Are you more responsible if you work in a ‘dirty’ business but work harder than your competitors to clean things up? Or is responsibility actually about making the decision to thrive in a less impactful industry in the first place?
In other words is social responsibility an absolute or is it most true when it’s comparative?
Acknowledgements
Photo of “Dilemma” taken by zeeweez, sourced from Flickr
I’m always amazed by how one business closes and another one of an almost identical nature springs up in its place. Recently, another of the cafes near home closed. Strange thing is that the café that was there before them, on the same site, also closed. And the one before that.
Clearly this is not a good site. It’s right on a corner. There’s no parking. And most of the competition is about a block away, so there’s no clustering effect.
The closure itself is sad. The effects for those who had to close were probably huge. But what never fails to amaze me is how business owners believe they have what it takes to beat the odds without tilting the odds at all. There’s this extraordinary belief that, somehow, doing the same thing as the guy that just failed, is the recipe for success.
Of course there are a thousand reasons why a business can fail, especially in a sector as unforgiving as hospitality, but if it were me, very big flags of misgiving would have gone up about this site. Once is a mistake. Twice is a trend. After that, any decision to open here is just plain dumb.
It’s not an isolated incident and it’s not one restricted to a small business. We can all think of examples where brand owners have ploughed on with an enterprise that really doesn’t have what it takes to succeed long-term, and they did it because someone offered them cheap gear or they thought they were better than the previous tenants, they were in love with owning a business at the expense of all other rational thought, the numbers somehow made sense to them or they were waiting for the market to turn so that they could be there to cash in.
Denial is a powerful human emotion. People fill up sectors all the time with new enterprises that have no differentiating factor except the new owner’s unshakeable belief in their own infallability or luck. They create brands that look like every other brand. They do what everyone else does. And they continue to believe that they’ll be the one standing as others fall around them.
For me, there’s only one question that really needs to be asked and answered, and it’s as true for opening a small café as it is for the biggest brand launch or the most ambitious expansion: why will it work (this time)?
If nothing’s changed, there’s a good chance the outcome won’t either.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “Hello Good Buy” taken by Paul Wicks, sourced from Flickr
I’ve always loved this quote from Dean Poole. Design, he says, is creating things for clients who “don’t know what they want until they have seen what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want and it’s not what you did.”
So often, companies get design wrong. Designers frequently argue clients get the aesthetic wrong. That may be true, but I think it’s deeper than that. Actually, more than one party can get the function of design wrong. Design actually fails when people haven’t designed in human terms exactly how they want the recipient to act/react.
Recently, Seth Godin observed that great design is about getting people to do what you want. “The goal,” he says, “is to create design that takes the user’s long-term needs and desires into account, and helps him focus his attention and goals on accomplishing something worthwhile.”
I agree – and that changes the question that every brand owner should ask of their designer. The question is not so much “will they like what they see?” but “what will happen next?”. As a result of what has been designed, will they pick up the book?, will they find their way to the train?, or will the design not work and the shopper will walk past his favourite tin of tomatoes because he didn’t recognise it anymore?
Design works when people do what you want them to do as a result of what they are presented with. Look for that to happen. Look closely.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “What are you looking at?” taken by nolifebeforecoffee (stencil by banksy), sourced from Flickr
In a world of conversations, everyone has something to say. You can’t control that – nor should you, at least not in a democracy. Some people will agree with you. Others will not. You can’t control that either. Some will argue their case against what you are doing or suggest that you are not doing it correctly. They have the right to make their point within legal bounds.
But where a lot of brands go wrong is that they take their cue for their own storytelling from the stories that others are telling about them. Their story, in other words, manifests itself in the form of reactions to other people’s stories rather than as actions built around their own narrative.
Don’t get me right. Brands must respond to the assertions of others. But they cannot allow others to control the brand conversation to the point where their own share of voice is lost. They must know and advance their own viewpoints.
Too many brands view challenges as criticism and react to them that way, instead of looking upon them as what I believe they increasingly are: competition for attention in the “ideaplex” – John Butman’s nifty phrase for the profusion of activities, channels, structures and technologies generated for the creation, distribution and consumption of ideas. Great book by the way.
