Most people believe that good will triumph over evil.
This optimism is a core tenet of humanity.
Indeed, it’s so ingrained that we often assume that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will be easy to tell apart – like night and day.
Sometimes this is the case; some crimes can never be justified, while some acts are universally welcomed.
However, much of our world view dictates ‘good’ from ‘evil’ on a purely subjective basis.
For example, religion will likely always remain a matter of individual opinion.
The same is true of culture.
There’s little doubt that globalisation has led to a degree of homogenisation of attitudes and behaviour, and we’ve lost much cultural variety along the way.
But this is nothing new; the Greeks and the Romans are perfect evidence that even the strongest and most influential ‘civilisations’ rise and fall.
This is because culture and ideas are subject to the same principles of evolution as biological species: only the fittest survive.
And as with biology, the key to continued survival is genetic diversity.
This means we must draw from as many influences as possible, but at the same time, ensure that we do not distill everything into a single, homogeneous result.
I was reminded of this while watching a fantastic TED talk from Dan Dennett (below).
He approaches the topic of cultural propagation from a philosophical angle, but there’s a clear relevance to advertising and planning in there too.
For me, the abiding lesson is that our individual cutural and moral perspectives are never ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Hypebeast and Today and Tomorrow have already featured this fantastic partnership between Lego and Muji, but it deserves more than a quick twitter link.
The concept is so simple that I’m sure children all over the world already have their own version.
However, there’s nothing wrong with brands celebrating existing behaviour.
The reason this partnership works so well is that it builds on the essences of both brands: Lego’s boundless creativity, and Muji’s delightful simplicity.
On a related note, take a look at this glorious anthropological study of Lego ‘nomenclature’, and this inspiring post from Russell Davies on the importance of imagination in play, communications, and the world in general.
“Rather than simply interrupting [people's] escapism, we now have greater scope to make [their] lives better.”
Today’s suggestion – to incorporate an element of CSR into everything you do – continues this logic:
If brands are to become a meaningful part of people’s lives, they need to enrich those people’s lives too.
Rationale
“Give, and you shall receive”
This applies equally well to brands as it does to people; indeed, many of the world’s great brands were born on the principle of cooperation.
Lever Brothers built the foundations of today’s Unilever on the principle of ‘doing well by doing good’.
Similarly, Cadbury created an entire social eco-system for its workforce around the company’s factory in Bournville – an approach rooted in the Quaker ideal of mutual benefit.
For some reason, this ‘considerate’ approach to business went out of fashion for many years, reaching a low point in the corporate greed of the 1980s.
However, a renewed focus on ‘Corporate Social Responsibility‘ (CSR) became popular in the 90s, and brands today cannot justify a lack of broader conscientiousness.
But CSR isn’t just a ploy to enrich the company’s annual report.
Indeed, simply throwing money at a charity can often seem more like an acknowledgment of guilt than genuine concern.
For CSR to be effective, brands must demonstrate a real commitment to driving change and helping people.
This is most effective when the area of CSR focus relates to the brand’s core purpose and expertise, and integrates with the brand’s overall marketing.
For example, while I’d applaud a petroleum brand that donated 10% of its profits to feeding the poor, I’d admire and celebrate that brand much more if they invested the same amount of money in developing ecologically balanced sources of energy that ensured a brighter future for everyone, not just their shareholders.
However, it’s often difficult to justify that kind of longer-term CSR to shareholders, who invariably demand results today (and not 30 years down the line).
The good news is that CSR is a powerful and effective way to build a successful brand – a financial benefit that even myopic shareholders can relate to.
This is because CSR has the ability to create much deeper connection and engagement than broadcast advertising ever could; by helping communities and society at large, brands can demonstrate that they’re on the side of the people, and that helps to establish a more powerful bond.
So how can brands make best use of CSR opportunities?
Other initiatives, such as Nike’s ReUse-A-Shoe Program, take the concept of CSR even further:
Benefit
Feeling good about a brand makes it much easier for people to justify choosing it over alternatives.
Furthermore, genuine CSR inspires people to talk about the brand, driving word of mouth and amplifying ROI.
