Ideas Made Well

What do jokes, food recipes, perfume smells and fashion all have in common?

Well, it’s true that there are all thriving at the moment but the answer is that they have no copyright protection. So, it is totally legal for anyone to buy a designer dress and rip it off exactly and then sell it under a different brand name. In fact, many designers are now actively collaborating with the “fast fashion retailers”, who take their £500 T-shirt and do the £4.99 version of it literally days later. That designer makes zero money out of the £4.99 T-shirts.

This may seem rather perverse, but the reality is that everyone ends up better off. The designer sells more of their designs, because they have the kudos of being worthy of copying, hence increasing the appeal of an original. The target market for the £500 version is very different to the £4.99 version. Lots more people get access to the design itself. The fast fashion houses don’t have to use so many designers churning out unproven designs, and the fashion industry ends up making more money in total.

This is only possible because of the desirability of brands, which of course, are protected by copyright laws.

Conclusive proof, if it were still needed, that brands make the world go round.

Martin Sorrell has apparently admitted last week that growth prospects in the West are weak for the foreseeable future.

Governments all over the place are finding creative and not so creative ways of reducing spending and extracting more money into their coffers. Companies are cutting back wherever they can. Borrowing money for consumers is becoming harder and harder, with mortgages being particularly difficult to obtain.

Meanwhile Apple goes from strength to strength and many companies, like GroupOn, the shopping voucher company, continue to expand into different countries, seemingly untouched by the purveyors of doom and gloom. Indeed Start itself has expanded its geographical footprint in recent months with some really impressive results.

If economists are to be believed, then the key to success is to keep on innovating and expanding when everyone else is retrenching – a sure fire way of gaining a competitive advantage.

Yet why is this so hard for companies to take on board?

The depth of evidence in history is extraordinarily in support of the case for investment behind innovation. It’s a bit like someone being shown all the evidence that 2+2=4, yet deciding that in fact they are going to go down the strategy equivalent of 2+2=3. You could understand it if there simply was no access to money, but for most large corporations, this isn’t an issue. It is, instead, a mindset; an aversion to any form of perceived risk, that drives this illogical behaviour.

The ultimate irony is that the bigger risk will be faced by those companies who ignore growth opportunities at this time.

This week, there is more anticipation in the air than there is oxygen.

The World Cup starting on Friday is the event that dominates all the news bulletins and much of the pub chat (except in Scotland of course). The Isle of Wight festival also starts this Friday and as most football fans would testify is as good a place as any to watch the World Cup. Wimbledon is just around the corner, and with Andy Murray, represents another opportunity to demonstrate national pride (particularly in Scotland), but conversely is a rubbish place to watch the World Cup.

But the other big thing happening this week is of course Big Brother. It’s not as big as it used to be of course, and its top of mind saliency has diminished considerably from the days when the tabloids each vied with each other to be the ‘official’ Big Brother paper and ran multi-page special pull-outs, reflecting the enormous interest in watching ‘not a lot’ happen.

This series of Big Brother will be different from all the ones that have preceded it, if only because it will be the last ever one.

Whether the audience floods back to historic levels seems unlikely given the competition, but the last ever Celebrity Big Brother earlier in the year performed particularly well in terms of viewers.
Channel 4 have been brave to cut it as it produced so much revenue for the channel, allowing it to fill huge quantities of its schedule with very low cost programming. “Everything has a shelf life and Big Brother had become very tired”. Whilst this is true to a certain degree, it is also true that no one is forecasting the demise of the World Cup or Wimbledon or Glastonbury. These ‘formats’ have stayed pretty similar since they began, yet they go from strength to strength.

Could ‘Big Brother’ have escaped the axe and maintained its mojo?
When they changed it a bit, to keep it fresh, the true Big Brother devotees screamed in horror. Others barely noticed the difference, and over time became bored with the format. The web played its part by providing all sorts of similar content, that meant that Big Brother lost its point of distinction in the last few years, such that most people will be unaffected by its passing.

The big launch tonight will be treated with derision by many, focussing on the collection of weirdos who will make up the contestants. Yet, this undervalues the impact Big Brother had on television and also, not to be dramatic, but on society.

The idea of Big Brother was far bigger than voyeurism. The irony of ‘Jadegate’, which led to Channel 4 being censured, was that the issue of racism was discussed more than a lifetime of Panoramas would have achieved. This was Big Brother’s great strength, the ability to let a set of ordinary people talk – or shout – about everyday issues in an entertainment format that was real. There are many copy-cat formats, which have become less and less real and the issues have become somewhat less interesting: who fancies who on a desert island is not exactly that compelling.