Ideas have, as Butman rightly points out, proliferated to the point of glut. And stories are of course the perfect vehicle within which to express a myriad of opinions – some of which will concur with your actions as a brand, and others that will not. Now everyone wants to get their point across – brands, advocates, NGOs, politicians, senior management – and the media and social media provide a perfect pitching ground within which to raise hopes and doubts.
Today, we are all litigators, pursuing and prosecuting agendas and viewpoints in equal measure. Debate is healthy. It’s a sign of a competitive and free market at work.
Brand owners and managers shouldn’t be afraid of that. As my friend Janelle Barlow once wrote, “Complaint is a gift” because customers who complain are at the very least emotionally engaged with you. I suspect the same is true of criticism, or at the very least of authentic criticism – consumers in particular want to know what you are doing, why, and how you justify that. Criticism and commentary is their way of holding you to account. They want to see you do what’s right. And that, it seems to me, is a lot better than them not caring about what you are doing (or not knowing what you think).
Time and again, I’ve seen research that shows that a brand or industry’s most vociferous critics were also the people who most wanted to know more and who were most open to changing their minds if their fears or concerns were acquiesced. The contradiction is not surprising on reflection. Speculation will always fill a vacuum. If people don’t know your story, your position or your achievements, they will fill that information gap with rumours, concerns or other people’s suggestions or data.
As the battle for market share sheets increasingly into a battle of stories, the challenge more and more brands face is unfurling and advancing a credible, loveable, spreadable chronicle over a sustained period of time: a story that is consistent in its messages, responsive in its approach and flexible in its expression.
The contrast is equally stark. You either know your story and run your conversation your way or else someone else runs the agenda and you end up locked in a response loop.
Photo of “Jump through no-see/talk/listen zone?”, taken by Bes Z, sourced from Flickr
As in most things in life, there’s a time to hold your ground when you’re a brand, a time to step back and reassess, and there are times when you should look to front-foot your position. Those calls should be based on pragmatism not impulse, because the resources required to up your game can be considerable and the consequences of failure can be significant. So when should a brand take on a competitor, directly or indirectly, and how should they behave when they do so?
Let’s start with the circumstances in which an attack makes sense.
1. It’s the only way to expand your market share – if you have carefully thought through growth plans but are competing in a market with little or no organic growth, the only way to expand your presence is to take it off someone else. Be aware though that in many static markets, fluctuations in market share are small – so a concerted effort to grasp a bigger piece of the pie is likely to be costly, drawn out and could well become bitter. Is it worth it?
2. You have something to sell that your competitor doesn’t – a new product or an improvement on an existing product, especially in markets that have deep parity, is a great opportunity to press home the advantage and convince more customers to go with you. Be careful though that your innovation is not just a one-off, and that you can bring other ideas or improvements online quickly to match take-up and raised expectations.
3. You have something to say that your competitor won’t – a particularly good approach for brands looking to project a distinctive personality into a bland, safe market. Gaining share of voice is a great platform for gaining market share in these circumstances because it prompts people to pay attention. This approach particularly suits challenger brands.
4. Your competitor is stalled or complacent – catch a static competitor off-guard by moving quickly and decisively to achieve specific goals. It’s important in these situations to focus on actions and successes that can act as a beach-head from which to further expand your presence. (Sometimes, a particularly sleepy competitor won’t even notice the change that has occurred.)
5. Your competitor is fading – maybe they’ve had a drop in reputation or credibility, or they have simply run their course as a competitive force. This is the time to make the call that they are vulnerable and to lift your game.
6. You want to create an alternative – very much a challenger strategy. This is about raising questions about the “accepted” way of doing things and proffering your brand as that new and exciting way. Before you can succeed in this, you will need to show that the risk of change is worth it (particularly in B2B markets) and that what has been acceptable is no longer enough.
7. They’re poised to attack you – if you receive market intelligence that a competitor is about to attack you, sometimes the best form of defence is to attack them first. This can force them to change gear to defensive mode.
