The subconscious sell: Surrealism’s enduring impact on advertising 16 Apr 4:55 AM (yesterday, 4:55 am)
To suggest that surrealism has had a powerful effect on the discipline of advertising is a significant understatement. There is a strong argument that the movement created the defining intellectual framework for effective advertising – even if our industry prefers to play down the association.
Surrealism, emerging from the ashes of Dada, emphasises the supreme power of dreams, the necessity of overcoming rational thought, and liberation from conventional restraints – especially morality. It was codified as a distinctive movement in the Surrealist Manifesto, published by Andre Breton in 1924. Breton was heavily influenced by Freudian Psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of the subconscious. In this way we can see surrealism as an artistic rebellion against reason itself.
It is the duality between reality and surreality which surrealism wrestles with, that makes it so powerful in advertising, a discipline that works with both the conscious and subconscious mind to achieve its effect.
Of course, there is advertising that is more overtly real as well as work that is clearly surreal. Reality in advertising tends towards situations that create empathy and relatability, tapping into shared experiences and inviting viewer to see themselves in the narrative. Our recent work for EE provides a perfect example of this approach, the reality of peoples experiences shown to them in acts of raw empathy.
Pure surreality, by contrast, operates in the realm of dreams. It bypasses the conscious, rational mind and speaks directly to our hidden desires, fears, and fascinations. Today we give little attention to exactly how absurd the Cadbury’s Gorilla is, but it can only be described as a dream drawn from the subconscious, one that defies all rationality. While Alexander Orlov, the aristocratic Russian meerkat who built an insurance empire by clarifying the distinction between “Compare the Market” and “Compare the Meerkat” is pure surreality.
Beyond the purely real and exclusively surreal lies the vast body of successful work from the category mixing reality and surreality to play games with people’s expectations and cultures conventions. Even our Christmas advertising for Waitrose last year, while set the realistic environment of a family home on Christmas Day, veers off into seriality as a detective arrives on the scene to solve the mystery of a missing pudding elevating the piece into a crime drama worthy of Christie.
To suggest that advertising sometimes uses surreal imagery is to dramatically underestimate the impact of the surrealist movement on what we do for a living. Consumers understand the techniques used in much advertising like metaphor, magical transformation or simply a celebrity turning up in our local Asda, only because we are familiar with dreams. After all, we construct them in our own subconscious every single night of our lives as we hastily try to make sense of the irrationality and chaos of our world and the desires and drives we all have.
For the rationalists there is some support for the effectiveness of surreality in the concept of ‘System One’ and ‘System Two’ thinking – popularised by Daniel Kahneman. While this approach should be treated with caution by the serious marketer, the framework suggests that by the time our rational faculties have determined that gorillas don’t play drums and meerkats don’t run comparison websites, the emotional impact has already been made. This is surrealism as a tool for disarming rational scrutiny, which is helpful but far from the full story.
The real intellectual lineage for surrealism’s role in advertising is not Kahneman but Freud. The surrealists were heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the unconscious mind, repressed desires, and dream interpretation. When advertising employs surrealist techniques, it accesses parts of the mind – desires and drives – that remain hidden from conscious awareness. This recalls the controversial analysis of adveritisng by Vance Packard in “The Hidden Persuaders” and Edward Bernays’ post-war application of his uncle Freud’s theories to marketing. As the ‘father of public relations’ Bernays was not shy about his belief that people could be manipulated into behaving in advantageous ways for businesses and politicians.
For decades, advertising practitioners have been keen to distance themselves from accusations that we deliberately influence the subconscious. We’ve embraced metrics, attribution models, and performance marketing partly to present ourselves as rational business partners rather than psychological manipulators, fearing the regulatory consequences of the latter. But in this rush to rational legitimacy, have we allowed the value of what we are really capable of on behalf of our clients to be driven out of advertising? Have we diminished the recognition of advertising’s true power and therefore our ability to demand a fair value exchange from the clients we serve.
In today’s hyperrational marketing world, surrealism reminds us that advertising operates most powerfully at the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious mind. The most potent campaigns often defy logical explanation, speaking instead to something deeper and more primal within us. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that advertising’s ability to influence through the creation of surreal dreams isn’t something to be embarrassed about its our superpower. It is possibly also the reason that the TV ad – or any immersive audio visual experience – remains the most effective form of advertising ever devised, for what else can recreate the quality of a dream outside people’s minds.
Adveritsing doesn’t merely employ suurrealist techniques, increasingly I think that advertising only exists and only works because of surrealism and its ability To suggest that surrealism has had a powerful effect on the discipline of advertising is a significant understatement. There is a strong argument that the movement created the defining intellectual framework for effective advertising – even if our industry prefers to play down the association.
Surrealism, emerging from the ashes of Dada, emphasises the supreme power of dreams, the necessity of overcoming rational thought, and liberation from conventional restraints – especially morality. It was codified as a distinctive movement in the Surrealist Manifesto, published by Andre Breton in 1924. Breton was heavily influenced by Freudian Psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of the subconscious. In this way we can see surrealism as an artistic rebellion against reason itself.
It is the duality between reality and surreality which surrealism wrestles with, that makes it so powerful in advertising, a discipline that works with both the conscious and subconscious mind to achieve its effect.
Of course, there is advertising that is more overtly real as well as work that is clearly surreal. Reality in advertising tends towards situations that create empathy and relatability, tapping into shared experiences and inviting viewer to see themselves in the narrative. Our recent work for EE provides a perfect example of this approach, the reality of peoples experiences shown to them in acts of raw empathy.