Channel 4’s editorial team were well and truly castrated post ‘Jadegate’ and Big Brother was never the same again.
Big Eunuch was unlikely to be a ratings winner, so we will need to wait for the next big thing.Let’s hope it makes as large (see I know when to stop stretching the pun) an impact as its predecessor.

It wasn’t so long ago that media fragmentation was all about finding unlikely places to put advertising messages: petrol pumps, parking meters, and even people’s foreheads each had their 15 minutes of fame. As digital grew, and enabled a level of measurement that went far beyond the capabilities of other media, more and more budget was diverted away from traditional media. Now money is being diverted away from traditional new media (such as banner ads), and mobile/games consoles have become this season’s ‘must do’s.

Ironically, at the same time, the election debates demonstrated not just the value of television as a communications medium, but also the value of journalism (even if the physical sales of newspapers continue to slide), so it is a brave and foolhardy person who predicts their imminent death.

There is little doubt that media fragmentation will continue, probably for ever more.

And while it is as true as ever that you shouldn’t throw out the baby (traditional media) with the bathwater, the way that new media are used is far more important than the act of using them. There are some truly pedestrian iPhone apps in existence, some positively damaging uses of Facebook and Twitter, and millions of dire uses of email. The recession hasn’t helped as marketers have been under pressure to make their budgets go further and clearly there has also been pressure from non-marketers ‘to get the selling messages across as blatantly as possible’. Which, of course, in many ways is precisely how you shouldn’t use many of the new media, which rely on people wanting to interact with something about the brand.

So the business of sorting out which medium to use for which objective, as well as understanding how best to use those media, has become more and more complex, and in all likelihood will continue to get more complex.

There’s no doubt that a strong enough idea can work across multiple media and across different objectives, but these tend to be rare.

Often, an advertising idea is shoe-horned into ‘working’ across multiple media. Campaign ideas though, come and go, so even if you come up with a brilliant idea for a campaign, what happens next? Cadbury’s Gorilla was truly brilliant, but was then followed by some truly dire communications, ruining the impact of the original campaign.

This new era of media options calls for some new thinking.

Critically, this can’t just be new thinking in a silo – there has to be a more coordinated approach for it to work effectively or else you could end up with an unruly mess.

Understanding brands is therefore more important than ever, and having ideas that work across media (although not necessarily all of them) is equally important. Agencies can no longer rest on their laurels. If they are a specialist in a particular discipline they need to evolve into specialists in more than one discipline. The ‘one stop shop’ model has rarely worked, but that is a different beast to a more integrated approach that genuinely pulls together a number of different expertises across a defined area of disciplines.

Only with this capability will agencies be able to look at media fragmentation as an opportunity rather than a threat.

A decade or so ago, festivals were not things that troubled brands unduly. Glastonbury was still very faithful to its hippy roots, ‘T in the Park’, backed by Tennants Lager, was successful but it took months to sell out, the ‘V Festival’, backed by Virgin , was similar – successful but not manically so.

Various other festivals came and went, struggling to reach critical mass, and from a marketing perspective festivals were seen as an indulgence rather than a core means of reaching the music loving public. Fast forward 10 years and the situation is very different.

Tennants and Virgin have been followed by brands too numerous to mention, and festivals have lost their reputations as dens of iniquity and become shining beacons in the marketing plans of brands that want to connect with a youth/youthful audience.

So much so, that each festival is in danger of being subsumed by brands. Thankfully, the festival promoters have, in most cases, resisted the temptation to take the money and run, and have imposed severe restrictions on what brands can and cannot do. Add value to the festival experience and you are welcomed. Go on a tree-branding mission and you will be castigated.

Many of the most successful activations of brand activity have not been ‘on site’, but have been treating festivals as a 6- or even 9-month programme of marketing that culminates in the festival itself. A good example of this has been how the Guardian, by being the main Glastonbury media partner, has been able to give added weight to its festival coverage, which starts as soon as the sun comes out in spring and provides thousands of column inches by the end of the summer.

Or there is Virgin’s policy of offering tickets to its customers before they go on sale to the general public, a tactic now embraced by O2 for all the venues it sponsors.

Virgin Mobile also launched an ad-funded series on Channel 4 called ‘Road to V’, which featured unsigned acts all vying to get the ultimate prize of a slot at the V Festival, which ran in the two months prior to the festival itself.