8. You’ve been attacked and now you need to counter-attack – you’ve been on the receiving end of the attack and now you need to force a delay in their plans so that you can marshal a strong defence. I tell clients that the successful approach for a counter-attack lies in one of four Rs – redirect (change the focus of the attack to one where you are strong); refute (go after their facts); reposition (change how you are perceived in the market); or remind (tell your customers why you are such a valuable asset and why they should remain loyal to you).
9. The time is right to grow your footprint – this can be a much longer and less dramatic play than some of the other options. This is about steadily and carefully expanding your customer base through a combination of acquisition and attrition. You acquire a competitor and then use your greater presence to put pressure on other bigger players while scouting the market for more buys. This can be a highly effective approach in markets where it’s in everyone’s interests for things to remain stable, reliable and dignified (e.g. professional services or if you’re looking to grow your presence inside a supply chain)
10. You want to start a conversation – whereas option 6 is about taking on another player directly, this is a broader approach that focuses on reframing the terms of reference. Attacking the way that the biggest player in the market operates, for example, can be a great way of getting the rules changed so that you are in a position to profit. This is a highly effective approach in markets that have been monopolised or where the old rules are becoming increasingly redundant because of technology changes etc. Naturally, because this is a more political approach than some of the others, it is subject to all the risks of politics – enough said.
11. They’re doing something you don’t want them to get away with – maybe your competitor is behaving in a certain way, or not behaving in a certain way; maybe they’ve protected themselves in a particular manner or have failed to tell people what is really going on. This is an ethics-based attack that calls into question the scruples and modus operandi of your rival. As a result, things can get very nasty, very quickly. The key to successfully using this approach is to raise the issue and then to get others to take up the ‘cause’, so that it’s not just you who is seen to be outraged.
12. You see an opportunity to compete through confusion – sometimes the best way to attack is to use a multi-levelled, multi-pronged approach that combines moves in the market with moves in the corridors of regulators and/or public opinion. Use this approach against a wily competitor who can overwhelm you if you attack them directly but who may not be nimble enough to address concerted and well-thought through attacks on several fronts.
7 rules of engagement
So often, when brands take each other on, they engage in a head-on war that deeply involves the two parties but quickly disinterests or confuses everyone around them. For that reason, it’s vital that when you attack a competitor you do so under clear terms of engagement. Here are my seven rules:
1. Don’t fight with the rival – fight for the customers
2. Be assertive, not rude. Restrain from slinging mud. Attack principles, not personalities.
3. Be positive and optimistic about what could or should happen.
4. Use a mix of media (and messages) to make your point.
5. Work to your strengths rather than focusing on their weaknesses.
6. Commit, don’t just dabble.
7. Set a timeframe, set a budget, set clear measures. Assess progress continually and act on it.
Photo of “Cannon” taken by Joe Shlabotnik, sourced from Flickr
1. No scandal is as bad (or as good) as you think it is.
2. Criticism travels faster than attention. In this digital age, it’s as fast as light.
3. Scandal travels even faster than criticism.
4. Fallout makes the best news. It balloons scandal into incident.
5. If you handle anything perishable, you must be response-ready. If you’re not response-ready, you won’t catch up.
6. If your key people are off-camera, you’re off-brand.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “High Speed Lights” taken by Liam Swinney, sourced from Flickr
Many of us who started in advertising did so I imagine because we saw an ad or a series of commercials that made us dream of creating something that good, something that a whole culture talked about. Recently, the people at Hubspot reached back, took five of the great campaigns and had them reimagined for today.
It was an intriguing exercise. But while the creatives seemed to focus for the most part on how much the channels had changed in the time since the campaigns were forged and the implications of that for execution and campaign distribution, I thought it would be interesting to look at what some of these iconic ad campaigns did that made it possible for them to have such a deep cultural impact in the first place.
What’s clear is that iconic status is not about the nobility of the product. As CNBC observed, AdAge refers to its selection of the top advertising campaigns of the 20th century as including: “two air polluters, nutritionless sugar water, one reviled carcinogen, two companies infamous for the use of virtual slave labor, one purveyor of savory cardiovascular time bombs, two booze peddlers and one cosmetic product preying on the vanity of women.”
Nevertheless, the campaigns are considered paragons of advertising. Why? And more particularly, what can we learn from the success of those campaigns?