Pure surreality, by contrast, operates in the realm of dreams. It bypasses the conscious, rational mind and speaks directly to our hidden desires, fears, and fascinations. Today we give little attention to exactly how absurd the Cadbury’s Gorilla is, but it can only be described as a dream drawn from the subconscious, one that defies all rationality. While Alexander Orlov, the aristocratic Russian meerkat who built an insurance empire by clarifying the distinction between “Compare the Market” and “Compare the Meerkat” is pure surreality.
Beyond the purely real and exclusively surreal lies the vast body of successful work from the category mixing reality and surreality to play games with people’s expectations and cultures conventions. Even our Christmas advertising for Waitrose last year, while set the realistic environment of a family home on Christmas Day, veers off into seriality as a detective arrives on the scene to solve the mystery of a missing pudding elevating the piece into a crime drama worthy of Christie.
In truth, to suggest that advertising sometimes uses surreal imagery is to dramatically underestimate the impact of the surrealist movement on what we do for a living. Consumers understand the techniques used in much advertising like metaphor, magical transformation or simply a celebrity turning up in our local Asda, because we are familiar with dreams. After all we construct them in our own subconscious every single night of our lives as we hastily try to make sense of the irrationality and chaos of our world and the desires and drives we all have.
For the rationalists there is some support for the effectiveness of surreality in the concept of ‘System One’ and ‘System Two’ thinking – popularised by Daniel Kahneman. While this approach should be treated with caution by the serious marketer, the framework suggests that by the time our rational faculties have determined that gorillas don’t play drums and meerkats don’t run comparison websites, the emotional impact has already been made. This is surrealism as a tool for disarming rational scrutiny, which is helpful but far from the full story.
The real intellectual lineage for surrealism’s role in advertising is not Kahneman but Freud. The surrealists were heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the unconscious mind, repressed desires, and dream interpretation. When advertising employs surrealist techniques, it accesses parts of the mind – desires and drives – that remain hidden from conscious awareness. This recalls the controversial work of Vance Packard in “The Hidden Persuaders” and Edward Bernays’ post-war application of his uncle Freud’s theories to consumer manipulation.
For decades, advertising practitioners have been keen to distance themselves from accusations that we deliberately influence the subconscious. We’ve embraced metrics, attribution models, and performance marketing partly to present ourselves as rational business partners rather than psychological manipulators, fearing the regulatory consequences of the latter. But in this rush to rational legitimacy, have we allowed the value of what we are really capable of on behalf of our clients to be driven out of advertising? Have we diminished the recognition of advertising’s true power and therefore our ability to demand a fair value exchange from the clients we serve.
In today’s hyperrational marketing world, surrealism reminds us that advertising operates most powerfully at the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious mind. The most potent campaigns often defy logical explanation, speaking instead to something deeper and more primal within us. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that advertising’s ability to influence through the creation of surreal dreams isn’t something to be embarrassed about its our superpower. It is possibly also the reason that the TV ad – or any immersive audio visual experience – remains the most effective advertising form ever devised, for what else can recreate the quality of a dream outside people’s minds.
As Breton wrote nearly a century ago, surrealism seeks to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” In the best advertising, this contradiction isn’t just resolved; it’s transformed into something more powerful than either could be alone.
The post The subconscious sell: Surrealism’s enduring impact on advertising appeared first on .
Is creativity killing us? 14 Apr 4:19 AM (3 days ago)
The most pressing issue facing advertising today is the collapse our industry’s economics. The plain fact is we are paid less and less for the value we create. There are many cunning ideas for how we solve this but I’m not sure we have adequately understood the problem. A problem that has its genesis in the day we decided creativity was no longer a product but our industry’s entire identity.
The great advertising schism of the early 1990s, which began when Saatchi & Saatchi created Zenith Media, fractured what was once a holistic industry. On the media side this division has brought real value to both media operations and clients. However, it was a disaster for the other bit of the partnership, not because of the split itself but because of what happened next.
As media agencies built out their territory with measurable metrics, performance promises, and ever larger buying points, the other half of the divide made a fateful decision: to define ourselves as ‘creative agencies’. This decision seemed innocuous at the time, perhaps even inspiring. But we in doing so we painted ourselves into a corner from which we’ve struggled to escape.
By adopting ‘creative’ as our defining characteristic rather than one of many valuable services we provide, agencies unwittingly positioned ourselves as purveyors of a commodity product. We set creativity up as the only metric we wanted to be judged by and walked away from the many ways that agencies had traditionally added value. Worse than that, ‘creative’ ceased being a standard for us all to strive towards and became the collective name for any agency that didn’t buy media – a disastrous reframing that has steadily eroded our perceived value.
This semantic shift made it remarkably easy for clients to chip away at agency compensation. After all, creativity is widely perceived as abundant and accessible – something that can be sourced cheaply from freelancers, in-house teams, production companies, or influencers. The professional and strategic application of creativity to solve business problems became lost in translation.
As a result, we’ve watched our industry’s value proposition steadily dilute. Client organisations, never trained to evaluate the commercial impact of creative thinking, find it simpler to compare creative services on a cost basis alone. How can you quantify the difference between one creative idea and another on a spreadsheet? You can’t – and therein lies our industry’s self-made trap.
The irony is painful. By proudly claiming the creative mantle, agencies unwittingly devalued the very thing we sought to elevate. And while we embraced the ‘creative industries’ label with enthusiasm, aligning ourselves with film, music, and design I’m not sure they regarded us in the same light. There wasn’t a single advertising agency present at the Creative Industries Growth Summit held in Gateshead this January by the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy.
This isn’t to suggest creativity is not valuable – quite the contrary. Genuinely innovative thinking and expression applied to business challenges creates enormous value, we know that. The problem is definitional – creative should be an adjective and not a noun.
