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As far back as the 1990s, world-renowned neuroscientist, AR Damasio, showed that no decision we humans make is based wholly on rational thinking.

Our highly developed neocortex equips us to perform wondrous feats of reason and analysis, but it is still wired up through our older, emotionally driven, biological brain.

Which means, no matter how hard we think that we have actually thought about a decision, we can’t make that decision until we interface with our senses, emotions, instinct, and intuition.

So, don’t let them ever tell you that advertising isn’t brain surgery. In another study, according to the University of Washington: “Brain scan imaging supports the idea that every time you have to make a choice in your personal life, you need to feel the projected emotional outcome of each choice – subconsciously or intuitively. “You then make that choice according to that projected feeling.

In short, the mind engages its emotional centers even when making decisions as simple as whether to wear a seatbeit or to have cake rather than broccoli.

John Kenneth Galbraith knew this years ago when he said: “A person buying ordinary production in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.”
    
Research conducted on supermarket shoppers and published in the Journal of Marketing in the 1990s, showed that only 51% could recall the most logical feature of a product they‘d just placed in their trolley: the price of the item.

Human beings think with their feelings and emotions. Our instincts reach out and somehow feel what seems good for our souls, or bad.

Human decision-making is emotional, spiritual, political and, perhaps least of all, rational. The truth is, we aren’t really rational beings.

We are more human than that. In his On Equilibrium, Canadian author John Ralston Saul explains that human action thought naturally tries to balance six “qualities”: Common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory and the, lastly, reason.

On average, in a supermarket, this process takes about 12 seconds. And, in 85% of purchases, only the chosen brand is handled.

You reach out for the one you love. I use these wide ranging references to contrast with marketing’s ongoing addiction to heartless rationality, which seems to me to be often out of step with the way consumers live their lives.

Marketing’s reliance on logic and minutely reasoned, feature-filled advertising has created a disconnection between brands and real people.

“Management concerns are relatively narrow – relative, that is, to life, knowledge and possibility,” Wrote Don Watson in Death Sentence – The Decay of Public Language.

Client executives often think that emotion is wishy-washy and, worse, rules out hard sell creative. This is not right.

Selling emotion to clients is a tough business. Marketing, after all, is a process-driven occupation.

The UK creative powerhouse, BBH, found a way of building emotion into the process by moving away from the reason-centric, fact-focussed Unique Selling Proposition (USP),to the Emotional Selling proposition (ESP) and have produced some landmark work throughout the last decade.

The ESP allows advertising to more persuasively sell the idea of the brand, rather than the mere product itself.

In 1983, Andrex was lost for words. It led the British toilet tissue market and was one of the most valuable grocery brands in the country.

All was, not rosy, however. A competitor had come out with a marvelously soft product, a product that people loved when they tried it, a product that delighted the fingers and caressed the posterior.

Andrex was vulnerable, and the brand’s owners knew it. But Andrex stood to lose a rational argument, hands down.

A look back at the television advertising for Andrex in 1983 and 1981 will show a playful Labrador puppy running joyfully through a series of seasonal adventures with a train of toilet tissue billowing behind it.

The puppy gambols through daffodils, frolics on the beach, and bursts through piles of autumn leaves.

In the most famous spot, he slides onto a frozen pond and plays with a goose. These spots are off the scale on the “aah” factor.

Sure, the product looks as soft and strong as ever, but the star of the show is the puppy. He plucks irresistibly at our heartstrings.

By tapping blatantly into the emotions of the British housewife, Andrex saw off the competitive challenge until it could launch an improved product.

Instead of slashing prices or employing other desperate measures, the brand’s marketers sensibly decided to milk the appeal of the brand’s spokesman for all the little fellow was worth.

This worked so well that the brand’s sales were extremely buoyant during this time of danger.

What’s more, every Christmas for years afterward, a small Labrador puppy could be seen on British TV screens, sliding onto a frozen pond and playing with a goose.

Ask any focus group about Andrex and warm emotional words will come tumbling out. Quite an achievement for a toilet tissue.

The same is true of many of the world’s greatest brands. Even in a research situation, it’s occasionally possible to see people’s eyes moisten slightly when they talk about the promise offered by Nike’s vision of empowerment through sport, or Apple’s celebration of independent thinking, or even Coke’s hilltop depiction of global harmony.

Singapore Airlines transports us into a highly evocative, long-running dream. De Beers has made its product a potent symbol of undying love. Huggies induces parents to coo at their endearingly happy babies.

Of course not all successful brands harness “big” emotions like these. But generally speaking, they conjure up a tightly defined emotional space that is very appealing and goes far beyond the brand’s rational story.

Even a brand that appears quite rational may be offering something deeper. The tremendous success of BMW in Britain was built on imagery that, despite to be seeming cold, tapped into powerful emotions of power, success and control.

In the 1980s, Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s idea of the “emotional selling proposition” recognized the importance of this emotional space.

Even science supports the importance of emotion in branding. In 2002, the Department of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study on how well people recognize certain words.

It showed that the right side of the brain, the emotional side, played a bigger role in processing brand names than it did in processing emotion is fundamental to the very concept of branding.

The skilled way in which modern brands use emotion is all the more remarkable when one considers traditional corporate culture.

Yes, the value of brands is understood to a greater degree than ever before, and many companies now talk about sustainability rather than short-term obsession with the bottom line. But the business world is still generally more comfortable with facts than emotions.

After all, in the last decade, a concept known as “fact-based management” became quite popular.

This sounds very uninspiring, but it’s certainly easier for a CEO to defend than “emotion-based management.”

Business leaders are not expected to behave in a highly emotional fashion not too often, anyway.

Instead, they need to spend much of their time obsessing over quite rational things like product quality, product functionality and product improvement.

It’s only human nature that they often wish to see the results of this dedication communicated to their potential customers.

It’s the default position, and it’s defensible in the inherently anti-emotion culture of senior management. As Mark Twain said, “It is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.”

However, set against this are some powerful trends which favour a more emotional approach.

First, the erosion of functional product differences has been widely documented, and even where they exist, the gaps can be closed in a matter of months or even weeks.

This naturally leads many brands to attempt to build a more emotional connection that is less vulnerable to an innovative competitor.

Secondly, emotions provide cut-through. In his book The power of simplicity, Jack Trout pointed out that the average manager now reads a million words a week, and refers to theories that the Baby Boomer generation is suffering significant memory loss as a result of sheer information overload.

There might be some other reasons, but that’s another topic. A few years ago, the research firm BASES reduced is predictions for the amount of awareness that could be generated by a given advertising spend.

It’s just not that easy to get noticed any more. In an information-saturated world, there’s lot to be said for by passing clogged mental highways and going direct to the heart.

And there’s so much data around that it’s easy for people to post-rationalize buying decisions that are actually grounded mainly in emotion.

Finally, the sustained success of several brands with a high emotional component to their success has simple led to a greater understanding of the power of emotion to deliver healthy financial f\returns.

A fly on the wall of any meeting room in corporate America would hear people saying they want to “do a Nike”, “a Starbucks” or “an Apple.”

They may not mean that they would like to imitate those companies in very respect, but they would like to imitate those companies in every respect, but they would kill for the emotional equity in those brands.

Even a brand with a hideous reputation for product quality can retain such emotional equity that it can be successfully reinvented: just ask the owners of Triumph Motorcycles.

Of course many brands develop emotional equity without necessarily doing emotional advertising.

Starbucks spends comparatively little on advertising, but its in-store experience is carefully planned to set off the right emotional triggers.

Most brands need to rely more heavily on advertising, or at least on the broad discipline of marketing communications, to build emotional bonds.

In Britain, the IPA Effectiveness Awards have encouraged particularly rigorous analysis of the effects of communications, and the real, hard-headed financial value of emotionally driven campaigns has been proven time and time again by brands as diverse as Tesco, Orange, and Andrex itself.

But hang on a minute. It can’t be as easy as that, can it? No, it’s not, unfortunately. For one thing, our competitors probably have had the same idea.

But more importantly, the real people we are trying to influence are not always reaching out desperately for our brand’s little bundle of emotions.

Enough has been written about the sophistication of modern consumers and their ability to decode and avoid every device of marketing, should they so wish.

This is no longer just a phenomenon of the most advanced markets either. Siemens launched its Xelibri phone with an ironic campaign poking fun at modern technology mass-marketing and carrying the strapline “That’s so tomorrow.”

It generated interest not just in the expected places, but also in the leading cities of China, despite their relatively recent exposure to modern marketing methods.

And in the most developed markets, even irony is no longer enough. The American middle-class adoption of blue-collar brands and attitudes is simultaneously ironic and respectful: We have entered the post ironic age.

This context has made life more difficult for brands appealing through emotion. They are searching for connections with a more elusive consumer, through a communication fog of irony, self-reference and quirky humor.

In a world where much advertising was quite rational, it was easier to stand out by using pure “big” emotions such as sex excitement or the cuteneness of children and animals.

All these can still work, but they are received in a more skeptical environment.
Some brands have successfully reacted to this by developing campaigns, and a personality, that do not overtly use emotion in an easily described way, and yet are clearly not rational either.

A successful print campaign for diesel is based on the premise of bizarre market research conducted by the company.

It uses emotion in that it makes us smile, but the humor is carefully modulated. If we think about it enough, we can figure out that it’s meant to make diesel users look like knowing, savvy people, far too intelligent to be fooled by the ludicrous methods of the marketing world.

There’s emotion there, but it’s a far cry from the toned sexuality of Nick Kamen sitting in his underwear for Levi’s in the mid-1980s.

Another development is that some brands have successfully adopted a much less predictable approach to using emotion.

Their tonality is not one-dimensional, or necessarily consistent, but somehow all feels as if it’s all coming from the same place.

The voice of the defining modern brand is not mono, stereophonic or even quadraphonic: it’s polyphonic, like that new church organ-like ringbone on your mobile phone.

It’s a carefully arranged collection of emotional triggers that keeps you engaged, and adds up to a complex personality that feels real and interesting.

Everywhere you look, there is evidence of the search for authenticity, massively demonstrated over the last few years by the demand for retro and vintage clothing, polyphonic brands often feel more authentic because they feel more like real people, with a variety of moods and ways of talking.
 
The mother of all polyphonic brands is Nike, which has encompassed an astonishing diversity of emotions in its advertising while still talking in an inimitably Nike way.

Raw excitement, tear-jerking inspiration, sophisticated and unsophisticated humor, tranquil beauty, and sheer irreverence have all played a part in Nike communications over the years.

Yet, generally, you know when it’s Nike talking to you and not someone else. There is a clear underlying attitude that has been imitated by many, but never consistently captured by any other brand.

This raises interesting questions for advertisers. How can they manage the process of developing a powerful polyphonic brand, which generates strong relationships by many, but never consistently captured by any other brand.

This raises interesting questions for advertisers. How can they manage the process of developing a powerful polyphonic brand, which generates strong relationships by using a rich palette of emotions?

The best way, of course, is if those who work with the brand have an instinctive understanding of what the brand really stands for.

Nike’s powerful voice has not been formed primarily by any single brand manual that dictates the emotional tone of the brand’s contact with consumers.

Instead, there is a hugely strong corporate culture built in part by an amazing oral tradition, which gives people who work at or for Nike a pretty good chance to get what Nike is about.

Powerful emotional advertising for a brand tends to emerge when people feel what the brand is about, rather than do it by the manual.

It’s a lot easier for this to happen when the corporate culture, the emotional heart of the company, clearly contains an essence that real people find appealing.

Otherwise we may end up as Scott Bedbury puts it, “putting lipstick on a pig.” In recent years fewer advertising people have promised that advertising can solve every problem, and more stress has been put on the need to develop the right internal culture as well as the right communications.

But what if the company is still a little pig-like? After all, most companies are really not that interesting to ordinary people, and many still carry a hint of curly tail.

Not every corporation can be as intuitive as Nike, Virgin or Diesel, but they still need to build storing, emotional bonds with their customers.

One response to this task is when a group of those working with the brand come together for a session to try and capture its emotional essence.

In days gone by, this might have entailed going to a nice hotel in the countryside, decompressing, bonding and generally getting into a suitable state of mind.

In a strict financial climate, this can often be seen as indulgent, so many “Offsets” now take place onsite, in colorless conference rooms decorated by corporate art carrying inspiring symbols of teamwork or leadership.

Part of the output of these sessions may be a set of guidelines for the brand’s values and personality, often arranged in a circle or a box. The list of words usually looks something like this:

Honest
Confident
Contemporary
Understanding
Warm Witty (not slapstick)
Innovative

This list goes down pretty well internally, and may be approved by consumers in research.

It’s difficult to argue with, and that’s exactly the problem. It’s incredibly bland. Consider for a moment a brand that demonstrated exactly the opposite qualities, a brand that was;

Lying
Timid
Old-fashioned
Uncomprehending
Cold
Humourless (despite occasional forays into slapstick)
Luddite

No one has launched this brand, or ever will (although I for one would buy it, if only because it sounds a lot more interesting than the first one).

This reveals that many of the words most commonly used to define brand “personality” simply don’t.

They are just obvious. This often becomes apparent when the “personality” gets illustrated on a video “essence taper” using found footage, cut together to a rousing piece of music which on one (except Microsoft) could ever afford to use in real piece of advertising.

The results are all too often spectacularly wishy-washy. Personality and emotional richness have been eliminated, rather than enhanced.

To avoid this, those working with brands need to fight very hard t weed out the predictable or generic.

We need to allow more individual, creative interpretations of a brand’s personality to emerge, which are not driven by the need to achieve easy consensus.

