Never get out of the boat

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

does culture really eat strategy for breakfast?

Culture, in an organisational sense, is usually interpreted as the collective behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that - when mixed together - create a particular set of norms within said organisation.

Culture within the organisation gives people direction, and makes it easier for employees to find their way at work without having to think that much and get along with other people in the organisation.

Obviously there can be 'good' culture and 'bad' culture, depending on your point of view.

There are themes that many organisations seem to share.
Uniqueness is one of those.

For the most part unique culture is really a set of generic rules.

Usually along these lines.

1. Be and think positively (this means total enthusiasm for any new idea, no matter how stupid)

2. Embrace change (but never ask why?)

3. Never criticise the work of others (see point 1)

4. Only look forward, never back (see point 1, again)

However, within those companies where culture is said to eat strategy for breakfast, it is reported that this clear set of shared values and norms actually shapes the way a company operates and is a fundamental driver of the financial success of the business.

A picture of this kind of strong culture features passionate, empowered employees, deeply engaged.

High performing teams, trusting each other, communicating authentically and powering the business towards financial growth and reaching new heights of innovation.

And it all sounds plausible, especially when the usual suspects are presented as case in point.

Zappos, Google, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks are among the most frequently mentioned.

They have dynamic, engaged leaders, organic and vibrant self directed employees, empowered to take risks and fail-fast while truly caring about making a difference in the world. Etc etc.

It certainly seems plausible that culture does, indeed, eat strategy for breakfast*.

[*The quote itself is attributed to Peter Drucker, though there's no evidence he ever said it - other than the anecdotal evidence of Mark Fields from Ford Motor Company, who attributed it to Drucker in a 2006 speech. In any case Peter Drucker is on record noting that culture is hard to change, therefore it's sensible to try and work with whatever you’ve got].

So the fashionable idea is that within these kind of environments the sheer force of strong culture wills the organisation to success. Poor old strategy is relegated to a mere administrative function.

My fear is that the 'breakfast' quote has been skunk-ified and it's proponents are somewhat culpable of mistaking story-telling for fact.

I recently participated on the jury in an advertising awards show. One of my categories to judge was the 'agency of the year' prize. Around 7 or 8 finalists gave their presentations to the jury, each of them presented a section that outlined their respective 'unique values'.

You guessed it, all of the agencies unique values were practically identical. You could probably reel them off yourself right now, with no prompting. All bar one, I should add.

The agency in question presented no values at all, however did present a set of behaviours. Had it been down to me only they would have won the category. As it goes, they came second but that deviation from convention stuck with me.

Anyway, this interpretation of 'breakfast' is like a halo effect - a perception of one quality is contaminated by a more readily available quality. For example because Kanye West is a successful pop-rapper he must therefore know something about the advertising business and should be allowed to lecture us from Cannes.

In his book The Halo Effect Phil Rosenzweig describes (among nine distinct business delusions) the delusion of the wrong end of the stick.

The wrong end of the stick being a halo effect that tricks us into getting causes the wrong way round.

Is it that companies with a strong culture perform better?

Or is it companies with clear goals and strategies to achieve those goals (to paraphrase Rumelt; companies that are doing the work to uncover the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors) are the high performing or growing companies that tend to get a better culture?

Yes, culture can eat strategy for breakfast but if theres no strategy on the breakfast table then culture will get pretty hungry and grumpy.

Does this sound conservative to you?

Well, the 'breakfast' lobby does appear to be the voice of the new digital business.

Purpose before profit right?

It's the sharing economy, that 'could just save the least advantaged from ravages of capitalism' according to poster child and 'culture driven' TPG private equity funded Airbnb.

Where presumably culture is eating strategy for breakfast.

Rushkoff puts it this way.

'[Silicon Valley start-ups] claiming to be saving the world, when they’re really just the latest generation of desperate yuppies chasing capital and,in turn, reinforcing Wall Street’s monopoly over our society. Digital business is revolutionary only in the way it camouflages business as usual.'

For those of us in advertising, rather than simply selling a respectable service we can pretend that we are doing something much more grandiose.

If business is really going to contribute to a better world then we're best advised to focus on providing better strategy for culture to eat.

the bitterest pill

By three methods we may learn wisdom:

First, by reflection, which is noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is easiest;

and

Third, by experience, which is the most bitter.

- Confucius

Thursday, June 26, 2014

do it clean

Fellow behavioural enthusiasts will no doubt be familiar with the Fogg Behaviour model.

Just in case you're not, it was developed by BJ Fogg founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

Amongst other accolades his model was selected by the World Economic Forum as their framework for health behaviour change in 2011.

