buckets work is the precise opposite of what people usually look for in Big Ideas. They’re vague - which means they can accommodate all sorts of other, often contradictory thoughts. The vagueness means they’re hard to codify, which means they exist in conversation, images and bits of film, which lends itself to idea creation, and which means they’re hard to smelt down into an ordinary Big Idea. They’re often emergent – no-one sits down and creates them as the future of the company, because that’s impossible. They grow out of philosophy, sometimes via advertising, sometimes as other things, but they’re adopted and emerge as an expression of the idea bucket rather than imposed as such.

And, back to my original point about these kinds of ideas, the words don’t matter much. This isn’t about phrase-making. It’s not about the actual words, it’s the bundle of ideas, activities, history, products, people, attitudes, emotions, habits that the words represent. You can take the words away and the bundle still remains, having words is just a convenient heuristic for everyone.

               

                    

So, if you buy this and you want to get yourself one of these bigger things that we shouldn’t call Big Ideas. How might you do it?

1.    Starting doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently.

2.    Look for the patterns that emerge. Look for the phrases that people use to describe what you/they are doing. Collect the things that seem to work as summaries. Notice them, put them in a drawer, don’t turn them into CI guidelines.

3.    Try not to write too much down. Manage the brand through conversation and impressionistic media – videos, stories, images, heroes. Not through mandates, best practise or benchmarking.

4.    Don’t be media neutral. Favour the things that are rich with experience and texture - events, retail, social media, film. And relegate the things that are thin and specific. Because the rich stuff is more likely to help you move forward.

5.    And something else and something else.

Er, that’s it for now. I think there’s something in this and I’ve not quite got there yet, but I thought I’d think out loud for a bit. That's why I write blogs not books, I can't do that sustained thinking.

And, since I've always been a fan of Grant's notes at the end of his posts, here are some notes, kind of:

a) I’m not planning to talk about Nike much, I don’t think that’s right, but this time Just Do It was the most apt analogy. It's not like I'm giving anything away.

b) Full credit must go to Joey Headset for uploading Crumbelievable. Though I first heard about it on the splendid American Copywriter, I just can't track down which episode.

c) I've been meaning to write about this for ages, but it was Leland's really good thinking that got me off my arse to add my two cents. (see how transatlantic I am with my colloquialisms)

d) All credit in the world to Spell With Flickr.

e) As you can probably tell, I've yet to get any work.

               

another sci-fi reference

One of Rob@cynic's comments below reminded me of my favourite definition of a brand. (Which completey undermines my points below about being straightforward with language etc, but hey, I'm a planner, what do you expect, consistency?)

It's the same as William Gibson's definition of cyberspace - a "consensual hallucination". That's what a brand is, a "consensual hallucination", it's something illusiory that only exists because sufficient numbers of people are willing to pretend that it's real.

daddy, what's a brand? part 1

I've been thinking a lot about what we mean when we say 'brand'. (Not prompted by Arthur, I just thought that was a slightly funny title.) In this and the preceeding/following posts (depending how you look at it) are some of those thoughts:

It would be quite useful to stop using the word brand altogether. (Though it's a hard habit to break)

Because using the word brand often seems to be an excuse for talking a lot of bollocks. Which I guess I'm possibly just about to do.  Using the B word seems to give people the option of detaching themselves from common sense and a real understanding of people. Using the B word seems to lead to pointless brain-storming, ill conceived projective techniques and endless tiny diagrams.

How about if we just used these words - product, service, company (or organisation) and reputation. And maybe, if we really have to, image. We all know what these words mean. We all know how we would go about managing and improving these things. We don't need to talk bollocks to talk about these things.

Thinking back to my days on Honda I suspect part of their brilliance was that they refused to let us use the world brand. We were never allowed to talk about brands. We weren't allowed to think of doing a 'brand campaign' (with the inevitable corollary of also doing a 'product campaign' and then having huge fights about which one got the biggest budget blah blah blah). We only ever did product ads, however minimally they featured actual products. It's just that one of the objectives of these ads was called 'image up'.

So how about if we dropped the word brand for a bit? it seems like a small tweak in language, but it might create a bigger tweak in thinking.

(I will now proceed to use the word brand an enormous number of times, assuming you're reading down the page. Ah well.)

daddy, what's a brand? part 2

We need to distinguish between brands and BRANDS

As many of us have, I've been reading Neil Boorman's splendid Bonfire Of The Brands. He's writing a blog about writing a book about burning all this branded goods as an experiment in living 'brand-free'. Which is rather noble and interesting. And is just the kind of experiment which makes you think about stuff. And it made me think about what exactly he means by 'brand'. Because mostly what he talks about are highly-branded goods, luxury things, fashion things. Not soap powder and hammers. There's not much discussion (unless I've missed it) of the brand of matches he's going to use to start his fire or what'll happen when he burns the Esso/Shell/Tesco fuel in his car.