But by being brilliant on-site, in other words adding value to the festival experience, as brands such as Bacardi have done with their Bacardi bars or Walls ice-cream have done with their sand-filled beaches, you absolutely can stand out from the other brand activity on site; it is much harder if your effort and your return on investment relies on just a couple of days’ activity. And if you just do something bog standard on site, then you will drift into the background as easily as a member of the crowd.

So, what does it take to succeed?

Do you have to do something brilliant and spend a fortune in order to stand out?

No you don’t. What you do need to do is to understand the mentality and needs of the festival-going public. For instance, an astonishingly large number of people don’t go to festivals to listen to the music. The repeat purchase percentage is very high. with people going back to the same festival year after year. They don’t want brands that don’t belong there, cr*pping on their festival. Again it comes back to how you, as a brand, can add value to their experience. So a tethered hot-air balloon, that is used for branding purposes, would go down like a lead one. A tethered hot-air balloon that is used to help punters see the festival site from the air would be seen in a far more positive light .

In many ways, festival marketing is no different to normal marketing. It’s just that your audience will applaud you louder if you get it right, ignore you if you don’t make an effort and laugh at you if you get it wrong.

Thank you and goodnight.

When the clocks went back last week, and everybody got a bit overly excited about the fact that there was a chance that you could now go home at the end of the working day in daylight, it reinforced how strong the feeling of optimism is among us Brits.

The fact that there was snow in most of the country, and that London experienced driving wind and rain did little to undermine the feeling that summer was just around the corner. We are, apparently, laden with more debt as a country than ever before and the economy is shot (although that is not being felt at Start Towers at the moment). The next few years will be grim according to economic analysts, and we have the prospect of an election that may well result in a hung parliament, meaning that the immediate prospects for us all are more doom and gloom than uplift and inspiration.

Yet the British sensibility is that we treat such things as run of the mill. We treat the advent of spring/summer as momentous. I swear that the number of smiles in London has increased by a factor of three in the last week and it is purely down to the extra hour of daylight.

This is pure, unadulterated optimism. The prospect of long summer nights suddenly becomes attainable. The end of grey days, grey skies and grey moods.

There is a lot to be learnt from this. Brands that don’t take advantage of their equivalent of the dawning of summer are missing a huge trick. Tapping into optimism is always going to be a cost-effective marketing strategy, whether your summer is in fact summer or winter. Music festivals are a great case in point – people love the idea of festivals more than the actual experience, yet the totality of the experience including the many months leading up to the festival once you have secured your ticket outwieghs any negatives with the experience itself. Holidays are another example – how many people get more out of their holiday when they are still at work versus the holiday itself?

On paper, this may seem incredibly obvious -a very early morning flight demanding that you are at the airport at 6 in the morning, a two-hour transfer from the airport, buffet lunches galore and horrendous decor in your room, the German towel syndrome and constant heckling to do a horrific tour all point to a bad experience. Yet we still boldly book the holiday, highlighting the positives: “Amazing beaches. Crete (or wherever) is so nice at that time of year, and the people are fantastic”.

The fact is, we are a nation of optimists. And consequently we respond well to messages that tap into optimism.

How many people prefer pessimists to optimists?

The thing about about optimism though is that it is NOT about showing happy smiley people enjoying your product or service. It is a spirit rather than an action. The smiling faces are the outcome rather than the means of communication.

Will this be a summer of sun to remember? Of course it will.

If you go through the post-mortem of Obama’s triumph*, there are several fascinating “things he did” that led to his victory. As one cynic noted at the time, it was probably enough to say “I am not George W Bush and believe that everything that W stood for, was wrong.” would have been a pretty compelling strategy. But of course, politics is not as simple as that.

Obama pushed a number of buttons apart from not being Dubya – his opponent wasn’t W either after all.

1) He was perceived to “stand up to lobbyists and special interests”. Strange then that in the UK as we enter the pre-election phase, that so much has been spoken about the role of the House of Lords.

2) He told people “what they needed to hear vs what they wanted to hear”. Sounds a bit close to the Tory party views on the economy doesn’t it?

3) Obama’s team also declared: “This is an election for change”. How close is that to the current Tory slogan? Research showed that 34% of Americans were looking for change, and that 90% of them ended up voting for Obama.

4) He said that “he was looking for people around him who were calm. That’s how I am”. Funny then how Gordon Brown’s temper was suddenly revealed a couple of weeks ago.

There are plenty of other examples of how the Obama success story has been absorbed by all the parties over here; Labour’s attacks on Cameron’s Etonian background clearly are aimed at painting Gordon as the more Obama-like from a class point of view.