We must reclaim creativity as a standard of excellence and not the name for an entire sector and do this as a prelude to reframing the conversation around the true value we provide – applying commercial imagination to business challenges. Commercial imagination encapsulates what the best agencies have always delivered – the ability to create new possibilities for brands, to see pathways to growth others cannot, and to transform business fortunes through imaginative and commercially grounded thinking. It acknowledges the potency of creativity while anchoring it firmly to business outcomes.
If we have any chance of prospering the first step must be to we must abandon the ‘creative agency’ label that has served so badly. Our industry doesn’t exist to produce creativity for its own sake – we exist to imagine and implement commercial transformation for the brands we serve. Only by reclaiming this broader purpose can we rebuilt respect and recognition for the value our industry creates.
The post Is creativity killing us? appeared first on .
Feral Strategy 8 Apr 10:25 AM (8 days ago)
Believe it or not adliterate has been going for twenty years. It began in March 2005 in an attempt to get some thinking out into the public domain rather than leaving it imprisoned in my mind and the agency I worked for. Since then, distributing your thinking has become far easier, and arguably there are better places to do this than a blog. But I think the fundamental ethos of the creative commons has stayed the same – let go of control to gain influence. For me that has always meant making my thinking universally available and for free. But after twenty years I am going to try something slightly different. To celebrate 20 years of adliterate I am making a book and charging you for it. It’s called Feral Strategy.
Feral Strategy crystalises my approach to brand strategy. Over three sections – Freedom, Survival and Thrive – I go through my very ideosyncratic approach, one that is less domesticated and more wild than most. It is not a text book or a step by step guide and there are no handy frameworks or processes. In fact you might find it entirely useless, because my intention is to share how I think and not what I think.
Much of the content in Feral Strategy is available free on this site and you are welcome to go and look for it. But Feral Strategy like any good book, packages all this thinking up into a short and coherent read.
The first edition of Feral Strategy is available in a cloth bound, hard back book containing 120 pages of elegant type inside a suitably blood red dust jacket. I intend to make just 100 copies available in the first edition and it will set you back £25 (or a suitable equivalent in the US, Canada, the Euro zone and Australia). I am using a print on demand platform for this production run and so the unit price is relatively high for each copy, especially as I have tried to create an artefact that is worth having on your bookshelf. Moreover I want to donate half of the profit from each book to Right to Roam, a UK charity campaiging to open up access to more of our countryside to our people – It feels a suitably feral cause. The rest I want to retain in the project for future editions. If you invest in this limited edition I can promise you that any future editions will protect its uniqueness.
I can’t give you any quotes or reviews of Feral Strategy from luminaries because you are the first readers. So any comments would be very welcome. Including any mistakes you can find which I will remove from future editions and will underscore the rarity of the copy you have.
Feral Strategy has been four years in the making, I hope you enjoy it.
You can order your copy of Feral Strategy here
The post Feral Strategy appeared first on .
Why Marketers Must Address Middle Class Challenges 19 Nov 2024 10:07 AM (4 months ago)
There is one audience every marketer is allergic too.
The middle class.
You can talk about them in the abstract, but you must never mention them by name.
To embrace the middle is to suggest that your brand is smug, satisfied, mediocre and just plain middling.
But it’s time to recognise and champion the importance of the middle class as the heart of our nation.
Because the middle class are hurting.
And this is a massive problem because they are the people virtually every business depends upon.
The less well-off may need our help and the richer may attract our fascination but the middle are the engines of our economy.
And things are getting increasingly bad for them.
Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last UK Government, may have got into hot water for saying life is tough for households earning £100,000, but this is one thing he is right about. Because life is tougher for them and everyone that grafts for their income.
That’s the PAYE employees in basic and higher tax groups who don’t have private and passive incomes, family wealth, non-dom status, tax avoidance schemes, homes in the Isle of Man or anything else that marks out the grifters from the grafters.
People that have seen their economic power eviscerated by pointless levels of growth and then had injury added to injury by inflation and then another injury in interest rate rises.
Yes inflation. If I had a pound for every time people have told me that inflation and the cost-of-living crisis is over, I’d have a lot less today than five years ago. It’s not over, not by a long chalk.
People make this mistake because we don’t understand inflation. We are a generation that has no memory of the corrosive inflation of the ‘70s. And even though we are beginning to realise how weak the pound in our digital wallet has become, I still don’t think that we really get it.
How toxic it is. How psychologically damaging it is. How enduring it is.
Inflation doesn’t ever go away.
Headline inflation eventually comes down but the damage Is done.
Prices once up will never come down. So we are paying far more for everything than we were a few years ago – about 20% more than this time in 2020. Energy costs and food prices may have come down, but the middle classes spend a lot less on these as a proportion of total income than the rest of the population.
Of course, in an inflationary economy, wages go up. But, partly because of unfounded fears that wage rises will drive inflation, they are not in line with inflation. No one that has received a pay rise has got anywhere close to keeping their income stable.
And those people that report pay rises, tell us that they are hardly getting anywhere. Because those rises either end benefits or slide them into a higher tax bracket. And this at a time when the tax burden of the middle vastly out paces the rich.
Then the double whammy is that the Bank of England has tried to control this inflation by increasing and maintaining high, interest rates.
This has crucified middle class families through their mortgages payments or rent. And all for nothing, since this round of inflation wasn’t caused by people having too much spending power, but by supply side costs like energy.
Slowly but surely the middle class is being hollowed out. Sapped of their energy, dynamism and spending power. And that should petrify every marketer.