Many of the great brand campaigns have nudged the social boundaries in one way or another. But the push-back to prevailing attitudes is contextual, often far from aggressive and pitched as much as a social message as an advertising one. Clairol for example didn’t just promote hair colouring, they made it the most natural thing in the world (in every sense), even using the suggestive headline “Does she … or doesn’t she?”. At one level Clairol’s campaign offered women options, but at another, the campaign challenged the very definition of feminity, adding fun, cheekiness and a modicum or three of impropriety. Two decades later, the infamous Brooke Shields’ Calvin Klein campaign carried that same risque suggestiveness. Later, the infamous “Hello Boys” ad featuring Eva Herzigova for the Wonderbra would literally stop traffic.
A number of the iconic campaigns didn’t just offer an alternative action, they also made the product the absolute symbol of that rebellion. Volkswagon’s “Think Small” campaign was the antithesis of everything that post-War America treasured: a car that was small, fuel efficient, affordable and foreign. Portraying the vehicle this way was a prompt to those for whom consumerism held no attraction to register their protest against such pressure on the road. Equally, the Avis campaign dared to challenge the very definition of corporate success by making second-best a desirable place to be – because, according to Avis, being number 2 was the greatest incentive the company had to try harder. In each case, the advertisers took a potential product weakness and, by actually highlighting it, transformed it into a celebration that challenged deeply pervading beliefs of success.
Some iconic advertising literally invented need, then promptly installed the product at the head of the category. DeBeers, as we all know, made a diamond a symbol of romance with its “A Diamond is Forever” campaign. As Bob Garfield observed, “Now, thanks to the simple audacity of the advertising proposition, the diamond engagement ring is de rigueur virtually worldwide, and the diamond by far the precious gemstone of choice.” Federal Express made overnight delivery into an industry with their promise to get the package to its destination when “It absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.” Other campaigns have sought to create categories, with varying degrees of success. The DeBeers and the Federal Express campaigns were so successful because they found intriguing ways to turn ideas into mainstream rituals (giving a ring, preparing and sending something overnight) and to link their brands to those rituals in ways that made a substitute feel like a compromise. Once again, they challenged the accepted way of doing things.
Others introduced phrases that became memes, long before memes were even recognised as such: “Plop plop, fizz”, for example, “Where’s the beef?” or the infamous “Wazzup”. These quickly worked their way into the vernacular. Or they introduced characters into the culture who became personalities in their own right – the fast-talking FedEx guy, the Marlboro man and of course that guy with the infamous eyepatch in the Hathaway shirt.
The world has seldom wanted for campagns that were recognisable or clever. For me, the truly icons of brand advertising though have been those campaigns that were about much more than just publicity or sales. In each case, iconic campaigns locked the brand itself to a change in the collective mindset. They instigated challenges to how people felt or what people did or how people expressed things, tying them to images, ideas and phrases that people were bewitched by, so that the brands were linked to those changes in attitude. Perhaps it’s no surprise after all that many of these products had few natural attributes to work off. Perhaps that lack of innate reason to buy inspired creators and approvers alike to push the boundaries. So much of today’s advertising seems to be missing that gentle bite. It may be cool and smart, but it often lacks a beguiling sense of subversion.
The iconic brand campaigns told stories – and those stories were always human. To a certain extent, it could be argued they were often simpler ads for simpler times, but I think far more importantly people recognised, and identified with, the integrity of what they read or saw. They believed the characters. Perhaps, more advertising should be more stark, more frank – less polished, less technical, more down to earth. Perhaps as Leo Burnett himself did with the Marlboro Man, writers need to develop icons who feel real rather than wheeling in celebrities or mouthpieces who just sell.
With the notable exception of the Apple ad, campaigns were onscreen or in print for many years. People had time to get used to them, to read things into them, to accept them. After a time, the ads stopped feeling like marketing; they became encounters that viewers and readers were relaxed with and that they looked for. It was a slower pitch, a more measured pitch. Sadly, that long, slow boil now feels as good as gone. Campaign gives way to campaign, with little sense of continuity and often with wildly divergent strategies. The discipline of a strong message, well delivered, time and time again seems to have deserted both marketing managers and advertising creators. Everyone it seems wants to tell the next joke, try the next technique, employ the latest channels. Too many advertisers have forgotten that people forget. As a result, too many ads are now just part of the noise rather than part of the culture.
