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A Way to Think about Brand-Building
David Rutherford
If we were in any other line of work, we would not give brands a second thought. The general public never wonder why some brands are more appealing than others, much less torture themselves with questions about the essence of one brand or the key discriminator of another. Brands are part of everyday life, and that's it. As we know, however, brands go much deeper, and this book's mission is to show how to turn this to business advantage. Some of the content will confirm what you believe. Some of it will challenge your thinking.
I also have to explain something that happened in writing this chapter.
I kept running into an overlap between the concept of "a brand" and the idea of "positioning." It started to make everything too complicated, so I separated out an addendum called Positioning and all that Jazz.
Arthur Koestler was one of the first to study creativity in a formal way. He said that discovery is seeing something that was always there, but hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit. This first chapter re-interrogates what we might be taking for granted.
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So What Do You Deserve?
Peter Elwood
David Ogilvy said, "Clients get the advertising they deserve." This has two meanings, according to the situation. On the positive side, it hails a client's immense motivational value. On the downside, it describes what happens when a client (often without realizing it) is part of the problem.
E. Peter Elwood is ideally positioned to speak to this. He had a stellar career with Unilever Canada, having been President of Lipton, and Lever Brothers, and VP of Marketing at both companies. He challenged, and still challenges, conventional wisdom, andinspires this in others. This shows in the legacy of his brands, and in the people who worked for him. He had an influence, directly or from afar, on four major Cassies winners:
- Dove. Sustained Success in CASSIES III (1997).
- Sunlight. The Grand Prix in CASSIES 99.
- becel. Sustained Success in CASSIES 99.
- Lipton Chicken Noodle. Gold for Packaged Goods in CASSIES 2001.
From the agency side, he had the highest kudos of all-top people clamoured to work on his business.
He distills his thoughts here.
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Advertising Strategy Development
Andy Macaulay
Before we get to Andy Macaulay's discussion of Advertising Strategy, we need to put it in context. Here's his favourite definition of a successful brand:
A promise for which there is
no acceptable substitute.
Like other definitions (see Chapter 1) this is all about the perceptions and reality that ring true to the customer-in a way that no other brand does.
Advertising Strategy is critical to this, though in a sense it is a misnomer.
The thinking that Andy has in mind goes far wider and deeper than advertising, even with its expanded definition of persuasive communication. He also touches on the type of brainpower you need for great strategy, and the need for a positive, free, and frank environment.
In Andy's words, whether you think in terms of Brand Essence, or Positioning, or one of the many concepts in use today, great brands find the truths that allow them to deliver on their promise.
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Briefing-Increasing the Odds of Success
Arthur Fleischmann
As Arthur Fleischmann says at the end of his chapter, briefing is "one of the most critical (but often most neglected) aspects of the creative development process." He's right.
There's something about us humans that makes effective communication elusive. Arthur refers to the game of broken telephone. It's an example of what we might call Murphy's Law of Communication: Anything that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood.
I've known a few people who find briefing, especially creative briefing, difficult or even tiresome. If any readers are in this camp, I hope this chapter changes your minds. A great brief is not a dashed-off version of you-know-what-I-mean. There is a rare skill to doing it well, but the results make it very much worth the effort.
The chapter makes an important distinction between "The Brief" and "Brief-ING." The first is the formal document that most systems require, and the second is all the activity that surrounds it. There are different, and sometimes controversial philosophies about briefing too. The chapter covers these in some detail, before closing with a review of the approach at john st.
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The Creative Responsibility
Ian Mirlin
Most of this book is written to senior people. So is this chapter, but it has an ingenious way in. Ian Mirlin has constructed it as advice to junior creative people. However, his real audience is the senior echelon-at the client and the agency. Ian points out that despite all the talk of change, we are missing a critical opportunity-to redefine the role of "the creative mind."
Ian is a copywriter by trade, and is regarded as one of Canada's finest. He is also the Mirlin of Harrod & Mirlin, and more recently has become the Chief Creative Officer at Young & Rubicam. As President at Harrod & Mirlin, he guided the agency through several incarnations- from local independent to part of a full-fledged multinational network.
This background has given him a view of the inner sanctum of busi-ness that many creative folk never see, and is the driving force behind his view of where the partnership of client and agency should be going.
There are no diagrams or checklists, just an exploration of ideas from a man who has seen this business from many different angles. Enjoy the journey.