These are the findings of the latest installment of ‘What the Fuck is Going On?’, the ongoing research programme at Saatchi & Saatchi, that dived deep into the lives and feelings of middle class people all over the four nations of the UK. It tells the story of a group of people that see work almost like a religion but can’t make it pay anymore. People that are more resilient than many but are having that resilience tested to the limits. People that are motivated by aspiration but are seeing the engine of aspiration – university – fail to deliver for them and their children. In part because of the obscene levels of debt that a university degree demands. And people for thier social contract with the establishment appears not ot be worth the paper it is written upon.
If you care about them, your brand should be doing something for them – being middle class they don’t like to complain and won’t ask for help. Because, in the words of Labi Siffre, they understand all too well that ‘There’s someone, somewhere, much worse off that you are’.
Support their aspiration, help them make more considered choices, enable their ambitions, deliver real value and support the causes that they still believe in but at less able to contribute to. And above all don’t be embarrassed to serve them.
Because make no mistake, that sound you hear is the silent scream of pain from the middle class. From your best customers. From your route to growth and that of the Nation as a whole.
You can download the short book ‘Heartland, giving voice to the British Middle Class’ here.
The post Why Marketers Must Address Middle Class Challenges appeared first on .
The UK Budget and growth – an adland view 11 Nov 2024 3:18 AM (5 months ago)
I was asked for my view on the impact of the long awaited UK Budget – the first from the new Labour Government. This is an important fiscal event in the UK becuase it sets out the tax, spend and borrowing regime for the year ahead. And while it was a couple of weeks ago, the conversation is still very much alive because this budget attempts to achieve something (namely kickstarting the lacklustre UK economy). As a result there are winners and losers. Much of the focus in adland has been on the increase in taxation on businesses like ad agencies and clients, but in a typically myopic way not on the lives of the people that actually matter – the customers of our clients. This piece attempts to put the record straight.
Good things are supposed to come to those who wait, and in the case of the Budget, the waiting was longer than it takes to watch both Dune movies back to back. We did the waiting, so is it any good?
Some acronyms like the IMF say ‘yes’, and others like the OBR say, ‘not so much’. So, let’s take an adland view of the budget.
There is only one way that this industry should judge the Chancellor’s plans: are they good for growth? Black holes need to be filled, children must be rescued from poverty, and our public services need life support. But we can only do that with a growing economy.
A lot of old nonsense is talked about growth, but it’s no use inventing new technologies, implementing innovation, hiring new staff, building new production facilities, or opening new outlets if people can’t buy what you have to offer. Indeed, as economist Steve Keen reminds us, new investment and employment are far more likely to result from businesses having more customers than having more profit.
It is people that drive growth, not products. And the secret to a prosperous economy is very simple – a lot of people with a little more money. On that measure, we should see the budget as necessary but not sufficient. Despite being described as the most dramatic economic event in recent years with tax, spending and investment all up, it’s actually rather timid.
Nothing has happened to taxes on earned income – Income tax and Employee National Insurance. There is to be no reduction on the historically high tax burden on the grafters in this country – the customers of our clients. Reducing fiscal drag will be welcomed, as tax thresholds are upgraded in line with inflation, but this only starts in 2028. As for removing the financial burden of childcare to improve productivity and early years outcomes, we have free breakfast clubs and funding for the previous government’s extension of childcare hours but no radical reshaping of how we support working parents.
Taxes on unearned income have the power to free up accumulated wealth and recycle it back into the economy to fuel growth, but we have seen very little movement here and certainly nothing close to equalising the taxation of earned and unearned income. The top rate of Capital Gains Tax rises from 20% to just 24% and there is not the slightest whiff of a proper wealth tax.
That said the increase in the minimum wage to just shy of the real living wage is incredibly significant, representing a 16% raise for younger people. There is no doubt that this will have a material effect on spending with our clients though it benefits the less well-off, who tend not to be their most valuable customers.
Public services are to get more money but not much. Health is promised £25.2bn more but at £6 per person per week this will only be enough to stop the rot from getting worse. This is a shame because spending on health is a powerful spur to the economy given it is such a large employer and better health outcomes get people back into work. Housing gets a bit, but this won’t combat the asset inflation that prices people out of better homes or homes full stop. And it’s a similar picture across many public services with an average uptick of 1.5%. Education does of course benefit a little from closing the VAT loophole on Private Schools.
Changing fiscal rules so that Capex investment is treated differently to debt used to fund operational deficits, is long overdue. This will enable direct State investment in growth categories like aerospace, life sciences and biotechnology alongside the creation of Great British Energy. This is a Government acting in a muscular way to prime industries upon which the Nation’s future depends with the benefits on employment and balance of trade that they entail.
All of which leaves the National Insurance elephant on the table – the Employer’s one. It’s hard to estimate the impact of the increase to 15% on people’s wages and employment. Employer groups and the Office of Budget Responsibility take a dim view over the mid-term. But the reality may be very different over the longer term and frankly, it’s hard to see an alternative source for such a significant chunk of revenue – £25bn over the lifetime of the forecast. This appears to have been the least bad option for the Chancellor, especially without doing more on capital gains, accumulated wealth and inheritance.
This is a budget that does offer a little hope to the customers we serve, but I suspect few people will notice much change in their income beyond those on the minimum wage. It makes careful choices and hammers public services less than we were fearing. But we are not out of the economic shit by a long way, and we will have to wait even longer to see whether this Government delivers the growth they have promised time and time again.
Image courtesy of Chris Boland
The post The UK Budget and growth – an adland view appeared first on .
Brand led business transformation 9 Jun 2024 6:38 AM (10 months ago)
Without doubt the driving force behind business transformation over the past decade has been digital. Creating new digital businesses and bringing the power of data and digital services to established organisations.