(And I know I'm being annoyingly literal here and he's too smart and savvy to pretend you can live an entirely brand-free life unless you're an ex-member of Crass. I think he's just aiming at a thought-provoking gesture and a life less mediated by brands, which seems entirely fair. Anyway if you were going to be entirely brand free you'd pretty end up doing what Michael Landy did, and destroying all your possessions. Which was another fascinating project. I guess you could get everything from Muji, but that's sidestepping the point, it's just another brand. One of the best fictional discussions of brand-free-ness is in Pattern Recognition because Cayce Pollard, the protaganist, is allergic to brands, but then she's a brand-consultant.)

Anyway, what it made me  realise is that when we talk about brands we're talking about at least two different types of thing, which you might divide up like this:

brand - a service or product where most of the value is in the service or product

BRAND - a service or product where most of the value is in the image or reputation of the service or product

(I imagine the latter is mostly the kind of brand that provoked the affection and then the ire, of Mr Boorman)

You see what I mean? Does that seem useful? I know it's naive and simplistic but isnt' simplicity supposed to be very fashionable right now? I think a distinction like that might be helpful to think with.

And I don't think, as many people might, that brand is neccesarily better than BRAND. They're both equally valid sources of happiness and utility for people. It's just that if we're going to make them useful, interesting and relevant it's worth knowing exactly what kind of bRaNd we're talking about.

daddy, what's a brand? part 3

Brands are easy, people are hard

As I've probably said before, I think managing a brand (or product, or service) is really rather easy; be honest, be interesting, create happiness, create utility. Or at least it's easy if there's just you managing it. Or you and your husband. Or you and your mate from college. Brands only get difficult when large organisations get involved, say anything from 5 people to 500,000 people.

Because the stuff that's simple when you make all the decisions yourself, and it's all in one person's head and one person's soul, are frustratingly impossible when you've to try and get groups of people to do the same thing. We don't have the language to talk about the complexities and nuances of brands, we don't all see the same thing when we look at one or understand the same thing we talk about what we're going to do. So as soon as the management of the brand lives in more than one person's head it starts to fracture. Which is where all the brand management and planning tools come into play. They're not really there to help you understand the brand, they're there to enforce it, to try and make sure the organisation has some shared sense of what it means. And they can never really do that. And if it can't be done through benevolent shared understanding then they do it with compulsion, by issuing CI guidelines and manuals and three-ring binders. And maybe once, in the days of monolithic and mediated brand communications that might have worked. But not any more. Not when so many brands depend on real human contact. And every conversation can't be scripted. Then the brand really does live in every person's head and every person's mouth.

This is the hard part about managing brand-owning organisations, not managing the brand, but managing the people who are managing the brand. This isn't really news, but I think its worth remembering. I think smart planners and strategists should bear that in mind when they're  trying to make something happen inside an organisation.

And don't get me started on the fact that, of course, none of these people actually manage the brand anyway, their customers do that. (Except, that I tend to use 'managing' in the sense of 'coping' rather than 'organising'.)

cable confusion

Many, many years ago I decided that I would, wherever possible, only buy Sony products. I absolutely loved my original Stowaway, perhaps the best product I've ever owned. I adored (and still adore) their industrial design and I thought that a single brand policy would simplify the CE shopping and owning experience. And it has. Kind of.

But there's always been some nagging disatisfaction about the whole experience and this brilliant post today crystalised the problem exactly. You'd think that buying only, or mostly, Sony products would reduce the number and confusion of cables. But oh no. And you'd think that Sony would reward the customers who buy mostly, or only, Sony with simpler cable management. But oh no.

I'd never really thought about that before. That's what makes for a good blog post. And it turns out Martha Stewart's a genius.

grandly pronouncing on the future of media

Campaign asked me to do one of those group interview/opinion things a while ago. You know, they ask a few industry big-heads the same questions and make a piece out of it.

Obviously they had to edit it down a bit so I thought I might as well stick my answers up here for you all to mock.

The Future of Media - Questions

Can content replace the 30-second TV ad? (By content we mean ad funded programming, brand-owned TV channels, product placement etc)

That’s a bit like asking whether chocolate can replace ice-cream. They have some things in common, but that’s not really the point.

We’re entering a world where people will only watch what they want to watch. So they may well watch short bursts of communication (maybe 30 seconds) or ad funded programming or whatever, but only if it’s better, more interesting or more compelling than all their non-ad-funded options.

And it’ll probably help if your brand has a history of providing exactly that kind of thing, and experience in doing it. So we’re excited by this future.

Will people still be reading newspapers in 20 years? (How must newspapers adapt to survive?)

Yes, in that people will still be reading news printed on paper. Paper is incredibly convenient and humans are evolutionarily adapted to be interested in news. So news plus paper makes sense.

Whether the existing newspaper brands will survive is a different question. I think they have to realize that innovation means more than ‘getting slightly smaller’ and that they need to move from being newspaper brands to being news brands. People like The Guardian are getting that. I’m not sure about many of the others.

Will we ever watch ads on our mobile phones? (If not, what will we watch? How will advertisers use mobiles to target consumers?)

People are already watching ads on mobile phones. We’re offering ads on mobile phones. Isn’t everyone?

