WHERE’S TOMORROW?

I get asked a lot of times what are you doing to get future ready? My answer is the always the same, I’m trying to look ahead. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because we humans are not programmed to do that. We are schooled to learn from the past. Our predictions are often based on what we see when we look back and examining the patterns that lead us to where we are. The age we are in doesn’t work that way any more. In these times evolution is just as likely to be created by discontinuous change as it is by steady progression.

Take for instance, Youtube, Facebook or Twitter. Did anyone see any of that coming? And what exactly did those instruments of social networking evolve from? Or did they just spring up from the fertile earth of the Internet, shattering old notions as the took root?

Here’s a small part, of a small part, of what’s happening. The consumer is not only consuming media, he has become a medium. His life, his opinions, his antics can now be broadcast to the world and be followed by similar minded people. Nary an experience is so trivial that you can’t Tweet about it.

‘Dozed through a presentation. Yawn! They should get the presenter’s blood sample and use it to create a sleep medication.’ Stuff like that populates the ether and is gobbled up and commented upon by connection hungry folks. We have discovered that the ordinary lives of other people like us are extraordinarily entertaining.

These days, you don’t have be a star to have a following. You just have to offer up something of yourself, a slice of your so-called life. Not just anything mind you, but that something which can add value to someone else’s moments. A joke. An opinion. A review of your new stereo system. A heart-rending confession. A discovery. A problem that you need help with. Anything that stimulates either the heart or the mind of the reader/viewer. Anything that pays dividends on her investment of time and attention.

All this is nice to know, but what does it have to do with how brands are built? With advertising? Nothing and everything.

If you gaze at the past you will find little of relevance to the subject at hand. The past has taught us to create communication that answers questions that aren’t wrong, but they aren’t the right ones either.

Will all our consumers get the message? Is the ad likeable? Will it cut through the clutter? Is it memorable? Will it build preference for the brand? And so on.

You might have noticed that all these questions are about what brand’ s marketing needs. They aren’t about the consumer at all.

In a time, when the consumer is also a narrowcaster and word of mouth is fast becoming the most powerful word of all, shouldn’t we be thinking about what our communication gives our consumers? You wouldn’t expect anyone to buy a product that doesn’t offer a benefit, why then would you expect him to consumer a message that doesn’t offer any?

Maybe the first questions we ask of the idea should be the following.

Will the ad stimulate the heart or the mind of the consumer?

Will he share it? Or better still comment on it?

Now there are some who will say that this applies to the West. India still lives in its villages and status quo is the only status that matters. If you look back for a second you will notice that India has changed more in the last 5 years than it did in the last 50. And it will change even more in the next 2. That’s something that you can bet your business on. We have.

BRANDING AND THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Unless you had your head in a cloud of opium smoke the last couple of days, you must know that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now you may be pro the decision to bestow the honor that Mahatma Gandhi was nominated 5 times for but never won, to a guy who is fighting two wars. You may be anti the decision. You may be, like, wthhh (what the hell happened here)? Or perhaps you just don’t give a monkey’s red derriere about the whole darned tootin affair.

What’s a popular take on the hoopla? That Obama didn’t win the peace bonanza just because he’s Obama. He got it because he’s not Bush.

You could argue that everybody was so relieved that the President whose diplomacy was as evident as the weapons of mass destruction in ‘I-rack’ and under whose stewardship the economy went ‘nuculeer’ on all of us was gone they just hugged the guy who came next and annoited him the savior. I would argue otherwise.

When the Nobel committee was deciding who was worthy of the Peace Prize, Obama was eleven days into his presidency. His brand shone over the world like a beacon of hope. Many of us were swayed by the talismanic words ‘Yes, we can’.

Obama, from the time he made his run for the highest office in America, built his brand on one value ‘Optimism’. He held out hope that things could be different. And that the people who walk the old corridors of power in Washington DC could be more answerable to the folks who live on Main Street. Even when the rough and tumble of the Presidential race got really rough, he stayed positive, responding to negative attacks with his optimistic message. He stayed true to his brand.

The thing is he didn’t just talk the talk. He lived it. And he inspired others to as well. His campaign had an army of unpaid volunteers numbering hundreds of thousands. They evangelized his brand in their neighborhoods. They converted skeptics into believers and some hardcore nay-sayers into fence sitters. They did it because they felt they owned the brand. His optimism became their optimism. They created the largest grassroots movement in the history of American politics.

Was it just serendipity? Was Obama just at the right place at the right time? Was he the ultimate anti-Bush when the Bush brand had flamed out? All that and a helluva lot more.