So while there are reasons to suggest that the days of iconic advertising may be over, the lessons from iconic brand advertising should still be teaching brands and brand owners a thing or two.
Are these your 10 Best Ad Campaigns of All Time? If so, why? If not, what’s missing?
Acknowledgements
Photo of “Watching the Game” taken by A. Davey, sourced from Flickr
If you’re a cult brand looking to take on a scale player in an industry that favours significant footprint, how can you hope to win? Possibly by retaining everything that reinforces your cult brand kudos and plugging in to what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as the Collaborative Economy.
According to research that he shares here, companies like Airbnb are now giving traditional hotel brands something of a run for their rooms. The model is effective, according to Thomas Friedman who wrote an article in the New York Times that Owyang references, because this collaborative approach is personal, local and based on a refreshing sense of trust.
Friedman quotes Brian Chesky, the guy who started Airbnb, ““It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.”
The fact that 140,000 people around the world are staying in Airbnb rooms on an given night proves that intimacy can indeed scale. That’s possible of course because the encounters themselves take place in local neighbourhoods, homes, and rooms – environments that larger hotels with their hundreds and hundreds of rooms stacked on top of one another simply cannot replicate. Airbnb may be a mass model, but it doesn’t feel that way. And it doesn’t behave that way. It retains the sense of “in the know” that makes cult brands so compelling for followers – the very qualities of unique and personal that Chesky refers to.
If you’re a major hotel chain, perhaps this trend is not big enough yet to warrant completely changing what you offer, but to me it points to an irony that scale brands will in time need to find some way to resolve.
As brands find more and more economic reasons to get bigger, the experiences that customers increasingly value and trust are getting smaller (as in more one on one).
Acknowledgements
Photo of “LDI – Multi Bed Jumping” taken by Eric Schmuttenmaer, sourced from Flickr
It’s no news that the relationships between brands and their customers are changing. But the rise and rise of a new intermediary is something we should all ponder. Once we relied on frontline staff, advisors and others to help us glean the best choices. Increasingly, as the popularity of review sites like TripAdvisor can attest, buyers are getting the lowdown on what’s good and what’s not from people just like them – customers.
The good people at Clear Returns spell out the changes in this nice summary:
That’s not surprising. In a world brimming with choices, buyers want to know that they are making the right decision – and review sites and searches are a critical part of establishing whether a brand does indeed do what it says on the box.
That has implications not just for how brands behave, but also for how they manage their reputations and their experiences. Writing on Business 2 Community, Nathan Labenz talks about what he calls The TripAdvisor Effect. “Brands were a natural fit for radio and TV advertising, and brands thrived with the proliferation of cable channels, which kept advertising costs down while offering unprecedented demographic targeting. With the rise of user-generated content, however, brands have faced challenges. People are talking about brands on social media sites in ways that brand managers can’t control and often can’t even detect,” Labenz observes.
But while he questions whether this loss of control makes brands irrelevant, my reading is that this new feedback loop changes the influencer set and thus the interactions that brands must manage in order to remain competitive. It means brands must be findable and traceable of course and that they must look to encourage good things to be said about them. That, as Labenz says, does indeed put reviewers and critics in a powerful position of influence. It forces brands to not just monitor but also to react as never before to what consumers are saying about them.
However, the way a brand is managed now, through conversation and social exchange, is a key change-point. Awareness has become scrutiny. The scale has changed along with the ability to control what is said, by whom and where. And the onus to deliver has changed. Brand management is now less about how the branding itself is presented and much more about how it is talked about. Brands have gone from being seen during commercial breaks and when shoppers were looking to buy to being always on show and judged in real time by any consumer with an internet connection.
That can be scary. But it’s also easy to overlook that there are some significant upsides for brands in this shift. Brands can at least see (something of) what is being said about them. They can encourage people to talk about what they have done right. They can acknowledge and correct their mistakes. But to do that, they must often change how they manage themselves and the expectations of their customers. And they must be able to sort the fair calls from the unreasonable rants.
