Brand Innovation

The sweeping changes in brand marketing have not come about because people have suddenly stopped aspiring.

Brand Innovation
1.1 From Ad Idea to Media-Neutral Idea
The sweeping changes in brand marketing have not come about because people have suddenly stopped aspiring. The glitzy shopping and celebrity culture of the past ten years show that we are far from over consumerist dreams of “the good life”. If anything, the basic human needs and greeds that consumer capitalism promises to fulfil are given freer rein. These days people expect to have luxury, or style or status, or to “better themselves”, to become glamorous, cultured, intellectual, even progressive (the “right-on” are often paradoxically among the most consumerist – in being committed to right-on brands and lifestyles). Whatever questions there are about the sustainability of this belief system, it is not fair to claim that it has faltered yet. The big debate within marketing is between two paradigms, which I call brand image vs brand innovation.

It might be worth setting out some contrasting features of these two approaches.

Some companies still have faith in brand image. Levi Strauss clearly does, as it has just unveiled a major new TV advertising campaign. Eight years of sales decline led the company to question whether its (highly entertaining) music video-style advertising was still working. And so it has changed direction, producing yet more (highly entertaining) TV advertising: featuring Shakespearean poetry instead. But it has not addressed the bigger question: what is the place of this brand in people’s lives?

Challenges to the Old Model of Branding
Some companies reject brand image absolutely, like Red Bull in the UK, which refused to run global advertising (Gives You Wings) until the brand was well established. Instead, like Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants, it stole up on the soft drinks sector by working through festivals, wholesalers, garages, corner shops, students, nightclubs . . . and in the process built a liquid counterculture.

But the situation is not as simple as two sets of marketers and brands with different approaches. Many, like Nike, combine both approaches. And commentators from both camps read the same evidence and case histories, and claim support for their side: A brand image view: Apple’s iPod proves that iconic advertising, design and PR still work. After all, the product is just an MP3 player. What makes it stand out is the brand, meticulously constructed by advertising and design. And just look how disciplined and consistent they have been. If only lesser brands could follow suit.

A brand innovation view: iPod’s success has nothing to do with brand image. It is a great product, a radically different experience, linked to the iTunes music store, which made downloading legal. It seemed to take off through imitation – like a fashion craze. The ads just reflected the fact that people wanted an iPod when they saw others wearing one. How did this debate get started? As far as I can remember, there was no debate 15 or 20 years ago. But in the mid-1990s a view, which I call New Marketing, emerged for all sorts of understandable reasons, outlined below.

It Was an Advance
Marketing is a creative discipline. And in creative fields, when somebody produces a radical new way of doing things, many others tend to copy – especially if it is high profile, generates lots of publicity, wins awards and so on. The case studies that I covered in my first book The New Marketing Manifesto were pioneers. They came out of a cultural context – postmodernism – and an explosion in media channels. Suddenly it seemed possible to produce marketing communications that broke the old rules, using ideas that were interactive, personal, agitating or just plain scruffy. In that book I tried to capture some of the common features of this movement in a series of new rules: 1. Get Up Close and Personal (e.g. Nike getting involved in grassroots sports fixtures) 2. Tap Basic Human Needs (e.g. Gucci tapping into broad glamour rather than niche luxury) 3. Author Innovation (e.g. Tetley’s round tea bag, which toppled a 35- year brand leader) 4. Mythologise the New (tapping into changing social values, e.g. Clarks Shoes’ new take on middle age) 5. Create Tangible Differences in the Experience (e.g. Guinness producing a “draught in can” system) 6. Cultivate Authenticity (e.g. MTV Unplugged returning to acoustic sets and live performance) 7. Work through Consensus (e.g. AIDS advertising in cinemas to get new couples talking) 8. Open Up to Participation (e.g. Sainsbury recipes in advertising and store promotions) 9. Build Communities of Interest (e.g. Oddbins teaching its customers about wine, holding tastings etc.) 10. Use Strategic Creativity (e.g. Gap using dance, an idiom that involved people in the idea of comfort) 11. Stake a Claim to Fame (e.g. Richard Branson’s many publicity stunts for Virgin) 12. Follow a Vision and Be True to Your Values (e.g. IKEA, whose consistent thread was the question: “Is this us?”)