Action
Identify as many relevant opportunities as you can for your brand to give something back to its communities, and assign a meaningful portion of your brand’s resource – money and effort – to delivering these contributions.
Previous posts in the ‘planning for the future‘ series
The process of identifying the most relevant and engaging times and places to deliver specific brand benefits, and the most efficient and effective ways to deliver those benefits in that context.
The first step in this evolution involves a fundamental shift in how we view brand communications.
Rather than merely promoting other forms of value delivery like products, brand communications can become a viable means to deliver benefits of their own.
Rationale
People don’t actually buy products or brands; they buy things that enable them to achieve specific aims.
As a consequence, brands that help people to achieve their aims more comprehensively are more attractive, and therefore more valuable.
Planning can help add to this value by enabling brands to create more opportunities to satisfy.
Our challenge is to turn every single interaction – including communications – into an opportunity to help people achieve their aims.
Nike already champions this approach.
It understands that people don’t buy ‘sportswear’; they buy things that enable them to participate in sporting activities.
So the brand focuses on creating more opportunities for people to enjoy those activities.
Run London is a great example, creating deeper engagement not just with the brand, but also with running:
Run London doesn’t just build engagement either: over 30,000 participants pay to take part, and the event generates more than £1million in revenue.
Given this, it’s easy to understand why Nike employs the same approach in football with Joga3, and in fitness with the Rockstar Workout.
Benefit
When everything a brand does helps people to satisfy their wants, needs, and desires, it becomes a much more valuable part of their lives.
Action
Identify the corebenefit that your brand offers, and then identify ways to deliver it through every interaction – including communications.
Planning is the process of identifying the most efficient and effective ways for brands to share the things they want with the people that matter to them most.
Until recently, that has translated into identifying the most compelling ‘big brand ideas’, and then broadcasting them to apparently homogeneous audiences through conventional mass-media.
However, this approach no longer delivers the results we need.
Contrary to the laments of the media industry, this is not because attention has become more scarce; indeed, people actually have more free time now than they used to.
The real issue is that people have more opportunities to participate in a wider variety of activities, and unsurprisingly, they are choosing to focus their attention on those activities which offer them the greatest rewards.
In place of some of the time they used to spend ‘fire gazing’ – escaping the boredom and drudgery of everyday life – people are increasingly harnessing their cognitive surplus to learn and grow.
This more varied behaviour means that ‘audiences’ are increasingly dispersed: fewer people are doing the same thing at the same time, and mass-media are increasingly less ‘mass’ as a result.
However, this actually presents more opportunities than it does problems.
Rather than simply interrupting people’s escapism, we now have greater scope to get involved and make their lives better.
But, in order to achieve this, we need to rethink our approach to brand communications.
We need to move away from planning that centres on people’s ‘media habits’, and focus instead on the things that people are trying to achieve through those habits.
In other words, we need to ask why people do what they do, not just what they do.
Once we understand people’s motivations, we’ll find it much easier to find more relevant roles for our brands:
If people want passive entertainment, how can we help with that?
If they want to learn something new, what role can we play?
If they have a challenge, how can we help them solve it?
Brand communications can evolve into a means to deliver actual value, rather than simply a means to promote otherforms of value delivery.
The benefit offered can be as simple as passive entertainment, but interactive experiences, education, and even corporate social responsibility (CSR) hold even greater potential.
In line with this evolving quest for people’s hearts and minds, planning’s role needs to evolve too, becoming
The process of identifying the most relevant and engaging times and places to deliver specific brand benefits, and the most efficient and effective ways to deliver those benefits in that context.
Over the next few days, I’ll share some ideas that can help make that future a reality.
“Not many brands ‘get’ the youth market; they’re either too in-your-face, or try too hard to be ‘down with the kids’.”
Some brands do get it right though, as demonstrated by a recent partnership between Burger King and a Singaporean fashion brand, Flesh Imp.
Flesh Imp have designed a range of items as part of the tie-up, including some great T-shirts and headwear, and have implemented some engaging in-store activity too.
The result feels very natural: a hint of self-deprecating irony from both brands builds their respective personalities by showing that neither takes itself too seriously.