Digital business transformation (DBT) has dramatically improved the way that businesses serve their customers. Exceptional customer experiences have transformed entire categories, built new businesses and given legacy businesses new momentum.
But digitally led business transformation has its limitations. While, on the supply side, it has saved vast sums of money DBT has been poor at delivering sustained competitive advantage. Once best practice has been established, popularised and adopted every customer experience first mover is recommodified. The advantage is lost.
For a while McDonalds were the only Quick Service Restaurant to provide self-ordering screens, now everyone does. At one time Monzo had the best direct banking customer experience, now every bank is there or thereabouts.
We need to recognise that DBT has run its course, not as a powerful means of delivering new digital experiences and services. But as the driving force in business transformation.
It is time to usher in a new era of brand-led business transformation.
Brands, well-built and surgically focused offer the necessary vision and direction to build sustained advantage for organisations. That can then be delivered by every customer experience, digital or otherwise.
If this seems a bit curious, if you are confused by how something seemingly so ephemeral as a brand can perform this task, you need to question the role that your brand is playing in your business. And you probably should be wondering about the value of your Chief Marketing Officer.
We are not talking about brands as ornamental baubles that sit on the periphery of the business to lure people to a customer experience that fails to deliver. But as instrumental powerhouses that articulate with clarity the distinctive way a business will serve its customers and help it to deliver against this through every experience, every service and every journey.
If outstanding customer experiences are the goal of many businesses today, brand is the instruction manual for the nature of those experiences.
Where once brand meaning was fashioned to frame and reframe the products and services an organisation delivered to the market. Today an organisation’s products and services must be created to serve the brand and the role it is playing in people’s lives.
The rebirth of EE as the lead consumer brand for BT group is the posterchild for this new approach. Of brand led business transformation.
While the new EE offering combines the engineering and expertise of BT with the innovation and customer service of EE, it is more than a merger of two brands.
New EE has come to market with a far bigger ambition to BT and EE.
For one thing, it doesn’t exist to fight tooth and nail for market share in premium connectivity. It exists to serve more of people’s lives than its predecessors ever could.
The new EE brand exists to harness the power of technology to make the everyday better for people, regardless of traditional business vertical.
It’s this red thread to the future, through current and adjacent categories, current and growth audiences and all customer journeys that is at the heart of brand led business transformation. Rather than iterating to an unknown future it is about manifestly taking control of the destiny of the business.
Where DBT was ‘customer centric’, meaning that it has intuitive user experiences that match real purchase journeys. Brand led Business transformation is customer first meaning it always asks ‘how can we help’ before is asks ‘how can we sell’.
And while conventional brand thinking is focused on building affinity with customers, often through shared values, brand led business transformation is about establishing relevance in people’s lives through an understanding of what they need and how the brand can act on this desire.
But most importantly brand led business transformation is about imagination. It’s about the ability of the organisation to imagine a new future for itself. Freed from category orthodoxy, best practice and the tyranny of tried and tested.
There is real joy in this process. To literally free an organisation from legacy and from the settled will of the market and to give it agency and control. To enable rebirth and not simply reappraisal.
But if you are to use your brand to transform a business you need the right partners. People that can help imagine that new future. People that know that analytical thinking can only iterate not transform. People that can harness imagination and put it to work.
Sadly, our corporate business culture is not good at this. Whether that is because of the tyranny of quarterly reporting, whether it’s because of the dead hand of best practice or whether it’s MBA syllabuses that decline to value imagination, it’s in short supply in many organisations and consultancies.
Far too few businesses and business strategists can imagine their way out of a paper bag, so schooled are they in orthodoxy and category behaviours. That’s why they are far more comfortable making products and thinking about how to sell them than imagining a new future for a business and then figuring out how to honour that promise.
All this matters because of the need to find growth in low growth markets.
Fighting for a share of established markets is all too often like a land war in stalemate, with each side scrabbling for every inch, often at great expense. Looking to serve a bigger share of your customer’s lives using the power of your brand to open new audiences, new categories and new services, while repackaging existing offerings in a different light, offers the opportunity to deliver fresh growth.
And that is the power of brand led business transformation.
The post Brand led business transformation appeared first on .
I’m bored 3 Jan 2024 2:04 AM (last year)
When we were young and desperately bored as the long rainy Sunday afternoons stretched into eternity, we were told one thing about boredom by our parents.
‘Only boring people get bored’.
This is of course absolute rubbish. Being bored is a quality of the interesting, the quick and the clever. The truth is that only interesting people get bored.
And that is because interesting people tire of stimulation far more quickly than the terminally dull.
I was introduced to a business and climate leader recently with the warning that he had a terrible lack of attention and would get bored easily. Like this was a problem.
We think of boredom as an affliction. Constantly jumping from one subject to another. We call it a short attention span. In the young we blame Tik Tok.
I think of it as a superpower.
Your abject boredom means something.
Usually, it means that you simply aren’t interested in what is being said or the way it is being presented. And that means it’s probably not interesting to anyone else.
Our business depends on being interesting.
The aim of what we do is to interest people, usually our customers, so that they do something to our benefit. And I think there is cascade of interesting. If the strategy is interesting, then the brief will be interesting. If the brief is interesting, then the creative people will be interested. If the creative people are interested, then the work will be interesting. And if the work is interesting, bingo.
Your boredom is an early warning system, a canary in the coal mine, that is telling you to call a halt to proceedings and do something less boring instead.
Occasionally your boredom means something subtly different. That you are full. Or rather the subject is so interesting and engaging that your mind has gorged on it and needs time to go away and process what it has been thinking. You aren’t bored with the subject, far from it, but you don’t have any bandwidth to listen to or absorb anything else.