That list has stood the test of time pretty well. If I wrote that book again now I would probably drop rule 11. Being famous has become a mixed blessing, often a recipe for hubris (in the form of an attack by an NGO) and for being seen as inauthentic, corporate and domineering. I might even substitute “be humble”! And I would probably modify rule 4. As I will explain, I have come to mistrust the idea of cultural trends research. But I still believe that brands should be signs of the times, creating a sense of currency, seen as the way things are done now.

But I wouldn’t write that book again now, because the reasons those rules apply have become clearer. The 12 rules are like 12 blindfolded people describing an elephant. They grasp many significant details, which are valid, yet they seem to miss the consistent whole. That is why I am writing a new book. It has just as many examples as the first book (because I reckon nothing is more helpful to understanding or coming up with new ideas). But it also has a general theory running through it, which addresses the thorny question: what is a brand.

It was clear by the time I wrote my second book – After Image – that there were significant doubts about the validity of the old model of brand image marketing and the brand image television commercial. Here are a couple of sobering statistics: The number of TV advertisers increased by 27% between 1996 and 2003.2 This reflects a number of changes, all equally concerning to the mainstream TV brand image advertiser: media inflation (so that any one advertiser can afford less airtime), media fragmentation (more channels, more spots, fragmented audiences) and more advertisers competing for share of mind. Consumers are rejecting marketing messages (ads, junk mail and so on), according to the Yankelovich Marketing Resistance Survey in the USA.3 For example, 69% are interested in products/services to block/skip or opt out of marketing; 59% say marketing has little relevance to me; 61% say marketing is out of control.

The situation has changed since the heyday of brand image in the 1960s. Then only 48% of consumers reported a mixed or negative view of advertising; now the figure is 72%.4

One major development that is more and more apparent in research groups on marketing ideas is the phenomenon of marketing literacy. I see this as the ability, for instance, to discern that there is a difference between hiring a good agency and being a good brand. It is the critical ability to “read through” marketing and examine its construction and intention.

This insight – that consumers are jaded, cynical and marketing resistant – is generally accepted. The question is, what can we do about it?

Some suggest a sensible, opt-in approach, what Seth Godin calls Permission Marketing.5 I am more of an advocate of marketing that is not junk – so that it won’t be rejected because it is not “messaging” (more on this later) and it is good stuff, which is welcome, be it a Harley Owners Group news letter, BMW short film or Gmail invite.

Some have described the situation with advertising, direct mail, spam, outbound telesales and so on as a new tragedy of the commons,6 analogous to the seas that get over-fished because as resources deplete, people fish harder. Advertising and other forms of messaging are shouting louder and louder, and people are covering their ears.

I think this problem is both over- and understated. There are hundreds of examples in this book of marketing ideas that have caught people’s imagination. Most of the rest is just commercial noise, like the signs over the shops when you walk up the street. No matter how many new ways of messaging marketing employs, people just do not want to know. Yes, it is annoy- ing to have to put handfuls of junk mail into the recycling bin. No, marketing resistance doesn’t extend to new non messaging forms of marketing. If anything, all the rubbish makes good marketing ideas stand out as more attractive.

Nevertheless, that wouldn’t be my view if I were on the board of a public company, paying for this spiralling-out-of-control frenzy of messaging. People are starting to ask questions. One of my clients ran a test of their direct marketing and found conclusively that it produced no uplift in sales. They then did research groups with recipients of their mail shots and found that no one opened them. No wonder the marketing wasn’t making a big impact on sales!

It Was a Response to New Media
The second reason a New Marketing paradigm emerged in the mid-1990s was that there were new media choices, just as previous paradigms of marketing had emerged in response to the appearance of national print media, radio, then commercial TV.

We went from a few choices of advertising medium (TV/print/radio) to an abundance of choices. In a recent presentation to a financial services company, I listed over 200 choices of types of media they could be considering. (It is not just consumers who suffer from information overload!) And within each of these types of media, there are often hundreds of different titles and options.

The internet and mobile phones are obvious examples and have spawned many new formats, but there have been just as many offline developments. To highlight just a few key examples: Customer relationship marketing is developing beyond the Tesco Clubcard model (i.e. tracking purchases to target promotions and offers). It is often used these days to educate customers. Nestlé in France uses a club to teach people to cook better, healthier meals. It has an informative website, helplines and even a cookery school where people can take courses.