We need to use visual and aural references that feel right, rather than just illustrating a list of words.

And overall, we need to allow emotions and intuition to play a bigger part in the process, since the very thing we are trying to create is itself emotional.

All these are difficult in the normal course of things, but the prize, a well-defined emotional brand space, is enormously valuable.

Even if we achieve this, there may still be trouble ahead. Speed of communication, the availability of vast amounts of data on any subject, and the constantly evolving sensibilities of the people we are talking to mean that some level of rational underpinning needs to be available, even if it is not overt.

If there’s too big a disconnect, problems occur. At one level, the communications may simply cease to work: people may applaud the brand and like the brand for how it talks to them, but simply ignore e it because their own experiences do not support the spin.

More seriously, a brand which has forged powerful emotional bonds with its audience is held up to the most stringent standards.

If hell hath n fury like a woman scorned, the marketing world hath no fury like a loyal consumer scorned.

The very power of Nike’s emotional bonds with the American public has made it a tempting target for attack over its labour practices.

Direct marketers know that some of the best customers are those who have complained and been satisfied: the disappointment of loyal customers is equally potent.

Nevertheless, the power of an emotionally driven relationship does not dissipate overnight and, by being seen to address those concerns over time, Nike has recaptured the lost ground.

When we say someone “is a bit emotional right now,” We mean it partly as a warning.  We are sending a message that “you may find dealing with this person a little difficult right now.” Emotions are not always easy for people to deal with, and the same is true for brands.

It’s easy to make emotional advertising that is patronizing, or generic, or unbelievable, or just plain nauseating.

For brands, emotion brings responsibility as well as power. So it’s easy to back off and fall back on advertising that appears to sell the product really well, And makes good sense in the boardroom when presented after the quarterly budget. But the you won’t have a puppy on your side when the going gets tough, will you?

 Keywords: emotional selling, advertising, ad, ads,

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 “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it,” said Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock.

Advertising is a means to an end. We are here to ring up sales not win gongs. Trouble is, too much advertising has become adept at drawing too much attention to itself for its own sake, without being able to go that final 95% of the distance, closing the deal for the product that is behind the idea.

It is argued by clients that advertising creative people have too many non-commercial preoccupations, like creative awards and funny shaped, glittering prizes.

The desired response most creative people want from their ad is for their peers to say, “Gee, I wish I’d thought of that.” Why we get paid to do what we do? Are we TV sitcom writers, to make people laugh?

Are we gag writers for observational comedians, putting our finger on telling truths?
Are we prose stylists, delivering beautifully written passages of literature?

What really clever people do is “brand building” brand diamonds, brand signature, brand architecture, brand onion, brand hado. Say the word “brand” often enough and everything will be okay.

Now, I’m not saying that building the brand isn’t ever the answer. What I am saying is, it isn’t always the answer. But it’s become a simple knee-jerk solution to avoid the discomfort of thinking about the “S” word.

There are great brands which can charge a premium for any product with their name attached.

How the brands got built was that the advertising sold the product in an appropriate way. The brand building is the part that’s underlined. And a brand got built.

Now, once a brand’s built, you can sell the brand because it exists. But before the product builds the brand, you can’t sell the brand, because it doesn’t exist. And it’s silly to sell something that doesn’t silly?

All agree on one thing, “brand” is totally mysterious to the mind of man, and “brand” is all powerful.

The problem is if you substitute belief for thinking, you believe your answer is always right in every situation, no matter what.

And, of course, it isn’t which is why we have so much expensive advertising failing all the time.

One problem with blindly following this route is that, handled lazily, many brand values are the same within a particular market.

If all the brands in the market are selling similar brand values, who wins? It’s a no- brainer because, unless you change the dynamics of the market, the market leader must win more from any market growth. So, given that there’s usually only one brand leader in any it’s right.

But if “brand” advertising isn’t infallible, what else is there? I’d like to suggest thinking for ourselves as an alternative to blind faith.

The problem, as we’ve seen with “brand”, is that we have a whole industry of people dedicated to making what we do as complicated as possible, dedicated to making it virtually impenetrable to any outsider.

We need to demystify the process. We need to give everyone access to it. We need a device so simple anyone can use it.

So that the best solution wins, not just the most complicated one. That’s where what I call, the Binary brief comes in.

It’s called “binary” because all you do is choose between two alternatives,
Like the zeros and ones of binary code. Like the binary code, it’s fast, and it’s unambiguous.

But the real value of the process is the rigid discipline that you need to apply to the result.
You must only choose ONE of each pair of alternatives.

The questions are ranked in three levels.
(1). What?
(2). Who?
(3). How?
That’s it.

(1). What does the advertising need to achieve? Should we grow the market, and (if we’re number one) take the major share of the increase? Or should we go up against whoever’s bigger than us, and try to take a share from them?

(2). Who should we target? Can we get our current users to buy more of our product, or buy it more often? Or should we be looking to get people who’ve never tried it to switch to it/?

(3). How do we’ do it? Do we have a genuine unique Selling proposition (USP)? (A”[received” USP is fine, but the letter “S” is really important. It’s all very well being unique, but does anyone want what we’re unique for?)

Or should we be selling the brand?

If so, how?
NOW is when vast army of brand-building specialists can get involved, because now we know what we’re doing, who we’re doing it to, and why.

In fact it’s so simple it’s hardly worth bothering with Century to get to this clarity of thinking?

In fact, just to illustrate how it works, let’s hold the two cola giants against the Binary brief.

Coca-Cola was obviously number one in the cola market. All they needed to do was sell cola values and they’d get the major share of any growth in the market.

Pepsi looks at Coca-Cola, sees they got successful and thinks: “We’ll do the same thing.”
You see it in very market.

Numbers two and three are so hypnotized by number One that they let them make the rules for that market, and are scared to deviate.

“Brand advertising worked so well for Number One, we’d better do the same thing, but with our name on the end.”

And, because you’re in the same market, the brand values you are selling are usually the same brand values that number one is selling.

So the market grows, and Number One takes the major share of that growth, thank you very much.

It took Pepsi many decades to wake up and realize that as long as they were selling cola values, they were just doing Coke’s advertising for them.

They had to start talking people out of Coke and into pepsi. They had to aggressively go for brand share.

So how to do that? Well obviously they had to be talking to people about why they should try Pepsi. They had to go for Triallists.

Fair enough, but what message was going to get coke drinkers to change brands?
Well, selling Pepsi according to cola values hadn’t worked. Why would anyone switch from Coke?

They needed something differentiating. They’d needed a reason. “Pepsi Tastes Better” is a good place to start, if you can back it up. They had research that could.

So they went for USP: Take the Pepsi challenge. The aggressive nature of advertising (selling a product in an appropriate way) became the Pepsi brand. Now they have better advertising than they’ve ever had, and none of it’s for Coke.

Meanwhile, coke was more interested in growing the market. They figured they could get much more growth from increasing the overall size of the market than they could from worrying about taking share from their smaller competitor.

So they kept selling Cola values. The problem was everyone, everywhere had already tried coke, so how do you increase sales? The answer was get existing customers to consume more.

So the message became “Don’t just have a Coke on your own, have one with a friend, it’s much nicer to share.” “I d like to buy the world a Coke.”

Finally, Coke virtually built the cola market, so it could just appropriate all the market values to itself.

They must do brand advertising. So, against the binary brief, coca-Cola went for: market growth, current consumers, brand.

So that’s how it works. You make three simple choices and you have one of eight possible advertising strategies.

All your advertising is briefed according to those choices. All your advertising is judged against them.

You can make the decision-making process as complex and thorough as you want, you can take days arguing back and forth over each decision. But at the end, you must have chosen only one of each of the alternatives.

That all sounds simple enough, right? Well it is simple. But it’s not easy. It’s very tough to make those choices. And that’s the whole point.

Most marketing people, clients and agencies, live in denial. They want their advertising to include all of those alternatives.

They don’t want to leave out anything. They refuse to make those choices. So they get made for them by the consumer. Remember the old analogy of throwing six tennis balls at the consumer, and they won’t catch any?

Well that’s not quite true. Throw six tennis balls at the consumer and they’ll probably catch one.

But there’s a five in one chance that it won’t be the one you wanted them to catch.
So make the decision up front, don’t trust to luck.

If you’re a creative, take a look at the brief you’re working on: have they made those choices?

If you’re a client, take a look at the advertising you’re being shown: Is it clear from the ads what those choices are?

Because if it isn’t clear to you, what possible chance has the consumer got of working it out?

That is, of course, assuming that we’re still doing advertising for consumers. And not just as some vague “extension of the PR component of the brand building exercise.”

Understand, there’s nothing wrong with brand-building. But only when it’s appropriate.
My problem is that, because it’s kept so vague and ephemeral, it’s used to cover up an awful lot of lazy thinking.

That’s why I think we need to demystify the whole process. We don’t want ordinary thinking and clever words.

We want clever thinking and ordinary words. That’s why it’s time to bring the “S” word out of the closet.

I think we can stop being ashamed of what we do, and pretending we’re doing something else.

I think the consumers have worked out what those little films between the programmers are for. I think they know they’re adverts. They just don’t know: who, what or why.

Keywords: selling, advertising, ad, ads, brand, market,

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The law of Consistency has a natural-born enemy. The Crime of the New Broom. A change in the marketing department usually ushers in sweeping changes to agency, campaign and brand direction.

Problem is, the public often tires of a campaign at a much slower rate than marketing executives.

The history of advertising is littered with abandoned campaigns, like unfashionable spouses, that have been replaced with new models long before the original has worn out.
Or, sometimes, even worn in.

Consumers frequently remember a brand’s campaign long after everyone in the company’s organization has forgotten the name of the idiot client who canned it in the first place.

New agencies, and new creative directors, are just as guilty as client executives of this impatient sin.

Many are eager to make their own mark, often at the expense of the carefully constructed thinking and positioning of the originators.

Consistency is an uphill battle in the dynamic change worshipping culture of advertising.
After all, the setting up and solving of new issues is what fuels the momentum of the marketing process.

The task of remaining consistent is made harder these days withy the number of multimedia touch points a campaign must maintain with consumers, along with the increasing number of hands guiding it through these various permutations and extensions.

In 2003, Heinz in the UK announced, to the horror of nostalgic consumers, that it was taking a “long hard look” at its 36-year-old slogan, Beanz Meanz Heiz.

The widely-loved catchphrase that had already survived an attempt on its life a decade earlier, when agency BMP ran with Heinz Builds Britz.

However, the original recipe for success stood the test of time and was reinstated within three years.

Another example: Toyota in the US dropped their “Oh what a Feeling” campaign within a couple of years of it being devised in the late 1970s.

Yet the notion lived on other markets, like Australia, where it became the best-known slogan in any advertising category, as well as the most creatively awarded campaign, in the country.

Meanwhile, the US Toyota client was spending tens of millions of dollars trying to embed a different tagline, then another, and another, without capturing the burr-like quality of the original.

There are several global blue chip advertisers who could learn from Toyota’s percipience.
A number of techniques can make consistency easier to achieve, like the creative use of brand properties, mnemonic devices, and demonstrably campaign able ideas, for a start.

An advertising property is like a house; maintain it, freshen it up every couple of years, and it will last a lifetime.

In the East, the trader mentality still prevails: buy and sell, buy and sell. It is tough to accept a formula that suggests one should build anything like brand equity for the long term. When Asian brands look to global markets, a completely different mindset is needed.

One upside of thinking short is being able to move fast; and that is the bottom-line attraction for the Asian investor. Nevertheless, in the marketing arena, expediency often devalues brands in a flash.

Clearly, the advertising communications services industry in Asia has been delinquent. Our industry simply hasn’t yet got its act together in educating.

Asian brand owners on the great upsides of developing positive brand strategies and long-term brand building.

The ways of the West have reached into the heart and soul of Asia, and teenagers – the big Asian consumers of tomorrow – are relishing and embracing it all. And why not!
In the face of this, the main thing is to retain one’s core values.

Yet no marketing model should be so rigid that that you can’t finesse it. No corporate marketing mantra can be so rigid that any change, any flexibility, verboten.

Corporately, one can say: “Here’s the model we’ve always used; so let’s see if it works in a particular society.”

For instance, Marlboro has never significantly changed its platform since the 1970s, whether it’s talking to men who dig ditches or the men who dig ditches or the men who sit in boardrooms.

Global consistency in its advertising has been the cornerstone of Marlboro’s power. Because it is visually very strong and simple.

Everyone can understand it and the values it projects. Marlboro’s success among young and old in Asia is a fine example of how a well established Western brand identity has triumphantly crossed all Kinds of cultural and social barriers and has stayed true to itself in the process.

Marketing a global brand that seeks substantial growth across a large group of people should try to follow much the same model anywhere.

It’s just plain common sense. This fast-shrinking world of communications and the fast- growing movement of people across continents are two reasons for consistency.

Another is the need for a consistent brand soul to present to all people.
The brand-bonding mission is a tough one.

Businessmen in Asia are not renowned risk-takers in an esoteric area like marketing. They are conspicuous for their conservative approach.

Nevertheless, underneath the surface lies an energy that loves to take financial risks at the race track and Gasinos, so we-the communications services industry-have to find more creative ways to get Asian brand owners to commit to more courageous brand-building programs.

My sense is that a brand’s soul could start to lose its way if the diverse creative expressions across the globe are allowed to move further away from the brand’s core values.

I’m definitely in favor of central control of global brands and I think most brand owners would support this view. However, you need regular checks and balances to make sure you’re scoring well.