His campaign did not rewrite the book as much as write a totally new one. It was a masterful combination of new media, door-to-door and community grass roots campaigning with clever tactical use of traditional TV advertising, which culminated not in one big moving commercial but a 30 minute address to the nation, something that only the elected President usually does.

Everything they did rang resoundingly their message of hope, ‘Yes, we can’. By the time the voting was done it had not only caught the imagination of Americans but people across the world. Hope had a new champion and for the first time it felt like he was one of us.

This is what the Nobel Peace Prize committee voted for. Not the actuality, but the glittering promise and the Hope that it held. The brand had won, once again.

We’ve seen a human being go from being an individual to a Megabrand on the strength of the Values he shares with his consumers. Can our brands do the same? Call me and I’ll tell you.

INVENTIVE VS CREATIVE

Every marketing person knows this. Creative is what comes out of a ‘Creative’ Department, where creative people sit, feet-on-table, chair tilted at a gravity and common sense defying angle, waiting for a brain flash, after which ‘The Idea’ arrives, accompanied by the resonant thunder of creativity. Can we have some applause, please?

Actually, the creative process is nothing like that. It starts with hours of grappling with the brief, followed by hours or days of getting tired ideas and clichés out of your system. Then and only then happen upon some fresh thoughts. If your Creative Director kills those with a casual flick of his underpaid hand, you start over.

Anyhoo, this is not about creativity. One started this little gander through the woods of my words by stating rather boldy ‘Creative versus Inventive’.

The point is rather simple, really. Good brands have great creative. Iconic brands invent.

Is that to say, their marketing and advertising don lab coats and make stuff up? Well, not literally. Let me drop a couple of three examples, since I find this generally helps me make the what-cha-ma-call-it, ah, point.

IBM was a computer company, till they ‘invented’ e-business in 1999. Did they really invent it? No. They spotted that business was slowly moving from traditional interfaces to digital interactions. What they did next was really smart, they branded it ‘e-business’. Then they launched a global campaign that told the world how business would be conducted in a increasingly networked world, helped by IBM’s products and services, of course.

Go back to last year. Volkswagen wanted to talk up the new Golf’s driving capabilities. Instead of talking about it, they invented a new driving experience. Night driving. I urge you to visit night-driving.com and see for yourself.

Fifty years back Avis the number two car rental company in USA invented a new attitude. In a culture where number one was always king, they invented ‘Number 2ism’, the attitude that celebrated and defined the virtues of the under dog. Their calling cry, ‘We work harder, because we are only number 2’.

Recently, Burger King invented the counter-culture mascot when they launched The King.

Here, at home, we have had our share of branded inventions. Lead India by Times of India. The Zoozoos by Vodafone. ‘The Power of Ideas’ program by The Economic Times.

But why invent at all? Because when you invent something new people take notice and if they begin to take ownership of it you get to own a piece of real estate in their hearts and minds.

Of course, after you invent something you still have to express it in a way that is ‘Creative’ otherwise it won’t be engaging and compelling. So maybe I should change the headline to Creative and Inventive. Ah well, another time maybe, I have more creative things to do.

Why Market Your Company With Stick-on Emotion When You Can Tap the Real Thing?

BY: DAN HEATH & CHIP HEATHThu Oct 1, 2009 at 2:00 PM

Why market your company with stick-on emotion when you can tap the real thing?

EnlargeBUM WRAP Downy cozies up to the feeling that its product signifies a mother's love. But why not help real moms? | Photograph Courtesy of P&G

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Marketers caught on early that emotion sells product. "Would your husband marry you again?" screams a Palmolive ad from 1921. (Not unless you scrub with Palmolive soap, honey.) Today, Heineken has promised warmer international relations via handoffs of Premium Light from mountain men to Indians to ballerinas. And, of course, Axe has sold young men on the fantasy of hooking up with deodorant-loving nymphomaniacs.

Emotional appeals are ubiquitous. They're also interchangeable. It would be just as easy to pitch Heineken as an aphrodisiac and Axe as a global harmonizer ("Peace starts in the pits").

And that's the problem: It's all stick-on emotion. Sometimes that works brilliantly (see: Corona). Other times, it's as weird and clumsy as an adhesive moustache -- remember Carl's Jr. and Paris Hilton's sexed-up hamburger ad? Fortunately, there's a better and more sustainable way to create emotion: Mean it.

It wouldn't be that hard to take emotion seriously. Most fabric softeners, for instance, have sold themselves with stick-on "mother's love." That is, when you use Downy or the like, you're not really softening your family's clothes; you're telling your child, "I love you." (The children of the world, though, want mothers to know that there's a more effective way to show love: unlimited texting.)