But the idea of targeting consumers with mobiles is wrong-headed. We make content available to consumers via mobiles – if they find our brand and communications compelling enough then they’ll seek them out and ideally, pass them on. We can’t target consumers any more, they have to target us. And in those circumstances the most relevant, most interesting, most useful communications win. Not the ones with the biggest ‘targeting budget’.

What effect will time-shift TV have on advertising? (Will changes in technology mean ads become more targeted? Will consumers search out ads/info via their TVs like they do on the internet?)

Time-shift TV will kill bad advertising. Just like it’ll kill bad programmes.

People will only want to watch what they want to watch.

And they’ll only seek out what they want to find. So if your ads are funnier, cleverer, more moving, more involving, or more useful than all their other options they’ll watch them. If not, you’re toast. The channel’s not important, the story-telling, the connection and the content is important.

Who will be the dominant media owners in 20 years?

Regular people will be the dominant media owners in 20 years time. They’ll construct their media viewing from thousands of different sources.

Some of them will be existing media brands – the BBC, Google, Rocketboom, Univision.

Some of them will be emerging media brands - already, today, 30 or 40 of the most visited 100 blogs in the world are Chinese.

Some will be brands who we don’t think of as media brands right now - I suspect Nike will be one.

But most of the time people will be constructing their own media channels from stuff sent to them by other regular people. The idea of ‘dominant media brands’ is going away.

idea linking and embedding

I love collecting jargon from other industries. It often reveals another way of looking at the world and that's normally an interesting thing for a planner.

I've come across OLE a lot in my life adjecent to technology brands but I've never really stopped to think what it meant. But then the other day I did - Object Linking and Embedding. It still doesn't mean a lot to me but I love the notion of Linking and Embedding. It seems a really useful construct for the modern world.

And then it struck me - branding is really 'Idea Link and Embedding'. That's what we do. That's meaning management. We take one idea; a company or a product, we link it to some other ideas; perhaps some attitudes, some aesthetics, a bundle of associations and we embedd some other ideas within it; a colour, a logo, a piece of music, a smell.

And that's what the web's about too. Blogs especially. Idea Linking and Embedding. (Which is kinda akin to the thought of Theory Objects. Perhaps. I'm a planner I don't look that closely.)

But it's interesting isn't it? It's not reinventing anything but it makes you think about it slightly differently, which is all you could ask for.

(letters courtesy of Spell With Flickr, via Servant of Chaos)

sympathy for the hotel

I feel sorry for hotels.

They're always getting stick from bloggers - especially from brand strategists or anyone who thinks about service or the relationships between brands/companies and people. They're perfect testing grounds for pet theories. And these kind of people are always in hotels. And every tiny, petty annoyance becomes a late-night, nothing-better-to-do blog entry. Exacerbated by jetlag, loneliness and miserable ennui.

So here's my contribution.

Stop personalising

This is the screen I was greeted with when I got to my room yesterday. I've stayed here at least a dozen times in the past year. I'm a member of their frequent stayer club and they greet me like this. Welcome Dear Davies. Not very friendly.

But that made me think. What would I prefer? Welcome Dear Russell - too friendly (depending how grumpy I'm feeling). Welcome Dear Russell Davies - just doesn't read right, if I'm Dear why are you using my whole name. Anyway, why are you using a greeting style from a letter? this isn't a letter it's a TV screen. Welcome Dear Mr Davies - OK I guess but a little formal.

Which makes me think - why bother? There are so many ways this can go wrong and bug people, compared to such little value if you get it right. Does anyone really feel a warm thrill of human connection from seeing their name on a screen like this? I don't think so.

Why not do away with the fake welcome and put something useful or interesting on the screen instead. Like what's happening in town that evening or something. This onscreen personalisation is a great example of one of those things that technology lets you do, but that you probably shouldn't.

Luxurious vs Expensive

We had a treat at the weekend and stayed in a rather expensive hotel - The Grand in Brighton. One night cost a lot. And it was great, a proper treat, it felt luxurious, comfortable, pampering, premium. And then I noticed that they were charging £10 an hour for a wifi connection. And I suddenly felt like the whole place was a rip-off. £10 an hour. For something that way cheaper hotels will do for free, that costs them virtually nothing. And that there's no way they can deliver in some luxurious way. (I presume £10 an hour doesn't get you an IT butler or a concierege who'll type your mail for you.)

And that's the difference between luxurious and expensive. Luxury costs money but feels worth it. Expensive feels like a rip-off. The thin bubble of luxury is incredibly easy to prick with the wrong move, the wrong moment, it's all in the mind of the buyer and a tiny mis-step can ruin it.

I have to say that overall, the Grand felt worth it (if you don't think about it too much) but that little moment could have undermined it.

You see what I mean about petty annoyances? I feel sorry for hotels.

proper planning

Every now and then I'm reminded what a charlatan I am by someone who's done some proper planning. Richard at Adliterate has just done that with a fantastic bit of thinking about ad engagement in the age of the PVR. Get the speech and the slides here.