So, is it bad that the election strategies consist of doing the negativity thing (They’re cr*p and they know they are), which has characterised every political campaign for the last 40 years, or that the party strategists have dissected Obama’s route to victory and sought to apply those lessons?

Start would say “Yes”.

There has been a lot of talk about the incredible traction that Obama was able to make using social networks. In reality, the social networks were used for fundraising rather than anything more imaginative. It was a really successful strategy, raising $151m dollars in one month alone. This then enabled things like a 30 minute advertorial to be transmitted, which cost a mere $7m dollars and hit 33m people. So, it would be wrong to say that they didn’t use social networks very well….but fundraising is not a key issue in the UK – or at least nowhere near as important as in the USA where TV advertising still dominates as the medium of choice for political parties.

The beauty of social networks is that they allow you to show your prejudices. If I was a floating voter, I would definitely be influenced by what my social circle thought. Assume the average number of friends is 100, and that half professed allegiance to party A, while only 10% supported party B, that may well be an influence.

Posters that have innocuous claims of “We must change the NHS for the better” cost a whole lot more money, and can’t be that effective to any person with a brain. No substance underneath it – it is just a claim. “Committed to the NHS”. “Dedicated to a healthier Britain”. “Protecting essential services”. Blah blah blah. How does anyone really think that messages like this are going to change the status quo?

This SHOULD be the first election that genuinely uses the various digital platforms to make a difference – but we are already getting the photo opportunities that would have worked 40 years ago, and the posters that either say nothing or that slag off the main opposition.

PR will always have a key role in politics and it is where “dirtier strategies” can be employed. But often the messages are geared to making the party faithful ever more faithful, rather than attacking the floating voter. To effectively get to the floating voter, as in normal commercial life, you need to turn on the floating buyer, and you need to provide an argument of substance, and then communicate it succinctly but persuasively.

The vast majority of the target audience (the voters) don’t really care about who wins. That is a reality. Going back to the Obama lessons, perhaps his biggest plus was the fact that he was authentic. He didn’t appear to be playing the game. and hence demonstrated he was nothing like W. Sarah Palin and Joe whatsisname, played the game overtly. And so whatever they said about not being like W, they came across as being just like W.

So what would Start recommend to a political party to ensure success?

Ten golden rules:

1. Be authentic. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of the floating voter.

2. Restrict photo opportunities that are clearly set up.

3. Use social networks to use supporters to do the hard work for you.

4. If you are going to use posters, make sure that what you are saying is truly motivating and provides some new information.

5. Think carefully about who campaigns on your behalf. Having a devout Tory or Labour supporter try to force their views on the unconverted is destined for failure.

6. Learn from successful brands rather than learning just from successful political campaigns.

7. Accept that your target audience is not everyone in the country – the floating voter is your bullseye, not your most enthusiastic supporter.

8. Don’t get too reactive – it turns the battle into a spat.

9. Try and use media that allow you to explain “why”. And make sure you don’t have hundreds of people signing off what gets published

10. Be confident. If you believe something and you have a strong rationale, just say it.

There are clearly lessons to be learned from how Obama won but that should be only part of the strategy. It isn’t a strategy simply to mimic what has worked before.

*Source: The New Yorker: Battle Plans. ‘How Obama Won’, by Ryan Lizza, November 17 2008.

Has anyone else been inundated with mailshots from potential candidates?

Not the standard shiny leaflet stuffed through the door (they presumably will come later) but the letter on four-colour letterhead sent by second class post, which must be costing a fair old bit if everyone in the constituency is getting the same. The content always starts off quite well, giving you an insight into the candidate but very soon slips into “The other party/parties are crap” mode, and then revels in attacking the policies/record of the other parties.

Such negative campaigning has been the basis of all political campaigns in the UK for as long as anyone can remember and so surely it must work. But does it really?
I suspect it doesn’t work nearly as well as convention would suggest. But, just like two football teams that hate each other, the war of words seems unavoidable.

The big difference is that no game of football ensues, so the combat is just words. Therefore it feels hollow and without substance.

Richard Branson is someone who has made ‘negative campaigning’ work, but he always has an argument or a reason to believe, before he lets rip. If only politicians followed his lead – so much of what they say is truly vacuous. “We need a better NHS”. “We must put education first”. “We need more police on the street to fight crime”. “We must ensure our boys in Iraq get the support they need”. This isn’t a strategy, and in this way, all the parties are as bad as each other, and it all sounds like political nonsense.