Your boredom is telling you to stop talking and listening and go and think. Think and do, to put into motion all the things that the conversation has sparked in your mind.
Of course, sometimes you may be bored with something that everyone else finds absolutely fascinating. This kind of boredom is telling you that you are in the wrong place completely – you need a new challenge or a new job. The advice is still to get the hell out of that meeting.
And this year I want to suggest something hugely unpalatable. That we should declare our boredom more often.
How much of our lives are spent in meetings, discussions, presentations and conversations where we are bored? Where we are either lack any interest or we are so fascinated we are full.
But we soldier on. The meeting is scheduled for an hour or three so that’s the allotted time that must be filled. We drift off, start looking at our emails, whatsapping other people in the meeting saying how bored we are or maybe ordering some more bin bags on Amazon.
It’s time to call time on this nonsense. Imagine the time you would win back if you left that hour long meeting after 42 minutes to do something else because you were clear that you were bored.
It doesn’t necessarily mean stopping the meeting in its entirety but bowing out yourself with the words, ‘I’m terribly sorry but I am now bored and I’m going to do something else’.
Or if you find that a little rude, and I struggle to think why since it’s not you who is being boring, you might say ‘I have found this conversation so interesting that I am now completely full and need to go and process it’.
Imagine how much happier you would be.
Imagine the productivity boost to you, your company and the country.
So, this year embrace boredom as a superpower. Celebrate it. Shout about it. Use it to power up your professional life.
I’m bored of writing this now.
Image courtesy of Cheryl Colan
The post I’m bored appeared first on .
We need more government not less 17 Dec 2023 9:20 AM (last year)
It doesn’t take decades of political communications expertise to know that there are significant challenges facing both main parties at the next general election.
In fact, a more telling insight into its likely outcome – a significant opportunity unique to Labour – can be gleaned from an adland adage more commonly applied to fast-moving consumer goods:
The hardest task in marketing is to grow a declining category.
It’s easy to build a business in a growing category; simply outspend the competition and ride the wave. Ask anyone making meat-free burgers.
But to turn around a category that people are deserting in droves takes marketing superpowers. The most remarkable recent example is Sipsmith Gin, who defied the collapse of the global gin market to spur not only phenomenal growth for itself, but also the revival of the whole category.
Today, Politics too is a category in decline, and currently Labour is the only party strategically and politically capable of emulating Sipsmith’s achievements.
‘Politics’ – not politicians. People have always distrusted the motivations and character of politicians, but democracy rests on the belief that government itself can be an effective force for good in people’s lives, and that is what is currently under threat.
And this is not an academic issue: we know what happened across Europe in the 1930s, and the coup belt of Africa today, when democratic governments seem impotent to protect their people.
In the UK, this decline is evidenced by six decades of dwindling voter turnout. Today, the level of voting amongst the young is so disastrously low it calls the democratic legitimacy of any government into question.
This is not because of the old trope that there is no point voting because all the parties are the same. It is because government itself seems entirely powerless as an entity.
In recent years, government has been unable to bring down inflation, stop energy price rises, secure sufficient PPE to protect nurses, stop the boats, make schools safe, cut waiting lists, prevent industrial action, stop antisocial behaviour or get a railway completed.
Government – not ‘the government’. Because while people are desperate for an end to the grinding sacrifice of the past 15 years, there is no sense that anyone believes the solution lies in a change of party in power. That’s certainly what our research at Saatchi & Saatchi is telling us.
This is a crucial difference between today and 1997. Not only were we in a far better economic position and in terms of global influence; we believed that government could change things.
And this wasn’t simply a belief in Tony Blair’s agenda and charisma. Whether you loved or hated her, Margaret Thatcher was the embodiment of effective government. On top of that, many people alive at the time remembered the ability of government to defend the nation, deliver a welfare state and expand civil rights.
In 1997 people believed that the UK Government could deliver. In 2023 they don’t believe that any government has the power to make the slightest bit of difference.
That is why ‘Politics’ is a category in decline.
And while the only avenue the Tories have left available is to scrap for votes through a deliberate strategy of divisiveness, Labour have more options.
Kier Starmer can play the same game; appealing for just enough votes to get over the line and yet again fighting for share in a declining market. Or he could fundamentally overturn the idea that government of any stripe is ineffective.
Labour could spend the next year restoring British people’s belief in the basic concept of effective government – to persuade people who might not vote at all that politics can once again make a difference.
This is a hard sell because it requires one of two things:
One is a definitively different and better product. Sipsmithachieved this by restoring artisan copper pot distilling to London, but in politics it’s easier said than done – especially with the lack of economic wiggle available to any incoming government.
The second option requires a quality that has become almost mythical in politics: humility. Labour could restore faith in politics and underline their own maturity and readiness to govern by championing real-world examples of effective government from across the political spectrum – proving that governments of all stripes can change things for the better.
In marketing this is called doing a category job.
And it’s critical because we have a new generation of potential voters whose only frame of reference is 15 years of national regression since the global financial crisis.
Rather than Labour focusing its energy and resources on stoking the Tories’ self-immolation, this strategy would see them practively celebrate the power and effectiveness of great government.
Because, while we desperately need saving from five more years of stagnation, cruelty and despair, there is a far bigger prize at hand: the restoration of effective government and, with it, faith in our democracy itself.
This article orginally appeared in the Indepedent Newspaper
The post We need more government not less appeared first on .
If you want to be right, try being wrong 29 Oct 2023 4:48 AM (last year)
The more fashionable parts of the advertising industry have always liked failure.
They go on and on about how important it is to fail. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s so great about failure.
While the more intellectual people in our business love tensions. They bang on about them all the time. ‘Where is the tension?’ they bark at you. To this day I have absolutely no idea what a tension is or how to find one. Even thinking about tensions makes me tense.