Nicholas at Flesh Imp gave me a bit of background to the whole collaboration, but it’s probably easiest to let some pictures from the brand’s flickr tell the story instead:
‘King’ playing card T
T-shirts come packed in great ‘take-away’ boxes
The window dressing at the chain’s flagship store
‘King’ T close up
Have it your way…
Limited edition headwear
Here’s your order
The brand has put together a great Facebook profile that shows more of the collaboration:
[click image to enlarge]
The whole tie-up fits nicely with the global BK Studio initiative – something that Flesh Imp have helped the brand with before:
BK isn’t the only multinational brand that Flesh Imp has collaborated with though.
This clip gives a taste of some great work they produced on behalf of Coke Zero, again in Singapore:
They did a great line for the Transformers movie too:
Flesh Imp 3D Transformers T
The magic ingredient that makes all these tie-ups work is authenticity: Flesh Imp manages to find an overlap in relevance between these large brands’ positionings and its own irreverent personality.
There’s a similarity to the Adidas Originals approach:
The difference is that Flesh Imp creates success for partner brands as well as its own, connecting them with a more cynical, younger audience.
As Nicholas pointed out, how many ad agencies could achieve that kind of impact?
Marketing is similar to conducting an orchestra: our role is to bring all the different pieces of a story together into one, harmonious experience.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but this superb TED talk from Itay Talgam helped to bring those thoughts together:
Itay’s points have relevance to many areas of business, but they seem particularly pertinent to today’s world of participative brand relationships.
Let’s explore his points in a bit more depth.
Be as one
Itay begins his talk by observing that, until the conductor arrives, the orchestra is just making noise.
Some of that noise may stand out above the rest, but ultimately, the noise lacks a coherent structure.
A conductor’s role is to establish that structure:
“The conductor enables eveyone’s story to be heard at the same time.”
It’s important to remember that brands only exist in people’s minds, and their perceptions differ depending on individual experiences and context.
Some people hear different parts of our brand’s music in different ways, and those differences lead to differing perceptions and preferences.
As marketers, we need to ensure that the important instruments stand out, but also that they all come together in one, harmonious melody.
Communications should work as an ensemble
When combined effectively, a full orchestra delivers a far richer experience than any one instrument can on its own.
The same principle applies to communications channels (i.e. media): we can use the power of a ’solo’ where appropriate, but relying too heavily on just one instrument can limit your potential.
Our task is to take the beauty and power inherent in each instrument, and weave each of them together into a rich symphony.
Audience participation is a double-edged sword
The clip Itay shows of the Viennese audience clapping along to the music is a great example of audience participation.
Rather than ‘interfering’ with the performance, their contribution adds to the ’story’ and elevates the experience.
However, such participation would have ruined a rendition of Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata:
Where it’s relevant, audience participation can play a valuable part in the experience, but it’s critical to remember that it’s not always relevant.
Our task is to identify when it makes sense to harness participation, and then influence and guide it to ensure that it doesn’t become an unwelcome distraction.
Inspiration vs. control
Itay tells the story of the conductor at La Scala, who was forced to resign because he was overly commanding.
As Itay notes, trying to control with an iron fist removes the possibility of partnership – a loss that would have serious consequences in a world where participation is becoming increasingly important.
If we try too hard to command the conversations surrounding our brands, we risk suffocating them.
Instead, we need to shift our focus from control to guidance – as Itay suggests,
“Open a space for players to add in another layer of interpretation — their own.”
We can guide the conversation along a particular path, but we need to allow that conversation the freedom to evolve of its own accord as well.
Immerse yourself
Quite early on in his talk, Itay notes that:
“success comes from happiness”
I’ve mentioned this before: if you want to be the best at what you do, you’ve got to love doing it.
Most importantly, you’ve got to getinvolved.
A means vs. the end
For me, the most salient point in Itay’s talk is when he contrasts interpretation with execution.
As marketers in a social world, our role is to inspire; not to control.
That will inevitably lead to some unexpected results; sometimes, people will interpret our efforts in a way that is markedly different to what we’d intended.
However, as long as the the results are still favourable, there’s little reason to worry: there are many different routes to success, and it’s arriving at the destination that counts.