At its core the model describes how three elements must come together at about the same time in order for a behaviour to occur: motivation, ability and a trigger.

Therefore the propensity for a behaviour to happen increases dramatically when one is highly motivated to attempt the behaviour (either as an individual or in a social context) and it's an easy behaviour to actually do.

With that in mid we were delighted with this simple behavioural design innovation that would go some way to solving a common problem in hospitals.

Apparently about 1 in 20 patients in U.S. hospitals get some form of unnecessary infection during their stay in hospital, adding re-treatment costs of up to $40bn every year.

There's even an acronym for it - HAI (Hospital Acquired Infection) - MRSA is probably one of the more salient nasty examples.

A lot of this problem can be attributed to the spread of infection from hands that are not properly clean. Even with the best intentions it is reported that doctors and nurses only sanitise about half the time.

The common solution - wall mounted hand-sanitiser dispensers at entries and exits - are proving to be less effective than it was hoped.

With other, more pressing things on their mind, staff, patients and visitors simply forget to use them, or do not notice them.

So what’s the solution?

Make it automatic, make it easy.

How about combining the behaviour of sanitising with a behaviour hospital workers do every day?

Like opening doors (trigger).

Pull Clean has been developed by London studio The Agency of Design and was brought to our attention via the OgilvyChange newsletter.

Which leads us to our second medical facility design problem, and perhaps this prototype - developed for Nanjing hospital, capital of Jiangsu province in China to aid the extraction of sperm from infertility patients - by way of contrast, fails the behavioural design model test somewhat.

Designed for patients for whom the the old-fashioned method of letting-loose-the-juice was difficult we're inclined to think that only the more adventurous patients will have sufficient motivation to give this a go - bearing in mind that the environment in which a behaviour is expected to occur contributes significantly to both the motivation and ability of the subject to perform - and how this is easier than the manual method is difficult to fathom.

Perhaps some of the same behavioural design thinking that went into PullClean could improve this other pull problem?

Friday, May 23, 2014

why the 'sharing' economy is 'keeping up with the joneses'

For an explanation of the current infatuation with the so-called 'sharing economy' then it's worth considering some of the ideas of Thorstein Veblen outlined in 'The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions'.

Published in 1899 it's a detailed social critique of 'conspicuous consumption', as a function of social-class consumerism.

Veblen was probably one of the great grandfathers of behavioural economics.

His view of people was generally one of 'irrational creatures who relentlessly pursue social status with little regard to their own happiness'.

This was clearly counter to the dominant classical economic theory.

When Veblen describes nineteenth-century aristocrats as spending their 'leisure' time fox hunting or learning obscure languages he says; that in order to be successful (as a signal), the signs of this conspicuous display needed to portray themselves as at least superficially useful or socially beneficial.

That is, it needs to pretend to be something other than what it really is.

Eg: fox hunting as some sort of duty to protect the livelihoods of serfs/farmers.
The learning of obscure languages is probably the 19thC equivalent of our reading of self-help books.

Perhaps compare these 19th century aristo behaviours with some of today’s celebrities.

Bono has accrued considerable wealth but - as he is not likely to trouble the pop charts again and therefore bugger-all to do all day - turning up at the UN to save the world is helping to resolve some sort of cognitive dissonance around leisure and privilege.

Don't even get me started on royals.

The language of this sharing (or collaborative) economy manifests in terms like 'empowered people', 'co-creation', 'peers' and 'crowdfunding', yet this movement's poster child - AirBnB - closed its latest round of funding with an injection of $500 million, led by private equity firm TPG.

Because these imagined socially beneficial properties of the so-called collaborative economy serve to solve a cognitive dissonance for buyers of those services.

It disguises the real motivation - which is, of course, status-seeking.

In other words, it’s marketing.

The idea of a 'sharing economy' is simply an extension of our culture's other dominant marketing idea - conspicuous authenticity.

When the big supermarkets joined in the ‘organic’ game a few years back one would have imagined that those who truly believed in the benefits of organic produce would have welcomed this as a good thing.

Now that ordinary shoppers could have access to organic produce then surely that would mean we would all have the opportunity to eat healthier and live in a better environment, right?

But the more organic became available to the mass of ordinary consumers, the less it is serves as a source of distinction for the status seekers.

Hence the original organic brigade moved on to ‘local diet’ as the next logical step. Then when that caught-on then ‘artisanal’ became the next expression of more-authentic-than-thou. (8 dollar toast, anyone?)

In ‘The Authenticity Hoax’, author Andrew Potter describes a ‘basic fusion of the two ideals of the privately beneficial and the morally praiseworthy’ as the ‘bait-and switch’ (or cognitive dissonance) at the heart of ‘the authenticity hoax.’