What I really understand is being wrong.
I’ve always believed that great work needs to be interesting. An interesting strategy delivered with an interesting execution. But I’m now of the opinion that the fastest route to being interesting is to be wrong.
Not totally, catastrophically, career endingly wrong. But a bit wrong. Because something in our world that is a bit wrong has always been worthy of note.
I’m no evolutionary biologist but I suspect that being alert to things that are amiss or not as they should be was one of the best ways for our ancestors to stay alive.
In other words, perhaps we are pre-programmed to pay more attention to things that are wrong than to things that are right – orange and black stripes in undergrowth for instance.
You would think that idea might be important in marketing, where we are locked in an eternal battle for attention and engagement. That we might be obsessed with the power of a strategy, idea or execution that is wrong.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case, in fact quite the opposite
As strategists, agencies and marketers we are constantly asked by our clients and organisations to be right. As right as we possibly can be. That’s why we obsess about research so much, not to find out interesting things that we really didn’t know but to try and show people that we are right. And if we aren’t, that it was the research that got it wrong not us.
Being right has a cult like status in marketing.
Of course, there are exceptions to the cult of right – work that gets it wrong, whether by accident or design. And often this tends to be the work that proves most successful in the market.
Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is profoundly wrong and has been for twenty years. ‘Right’ said women don’t want to see normal bodies in beauty advertising. ‘Wrong’ said this was nonsense and that championing real beauty would unlock sustained growth.
KFC’s work is pretty wrong too. For a fast-food brand to talk so overtly about the animal that they intensively farm and then slaughter is totally and utterly wrong. And yet fixating on the chicken, the whole chicken and nothing but the chicken seems to have brought home the bacon for the Colonel.
While British Airways now runs ads with just three bullet points and no lovely holiday photos. How wrong is that?
And the all the work of which I am most proud, from Direct Line’s Winston Wolfe to a decade of success for EE, has been really wrong. Show me a successful campaign and I’ll show you something wrong about it.
After all, who the hell sells insurance by deliberately confusing their brand name with that of a family of Russian rodents?
It’s also an incredibly simple action standard to bring to your work.
Sit down with the campaign you have today – it doesn’t matter if it’s a brief, strategy or work and ask yourself ‘what is wrong about this?’ What are we doing here that is incorrect for the brand, category or wider world. And if you can’t find something perhaps this is the right moment to put a little wrong in somewhere. Not because you fancy it but because it will be far more successful if you do.
And you will know what it is because wrong isn’t subtle.
Wrong gets questioned and often rejected as soon as you unveil it. By you, by your team by your leadership and by your client. One clue that you are onto the right kind of wrong is when the same objection is raised by every stakeholder you talk to. At that point you will know very clearly what is wrong and what must be protected.
That’s why one of the greatest qualities of client-side marketers is the ability to take an idea that’s wrong – from Cadbury’s drumming gorilla to BA’s refusal to show us pretty pictures – through every internal stakeholder and still make the work with all the commercial success that it delivers.
Because wrong only happens when agencies and clients are aligned that wrong is the right thing to do.
The post If you want to be right, try being wrong appeared first on .
I am still OK 19 Oct 2023 1:39 AM (last year)
It’s almost 12 months since I wrote about my mental health journey for the first time.
Up until then I kept it all quiet, or at least quite from the public and certainly from my employer.
The people that loved me were different. They knew exactly what was going on as they endured everything that I threw at them – bad moods, anxiety, despair, procrastination, excuses, mad theories the whole stone-cold buffet of depression.
But beyond these wonderful people it was a different story. No one could know what was happening in my head, because if they found out I’d be found out. Who wants a Chief Strategy Officer that’s wrestling with depression and thinks they are useless?
I genuinely thought that I might be fired when I first posted the piece. That clients might complain about having me on their business. And others turn on my weakness.
It’s one of the reasons I posted the piece on World Mental Health Day as surely it would be a bad corporate look to march me out of the building on a day of mindfulness and meditation.
Even though, by then I was finally on top of things.
And I am desperately glad that I did. Over the last year I have been contacted by so many beautiful people that themselves are wrestling with the way their mind works or doesn’t. It is simply one of the greatest privileges of my life to hear people’s stories. And I have been struck by the sheer quantity of hidden pain so many are enduring, while putting on a brave face and facing the day.
You need to know that you are not alone.
A lot has happened since last October. So, I thought I would update the story – in case anything about it helps you act or seek help or recognise that the thing you are experiencing is common to so many of us.
In time maybe you will share your story too and perhaps together, we can make progress in how we think about mental health, beyond giving everyone stress balls and yoga lessons on World Mental Health Day.
Since we last met
For the last 15 months I have been taking 60mgs of Duloxetine every day.
I know that its every day without fail because if I forget, I start feeling very peculiar by about 9am. I have these ‘drops’, like physical dizzy moments that only last a second or so but they kind of floor me. I call them ‘drops’ because they are like falling down a few floors and then having the fall stopped suddenly by a line or rope.
I don’t know what would happen next because I don’t let it go any further. I take my pill and grit my teeth because SSRIs, like Duloxetine, are absorbed in the intestine and it takes two hours to get there and start working.
The results of the Duloxetine are fantastic. For me it’s a wonder drug.
One app to rule them all
I monitor my mood using an app called, unsurprisingly, mood. At a set time every day it asks me how I am feeling, and I colour code the day with one of five tones of my chosen colour. You can see a snapshot in the image I have used for this post. I use red and I understand that you are supposed to code the day dark red if it’s going badly and light red if it’s going well – I guess the idea is that if its light red you are calm and measured. Not for me. I want the day to feel bright and sharp and clear and deeply fucking red. The light colour means meh to me. A meh day in which I can’t be arsed to do anything and my brain is lost in some fucking foggy bog. I want deep red every day.