The marketer of an everyday product – toothpaste, detergent, a product that is aiming for the masses, the people in public housing or out in the villages – must take into account the local culture, the local view point. Nonetheless, the central architecture on which the brand was built need not change.

The success of Marlboro – the Marlboro cowboy has become an international icon in countries where cowboys never existed – reinforces the power of consistently promoting one’s core branding properties.

Wherever legally possible, their brand advertising is universally the same all over the world, pitched to every socio-economic level.

What is Consistency?
Lifetime bonding is the ultimate dream of all ambitious brand owners.
People love to be loved and, predictably, they gravitate towards brands that know them, understand them and reach into their hearts.

For this, consistency – a single message – must be maintained across time, geography, media product and ad channels.

Brand Equity
Although only formalized as a concept about 20 years ago, brand equity is by far the most valuable asset of most companies.

It has been described as “the upstream reservoir of cash flow”, Consumer motivation to buy or to pay more has taken place, but it hasn’t yet been translated into actual sales turnover.

The very fact that brand equity is intangible makes the job of protecting and enhancing it that much harder.

Being true to the brand begins by ensuring that the brand owner’s staff, distributors, partners and agents understands the brand’s identity.

They should have a good grip on what the brand stands for: What is timeless about it and what is not.

Any genuine global brand-building effort should include programs that educate employees.

If the brand owner’s own staff don’t understand and embrace what he is trying to build, what chance has the public got?

Global brands are naturally obliged to transcend borders; sometimes those borders are jealously guarded with in the company itself. More seminars, workshops, field visits and work-exchange programs will knock down walls.

Cross-border bonding not only nurtures a freer flow of information and co-operation, it also lets a company develop its own marketing vocabulary and templates, Systems can also be put in place to track when brand-building efforts drift off strategy.

Getting employees to vote on the ad campaigns they think best exemplify the essence of the brand builds involvement; more importantly, it signals whether employees fully understand what the brand is all about.

Every brand owner has to find his own way of being true to his brand but whatever model is employed, enthusiastic support of the program at local market level is fundamental.

We sometimes forget that the lads and lasses in the territorial trenches are the brand’s first line of defense, and attack. Keeping true to yourself and your brand requires eternal vigilance.

The Danger of Change
While variety is the spice of life, change isn’t. Contrary to popular opinion, I figure that mature consumer generally resist change.

On the other hand, many marketers feel change is their salvation. So do advertising agencies. It is conventional to change; it is unconventional not to.

The world is changing so fast, or so we’re told. Information technology is upon us, changing us. Everything has to change to survive.

It’s as though we are all racing down a fast-flowing river, jostling each other to lead the race, with little concern or knowledge of where the river is taking us – and it could well be to Niagara Falls.

You don’t have to jump blindly into that fast-flowing river. You don’t have to be totally obsessed about change. Sit back and calmly get the perspectives in balance.

Brands are Made Up of Three Parts: The Body, the Soul and the Conscience
The body is the change engine; it represents the tangibles of your brand offering, the product developments and enhancements that are an ongoing process.

The brand’s soul represents the emotional side of your brand offering; it is usually deep-rooted, and mirrors the unique character, personality and culture of your brand.

The brand’s conscience represents the company’s corporate “pay-back” responsibility to specific target customers or to the public at large.

If large consumers marketers are serious about global growth for their brand, the three dynamics must come into play.

The mission of the brand body is pretty clear – it is your engine of regular upgrades and innovations.

Where things frequently go off the rails for marketers and ad agencies alike is the handling of the brand’s soul.

They apple consistent change to the look, the feel, the personality and the underlying compelling core appeal of the brand.

This is like getting Frank Sinatra to sing like Elvis Presley, and then like Pavarotti, just to be trendy.

Getting the brand’s soul right is not an easy task, but once you’ve nailed it, it need not essentially change for decades.

The brand’s soul is the mother of the brand, and like a country’s national flag and anthem, is should have a positive, long-term place in consumers’ hearts.

After consumers get the teenage adrenaline out of their system, they are not keen on constant cosmetic change.

The brand’s conscience has been an integral part of the game among big global brand owners for generation.

As it is more “corporate citizen” and institutional in character, it should tend to reflect the values of the brand’s soul and not be the target of constant change.

As the 21st century takes off, this part of the brand’s composition will expand in size and commercial value.

Asian brand owners (most of whom are not yet embracing this development) should take note to address this responsibility more seriously from now on if they have global ambitions.

A colleague contends that while a great brand is “the property of the world,” it is “subtly different to every individual.

There is, however, an essential core in a brand that strikes a universal resonance and that becomes the lowest common denominator – or the highest common factor – across the brand.”

While I think my colleague struck the right nerve on certain points, his view complicates the issues of brand building and “change” If the people who talk the change game are a bit difficult to understand, what chance have others, especially brand owners, in coming to grips with the issue?

Vigilance is the key watchword. Remember what the Singapore Girl is. She is the Warm, gentle, caring personality in her sarong kebaya forever and ever.

What, however, does change is that she consistently offers you better on-line booking systems, winder seats, wider, aisles, more cocktails, better food, more sophisticated in-flight entertainment, and so on.

It is equally essential to ensure that the Singapore Girl retains youthfulness and freshness as the years turn into decades.

We therefore endeavor to consistently contemporize the advertising through the story compositions and the production values – the structure of the content, the styling of the production values – the structure of the content, the styling of the film, the soundtrack, the still photography. Execution can play a big role in shaping a brand’s distinctive identity.

It’s a recipe that aims to always keep the Singapore Girl relevant and uniquely appealing to consumers.

Brand building is like building a relationship with a friend. If you connect fairly regularly, you stand a good chance of nurturing the friendship.

If for some reason he or she declines to a chat once every six months, then once a year, or may be you may see each other every two years, you’ll gradually forget each other.
It’s the same thing in advertising.

If you’re serious, you’ve got to keep up a regular dialogue; you’ve got to keep nurturing the relationship.

You’ve got to get your customers interested in you, bonded to you. Even when times are tough, and business is slow, somehow you’ve got to sustain a level of contact that signals your genuine desire to retain a relationship with your customers.

If you cut off the connection over an extended period, the downside could be extremely dark and life- threatening for your brand.

A global brand I admire is Rolex. Over the years, it has gradually moved from being a well-known, admired brand into what all brands aspire to the ad that launched the icon.

The phrase Singapore Girl came later, making its appearance in the lyrics of the song. The brand proposition has been delivered consistently for 30 years. Rolex has invested 30 to 40 years of consistent brand-building in order to institutionalize its brand.

It hasn’t changed its core brand platform in all that time. Even when the economy is tough, its advertising program is relentless.

It communicates six-star quality and has always had a strong endorsement program; great intellectual achievers, great explorers, great singers, and always the more lofty names.

Some people say the ads are unexciting and unchanging, but I think their strength has been their unchanging, focused view of the way life should be.

Just keeping up basic connection is an art in itself. Whenever you put your company name of trademark in a communication you are conveying a brand message; you are doing brand advertising.

So all ads are brand ads, which means a commitment to upholding the brand’s values across everything.

Propositions can vary. The media can vary. But the brand’s voice should be “family.” As far as the consumer is concerned, every piece of communication they see is a brand ad.

There is no such thing as having A-grade ads, B-grade ads and C-grade ads.
The same people, charged with building the brand, should approve every ad.

Once you adopt this thinking, you’ll find that your marketplace presence will become distinctly sharper.

A Unique lcon or Property
Its unlikely that the Marlboro Man will be bettered as a visual icon, although some of the world’s most successful campaigns shave not had a graphic icon in their communications.

I just happen to believe that a compelling, exclusive graphic entity is a huge asset in this game and that this ingredient should be firmly on the agenda in developing new brand-communications programs.

Apart from graphic characters, there are numerous other properties that can be employed exclusively to the brand’s advantage.

A unique wordsmith style is one; the quintessential slogan is another. Then there are catchphrases that potentially become part of everyday language.

Creating and massaging exclusive brand icons or properties is an essential prerequisite in a brand-building exercise.

Brand builders must be firm and focused. There are no half measures building a brand. If an ad isn’t right, if the language is wrong, if it is not the brand talking, say so. Every ad should be making a small investment in the brand’s eternal worth.

Success has its challenges. Once you become a global brand leader in both profits and reputation, there is a tendency to move to a defensive strategy, to protect your treasure, to look for safeguards rather than retain the adventurous sprit that won you fame and fortune in the first place.

I have no problem with the argument that different target audiences and different consumer feelings require different advertising solutions.

What I do have a problem with is when the only thing that links all the different ads together is the company logon.

Remember, please, that every worthy brand has a soul, a special personality. It is a fundamental responsibility for brand owners to leverage their personality in one form or another in all their advertising. It’s all part of the brand-building exercise.

It’s part of consistently connecting in a certain way with your customer. It’s the art of putting yourself head and shoulders above the din of characterless advertising.

Life for the global brands will get better and better and the global brand with triumph so long as the connection with the consumer is seen by the consumer as relevant, genuine and friendly.

Every brand owner with regional or global aspirations can learn from Mercedes-Benz. Here is the living proof that great global brands should never be changed to suit one or two markets.

The brand, its values and its voice must never be compromised. Mercedes-Benz is the same car, representing the same excellence, wherever it goes in the world. It is what it is.

Look at the brands that have had consistently good advertising over several years. Now look at the clients behind that advertising.

In every case, it will be a strong, prosperous organization. A focused, dynamic, confident brand owner and his agency generally have a close working relationship in which the agency is encouraged to explore and expand creative boundaries so long as the brand’s core values are nourished rather than reinvented.

Strong clients know their own brand disciplines. So do their agencies. They work as one in building the brand’s relationship with consumers.

Nowadays, unfortunately, this is actually the exception rather than the rule. It is very tough to keep focused.

More brand owners are starting to jump around in all directions, championing the need for change.

And the process of change to some brand owners means different brand values, different New Age advertising and so on.

In some cases, they may well be correct, but on most, they are not. They are merely confusing themselves.

This is a fine line. The brand’s core values need not change, whereas the creative delivery of those values should constantly be at the cutting edge.

Somehow brand owners get that confused; then they confuse their advertising agencies, and their final advertising reflects the lost path and confuses the consumer as well.

If you wish to create a reputation for yourself, whatever you do, branding is the name, branding is the game.

Branding has always been the major bugle player I the marketing battle. With the invasion of the Internet, the smart card and other technology, branding is now the Napoleon in the battle.

The brand is no longer just a marketing concept. The brand is now a financial concept it is a company’s most important financial asset.

Keywords: Consistency, Marketing, brand, advertising, brand equity, ad, visual icon,

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Four of the most potent words in the advertising universe used to be “As seen on TV.”
How quickly things change.

Media fragmentation is making advertising choices increasing complex, with current predictions indicating that there may be fewer than 10 to 15 years left in which to establish a global or national brand the traditional way.

In the US, free-to-air TV audiences are falling constantly (though networks are charging more and more to reach them) and it’s now ideas bigger than the borders of traditional advertising that are the pointy end of marketing.

The Law of Evolution is not about the survival of the fittest, but the most adaptable. Sheer media muscles in no longer enough, Mr. Dinosaur.

Every campaign should attempt to step outside the traditional media boxes that have to be ticked.

Look for ideas by thinking about your target person’s total time, not just their media time. When are they really in the right frame of mind to listen? As opposed to when the advertiser wants to talk?

Advertiser mindsets have to move away from the cosy pigeon-holing of consumers into age or socio-groups, and move toward a more realistic assessment of people’s real-life attitudes and aspirations.

This article exists because things have changed so much in the advertising world; we’re trying to ground our thinking in the most fruitful earth, regardless of the marching mutability of the times.

So what can be relied upon in the future, a part from more change? In my den, I keep a map of the globe that, along, with the dry land masses, shows the topography of the ocean floor.

When you see exposed all the underwater chasms, peaks, channels and plains that are usually hidden beneath the surface of the waves, then the flow of the gulf streams, the reflux of he oceans, and the patterns of the world’s weather are all far more easily comprehended.

A fascinating paradox about advertising people: we passionately push clients to be open to change, yet we’re the least open to change ourselves.

The most obvious example of this is what’s going on today with new mediums and technology.

Advertising people are not facing the fact that, in a few short years, the 30-second commercial will no longer be the medium, but simply a medium.

This means lots of people will be watching exactly what they want and not watching what they don’t.

Nowadays, we’re seeing a vast erosion of network ratings. We’re also seeing a disproportionate increase in the use of TiVo-like devices.

Yet, advertising agencies desperately cling to the 30 seconds. They hope all this new medium and technology stuff will go away.

Or, if they’ve been around a while, they hope they can keep doing what they’re doing until they retire, leaving it for the next generation to figure out.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going away, because viewers love the power and control they now have.

So, to me, there are two choices: think differently or be flushed down the 20th-century toilet.

That’s not just my opinion either. Last year, USA Today identified a new group of teens-to-twenties they call the “Unreachables” – people who are almost impossible to touch through the mainstream mediums.

And, recently, when Sun Microsystems’ Marketing director was asked why he fired his agency of only three years, he answered, “The big agencies only think about doing the next 30 spot.”

The good news in all this is that the new technology and media developments offer an extraordinary, never-seen-before opportunity for creativity – the very thing agencies thrive on.

Open-minded, big-thinking people will kick ass in this new world. Some already are. Our agency’s BMW films are a good example.

The films were designed to solve a simple but shattering problem for our client: Our target was no longer watching enough TV to be reached effectively: We couldn’t show him the cars properly.

We sat and thought about it. We knew this person spent 10 or 12 hours a day at work. We knew he had a powerful computer on his desk.