‘This desire for the personal and the public to align explains why so much of what passes for authentic living has a do-gooder spin to it. Yet the essentially status-oriented nature of the activity always reveals itself eventually.‘

This same bait and switch is at the very core of the collaborative economy.

Which is fine, as long as we recognise this.

The collaborative economy is no revolution. It is ordinary consumerism, built on the same economic system and appealing to the same ‘irrational creatures who relentlessly pursue social status with little regard to their own happiness’ as described by Veblen in 1899.

The the collaborative economy is pure marketing of a kind of fake authenticity that solves a cognitive dissonance problem for status-seeking consumers – their (pseudo) anti-consumerism hipster beliefs clash with their regular consumerist behaviours, so using the likes of Airbnb or LeftoverSwap allows them to tell themselves a story about authentic living with a do-gooder spin.

To paraphrase Potter, we live in the world of bullshit, but as long as you know it is bullshit, and as long as they know that you know it is bullshit, then it's a game we can all play.

As the bottom inevitably fell out of social media marketing as a thing a whole slew of social media analysts and such like have had to move on somewhere in order to dodge the rubble falling down around them.

A new shiny object was required.

Enter stage right; the sharing economy. But don’t go lighting the campfires and singing Kumbaya just yet.

The sharing economy is simply the new keeping up with the Joneses and the good old branding and consumer capitalism that we advertisers love.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

acausal connecting principles in the swing era

The pop stars of big-band years, the period from the mid-30's to mid 40's and often described as the 'swing era', were the band leaders.

These were usually virtuoso instrumentalists and 'conductors' of sorts.

Yer Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey among some of the most well known.

For the most part the singers in the big bands had to make do with being of secondary importance to the band leaders.

For example, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra’s vocal chores were handled some semi-anonymous young fella by the name of Frank Sinatra.

The natural order of things was disrupted, however, in part due to a somewhat random event.

A strike in 1942 by the US musicians’ union, in a dispute over royalty payments led to a temporary stop on any new recordings being made, as union musicians halted recording for any record company.

Live performances were still permitted, but this posed problems for both the radio stations (who had only just got their heads around playing records in the first place) and, of course, the record companies themselves.

Among the workarounds that the radio dj's employed were importing new records from outside the US, and staging a wholesale revival of pre-40s recordings.

Things were not so simple for the record companies, however.

For a start, early developments in the emerging and popular new jazz style known later as bebop - being honed by the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - were never properly recorded. We can still lament this today.

Around the same time as the strike Frank Sinatra was becoming one of the first vocalists to emerge in their own right and had signed a solo deal with Columbia Records. Columbia wanted to get Sinatra product out as fast as possible, so, to get round the no-musicians rule, Sinatra suggested that they hire master arranger Alec Wilder and vocal group the Bobby Tucker Singers as back up.

Very soon the rest of the industry noticed that the musicians strike didn’t apply to the singers in the band.

The MU just represented players of instruments so the labels quickly put together vocal only groups featuring the big band back up singers - mimicking instrumental arrangements acapella - and the main vocalists pushed up front.

Not only was a new genre born but when the strike ended the market had moved on and those other vocalists who had previously had to stand in the shadow the band leaders were following Frank's lead and becoming the new stars.

While this flip would have probably happened anyway it's not much of a stretch to speculate that the situation perhaps brought the singers' day forward somewhat.

It's best described as a synchronicity - a ‘meaningful' coincidence.

A sequence of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect but are still connected.

And an example of a swift and nifty bit of innovation (by copying) in the face of necessity on behalf of the record industry.
And set the tone for all manner of Elvisness and James Brown et al to come.

The story of how the record industry were slow to recognise how digital distribution etc would impact their business model, and the consequences that followed, is well documented.

But its worth noting that, frankly, this was not always the way.

Monday, May 12, 2014

there’s the first ad

Every agency I have worked with has used their own template variant of what we call the creative brief.

Some will mandate adherence to a specific template more than others.

Either way, the creatives receiving said brief are somewhat more uniform in their response.

They generally give a cursory glance to everything else and jump straight to the proposition/point of view/key idea section (whatever you want to call it).

On more than one occasion, and with different creative directors, it's been pointed out to me that the brief I have provided contained the same problem for them - namely the proposition.

As a 'former' creative that then shuffled over to the other (planner) side my tendency is still to describe the proposition/point of view as though it were a line or an ad idea, and it is written as such.

For some creatives this was not a popular approach.

Their argument being that they now have to work backwards to go forwards, dismantling this 'creative' proposition back into something non-idea-ish, in order to then take it forward into a legitimate creative idea.

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose.

Another way is to adopt the approach of John Hegarty - creative legend and the H in BBH.