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Working with Creative People
Rupert Brendon
At one time, I was the Course Leader at a weeklong offsite. The theme was how to get more effective advertising. There were about twenty marketing people, half of them men and half of them women. They were there to hear top speakers from various agencies. In one session, a Creative Director, almost in passing, mentioned to the group that it was in their interest to motivate creative people. Four Brand Managers, all men as it happened, were sitting side by side along one side of the U-shaped table. Their arms snapped into the folded position-classic male body language of disagreement. They challenged the idea with some intensity, along the lines of "nobody goes out of their way to motivate me, so why should I go out of my way to motivate you." The meeting went through an awkward moment.
This chapter reasserts that it is absolutely in the manager's interest to motivate creative people, coming down to the most powerful reason of all. It leads to better work.
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Quality Action from Qualitative Research
Lisa Elder
There's a story (I've modified it a bit) that a brain surgeon met a qualitative researcher at a party, and they got talking about what they both did for a living. After a while the brain surgeon said, "That's absolutely fascinating. I think I'd like to do that when I retire." "That's funny," said the researcher, "because when I retire, I'm thinking I would like to be a brain surgeon."
Qualitative research is fascinating, but it also needs to be handled with the skill of a brain surgeon.
When we asked Lisa Elder to write this chapter, she had so many potential themes that it was difficult to know where to focus. She settled on actionability. Most of us can relate to projects that start with "let's do some groups" and finish with a report that creates a bit of a stir, flickers briefly on the radar screen, and then falls into oblivion.
There is a better way to do it, as you will see.
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Advertising and Research-Why Such Uneasy Bedfellows?
David Rutherford
We had an issue with this chapter. How to handle the disagreements that swirl around advertising research.
There is the well-known antipathy of creative people. There are less public (but still entrenched) disputes in the research community. There are clients who more or less agree with what might be called the "general client approach." But there are others, including some marquee names, who are diametrically opposed to it.
We were not sure who could best speak on the subject. Whoever we asked might be seen as a representative of one stance or another. As we cast around for a victim, my name came up. Research is not my field, but I've spent my whole career close to it. I'm also not attached to a school of thought, except the belief that research is wonderful when used well and interpreted thoughtfully, and seductively dangerous otherwise.
So I was asked to jump into the tiger pit.
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Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)
Dr. Alan Middleton
To say that Integrated Marketing Communications is a hot topic would be an understatement. So we decided to get two views on it.
This first one is from Dr. Alan Middleton, no stranger to communication in general, and IMC in particular. Alan worked first in marketing and advertising, closing out the practitioner part of his career as President of Enterprise Advertising (now Enterprise Creative Selling) in Toronto, and later President/CEO of JWT Japan. Alan then transferred to academic life, and is currently Executive Director of the Division of Executive Development, and Assistant Professor of Marketing, at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto.
He takes us through some of the academic underpinnings of IMC, and offers a practical approach to this challenging topic.
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IMC-A View from the Front Lines
Laurie Young and Guy Stevenson
This chapter, like Chapter 9, is also about Integrated Marketing Communication, but this time from the practical point of view. Laurie Young and Guy Stevenson describe how IMC is handled at Ogilvy.
They discuss the minefields that make this seemingly simple idea difficult to put into practice, and give several suggestions for success. I can remember a time when one of the main beliefs of IMC was that there had to be a consistent "look and feel" across all effort. This was often taken to mean that the visuals and slogans of one medium had to appear in all of them. This explains why some IMC effort clumsily misfires.
This chapter says that force-feeding an idea from one medium into another is not the right way to go. Each medium should be used in the way it works best. How, then, do you keep the total effort connected and consistent? By having it adhere to a more embracing concept than look and feel. At Ogilvy, they call it The Organizing Idea.
There is also a caveat. IMC will not work if the agency and client continue to work in the old silo set-up. It needs structural and attitudinal change to break down those walls. This is something to bear in mind as you read on.
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Media Convergence. Lessons Learned. The New Reality.
Hugh Dow
This chapter is about media convergence.
As most readers know, this idea created an immense bandwagon effect. It led to a flurry of corporate takeovers, and a great deal of re-thinking in the media community. Now there has been time for the smoke to clear, and Hugh Dow puts it all in perspective.
He sees a definite role for convergence, but not as the be all and end all. For the right clients, though, using convergence in the right way, he paints a very positive picture.