The logic was, “Why not visit him where he is – at the computer?” The client saw the value in the idea immediately and signed on.

There were risks involved, for sure, like figuring out how to make a long-form film. But the idea was sound: We figured it out.
 
The client initially expected three million views. By summer 2003, they hit 50 million views. BMW has also had the best US sales year in its history, in the midst of an extremely tough economy. Going beyond ads seems to have worked well for them.

Another example is our successful launch for the Archipelago stock exchange. Which featured The Open Show, a minute long TV show that ran every day at 7:59 a.m. right before the conventional stock market opened at eight.

We will continue to embrace new ideas and put our clients in category of one rather than in the field of sameness their competitors play in.

It’s been fun, stimulating, rewarding and successful. Plus, there’s that little thing about it being the path to survival. Darwin wrote something about that.

Keywords: advertising, advertiser, evolution.

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“Positioning” must be among the most repeated words in the advertising lexicon rivaled only by “research,” “morph” and “it wasn’t my fault.

What’s most remarkable is that marketing survived so long before Al Ries and Jack Trout coined the term and explained their concept.

But once they did, everything changed. If they’d patented the word, they’d be rich as Bill Gates.

Since then, an understanding of good poisoning has made many people wealthy. It’s not a panacea, but is indispensable.

Poisoning solves the dangerous Grime of Being in the wrong place at the Right Time, Developed to find ways of finding room for new products in highly developed markets, poisoning became a major educative concept in the world’s developing markets.

Much has changed in the world of marketing since the concept was first aired, and no one is better placed than Al Ries himself to explore how positioning has evolved, and how savvy marketers have become in using it to carve out the richest territory.

Most days, the best-selling advertising book at Amazon.com is positioning: The Battle for your Mind by Jack Trout and yours truly.

What’s surprising about this is that the book was published 22 years ago.
For more than two decades, poisoning has been a hot topic in the advertising community, and not always favorably.

Bill Bern Bach Wrote an article denouncing the poisoning concept and David Ogilvy said, “phooey on positioning. “What is positioning and why does it generate such a love/hate relationship?

The poisoning concept challenges an idea that is the heart and soul of the advertising community: that the primary function of advertising is to communicate. “Tell more, sell more” sell more” was the old advertising adage.

Advertising as a form of communications is an idea deeply embedded in the corporate psyche.

Many advertising departments are now calling themselves the “Marketing Communications Department” or “Marcom” for short, too bad. The name encourages advertising people to go in exactly the wrong direction.

Advertising is not communication; advertising is poisoning. The best advertising communicates little about the product or service.

What the best advertising does, however, is to establish and reinforce a position in the prospect’s mind.

Marketing people used to talk about the 4ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Now they talk about the 5ps, the original four plus positioning.

And no company could launch a new brand without first writing a positioning. And no company could launch a new brand without first writing a position statement.

When you study these poisoning statements, you can see where marketing people have gotten off track in general.

They are written from the company’s point of view “We want to position our brand as the premier product in the category.” What’s wrong with a positioning statement like this? Everything. It leaves the prospect out of the equation.

A positioning statement should be formulated from the prospect’s point of view: “There’s an open hole in the mind for a premium product in the category.

The Open Hole
Price is the easiest hole in the mind to understand and it’s one of the easiest holes to fill.
Haagen-Daze’ decision to introduce a more expensive line of ice cream set up the “premium” ice-cream position for the brand and made Haagen-Dazs one of the enduring marketing successes of the past several decades.

What Haagen-Dazs did in ice cream, Heineken did in beer. It was the first brand to occupy the high-priced beer position in the mind.

Then the folks at Anheuser-Busch decided that if Heineken was the first high-priced imported beer, then they could occupy the position as the firs high-priced imported beer, a position that the Anheuser-Busch Michelob brand occupies today.

Rembrandt in toothpaste, Evian in water, Orville Redenbacher in popcorn, Rolex in watches, Mercedes-Benz in automobiles: these and hundreds of other brands owe their success to being the first brand to occupy the high-price position in the mind.

High price is only one of the open holes in the mind. Low price is another. What Haagen-Dazs Heineken and Mercedes did at the high end, brands like Wal-Mart and South west Airlines have done at the low end.

Minds can change. Stolichnaya was the first vodka to occupy the high-priced position in the mind. As time went on and the Cold War heated up.

Americans were turned off by a Russian vodka like Stolichnaya. So Absolute moved smartly into the high-priced vodka position. Today. Absolute outsells Stolichnaya in the US by about three to one.

How many price holes are there in a typical mind? It depends on the category. Normally there are three.

The regular brand, the low priced brand and the high-priced brand. When you own three brands that occupy all three positions, you can be said to win the Triple Crown of Branding.

Anheuser-Busch, for example, has Busch, the largest-selling, low –priced beer; Budweiser, the largest-selling regular beer; and Michelob, the largest-selling high-priced beer.

In some categories, there is room for an “ultra high-priced” brand. Today, Grey Goose Vodka, for example, is growing faster than Absolut and is not far behind Stolichnaya in sales, and is sure to pass the Russian brand sometime in the future.

“Country of origin” is another obvious hole in the mind. Toyota was the first to fill the Japanese imported-car hole and became the leading brand.

They did it again with Lexus, which became the leading high-priced Japanese automobile brand.

Corona was the first to occupy the Mexican hole in the beer drinker’s mind. Beck’s was the first to occupy the German hole.

Some consultants have called this positioning strategy, “the first-mover advantage,” but that is not so. It’s an advantage, but it’s not the reason that most leader brands got bo be leader.

It’s the “first minder” advantage. That is, the brand that gets into the mind first is the winner, not necessarily the brand that is first in the category.

• Duryea was the first automobile on the road, but never got into the mind. Ford was the first automobile in the mind.

• MITS Altair 8800 was the first personal computer, but never got into the mind. Apple was the first personal computer to get into the mind.

• Du Mont made the first television set; Hurley, the first washing machine. But these and many other brands failed to get into the minds of their prospects. You don’t win in the marketplace. You win in the mind.

The New Category
Sometimes there are no open holes in the prospect’s mind and you have to create one. We call this positioning strategy; “create a new category you can be first in.”

Gatorade, for instance, was the first sports drink. Developed in the 1969s by a team of doctors to add the Gators football team at the University of Florida the band now does over $2 billion in worldwide sales.

PowerBar was the first energy bar and now dominates this fast growing market. Some critics, of course, think this is just wordplay.

PowerBar to them is just a candy bar with a different name to help consumers assuage their guilt feelings about eating a candy bar.

May be there is little actual difference between a candy bar and a powerBar, but not so in the mind. Consumers consider them to be two different categories.

Red Bull was the first energy drink. Introduced in Austria in 1987, Red Bull now does more than $1 billion in worldwide sales.

Zima was the first… well, what was Zima the first of? The label said “ClearMalt”, but nobody knew what that meant. The television announcement ads were no help either. “What’s in it?” asked a bartender.

“It’s a secret, It’s something different,” replied a mysterious pitchman in his white suit and black hat.

Zima failed to establish a new category and sales remain disappointing. When you want to create a new category and then fill that hole, your need to focus your efforts on selling the category, not the brand.

What’s a computer spreadsheet? Almost no one knew what a spreadsheet was until Visi-Calc introduced the first spreadsheet for personal computers such as the 8-bit Apple machines.

And then they sold the benefits of the new spreadsheet category. Lotus 1-2-3 was the first spreadsheet for 16-bit machines like the IBM PC.

And Microsoft’s Excel was the first spreadsheet for the company’s Windows operating system. Digital Equipment was the first minicomputer.

Dell was the first personal computer sold direct to consumers. Palm was the first handheld computer. Michelin was the first steel-belted, radial-ply tire.

Prince was the first oversized tennis racket. And the Callaway Big Bertha was the first oversized golf driver.

These and many other brands became enormous successes by “creating a new category they could be first in.”

The Number-two Brand
Consumers like choice. Sometimes you can build a powerful brand just by giving consumers an alternative to the leading brand.

But What strategy can best deliver the number-two position? May be if we can produce a better product than the leader,” goes the thinking. “we won’t necessarily overtake them, but we will wind up in the number two position.”

This is the worst possible approach for a prospective number two band why? Because the better product cannot win in the marketplace even if consumers expect it to win.

As a matter of fact, there is a strong axiom, or belief, in the minds of consumers that “the best product or service wins in the marketplace.”

After all, this is so logical and so obvious, who could possibly disagree?
I could, that’s who. There’s a paradox in marketing.

While everyone believes that the better product will win in the marketplace, the worst possible strategy for any company is to try to produce a “better product.”

Why is this so? Because the leader in your field has already created the perception of producing the better product.

If you try to claim that your product is better, the prospect thinks, “No, it can’t be better; otherwise it would be the leader.”

Yet what do most companies try to do? They try to (1) produce a better product and (2) communicate that difference to customers and prospects. While it’s easy to do (1), it’s almost impossible to do (2).

Is Royal Grown cola a better tasting cola than coca-cola? Royal Grown thinks so and their research shows that 57% of prospects prefer the test of Royal Crown cola to coca-cola Classic. That’s a pretty big difference.

Yet, the better tasting cola (Royal Grown) has only 2% of the cola market. What they need to do, you might be thinking, is to communicate that difference. Well they’ve tried that and it doesn’t work.

“That can’t be,” the prospect thinks. “If Royal Crown were the better-tasting cola, it would be the leader, not coke. There must be something wrong with the research.”

Actually, the Royal crown company hired an independent research organization to conduct one million taste tests comparing its product with Coca-cola. Would 10 million tastes tests have made a difference?

No. You believe what you want to believe and if you believe that the better product wins in the marketplace, then you think coca-cola must be the better product because it is the leader.

Then how do you become a strong number-two brand? You become the opposite of the leader.

Coca-cola is the old, established brand which means that your parents drank coca-cola. So Pepsi-cola said, “You don’t want to drink what your parents drank, you’re the Pepsi Generation.”

Listerine was the “bad-tasting” mouthwash that Killed germs and odor in your month. So Scope became the “good tasting” mouthwash and a strong number two brand.

Home Depot is the leading “home-improvement” store, but its crowded aisles and jammed shelves appeal more to men than women.

So Lowe’s became the home-improvement store for women, with its clean layouts and wide aisles.

Windows is the computer operating system you buy from Microsoft. Linux, the fastes-growing computer operating system, is “open source software,” or free.

Duality is a fundamental characteristic of a human mind. Say “black” and people also think “white.” Say “and people also think “women.” Say “large” and people also think “small.”

Your best chance of occupying that number0two position is to try to become the opposite of the leader,

In every category, the mind has an open hole for a number-two brand, just waiting for someone to occupy it.

The Specialist
Every coffee shop in American sells coffee, but they also sell hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, apple pie, doughnuts, and dozens of other foods and beverages.

So Starbucks specialized in coffee and became a very successful brand. So did McDonald’s, which specialized in hamburgers.

And Dunkin’ Donuts which specialized in doughnuts. And subway which specialized in submarine sandwiches.

The largest air-cargo company in America was Emery Air Freight. What Kind of services did Emery offer?

Everything – large packages, Small packages, overnight delivery, inexpensive two – and three – day deliveries.

So Federal Express specialized in “small packages, overnight” and became a much more successful brand than Emery.

Enterprise Rent-Car specialized in the “insurance replacement” business and became the largest car-rental company in America.

In mature categories (such as automobiles) where most of the segments have well-established brands, the best way of positioning your brand is by emphasising a single attribute.

Volvo did it with “Safety.” And BMW did it with “driving.” In essence, they each became a specialist in the safety and driving categories.

It’s almost always possible to build a brand by occupying a specialist position inside consumers’ minds. The only real question is, “is the category going to be big enough?”

Left-handed golf clubs might be a specialist position, but perhaps it’s not a big enough market for a brand to exploit.

The Channel Brand
Hanes was the largest-Selling Panty-hose brand in department stores in America, but Hanes had a problem.

Women were not shopping at department stores frequently enough. So the company wanted to expand its distribution.

Supermarkets were the logical choice. (Women visit a supermarket almost twice a week.) So Hanes developed a second brand for supermarket distribution only.

The “L’eggs” name was particularly good choice because it was a double entendre (legs and eggs).

To reinforce the name, the product was packaged in a plastic container that looked like an egg. L’eggs, the first supermarket panty-hose brand, became the largest-selling panty-hose brand in the country.

The internet has created many opportunities to create channel brands. Amazon.com, eBay, Monster.com, Salesforce.com are just some of many successful “Internet-only” brands.

Paul Mitchell has become a $600 million hair and skin-care brand by focusing on the professional hair-salon channel.

Ping did the same with golf clubs by focusing on the MCM (multi-level marketing) channel.

One of the most under-used methods of building a brand is the “channel” brand. As new channels are introduced, they create many opportunities to do just that.

The Gender Brand
Sometimes you can build a brand by focusing on half the market.

• Marlboro became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for men.

• Virginia slims became a big brand by positioning itself as the first cigarette for women.

• Right Card became a big brand by positioning itself as the first deodorant for men.

• Secret became a big brand by positioning itself as the first deodorant for women.

The “Bad Name” Problem
Complicating the search for an open hole in the mind is the issue of the name. You can’t put a square peg in a round hole and you can’t fill a hole in the mind with a bad, or inappropriate, name.

Ralph Lifshitz was a young fashion designer in New York who aspired to better thing. So he changed his name to Ralph Lauren and made his Polo brand into the most successful fashion brand in the world.

Could he have accomplished his goal with the name polo Ralph Lifshitz? Of course not.