Yet the people in charge of the communications for all the parties are all really clever and very experienced – so how does this happen?

A lot of it comes down to passion and ideology. Without it, you don’t have a political party. With it, you have people who want to ram it down people’s throats. Some of the best brands in the world have a clear ideology but they also have a true understanding of target audiences, that goes beyond doing loads of research groups that ask people what they want. If their insight stopped there, then there would be no new products or new ideas. The best brands interpret research rather than just accept it as gospel – this is probably difficult with ideologically-based party stalwarts.

As with any other brand, political parties need ideas that make people sit up and think. Slagging off your competition can be one aspect of a campaign, providing you have a clear rationale for your slagging, and a plan to do it better that people believe, but it can never be the sole reason why people like you.

Yet it won’t be a surprise if the strategies of all the main parties will go down this route. Imagine a bloke trying to chat up a girl and spending the whole evening agressively saying how rubbish his rival suitors are. No communications agency would recommend such a route if they were working for the bloke. Working for political parties seems to colour the advice that is given. Negativity will rule and voters will ignore most of it. The party that will win is the party that moves away from conventional wisdom and resists the temptation (to the greatest degree) to slag off the ‘other lot’. This is 2010 after all, and whilst consumer-driven marketing is still a rarity, there is lots of evidence that it works …..

In the words of Barack Obama, can we change the way that political campaigns are delivered? Yes, we can.

Toyota cars have never had a long list of brand values, and have never managed to create a huge amount of excitement when they launch a new car. Safe, dependable and super reliable are what Toyota has always been about.

That was until very recently, when it was forced to recall 6 million cars in the US and 1.8 million cars in Europe. Brake problems, steering problems and accelerator pedal problems have all surfaced. There is much speculation that Toyota knew about the problems well before they hit the headlines and, like a burglar in the dock, have then asked for several other offences to be taken into consideration.

A lesson in crisis PR it is not, and for many previously loyal Toyota drivers, it is the end of the road for the brand.

Toyota will probably survive but it will be stuck in first gear for some considerable time. Its value as a brand has plummeted and it will take a very long to rebuild it. Strangely, it is not the faults themselves that have caused the most damage.

Imagine if a brand like TVR or Aston Martin, with their reputation for speed and cutting-edge motoring had the same problems. There is a strong chance that people would have forgiven them because they at least were trying to stretch the art of the possible.

Toyota however were just trying to be as safe,dependable and reliable as ever and failed. So there was little good will to sustain them when the going got tough. And it seems that their values weren’t delivered. And they were rubbish at crisis PR.

So what next for Toyota? A long, long uphill struggle to regain anything like their previous reputation. All the benefits of creating the eco-pioneering Prius have disappeared overnight and it will take a huge effort and much cash to rebuild the brand.

It is a stark reminder that if you communicate a set of brand values to the public, you had better live up to them. Disingenuous marketing has never been a great idea (cf Dunsani water) – the only way forward is for everyone in a company to live and breathe the values and to ensure the values are delivered day after day. If the marketing strategy is treated as an addendum to the core business, then you will get found out sooner or later.

Celebrity Big Brother has been the surprise hit of 2010, delivering far better ratings than were to be expected from what many see as a very tired format limping its way out of the limelight. When Channel 4 announced last year that Big Brother was to be no more, few were surprised. The racism row had totally undermined the celeb version and the “normal” (as in “other non-celebrity)” version was a freak show with weird and not very interesting people.

So, many people stopped watching.

The tabloids scaled down their coverage and the format was officially given one more year to live. It is unlikely that the “other” version’s last series will be a winner as, apart from being set in the same house and having evictions, there is a massive difference between the celeb version and its non-celeb counterpart.

The rise of celebrities and celebrity continues year on year, seemingly indefinitely. Many people are fascinated by each nuance of celebrities’ lives, most of which are kept well hidden and rely on speculation, conjecture, and – more often than not – total fabrication. The beauty of Celeb Big Bro is that many nuances are not hidden – hence the audience gets a lot out of it. They see what celebs are really like – or think they do. It therefore informs their lives beyond Celeb Big Brother the programme in much the same way as “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here” does.

If I was at Channel 4, I would keep the format and just do the Celeb version. They might even do two series a year? Although part of the reason for its success is probably the January time slot, when people are in various forms of hibernation /depression.

It just goes to show that two things that at first sight look very similar, aren’t in fact very similar at all, which is what everyone in brand and marketing knew all along.