Here’s an interesting sideline. While the Google and Econsultancy findings are supported to some degree by take-outs from the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, there is also evidence in the Barometer to show that people look to a range of sources, not just review sites, for credible and honest information covering the wider gamut of brand engagement, integrity, products, purpose and operations. For example, while buyers most trust consumers to tell them how a company serves its customers and whether it prioritises customer needs ahead of company profits, they trust employees to tell them about working conditions and benefits and they look to the CEO for information on partnerships with NGOs, financial earnings and performance and what senior management have achieved.
Review sites operate effectively at a transactional level. They provide a day to day journal of the interactions between buyers and brands. They enable people to discuss experiences in a world where brands are adjudicated, at least in part, by the experiences of others. They are the basis for reaction. They enable people to pass judgment and to publish those judgments for all the world to see.
But, for me, the rise of the review site doesn’t, and shouldn’t, fundamentally change what brands are about. It doesn’t change how brands are formulated or even how they function. Brands represent promises – just as they always have. It’s still up to a brand to develop and bring an idea to market and a brand must continue to control and drive that. A brand must retain its own identity (in the wider sense of that word) and the need to manage that is as critical as ever – it can’t be led around by the nose, dependent for its strategy on the whim and feedback of customers.
Because any brand that ends up being managed that way isn’t really a brand anymore. It’s an approval rating.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “muybridge leapfrog”, taken by BS Wise, sourced from Flickr
Anyone proposing something new in an organisation is likely to be hit by four questions that represent two contradictory lines of enquiry. They serve perhaps to highlight the ironies of trying to quantify demand.
On the one hand: The search for precedent
Question 1: Who else has done this?
Wrong answer: If the real answer is that many others are doing it, you have signalled what should be a non-starter. That’s because if others are doing what you are suggesting, it is not an innovation. It is, at best, catch-up. If you present it as a competitive opportunity, then you are, as Michael Porter has pointed out, relying on the incompetence of your rivals and that is not the basis for a sustainable competitive position.
Right answer: The idea is new for the sector, and a similar concept, using a parallel model, has worked well in other sectors with a similar competitive profile.
Question 2: Is there a demand for it?
Wrong answer: You think so, or there should be, or it’s a great idea so it’s bound to work.
Right answer: The forecast demand is sensible, based on conservative assumptions and calibrated to allow an exit if things don’t work out. If you can, draw parallels with other sectors where an idea of similar dynamics was introduced, the reaction of the market and the speed at which volume grew (against forecast). It will be particularly important to show why and how others won’t be able to simply copy or catch up to meet demand once it is established.
On the other hand: The search for uniqueness
Question 3: Why can’t it be copied?
Wrong answer: It can be, or no-one would bother, or we’ll be first.
Right answer: Because this is an initiative that has been inspired (not copied) by what has happened elsewhere, it cannot simply be replicated. Preferably there are high barriers to entry. These can vary greatly – from reputation to distribution to special relationships to IP. The highest barrier of course is not one thing, but rather a combination of factors that, when combined with the idea, give it singular distinction.
Question 4: Why hasn’t this been done before?
Wrong answer: Because no-one’s thought of it. That simply makes what you’re proposing a question of luck, in which case it can (and will) be easily copied once others see how well it works.
Right answer: The market conditions are favourable and/or there’s been a change in customer expectations and/or a competitor has pulled out of a market in which you can identify residual value and/or the IP to make the idea work has only recently been developed and protected, and/or you are now operating at a scale where you can implement the idea economically. Once again, the power of the offer lies in the combination of factors that you have and that others don’t.
Three ironies of demand
1. For demand to work in your favour, there must be enough need for viability but not so much that it encourages instant commoditisation. So there must be real interest but it is probably latent.
2. There must be an answer to a problem and that answer must be simple enough to be understood by customers, but not so simple that anyone can copy it.
3. Demand needs time to grow but not so much time that you run out of cash or interest before getting a return.
Acknowledgement
Photo of “I don’t know why you say goodbye I say Helloooo”, taken by Lee Nachtigal, sourced from Flickr