Marion Morrison wanted to become a cowboy movie star so he changed his name to john Wayne and became the most successful motion-picture star ever. Could he have accomplished his goal with the name Marion? Of course not.

Many Asian names will not work outside of Asia. Names like Daewoo, Daihatsu and Matsushita are difficult to pronounce and difficult to spell outside of Asia.

When the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo company started to market its products in the US, the company changed its name to Sony.

A good move. Many Asian companies that want to establish worldwide brands will have to do the same.

The “One Name, Two Holes” Problem
Then there is the problem of trying to use the same name to fill two different holes. Xerox, the leading brand of office copier, tried to get into the mainframe computer market with the Xerox name. It was a disaster.

IBM, the leading brand of mainframe computers, tried to get into the personal computer market with the IBM name.

The company has lost hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fill two holes with one name.

Are there successful examples of line extension? Sure, but these generally happen in weak markets where no single brand dominates the category.

Or they happen with weak brands with little identity in their categories. In other word, if your brand doesn’t stand for anything in one category, you can move it to another category where it won’t stand for anything either.

But when brands have a strong position in the mind, they can’t be moved. Could Coca-cola beer successfully challenge Budweiser? Silly question.

The “Moving-the-Hole” Problem
Some Companies think they can change what their brands stand for.
So Volkswagen is trying to sell a $100,000 automobile called the Phaeton. And Mercedes-Benz is trying to sell $20,000 A-class Vehicles.

You can deepen a hole, you can broaden a hole, but the one thing you can’t do with a hole is move it.

When a brand is strongly established in the mind, it can rarely, if ever, be moved to a new location.

You can’t go wrong, however, if you take your mind off your product, your brand, and your company and focus instead on the mind of the consumer. That’s where you can win and that’s where you can also lose.
Keywords: positioning, advertising, ad, brand,

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Imagine the movie Casablanca with Ronald Reagan (who was cast originally) instead of Humphrey Bogart.

Or Mission Impossible without Lalo Shiffren’s iconic theme music. My point is there’s occasionally a little something in the execution or production that really adds to a basic idea, improves/changes/replaces it, and literally makes all the difference to its success.

Maybe it was suggested by the commercial’s director, or ad-libbed by an actor on the set, or by the muso on the last day of recording, or inspired by the catering lady.

Not only can an idea come from anywhere, it can arrive anytime and from anyone. Sometimes it’s these grace notes that actually create the “burr” that hooks people to a campaign.

Which begs the question of when an advertising idea is finished? Usually, once the client has bought it, an idea remains stillborn at that level in its development. How else can it be controlled? Business loves being in control; sometimes more than it loves being successful.

Kotler’s view of marketing, adopted by advertising planners everywhere, is rooted in the notion of control: analysis, planning implementation and measurement.

It’s also true that many rational businesspeople aren’t comfortable with creativity; many would rather stick with plans made in meetings, where everything is spelled out in advance and all new ideas are firmly in hand.

Ambiguity is not tolerated for long. This leads management to gravitate towards the familiar, to premature.

Conclusions, to impose clichés and stereotypes. Which, in turn, is why so many ads just seem like the brief committed to film. That is committing a crime against effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the unpredictable way that consumer desires and creativity actually match up in the marketplace continues to disturb and baffle businesspeople.

Truth is, for it to be successful, an advertising idea must translate and transcend the logic of the marketing.

How, then, do you allow for the possibility of improvement in the execution of you advertising idea?” Kaizan is the Japanese world meaning “continuous improvement.”

Apply it to your advertising and the idea should get noticeably better from concept to final script, from storyboard to director’s treatment, and from first cut to final client presentation. Better and better, layer by layer.

Great advertising needs a “conspiracy of good intentions” among everybody involved in the process.

Different ads become great at different times. A great proposition or script is a start. But a script is not an ad.

An ad may only become great after the editor gets his hands on it, or t he easting agent makes an inspired choice, or the photographer works magic.

All of these stages should be considered as part of the creative process, not as part of the agency – client presentation process. The greatness should be allowed to sneak out at any time.

This article is about the Law of Idea and Execution, and the difference between them. And, more importantly, which one should come first.

Writing about ideas is pretty tricky as we all define an idea differently. As a result, quite a few people will disagree with this law; in fact, a lot of you may not even understand it.

The law of accepted wisdom states that are directors and copywriters (hereafter referred to as “the creatives”) conceive an advertising idea, then go about executing the idea.

In layman’s terms, they come up with a common theme, then create different. TV, billboard and radio scenarios.

For instance, a TV campaign may have four different ads with different actors, locations and dialogue, but there will be a common theme running throughout. This “theme” is usually the idea.

An idea is a medium or property that communicates a product benefit in an extraordinary way. In other words, it will often dramatise a boring fact through words, pictures or sound.

The best ideas tend to be the simple ones. They are the ones the punter looks at and gets straight away.

One of the great advertising “truths” is that creatives should be able to write a good idea on a postage stamp or napkin. Another common belief is that you should be able to explain an idea in a sentence. Below are a few examples from history.

Idea: People react with huge surprise when they see unbelievably cheap VW prices

Executions: Show various people seeing VW prices with extreme reaction, e.g. A woman feels faint or a dentist mentions a price to make a patient open his mouth further.

Endline: “Surprisingly ordinary prices”

Idea: Australians love their XXXX more than their Wives, cars, life itself, etc.

Execution: An Aussie bloke still reaching for a can of XXXX whilst nearly fully consumed by an alligator.

Endline: Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for any other beer
Idea: John Smiths is a no bullshit beer for no bullshit blokes.

Execution: John Smiths drinker climbs to top of Olympic-style diving board and does a “bomb”

Endline: No nonsense

Idea: The taste of real oranges is a huge taste hit

Execution: To demonstrate the hit of real oranges, a person gets a smack on the face from a big orange bloke every time he takes a sip of Tango.

Endline: You know when you’ve been tangoed

All of the campaigns above have several executions. In fact, when a person picks up what a campaign idea is, they can usually come up with their own executions.

Not all ideas can be summed up in words, but most of the goods one can. This is why billboards with headlines are pretty popular in our business.

For the last few years I’ve been creative director of an ad agency called Colenso BBDO in New Zealand. New Zealand is a small country with small marketing departments and small budgets. This “smallness” is great for ideas.

It has made our industry, my agency and I work in a different way. It has forced our clients, planners and suits to stick to one proposition, one benefit. The creative work has to be simple. There is no choice.

We can’t write mediocre scripts and throw a million dollar director at it. Nor can we just come up with a crap headline and shoot the visual in Florence. In truth, we have to come up with simple, affordable, easy-to-produce ideas.

An example. Our client TV3 is the second biggest network in NZ. A junior creative team comes to me with ideas to promote their upcoming TV premiere of the movie Scream.

They suggest putting red dye into the water fountain in Custom Street, Auckland (the NZ equivalent of Piccadilly Circus).

The client said yes. The cost of the dye and street painting came to less than $800. The media coverage in the newspapers comes to about $500,000. Idea first, then execution, very much second.

A creative team will come up with an idea, script and present it. The client approves it, then it’s “By hook or by crook,” where we’ll do anything to get it made. In extreme cases an agency copywriter might act, or a client do voice over.

Nearly all of the creative teams I’ve worked with, present their TV/Print/ radio in the same way.

Most of the time they present their idea in a sentence, then they list off the executions. Nobody walks in with a film clip or a piece of Dutch animation because on nearly every occasion we can’t afford it. So quite often, the “thought” or “idea” has to be original in words, not necessarily how it looks or sounds.

Now this law has been pretty good to us and any other creative who practices it. As an agency, we’ve retained business, won business and picked up our fair share of Lions.
End of story?

Well no, not really. Having practiced this law and benefited hugely from it, I can’t now tell you it’s crap. Well not crap, but certainly flawed.

I’m beginning to believe a great execution is more important than the idea. By that I mean the funny, clever picture, sound effect bit during any ad, ay well be better than the big creative idea behing it. Punters like to laugh; they don’t really give a toss what the ad idea is.

We’ve all heard a good retail ad penned by the local plumbing shop or hardware store. Often it’s some dumb gag. Without a clear single minded though.

The thing is, though, that modern advertising training and methodology says we should have a “logical, clever bit.”

I first noticed this in radio. You can come up with a great idea, which just doesn’t work on radio. If the ad’s not funny, touching or dramatic, you’re stuffed.

Show Ads
I laughed out loud when I saw this campaign, then I blew the ads out. They didn’t make sense to me. It just said Mini TV. I asked them to do more work explaining the benefit of Casio Mini TV.

A day later I changed my mind. I was being too logical. The benefit/idea was in the name. I initially reacted the way punters do, in that I laughed. That’s what it’s all about.

That’s why Cannes is one of the better ad awards. A lot of the TV work that wins tends to be visually stunning or just plain hilarious. The jury tends to award stuff the way a punter would.

The way advertising briefs are researched, composed and presented is half the problem.
A creative person gets a brief with a written proposition.

He or she will sit at their desk and play with those words. Those words will lead to sentences, which then lead to pictures. This process will lead he or she to a certain style of ad. A few of these ad styles are below.

Demonstration:
This is where the product is shown working for real
e.g. cooking pot used to melt inferior cooking pot.

Hyperbole demonstration:
This is where the benefit is still a demonstrational but done in an unreal way.
e.g. VW: Surprisingly ordinary prices, a mouse running on a steering wheel to demonstrate easy car steering.

Analogy:
Used when you are unable to show the subject matter. A good example is when one small company wants to say it’s as good as bigger companies in the market. The mouse scaring elephant scenario is an oft-used solution for this.

What I’m trying to convey is that every creative goes through the same process everyday. Our thinking is linear, our solutions systematic.

Why do you think we regularly come up with an ad somebody else has done? We get the same bride and our system comes up with the same solutions.

I believe truly great work happens when you mess with the system. Throw a spanner into the creative works.

NZ Skier is a good case of a screw up in the system. The client had no money so the creatives were told to they had use stock photography.

This setback turned out to be a godsend. We were forced to come up with a good idea, as the visual was decided.

One more example happened recently to me. I was doing some ads with a junior team on a video game called Mortal Kombat. It’s an ultra violent fighting game with various muscle-clad characters beating the shit out of each other.

One day wile thinking about it, I laughed out loud. We were thinking it would be funny if these guys were really a bit soft and girly.

We did a test using two of these animated characters. One was asking the other out of for a coffee because he felt that “they needed to discuss their differences.”

One of the copywriters, ad-libbed the dialogue with a funny, high-pitched voice, while our designer did some coarse animation.

It was funny, but it didn’t have an ending. Then we thought maybe the characters should have a fight to end the ad. We did that and it was still funny.

Now all we needed was an idea. We spent a day coming up with the idea and a line to summate the ad.

The ads ended up being about these guys trying to talk but always ending up fighting. We wrote three ads featuring the guys initially talking, but no matter how hard they tried, they always ended up having a fight.

The end line was “Violence. Always the best solution.” We started off with a sight gag. Ended on a campaign idea. Execution Idea.

Now this wasn’t a great campaign, but it showed a changed in our order of thinking. Some of the truly great ads of our time have been reverse engineered.

I don’t believe “Wassup” came from a three-page brief. I doubt a creative guy jumped out of his office chair and shouted “Why don’t we have these four blacks guys talking to each other?”

Most creative directors would never buy that ad based on a script. It’s common knowledge the execution was there well before the idea.

The “Cog” ad for Honda or the brilliant Club 18-30 campaign were hardly devised without some executional inspiration.

Advertising history has countless campaigns based on existing visual material and techniques.

UK advertising owes a lot to UK sitcoms, movies and skit shows. Many campaigns have been devised around their formats or star characters.

During the 1990s most London creative could count on a Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse character to deliver a client’s benefit.

This is not a new way of working. But it is a way that could be developed into something greater.

It may sound mad, but what if every brief forced you to work back from the execution?
What if creative were given a creative brief for a mobile phone that said you had to feature a banana in your TV script?

Maybe magazine ads for a car that couldn’t show the car, or could only feature its nearest competitor in the visual.

All of these suggestions immediately change the though process. Finally I believe the Law of Idea and Execution should be broken. Now, when I’m writing or judging ads, I force myself and my teams to break the law.

It can be anything from putting in an exceptional mandatory, like using a stock shot to using a soundtrack that fits the brands. If they present something that’s funny but doesn’t fit with the brand, then we try and make it fit.

As much as I can, I’ll abandon the logical route, because execution is about emotion.
It’s laughter, tears, tension, drama, etc.

Logical people will find it hard to word this way, but the chances are, it will make your ads better.

Keywords: campaign, advertising, marketing, ads, ad, script, idea, execution, creative, creatives, TV campaign, copywriter, magazine ads,

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Marketers readily fall into rule worship. Faith can be blind. There are many false prophets.

One of these was called “The Great god of Negativity” by some of the creative departments I’ve worked in.

This meant that their precious idea had been sacrificed on the altar by someone, on high, in the pecking order, who’d killed off the campaign by solemnly pronouncing it: “too negative.”

Problem/Solution, most agree, is a powerful demonstration technique in any advertising medium.

The issue is, creative people love delving deep into the problem side of the equation and clients –prefer the spotlight to be on the details of their products solution.

Why can’t we be positive, the client high priest chants rhetorically? (After all, everyone knows the song says: “Ac-centuate the positive/Eliminate the negative.”)

Leading Turkish clerics recently raised the same kind of question when it came to their country’s rabid soccer fans.