The result is that I can now tell how long great and bad spells last. The odd baddish day is fine – antidepressants don’t make the rest of the shit in your life go away, just the chemical imbalance. But I watch periods of about a week like a hawk. Because I am naturally paranoid about losing the clarity and energy I have now.
The mood app shows that I have had just three bad periods in the last year and none of them lasted longer than a week. If that’s the deal, then I can live with that.
But most of the time I’m good, rarely dark red but good. It’s clear that the amazing highs at the beginning of using Duloxetine have ebbed away and of course I miss them. But they have been replaced by what I can only describe as normality.
Most of the time I now feel normal. The normal me. The actual me. The me that simply doesn’t live in a cloud believing that his brain doesn’t work.
I really understand why at this point people using medication for mental health often stop taking their drugs. After all, what’s the point now that you feel normal? I may be ‘cured’ but I rather suspect that the sheer normality of how I feel shows that the treatment is working.
Whatever happened to the snoring?
The side effects I talked about are pretty much under control.
The rash I developed in the early months turned out to be eczema – a reaction to the drugs – and a steroid cream, so potent it has a flammability warning on the side of the pack, soon knocked it into shape.
My Duloxetine dreams continue to be insane and very amusing, if a little exhausting. I really need to record them somehow.
The snoring however, that’s a different matter. It appears that the medication relaxes my throat at night, and this causes terrible snoring. That would be bad enough but with a wife that is breast feeding, with very broken sleep, it is a real issue.
After trying all sorts of remedies, I finally got a sleep test done. This led me to a device that, with some discomfort keeps my airways open by forcing my jaw forward. But that has caused a problem called TMD in which causes my jaw to be extremely painful when I bite.
Fucking hell if it’s not one thing its another.
Oh, and there is the drinking. Early on I was told by my psychiatrist not to drink while taking duloxetine. I took her at her word, but it was a bit weird because the NHS is perfectly happy for you to drink and take the drug.
So, I started experimenting with the odd single glass of wine when I was out for dinner. Things seemed to be fine. Then in Cannes this year I allowed myself a beer and a glass of wine each night – just call me Mr Fun. Finally at the agency summer party I went on a bender and had three pints.
At this point I had not been drinking in any real way for 18 months.
And the result was horrible. Straight back into a low period. This may be a classic case of correlation not causation, but it was close enough to freak me out. I stopped immediately.
I really, really want to drink a lovely welcoming glass of Haute Medoc, or frankly the fruit of any part of Bordeaux, but I have come to the conclusion that my drinking days are over.
To be clear there is no upside to this state of affairs. I no more spring out of bed in the morning than I did after half a bottle of the gorgeous stuff the night before. There is nothing I like about not drinking, except I want to avoid ‘that’ feeling at any cost.
That’s where I am at with my medication. At 60mgs it’s here for the foreseeable future, possibly forever. Originally there was talk about coming off after a year, but I have been using Duloxetine for 18 months now and I can’t see letting go any time soon. The withdrawal is supposed to be horrendous and needs to be managed, so I’m none too keen to experience that and if I had to use this drug for the rest of my life, I would be more than happy.
I’d really like to hear from anyone that has come off after a good experience of using SNRIs. Or has been using them for an extended period of time.
The therapy confusion
And while I am taking a break from therapy, it was immeasurably helpful in going beyond the immediate and unpacking a whole cupboard of self-knowledge.
To my mind therapy is the unlock for all of us. How can we possibly be expected to navigate this world when we are chronically unaware of the way and reasons we respond to it? I wouldn’t say my life has been transformed by therapy and in many ways the insight I have into myself as a result is a bit fragmented. But it’s definitely helped.
The thing is, I can never be sure how good the therapy is that I am getting. Part of me thinks that the therapist doesn’t matter, it’s up to you to do the work and if you are prepared to do this, it will happen for you.
But there are also so many different types of therapy on offer that I don’t know which one is right for me or even what variety a therapist is offering. To me therapy is like going to a restaurant and not been allowed to see the menu and when you do, not understanding what any of the dishes are.
But overall therapy has been a good experience and I’d really like to get back to it. Knowing that I am not asking it to sort out the depression but to help me understand why I get into a bad place.
A year on I really am OK
Every day I am amazed at how good I feel.
This is not a boast, it’s the total and utter pleasure that comes from not waking and having the cloud descend on you. Not briefing yourself in the shower about how shit you are. Not being desperate to get to the end of the week so the pressure in your head lifts for a bit. And not being so hard to live with.
My newfound energy and clarity have transformed my professional value. And that this has had a massive knock-on effect on my sense of worth and mental health. I am prolific in terms of both ideas and output in a way I haven’t been in many years.
I have been able to enjoy every single moment of my youngest child’s first eight months. The very few occasions I have been ‘down’ since his birth have underscored how difficult these first months would have been if I was still lost in depression.
My older boys will be the judges of whether I have showed up differently for them or not. I truly hope so.
And though I am still a deeply flawed person to love and live with, I deal with both the ups and downs of my relationship better than I have ever done. At least I can say that my family gets the best of me and not what’s left after bluffing my way through a best forgotten day.
That’s the story so far. I will let you know if anything changes – good or bad. But if you ever need to talk about your experience or issues with mental health my email is huntingtonr@me.com. I am not an expert and have no ability to advise you. Such advice as I have in my original post. But I can share what I have been through or simply listen.
I can definitely do that.
The post I am still OK appeared first on .