Why not simply replace the fake emotion with a real one? What if Downy started doing things to help struggling mothers -- and then used their ads to talk about the work? What if Bounce retaliated by throwing its weight behind job seekers looking to bounce back from a layoff? What if all this good work raised the competitive hackles of the not-to-be-underestimated Snuggle Bear? Perhaps it could sponsor a winter-coat drive.

What we're proposing here is an arms race of goodness -- a generation of companies that compete on real emotion rather than stick-on sentiments. Maybe that sounds Pollyanna-ish. If so, let us introduce you to some companies succeeding by meaning it.

Toms Shoes has a simple business model: Buy a pair of shoes, and it'll send a second pair to a child who needs it. This year, it'll send about 300,000 pairs of shoes to the developing world. And because it's the company's genuine passion to do so, Toms can take advantage of the word of mouth built into its product and spend dramatically less on marketing than other shoe companies. When you mean it, convincing customers doesn't take as much shouting.

Toms is a three-year-old startup, but the same concept works at scale. Newman's Own started as a lark -- a way for Paul Newman to show off his salad dressing -- but it has grown into a powerful brand with products all over the supermarket and more than $100 million in annual revenue. All of the company's profits have always gone to charity -- more than a quarter-billion dollars to date. Now, no one buys Newman's Own salad dressing to make a diluted charitable donation. They buy it because it tastes good andthey like what the brand stands for.

The arms race of goodness isn't just for consumer brands. In the B2B space, over-the-top emotional appeals are less common. (Heaven help us if Oracle starts hyping database-loving nymphos.) But companies of all kinds can gain by embracing goodness.

Austin-based National Instruments is an unlikely exhibit for the power of emotion. The company makes high-end scientific testing equipment used by particle physicists and biotech engineers. As you'd expect, NI's employees care deeply about science. So when NI's leaders considered how to give back to the community, they wanted to tap that passion.

As described by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, NI set out to inspire more kids to fall in love with engineering and science. (The number of degrees awarded in these fields has been falling for years.) The company now sponsors robotics competitions for 9- to 18-year-olds, and it designed the software that powers Lego Mindstorms robotics kits. (You can't possibly hate science when you're building Lego robots.) NI employees also mentor STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students from local schools.

This work is valuable for its own sake, of course, but it also boosts NI's brand credibility. When customers assess NI, they see a company obsessed with engineering -- to the point where, as a hobby, NI's employees volunteer at robotics competitions. Other scientific companies could try to make that point in an ad; NI lives it.

Meaning it also pays off in an unexpected way: It motivates employees. When a company stands for something valuable, it makes workers happier. NI has become a perennial on best-places-to-work lists, and turnover is 50% lower than the industry average. Why would people leave?

The companies who mean it are building assets that can't be easily replicated. Meanwhile, other brands may rack up quick wins with clever stick-on ad campaigns. But, inevitably, that moustache will peel off.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

DIGITAL THINKING FROM THE 1950s.

TECHNOLOGY!!! DIGITAL!!! MOBILE!!! CHANGE!!! The hysteria is out there and growing. Sometimes it does a body some good to sit down and have a little think. Sift the grains of truth from the chaff of hype. Bill Bernbach, the founding father on creativity in advertising and the most influential figure the biz has ever seen, said this a few decades back.

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed.

It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though

his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”

In this battle between traditional and new media, this principle has somehow slipped through the cracks of our biased points of view. Oops!

Shall we go on then? Shall we see if the principles laid down by Bill when TV was the new media apply in this digital age?

“Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are NOT right if in your ad you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.”

Here’s a lesson to heed before you create another viral. Far too of them tell stories that have nothing to do with what the brand stands for or what it has to say. There’s no point if the world shares it and nobody can tell what it had to do with the brand.

“Execution becomes content in a work of genius.”

Visit www.cinema.philips.com and you will see what Bill meant. The thing is great execution takes time and it takes investment. Just because it is on the net doesn’t mean it should be made for peanuts or in no time at all. Anything that speaks for your brand needs a lot of loving.

“It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.”

Digital translation: Don’t get obsessed with the latest technology, the widgets. If you do not give something of real value to the consumer, it will just be a gimmick and it will be dismissed as such.

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”

Just because anything goes on the net doesn’t mean we do anything in the name of commerce. Every brand has an obligation to its consumers, an obligation to uphold its values, no matter what the medium.

“Word of mouth is the best medium of all.”

People share stuff that moves them deeply. It’s got to intensely personal. Make them laugh of loud. Induce tears. Make them feel intelligent. Provoke them into thinking differently about something. Stimulate a dialogue, an argument even. Whatever you do, go all the way. A half measure is road kill on the information highway.

We are at the end of this little ramble, but we are not done yet. I urge you all to go to www.ddb.com/bernbach, your mind will be a little richer for it. Namaskaram.