The clergy asked excited fans to stop sweating at matches and suggested, instead, they use expressions such as “Blessed Allah” or “Allah be praised” while watching football games.

Such phrases seem very worthwhile, of course, but perhaps they are not communicating the same thing as the profanities do: they don’t quite capture the same the emotion, and indeed spirit, that the fans are feeling at the time.

There are many old wives beliefs about effective communication that should be defrocked.

David Ogilvy propagated the notion (since recanted) that humour doesn’t work. He also p-reached that reversed out copy in print won’t be read.

Charles Saatchi, founder of rival international networks Saatchi & Saatchi and later M&C Saatchi, debunked that when he produced his famous Health Department press ad that explained what happens in the moments after a fly lands on food: Long copy, white type, all reversed out of a black background.

Story goes that he actually had it set in both positive and reverse type. He plumped for the negative and the rest is history.

Ironically, there’s another problem with ruling out negativity: that is, it can rule out the use of irony in your ads.

And irony has been one of the most successful techniques in media for many years. Think Seinfeld, The Smpsons, South Park for a start.

The young get irony in the way that an older generation of clients often just don’t. irony is used as a way of making sure that others know that you know. It’s cool code of kind.

There’s a positive tension in ambiguity, like Nike ironically using “ad buster” techniques. Nike successfully ad humorously traded on ironic cynicism, even using the sweatshop allegations in cool ads.

Another irony is that some of the greatest campaigns ever written have been “negative.”
Jack Vaughan, an Australian Hall of Fame copywriter and former creative director of Y&R K, has looked at the pluses ad minuses to see whether this negative prejudice is really a positive thing in communication… or not.

It happened again the other day. A client objected to a headline I’d written that began with the word “Don’t.

The line was in the form of question (another construct to which he objects), yet it had quite a positive point to make. But there the situation lay: as if some sacred rule had been broken and there was no avenue of appeal.

This negative taboo has been with us in advertising forever. I number it among the list of top 10 unwritten laws many (but not all ) clients seem to carry with them about ads.

I’d love to know where they get them from, but they’re precepts seemingly hardwired into so many of those who have anything to do with the commissioning or approval of advertising.

Other persistent beliefs are that the size, frequency or loudness of the product, brand name or logo is directly proportional to the ad’s power to persuade, be remembered or to score highly to branding.

These are also, untrue, as I’ve painfully found over years of creative practice, but they endure. I once made a spot for dog food that had the pack on screen the entire time, but failed to lift the branding score one jot.

The way to achieve high branding is to … but that’s another issue. What’s curious about negaphobia (a word I’ve just coined for this purpose) is that the belief is so dammed tenacious when it come to ads, but isn’t so in any other sphere of life and language.

Even the expression “Let’s not be negative” is, itself, negative – an entreaty to not do something.

Yet it is the most natural and perfectly acceptable way of admonishing other people to not be defeatist, or to put is another way, to encourage them to stop being less than positive, which is in itself a negative (because merely saying, “Be positive” has a different meaning: more a sort of “have faith,” “gird your loins” thing).

The same critics of creeping negativity in ads will feel totally comfortable, when on holidays, to buy a silly T-shirt with the words “NO WORRIES” or “DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY” screened across it.

These catchphrases are the very essence of our cultural mantras about feeling good. Not a problem, so to speak. Certainly, no complaints.

Likewise, it’s high praise indeed when inviting someone to, for instance, try a new wine vintage and they pronounce it, “Hey, not bad” especially if they add … “not bad at all.”

In the same manner we say, “not too bad” in response to “How are you?” Or “not half bad” even though this could literally suggest “half of me (or it) is bad,” or even “not just half bad, but totally bad.”

Compared to these deliberate understatements, “quite good” or even “very good” can seem insipid. And “bad”, of course, means really good in street parlance, as does “wicked” or “da bomb.”

These highly useful, adverse forms of expression give our language power. A placard saying “CONTINUOUS PEACE” is not as powerful as one pleading “NO MORE WAR,” which would be extremely positive if it were ever vaguely achievable.
 
Sometimes, it’s literally a matter of life and death: “DON’T WALK,” “WRONG WAY, GO BACK,” “NO RIGHT TURN,” “HIGH VOLTAGE, DO NOT TOUCH” are all Difficult to say succinctly and powerfully in any positive construct.

There is even a whole category of English words called Negatives without Positives, or Unpaired Words, like “dismayed” and “inept,” “innocent” and “unscathed”.

They must have something going for them: their positive forms have largely become obsolete. Boringly positive things like “mayed” and “ept,” “gruntled” and “kempt,” didn’t have the will to survive.

It’s interesting that for years, at least in this country, incendiary materials were marked “INFLAMMABLE” or “HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE,” possibly because the wrong negative prefix actually sounded more dire.

“Don’t tell me” means tell me everything. “You don’t say!” means I really want you to say it, even though I can’t believe what you’re saying. As in, “Well, I never.”

The beauty of our language is the way you can stretch it. Two negatives can be combined to make a positive: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

The reverse is also true: I like the story about the linguistics professor who is lecturing that in no language can two positives create a negative.

A sardonic voice calls out from the back of the hall: “Yeah, Yeah” Similarly, “Yeah, right” has also taken on a completely opposite meaning.

In art school, we are often taught to draw or paint the “negative space.” The areas of the scene that aren’t the actual subject itself. Here. The negative helps our spatial perception to fresh, quicker, more accurate.

And chiaroscuro – literally light and shade – help us see objects in the way we do, as planes and masses.

The trouble with negaphobia is that is locks up half our armory. Negatives are powerful. “Why is this ad highlighting the problem?” the client will ask. Because it’s less boring than the solution.

Why are newspapers full of bad news? Because people are much more interested in bad news; perhaps because it helps reassure them of traffic crawls past car accident.

It’s also notable how in matters of romance or passion, the negative is often so vivid. I don’t mean in the sense of the obvious: “Don’t. Stop. Don’t. Stop. Don’t. Stop” … etc.

I mean in many of the expressions we share with our beloved, often captured in popular music. “Never will leave you,” sounds more committed than “I will always stay,” and “The 12th of Never” seems an even longer undertaking than the absolute “forever.”

“Don’t Worry Baby”, from the mouths of the Beach Boys is quite reassuring. Greshwin ain’t necessarily so negative in one of the anthems of porgy and best.

And when 10cc sing the haunting, “I’m being in love (and don’t forget it) because I’m really so badly in love with you, I’ll try any tactic to hang in there.

At the other end of the spectrum entirely, some of the most powerful words spoken in the history of the English language, by their arguably greatest deliverer.

Churchill, are often nothing but negative. “Never has so much …” “We will not rest until …, “ “We will never surrender.” Or ever Kennedy’s “Ask not what your ..”. We’ll ignore Clinton’s, “I did not have sex with …”

Those of a more academic bent than I have reached similar conclusions. Googling around for references on “negative words”, there are, of course, a hundred well-intentioned but predictable passages on how to eliminate negativity from your thoughts/life/Writing/diary/ relationship/ emails/ job, etc. (One earnest polemic on positivism carries the straight – faced headline: “Stop Being So Negative!”).

A few, though, swim against the current created by the Hubbards and Carriegies with some interesting positive observations on negativity.

French philosopher, Henri Bergson, author of the creative Mind (1934, I learn, held that the world contains two opposing tendencies: the life force and the resistance of matter against that force.

Kenneth Burke later built on this by examining the ethical implications of the negative. “No” and “Don’t” are amongst the first words we learn as children: in the process learning not to throw our food on the floor or pull the dog’s tail.

He goes further to suggest negativity is the very basis of human morality. (Eight of the Ten Commandments are “Shalt Notes”).

Cognitive psychology research conducted by Tufts University professor Salvator Scoraci has made advancements in understanding learning and “false memory” – mistaken recall of test words.

It was Previously believed that memory was improved by “generative learning; that people remember better when actively involved in forming an idea around, say a particular word they’re asked to memorise; the theory being that positive collaboration helped it stick.

Scoraci has found people are actually more likely to remember such words when given a negative cue than when given a positive one.

This method of learning, using negative cues, is similar to how we find our way when we’re driving our cars, explains Scoraci.

If we make a wrong turn, we’re much more likely to remember the correct route next time by remembering that we shouldn’t go the wrong way again.

But to circle this back to advertising, my research has also revealed a fellow-sufferer and copywriter, Michael Gebert, in the US.

In his online newsletter, shameless Self-Promotion, Gebert echoes our frustrations:
No COPYWRITER WILL ESCAPE THIS FATE. YOU write a nice, punchy headline – “Nothing Fights stains like spam O.”

Then the comment comes back: “Nothing” is negative. Can’t we turn it into a positive? (Like what? “Spam-O fights stains Better Than Things”?)

Gebert goes on to say: put a sentence with a “not” a “don’t” in it in front of those people, and suddenly, they’ll be impressed by the mystical power of that one single word to repel all customers, regardless of the actual meaning of the sentence. That’s not grammar. It’s voodoo.

What’s most confounding to me about this whole issue is that some of the most negative expressions have long been the very stock-in-trade of the world of hard sell.

How many products have declared themselves “Not your ordinary …” or “Not for everybody” to boost their desirability to many?

“Accept no substitute,” “Don’t buy till you try our …,” “Will not be undersold”. “Nobody comes close to our …”. Just as the much-imitated “Drive away, no more to pay” has recently become.

There are also plenty of specific brands with famous and successful campaigns based on seemingly negative thoughts:

“Lemon” or “It’s ugly, but it gets you there” were never going to be taken literally about Volkswagen, but said a lot about their cleverly self-effacing attitude.

That, along with “You don’t have to be Jewish” for Levy’s bread, more or less started modern, more candid advertising.

More recently, “I never read the Economist. (Management trainee, aged 42)” has helped put that magazine high up the racks.

The Wallpaper Institute of America claims. “Nothing gets your attention like wallpaper,” along with whimsical visuals.

The Village Vice has been honest and successful by declaring its individuality with “Not America’s favorite paper” (and thus yours).

When Everyday Batteries themes their ads “Never say die,” it’s far more declarative than “Always stay ALIVE.” Heineken, in the UK, sold a lot of beer that “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”

And there’s no other line like David Jones’, at least in Australian retail. As Michael Gebert says, the arguments against the yea-sayers are obvious:

“So obvious that they always get the same response:’Yeab, I know. But change it, would ja? It’s just one word.”’

Anti-negativity, he claims, “deprives a writer of one of the most effective rhetorical devices in the English language, for no good reason. Would GM still own the car market if only they’d said, “You Would Really Rather Drive a Buick?

I couldn’t agree more. Or should I say, I agree as much as possible. I’ve always thought that Sara Lee’s long-running campaign in the US, “Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee” was so much more charming and approachable than the overblown self-congratulation of it’s underlying sentiment, “Everybody Loves Sara Lee.”

It’s a tradition that goes back to “Nothin’ says lovin’ like something’ from the oven” for Duncan Hines cake mixes. Or was it Pillsbury?

And what could’ve been more compelling than the theme that carried American Express to world popularity, “Don’t Leave Home Without It.”

Would it have conveyed the same indispensability expressed as” Always take it with you when you leave home”?

I think not.

But then, maybe I’m just being negative.

Keywords: advertising, negativity, ads, ad, campaigns, positive, negative, positivism, copywriter, brands,

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Let’s be frank; it’s hard to be genuinely warm in a cold-hearted business. However, advertising is the business of ideas, it’s imagination applied to marketing, it’s an instinctual evolutionary tool developed as a means of ensuring survival in this jungle.

Which means the somewhat rational process of getting to a great ad must be carefully constructed so as to avoid throwing gems onto the slagheap. The idea must be allowed to overcome the procedure.

Or else, the machinations can be tough-minded, steely efficient and produce a campaign that pleases all the brand stakeholders, and will unfortunately still fail miserably in the real world.

Clients who tick boxes will never get out of the square. It is the culture of a creative organization (and brand-holding companies must be just that), which gives its people their strength and enables them to channel and fulfill their talents.

Great, transforming ideas come from confident cultures. As the CEO of Britain’s BBC once explained: “You can’t make great television in an organization that is depressed … the challenge is to make the organization believe in itself.”

Character is destiny in company culture. And confident cultures grow and feed off their own achievements.

It’s said in academic circles that culture is like sex: it is impossible either to over-or under-emphasize it.

Yet a culture of fear, hurry-up-and-wait deadlines and armies of abominable no-men are just the start must overcome, before it even gets the chance to do its work in the marketplace.

While the creative ego may appear strong to the casual observer, the idea itself is very vulnerable at the embryonic stage.

Ideas are fragile things and can be carelessly crushed by a frown on the wrong person’s face in a frown on the wrong person’s face in a meeting.

“Just the way someone puts down his tea cup … can paralyze creativity,” Gladiator film composer, Lisa Gerrard, once explained. Ideas are like tomatoes, it is said, easier to grow than to build.

An agency “CD,” then, should also stand for Culture Director. Jamie Barrett is CD of San Francisco hothouse, Goodby silverstein & partners, and is responsible for growing some wonderful creative solutions from his sensitive plants. Ideas that have grown into nice, plump, juicy profits for his clients.

The list of not-so-nice stuff I’ve done goes on. In fact, one of my most recent un-nice acts was promising to deliver this “Law of Nice” article four months ago, ago, and then not delivering until today. Not particularly nice.

So as you read this, think of me not so much as the preacher who practices all this “nice” stuff, and more as a guy who believes in nice and wants to get better at it.

With that off my chest, I will now presume to be the guy who has the authority to talk about the importance – in advertising- of being nice.