Brand experience marketing, like the Bud Rising music festival in London, associates the brand with cool new bands and music. People also get to drink the product at the gigs and meet the brand in a social context: the way things are done in these places. A key audience for this activity is students, who are actively adopting new lifestyle habits.

Customer communities represent an advance compared to passive target audiences. The key feature of communities is the interactions of members with each other. They also give new members something to join and belong to. The Harley Owners Club, a 900 000-person community, is the engine of the brand.

Entertainment partnerships are booming. Insiders reckon that sponsorship of music stars will soon be as big as sponsorship of sports stars. Every single will be sponsored, every album, every tour. U2 tied up with iPod in a deal so synergistic it was difficult to see which brand was promoting the other. Rap icon Rakim appeared in advertising for Hennessey: confirmation that Henny was the official drink of hip-hop celebrity culture.

Ten years ago I worked on a pitch for a government antismoking campaign. The research I conducted used a panel of people who were giving up smoking – for real – and spoke to them before and during the first week. What I found was that before giving up the research groups favoured “good ads”. But once they were actually giving up, all this entertainment interest went out of the window. The most effective single piece of communication proved to be notes of support, in time-stamped envelopes, saying things like: “Well done, you got through the first day, that’s the hardest part over with.” Back in 1995, what we did with that insight was ignore it and come up with an ad campaign that better addressed how people felt while giving up. Today the Central Office of Information is launching a state-of-the-art CRM system that can send quitters timed text messages. We didn’t think of it ten years ago because it wasn’t really possible. Now it is obvious. And we are probably just beginning to fathom all the uses of new media.

But we should have been able to respond to the insights back then. For instance, what if people wore an I QUIT badge for their first week? The advantages could have been:

Staking a bit of pride by telling friends can help people stick to their resolution.

There could be a bandwagon effect, seeing all the people quitting at the moment.

Advertising could ask everyone to be nice to a person wearing the badge.

Past quitters might step forward at a bus stop and say things like: “I got off ’em last year, keep up the good work.”

And retailer partners could offer lots of treats and support wherever quitters went: a free drink in a no-smoking pub chain at the end of week 1, and so on.

In the last ten years it has become natural to think of ideas that are viral, peer to peer and interactive. The properties of new media have changed our view of how to use old media, just as advertising in the 1930s started using celebrities in posters (like Hollywood posters). They could have done it before, it just never occurred to them.

The new media have brought much more than new applications. They have brought new ways of thinking, new strategies, new ideas in their wake. And with 200 or so media to contend with, we are stockpiled with new ways of marketing for decades to come.

It Was the Natural Approach of a New Sort of Advertiser
The brand image approach was developed to suit the advertiser of its day: mass-produced products, which required differentiation.

In contrast in the 1990s, marketing’s centre of gravity moved towards media, services, retail and software as the new growth sectors. These sectors are cultural, experienced in use, diverse, fluid. A TV channel, an internet auction site, a supermarket, a bank . . . these are much harder to summarise in an “image” campaign. Branding becomes more like the frame around the picture than the picture itself. The main source of ideas is the direct experience of the service rather than the advertising. Advertising becomes like the trailer for a movie – you don’t want a fancy, imposed idea getting in the way.

Some of these new advertisers tried to do branding the old-fashioned way. They hired marketing directors from the old fmcg companies and agencies that wanted to continue to produce “great advertising ideas” for these new clients. But the approach that actually works for these sorts of clients is bigger than advertising ideas. It demands platforms that are cultural, integral to the business, and that link directly with company strategy: HSBC turned its advertising into a global etiquette guide and ran a January sale. The BBC was reanimated by launching digital channels and services. FCUK made a statement that you could wear (FCUK Fashion). Google made Gmail by (member) invitation only. Selfridges became a cultural theme park. IKEA challenged traditional British taste. Tesco got parents to collect computer tokens for local schools. Virgin turned every new launch into an “advertisement” for the brand. Penguin launched sampler-sized anniversary editions. Oddbins taught people to appreciate wine. Apple and then Starbucks became major forces in music. BA put beds onto its planes. Zara sped fashion retailing up.

As with new media, these sorts of New Marketing idea proved an inspiration for more traditional mass-produced goods. Even brands like Persil, Dove and Budweiser have started using media-neutral ideas, with a broader cultural remit than selling their wares.

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