Here’s my idea in a nutshell. When you’re happy, you do your work is important for another reason.

Consider how much time we all spend doing this nuttiness we call advertising. There are 168 hours in a week. Subtract 56 for sleep (eight hours a day). That leaves 112 waking hours.

Now add up the weekends, the shortened vacations, the late nights, the trains, planes, rental-car shuttles and taxis, plus the time we all spend thinking or talking about work when we’re not actually doing it, and I would conservatively guess that between half and two-thirds of your waking adult life will revolve around … advertising.

So I pose this question: why spend two-thirds of your life being a dick? Dicks in advertising are like anthrax.

You don’t want them to touch anyone, influence anyone, or be inhaled by anyone. When you have enough evidence of someone being a dick, clean the offender out of the office. Steritise their chair and desk.

Being nice does not mean being a sugar-coating, feeling-sparing, half truth telling Pollyanna.

But there are ways to deliver bad news or criticize that don’t make people feel as worthless as a dotcom account. Work on your delivery. Find glimmers of positive in the negative.

When you let people go, don’t kick them out the door. Walk them out the door and help them figure out the next door that makes sense for them.

Do dicks ever succeed? Temporarily, yes. I’ve heard ED McCabe was a raging asshole, and he had a nice run.

But I suspect Mr McCabe often looked to his left and right, saw a bunch of burnt bridges, and didn’t feel particularly good about it.

The desire to succeed is one of the most primal urges there is, but I would suggest that the desire to make a positive impact on the people around you is the most primal of all. And left unattended to, the whole success thing falls pretty flat.

In the end, no one will attend your funeral because you wrote a good catchphrase, or because, you cashed in some stock options when your agency went public, or because you played politics better than someone else and got a promotion. Your greater legacy will be how people felt about you, not your work.

Of course, normally success and “niceness” go hand in hand. George Bush allegedly has handwritten tens of thousands of thank-you notes in his time.

You may have your own issues with George, some not so positive. But you have to admit he is nice. And you have to also acknowledge that he “niced” his way all the way to the presidency of the United States.

Another great example of nice as a path to success comes from the world of sports. Did you know that Cal Reipken is a lifetime 277 hitter?

For someone who is arguably the greatest baseball stars of his generation, his numbers kind of suck.

Granted, he is a great player, but I would argue that his fame and popularity are due as much, or more, to the fact that he is very simply a “nice guy.

“Jose Canseco, Roclu Henderson, Barry Bonds – all players with better stats, but all renowned jerks.

Have you ever read an article about Bonds that didn’t reference the fact that no one likes him?

There was a wonderful biography written about Ripken called The power of Nice. And it’s true, nice is a very powerful thing to be.

It’s true in life, it’s baseball and it’s true in advertising. Like any competitive business, advertising has its fair share of not-so-nice people.

But if you think about it, that presents an opportunity for all the people who attempt to treat others well: who attempt to be nice.

It’s the old advertising theory of cutting through the clutter. If there’s a lot of “not-so-niceness” out there, “nice” will stand out that much more.

It will “cut through” – a horribly cynical and manipulative way to look at things, but it’s the hard truth. And hey, if you stand to gain something from being nice to people, what’s the downside?

You may ask yourself why a Law of Nice is particularly relevant to the profession of advertising versus, say, accounting.

Of course, treating people with decency ain’t a bad policy no matter what your line of work. But I would argue that it is of even more critical importance in our line of work than it is in most.

Advertising is one of the most subjective occupations there is. It involves creativity, which is, in effect, personal expression.

It’s an expression of one’s self: Which means that every time a piece of work is evaluated, it is unavoidably personal. Egos are in the room.

Feelings of self-worth. And because an ad’s merits are ultimately hard to quantify, it becomes just one person’s opinion versus another.

It’s easier to tell someone they stocked a shelf wrong than to tell them their ideas are lame.

I don’t think there are more dicks in our profession, I just think the nature of our work brings out the dick in us more often than not. We need to be sensitive to that.

Executive-Global-Creative-Officer-Other-People-Do-The-Work-And-I-Take-Credit-For-It-Worldwide, then, yes, you, probably are a dick.

But 99 time out of 100, the answer is no, you’re not a dick. You may often act like a dick – we all do.

But the key is to recognize the dick-like behaviour when it’s starting to happen and, as quickly as possible, stuff it back in the dark corner of your brain from whence is sprang.

Niceness does have a nemesis, and its name is ego. Wanting to beat the other guy is as much a part of our makeup as wanting to get with the pretty (or handsome) receptionist.

But both are biological urges we have to try and keep in check. I like to try and think of advertising as a little like golf.

Great golfers compete against the course. They don’t stare at the scoreboard the whole round and obsess on their competitors; they stare at the shot in front of them and obsess on the best way to play it.

Apply the same thinking in your ad life. Don’t waste energy comparing your work to the word of the guy down the hall, or the person with 20 page numbers after his name in the index of the one show book. Waste your energy on creating your next great ad.

Chances are, there will be people who make advertising that is as or more celebrated than the work made by you. What’s wrong with that?

I say, prop up other talented people – in your agency and in other agencies. When you feel that heavy, petty jealousy feeling, ask yourself: Would you rather be in an industry that produces a ton of shit?

I got into the creative side of this business because I was lucky enough to work across the hall from writers and art directors whose work inspired me. I tried to use that inspiration to fuel my own work. I still do.

Easier said than done, of course. If any creative person is being honest, they will admit this is incredibly hard. Imagine if all the great novelists worked on the same floor in the same building.

Or all the great playwrights. Or the great screenwriters. The atmosphere would probably get a tad competitive.

But that’s the way it is in a great advertising agency. Many of the best creatives in the world are asked to coexist and root for each other, even though some of them may be catching breaks and others may not.

It’s hard to be “nice” under these conditions. It’s hard to be a team player. But the reality is, people will sense it if you’re not. I Know: I’ve lost friendships based on my inability to feel good about their success. So I keep reminding myself: The goal is to do well, not for others to do badly.

One last thought: No one is nice all the time. Okay, maybe Mr Rogers was. But even Fred, I suspect, had his moments of weakness when he berated King Friday for something, or instead of neatly hanging up his cardigan sweater, angrily threw it in the bottom of the closet.

My suggestion is, when you feel like tossing your cardigan, walk away instead. You probably work incredibly hard, and you deserve a break. Again, this is particularly hard in advertising.

There are times when I would love to be a bank teller, or a tollbooth collector. Any job where I could walk away at the end of the workday and feel like there is nothing more I can do until I go to work again in the morning. This is clearly not the case in the business of creating ads. It’s a 24-hour pursuit if you let it be.

Don’t.

Keywords: ad, advertising, nice.

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Who are we talking to?” is a question asked in the formulation of literally every ad campaign under the sun –The emphasis is always on the first word.

It’s about targeting. However, the offence is forgetting about the second bit. The bit about talking to.

Traditionally, of course, advertising has “talked at.” That’s supposedly changed in recent years. But today’s marketing jargon about conducting a dialogue with the consumer is mostly just that, Jargon.

Many marketers are trying to personalize their brands, pretending to be like real people and yet not quite making it. It’s like faking sincerity. Glib. Unless you’re real, and real careful, you end up with depersonalized personalization.

Talking to demographic is actually not the same as addressing one person directly. It’s the marketing equivalent of “I hear you” rather than “I am listening to you”.

What’s required is a fundamental change. It has been described as a shift in emphasis from the era of “experts,” to the era of the storyteller.

In communication terms, the human mind has evolved to absorb stories. Our genes have evolved specialized language modules in our brains, and stories inform our shared cultural memory.

If you know who it is that you want to empathies with your brand, then refocus away from telling them what to do and instead focus on what they really need and want.

And what people really want from your brand’s advertising is engagement. They want dreams, memories, passion, and laughter. They want nourishing stories.

Not sales spiels.
Not speeches.
Not lectures.
Not product briefings.

Get used to the idea that no one is interested in learning about product features through advertising, anymore.

There are too many peddlers these days, a wise client once said to me, too many marketers have forgotten their roles.

Marketers should be telling stories. Selling intangibles. That’s how life insurance is sold, with stories – otherwise you’re just offering a bit of colored paper and a cheque when you die.

“Listen as I tell my tale with shameless sincerity,” is how the master Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini, defined the role.

He said: “Our duty as storytellers is to walk people to the station …” Do this appealingly, and they’ll board your train.

Neil French, creative director of O&M Worldwide, and pioneer of high creativity for the Asian world, knows a thing or two about shameless sincerity.

What follows is an enlightening fireside chat about how to talk to people once you decide “who you’re talking to.”

To me, writing an ad is talking on paper. It’s not really writing at all. It’s just chat. And I know that given a juicy subject, I can hold an audience with an anecdote for just so long – and not a second longer.

The Art of the chat. The art is all about knowing your audience. The comatose drunk is not actually an audience since, to him, my glittering oratory is as the buzzing of a live of wasps.

The nice cop is not an audience as he’s just glad I’m not blowing a feather-on-a curly-thing at him, or singing “My Way.” The audience was the group that seemed spellbound, half a bottle ago, and whom I’ve lost somewhere along the way.

Where did they go? And Why? Well, “Where” Is easy. “Anywhere out of earshot of this pillock” about covers it. But why? I think, again, I know.

I lost them the moment I stopped talking one-on-one, and started pontificating to “the audience.”

It’s why most political speeches, and most sermons, are so bloody boring. The speaker has a message for everyone, and insists on speaking to everyone.

Whereas the trick is to talk to one person in a room, in the knowledge that many others will also think you’re speaking only to them, personally and intimately.

It is widely acknowledged that when Adolf Hitler ranted at the massive Nuremberg rallies, every member of his audience felt he, personally, was being asked to come to the aid of the Fuhrer.

When Churchill spoke on the radio of “fighting on the beaches”, millions of men and women saw themselves as standing nest to Winston on the shingle, staring defiantly out to sea.

Jack Kennedy was talking to the young, the idealistic, the generation that saw him as a younger, sexier version of Dad, when he exhorted them to ask, “What you can do for your country.” You – singular.

And that’s how great ads work. When you read them you feel that this was aimed directly at you. In your heart you know that thousands like you are feeling the same, but that doesn’t spoil it. In a way, it enhances it: you’re a member of a select club.

When you see a long-copy ad, you know that it’s aimed at you, because you’re an avid reader.

So you read it – until, like the slurring old sod, it bores you. When you see a witty visual joke, you feel closer to the brand – largely because you know that so many people won’t “get it.” That’s how yoof-marketing works.

And one day, when it dawns on the brand-owners that the grey-dollar is more numerous and more cynical than any other, that’s how they’ll have to talk to the geezers.

The splendid and indispensable thing that we all have at our disposal, as writers and producers of advertising, is a choice of medium.

Let me lumber you with another of my hobbyhorses: I think all advertising is, to some extent, crass and rude. Let us count the ways:”

The bumph that clogs up your letterbox every day. An irritating pile of paper and a waste of perfectly good trees.

You have to shuffle through it all to get at the bills and the letter from Auntie Maisie. And Most irritating of all are the pieces disguised as bills or letters from Auntie M.

“Spam” in your email. We won’t even deign to discuss.

Television ads. Imagine for a moment that you and your family are watching … I don’t know … Formula One racing, for example.

Just as Eddie Irvine has stuffed his Jag into the old tires again, and shuey is about to carve bits off Coulthard, into your living-loom leaps a man in a suit who stands in front of the screen and tries to sell you a car!

And he’s there legally, and he won’t go away. That is what we do for a living. Personally, I will never, ever buy a Honda-anything, as long as I live, on account of their ill-placed, ill-timed, patronizing Formula One ads. But that’s the point. People take our rudeness personally.

Radio, I suppose, is less rude, as nobody actively listens to radio anyway: and, in any case, the ads are generally so bad they’re impossible to take any note of at all.

If you’re one of the perpetrators of radio ads, please note that a funny voice is not an idea, and a funny voice shouting is even less of one.

Try saying something interesting. But then, you probably don’t know anything interesting.

See? You can insult a radio-ad writer so easily, in the same way that they take such pains to insult your own intelligence. They won’t notice you, any more than you’d notice them.)

Print Media. Magazines, for instance. I’ve never actually been annoyed by magazine ads, except for the mass of them at the beginning of GQ.

They’re annoying merely because they’re all the same, can’t possibly work, and account for half of the weight of the mag.

Nevertheless, they’re not what I bought the thing for, and thus they’re rude for being there at all. On the other hand, they pay most of the cost of the mag, so I’ll put up with them.

Newspapers. Now, I have to admit to being a huge fan of newspapers. With the exception of some appallingly vast tomes in the US, there’s never enough advertising to be an annoyance.

And the best newspaper ads are witty and current, and I’m flattered if someone addresses me as such.

So there it is. Advertising that appears to be talking solely to one individual is a lot less rude than the “Ere, you lot! Listen to this!” school of communication.

Now, let’s go into that in some depth.
Hello.
Hello!
Why are you dribbling on my table? And who is this nice man in blue?

Keywords: advertising, brand, marketers, ad, ads, long-copy ad, yoof-marketing, television ads, radio, print media, radio ads, radio-ad writer, magazine ads,

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This is a great article. Because there’s too much good in the world. Too many good, solid campaigns. Too many good, sound people. Too many good meetings. Too few great successes.

Can a good idea become a great idea? How do you recognize great creative people? Research and analysis, more time and a bigger budget, will not transform into great.

Great comes from a different see of values altogether. It’s no point sharpening the same pencil.

As New Zealand ad guru Kim Thorpe once observed: “Good doesn’t deliver the slap one the back at cocktail parties or a desk piled with letters of praise from customers, or a desk piled with letters of praise from customers, or the TV interviews, or the follow up stories in the women’s magazines. Good doesn’t stir up much emotion at al.”

How do great creative people have great ideas? When Sir Charlie Chaplin was asked how he got his ideas, he explained: “Ideas come from an intense desire for them, continually desiring.

The mind becomes a watch-tower on the look-out for incidents that may excite the imagination … elimination from accumulation is the process … sheer perseverance to the point of madness. One must have a capacity to the point of madness.

One must have a capacity to suffer anguish and sustain enthusiasm over a long period of time. Perhaps it’s easier for others, but I doubt it.”

A more recent humorist, Douglas Adams, agreed; he suggested writing creatively was a straightforward matter of “staring at a piece of paper until your ears bleed.”

Great creative people are driven to extremes, looking for notions from the periphery of thinking.

Not surprisingly, a great idea is often harder to sell to clients than a more familiar notion, more difficult to produce, puts more strain on the client-agency relationship and sometimes involves working with difficult people.

However, to be successful, a brand must allow a great idea into its bosom and confront its key business issue.

A transformation of that issue should be the simple objective. This means setting a challenge that is big, bold, ambitious – greatest imaginable.

If you will it, it is no longer a dream. Aim to set the standard. High enough for your competition to envy.

Too many campaigns are written to maintain the status quo. That’s why they’re average.
Advertising used to aim for memorability, but that’s setting your sights way too low.

Shoot for fame. Great will get people talking. Word of mouth spreads a brand more persuasively than any media budget.

People talk about great ads and they become fans of brands. Fame means you’re always in the consideration set. Famous brand lines and icons become part of the popular culture lexicon.

Great advertising keeps the brand continually fresh and allow it to pop into real-life conversations more naturally and, therefore, it makes recommendations easier. Great ads deliver product placement in real life.

Ideas like these literally add a value to products over and above their actual product performance, the communication itself creating tangible value. There’s a sense of belonging to something special.

Great ideas sink deep into the soil of memory and builds up an untapped cash reservoir of brand equity. You can call it “the invisible benefit.”

What’s all this got to do with Silver Elephants? Founder of South Africa’s famous agency, The Jupiter Drawing Room, Graham Warsop, believes you don’t find what you’re not looking for. If you’re hunting for great, big ideas, then you need some high-powered ammunition.

I hope to prove that one of the essential components of great advertising has less to do with executional theory and technique and everything to do with a particular state of mind.

A state of mind that is so fundamental to the origination of outstanding advertising that it deserves to be enshrined in a law.

A Couple of Assumptions
What we’re concerned with here is the indisputable laws that govern the origination of great advertising, and by great advertising, I mean advertising that is sufficiently distinctive, compelling and relevant, that it stands out from its rivals in the category and results in increased sales and/or greater brand value for the product or service being advertised.

In addition, one must not assume this particular law is limited to the predictable format of the 30-second television ad.

This law holds advertising in all its forms and guises. The dictionary defines advertising as meaning “to turn the mind or attention to’ (from the Latin ad – to: vertere – to turn).

Accordingly, for this law, the definition of advertising includes above the line, below the line, design and packaging. (Isn’t packaging or packaging design there to turn the mind or attention to the brand?)

Defining the Law of the Silver Elephant
The Law of the Silver Elephant can be defined thus: Great advertising (powerful, distinctive, relevant work that increases sales and builds brand value) relies on the imagination of one or more individuals who have the desire:

(1) To bring something into the world that never existed before
(2) To do so in such a way that it surpasses what has been done before.

In England the law of murder requires two things to be proved. A mental intent (mens rea) and a physical act (actus reas).

The Law of the silver elephant likewise has two components: the mental intent to produce something that has never been done before, and the physical act of successfully carrying out that intent.

Let’s illustrate the Law of the Silver Elephant by way of an example. Two creative teams get exactly the same brief landing on their desk. The brief is a good one. Each team approaches it with a different mind-set.

Team One (The Path of Least Resistance Team)
“We’ve got this brief, we think we know what the client wants. They want something safe.

And safe is probably right for this brand. They’re going to research it so it’ll help if the solution we propose has a familiarity about it – we know people gravitate towards advertising that has something familiar about it. That’s the way to go on this one.”

Team Two (The Silver Elephant Team)
“What can we do that’ll make the solutions we propose really distinctive?
Let’s look at the work that’s being done in the market for our client’s competitors.

We should be aiming to produce something that’s never been done before in this category.

It probably won’t be an easy sell to the client, but if it’s distinctive and stands out, if it’s relevant and on brief, hopefully the client will see that it’ll make his advertising spend work harder.

We suspect that the client’s looking for something safe but hopefully he’ll realize that safe advertising is the riskiest advertising of all because it runs the risk of not being seen.”

Let’s make some more observations on our Silver Elephant team’s mindset. They are likely to share a common (or not so common) character trait. They are probably working for something more than money.

They’re governed by a desire to rise above the “me too” advertising formulas and create something truly original and distinctive.

It may be that, in the great scheme of tings, advertising is, as Neil French rightly observes, “not the most important thing in the world.” But to them it is.

To them, the smile on a face, the length of a dissolve, the choice of a particular typeface and its point size are worthy of much painstaking deliberation.

Willingly sacrificing evenings and weekends to sit in an edit suite crafting, honing and refining the communication – it’s not just about the money.

There is a greater driving force and it’s central to the success of most of the best work and most of ate great advertising that is produced in the world.

There is a personal satisfaction that comes from the act of creation, of bringing something into the world that never existed before and doing it in such a way that it will touch, delight, charm, persuade ad seduce and seduce an audience.

Our silver Elephant team will recognize that great advertising results when the driveling force to create meets the rational need top sell.

Where these paths converge, is where the greatness lies. It is in this soil that one will sow he seeds that reap such giant rewards for brands. If one looks at the example of luminaries such as Bern Bach.

Ogilvy, Abbot, Hegarty and Delaney, you will note that they genuinely care about the success of failure of the brands they communicate.

They are concerned with powerful advertising that is the servant, not the master, of a brand promise or positioning.

Our team’s desire to create something better, something, original lies at the very heart of this law.

They ask themselves, why is the world so full of charmless ads? So many strategies translated into communications that lack flair?

Everyone can mark a box that says strategically sound and safe. Few seem to go the extra mile and ask how does it make you fee? Few rise above the rational, appeal to the emotions and capture the imagination.

Our team doesn’t sit down to write an ad that’s the 20th best, the 10th best or even the second best ad in a category.

They aim to create the best they are capable of. When you think about it, isn’t the basis of all international advertising awards shows to recognize and reward work that has been brought into the world that didn’t exist before, work that has been executed in such a way that it is better than anything else produced in that category in a given year?

Let’s leave our creative team to soldier on with the belief. The Law of the Silver Elephant really comes into its own as a driving force for great advertising, when the client?

Marketer/ manufacturer exhibits the same desire to bring into the world something that has never existed before, to make it stand out from what has come before and to succeed in translating that desire into reality.

Such clients believe in innovation. Supremely conscious of the “sea of sameness” that exists in most product categories today, they place enormous emphasis on the need to try to create a product or brand that genuinely stands out.

They don’t just rely on an advertising message to give distinction to their brand. They are likely to ask themselves the question (often), how can I make my care, shoes, confectionary (insert product here) original and extraordinary.

It is therefore fitting that the person chosen to embody the Law of the Silver Elephant was an inventor. A manufacture. A brand owner. A client.

He was an Italian gentleman who represents the virtues of imagination, perseverance and vision (all Silver Elephant qualities) in such great measure.

He made cars. And the cars he made took his name. Bugatti. A name that to this day stirs the heart of every lover of the great marques. Etorre Bugatti was born in 1881.

At the age of 17 he left art school of pursue his own factory and set about building some of the world’s great automobiles.

By the age of 40 he had achieved much. His Type 35 was acknowledged to be one of the greatest racing designs of its day. But that wasn’t enough for Etorre. He decided he would undertake the design and production of the greatest motorcar the world had ever seen.

And so was born Etorre Bugatti’s dream for the Royale, a care that would out do every single automobile that had come before it.

Having conceived of the ideal of bringing into the world something that had never existed before (mens rea) he set about turning that dream into reality (actus reas).

One cannot help but admire the grandeur of his vision and the determination he brought to his task.

When the most expensive Rolls Royce of the day cost US$40 0000, the Bugatti Royale would cost double that, just for the chassis.

The car had a massive 14.7 liter engine – so powerful that second gear would take the car from virtually zero to 93mph.

The design of the car was sublimely elegant despite its colossal size. (The overall length was more than 21 feet and the wheelbase was as long as two current Chevrolet Corvettes!) Very importantly, for Bugatti, building the biggest and most expensive car was not enough. It also had to be the best. Quality was everything.

In a world where marketers and their agencies increasingly use all the powers at their disposal to seduce, encourage, persuade and sometimes bamboozle prospective clients to buy, Etorre took precisely the opposite approach.

So precious were his Royales, conceptually and actually, he wanted to not simply sell them, but to only sell them to owners who would truly appreciate them.

Hence, prospective purchasers would need to apply to Mr. Bugatti (or Le Patron as he was affectionately known) expressing their interest in the Royale.

Receipt of an invitation to his home at Mosheim, Alsace (where the factory was situated) indicated the applicant had cleared the first hurdle.

During the course of a weekend, Mr. Bugatti would appraise potential purchasers to ensure they would do the Royale’s name and reputation justice.

Apparently his undisclosed criteria were said to include the conversational ability and even the table manners of the applicant.

It was a condition precedent of the weekend’s evaluation that the applicant would be notified in writing of Le Patron’s decision and no further correspondence would be entered into.

Imagine being briefed on the advertising campaign for a car that money alone could not buy.

It should come as no surprise that when deciding on the radiator mascot for the car, Etorre Bugatti did not conduct any focus groups.

He did not evaluate Rolls Royce’s Spirit of Ecstasy and seek to produce something to rival its celestial grace.

He simply chose a sculpture created by his younger brother, Rembrandt Bugatti. It was of a standing, playing elephant.

And so the elephant (not necessarily the most obvious or even the most appropriate symbol for a sublimely elegant car capable of achieving speeds of more than 125mph) took its place in history.

The mascot was signed by the Valsuami Foundry (the most highly regarded foundry of its day) and cast in cire perdue silver.

Today it seems so many decisions are put in the hands of consumers. Rarely do marketers make a move without insisting a focus group wade through an animatic.

God forbid, focus groups are even held to decide on the most popular endings for movies. The Law of the Silver Elephant challenges marketers to take the initiative to be bold, brave and confident enough to make their own decisions about what is right for their brands.

To recognize that a “boring, staid, me-too, follow the leader, try and emulate the best competitor” mindset is the wrong one in these difficult and demanding times.

Sure, there will be those that point out that due to the Wall Street Crash, only six Bugatti Royale’s were ever built, and of those, only three were ever sold new.

To them, it might be worth pointing out that on a cold November evening in 1987, at London’s Albert Hall, Christies sold a Bugatti Royale at auction for the price of £5 million, the world record price paid for an automobile.

There are, of course, bound to be plenty of people who will miss the entire point of the Law of the Silver Elephant.

They will say that it’s not always about building the biggest and the best. It will escape their attention that it is Elephant –not literally his choice of vehicle (excuse the pun). He could have been the manufacturer of a bicycle, a washing machine or soap powder.

The law has actually nothing to do with cars. Etorre is demonstrative of a state of mind, an attitude. It’s about wanting to do something extraordinary and having the vision, perseverance, talent and imagination to succeed in accomplishing that endeavor.

It just so happened that Etorre Bugatti set out to build the biggest most expensive car the world had ever seen.

Presumably the inventors of DaimlerChrysler’s Smart car set out with pretty much the opposite objective, yet they honour the Law of the Silver Elephant every bit as much as Ettore Bugatti. The Smart car is an original.

It stands out from everything else in the category. It embodies outstanding design and required vision and imagination to bring it into existence.

And maybe that’s a point too. With genuine product differentiators, based on quality, becoming fewer and fewer, the importance of design is becoming greater and greater.

Winding up
It’s important to recognize that everyday around the world, thousands of agencies produce solid workmanlike communications that probably do a reasonable job in the marketplace.

But this article is not concerned with advertising that does a reasonable job in the marketplace.

It’s concerned with work that through its originality and relevance does an outstanding job in the marketplace.

Etorre Bugatti was a visionary. He didn’t run research groups to see what the gap in the market was.

He didn’t look at successful competitors and try and emulate them. He simply set out to create something from nothing. He set out to create something extraordinary.

The Law of the Silver Elephant is, it is suggested, a vital component in the quest for great advertising.

At its best, it relies on the desire of both agency and client to want to bring into the world something that never existed before and to do it in such a way that it surpasses everything that has come before it.

Both parties recognize that in a crowded cluttered marketplace, one word will conquer: imagination.

Not just the imagination to conceive bold powerful ideas, but the imagination to bring new products, styles and designs to market.

Both parties want to make the budget work harder by demanding, approving and rejoicing in work that breaks the code of the category.

From an advertising stand point, the ability to translate that desire into actuality is an enormously valuable attribute.

Clients should recognize this spark when they see it and should do everything in their power to kindle and not extinguish it. They should seek it out. Harness it.

Reward it. They should know that it’s important enough to be enshrined in a law and cast in stone. Or better still, in cire Perdue silver.

Keywords: campaigns, ads, ad, brand, advertising, marketer, Etorre Bugatti,

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