We are re-reading John Steel's Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning at the moment and in one chapter Steel reports on how Hegarty, too, headed straight for the proposition and similarly looked for a very simple, singleminded idea.

But Hegarty's next habit is described as this.

'[Hegarty would] take that one sentence and write it on a large piece of paper, above or below a picture of the product, almost as if the line from the brief were a headline.

Then he would pin it up above his desk and ask himself first whether the juxtaposition of that line and that product made some rational sense, and second, whether it also started to suggest something interesting on an emotional level'.

If there was something interesting there then...

'There’s the first ad in the campaign. It’s my job to create something better.'

That's endorsement enough for me to continue to write the brief as the ad for the ad.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

carpenters law

Measure twice. Cut once.

how branding actually works

“If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman.
All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.”

― Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

Similarly it's not the brand that chooses the customer.
This is the great myth of 'targeting'.
All that brands can do is give customers an opportunity to choose them.

Friday, April 18, 2014

future islands

After two weeks or so on heavy rotation on the office record player, this tune had began to worm it's way in to my brain.

On audio response only I was compelled to jump onto itunes and buy.

However the office music controllers instructed me that to find their Letterman performance on You Tube should be the first step.

Now I know why.

First time through is a bit strange, then about 5 repeat plays is the required dose, after that you are hooked.

Brilliant.

Whatever this is about. I BELIEVE him.

At the end, Letterman exclaims 'How about that? I'll take all of that you've got!'.

Yep.

Friday, April 11, 2014

never trust a hippy

The following is a short response to an article which appeared in Marketing magazine UK this week entitled 'Why does Ben & Jerry's have such loyal customers?'.

In the article, essentially a promo piece for his book 'Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry's', the author Brad Edmondson asserts that the people who buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream are intensely devoted to the brand and this single factor explains the success of the company.

Among some of Edmondson's other claims is one that states that the company’s liberal political stance (vocalising support for things like same-sex marriage and the occupy movement) make lots of people angry, particularly conservatives.

However this is ok because the company doesn’t sell ice cream to conservatives.

Their customers are only affluent, middle-aged, and urban liberals, apparently.

And intensely devoted.

And what's more, when I queried this point to the author on Twitter, pointing out to him that Ben and Jerry's sales patterns will in all likelihood conform to the same patterns as any other fmcg type brand - ie the vast majority of it's sales over a year will come from people who buy the product only once or twice in that period - he responded with the following:

@eaonp @MarketingUK B&J's success comes from connecting to a passionate segment. "The vast majority" is not their concern.
— Brad Edmondson (@BradEdmondson1) April 10, 2014

'B&J's success comes from connecting to a passionate segment. "The vast majority" is not their concern.'

The article is, as you will have gathered by now, utter delusional nonsense if viewed as any sort of real-life marketing case in point.

One suspects the entire book is much more of the same. Probably more intensely devotional.

But, as a piece of brand marketing collateral a bit of myth-building is never a bad thing, so fair play on that one.

What interests me more is 'why' this sort of myth building is important to Ben and Jerry's, and who, exactly, is the audience for the myth.

The first clue is when considering the the B&J story within the frame of the classic counter-culture to sell-out journey.

Very short version.

In 1978 Ben and Jerry, a couple of slightly out of date diet-hippies have an ahead-of-their-time-idea and set up an 'artisanal' ice cream shop in Vermont.

The Ice cream parlour gets popular locally, in no short measure due to the quirky distinctiveness of our two protagonists, a quirky distinctive product and the brand they had begun to build.

Before you know it they are beginning to establish a distribution network among grocery stores and supermarkets.

This draws the attention of media and marketing commentators, some national media coverage hails their product as the best of it's kind in the country, which leads to more distribution and more rapid growth.

However now, our heroes are faced with a sell-out conundrum.

Quite quickly this thing has turned into a pretty viable big-bucks business drawing lots of interest from 'the man' in various guises, and the lure of national distribution and even bigger profits.

Because, as the chaps are now starting to realise, this is the engine of capitalism.

And they are bang in the middle of it.

Every new anti-establishment approach business or thing that starts off as some sort of alternative to the mainstream - more artisanal, authentic or rebellious - eventually gets acquired or incorporated by the establishment and resold back - often completely intact - to the mass market looking for things to consume that signal their alternative status to others.

[One way of describing this I've heard is that act of attempting to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture that the next wave of counter-culture will want to counter.

That other counter-culture to captain of industry, Steve Jobs got over this very quickly. Despite his hippie roots Jobs had no problem at all accepting the natural laws of capitalism]

Indeed, the man does come calling, chequebook in hand, and B&J ink a deal in 1986 for distribution by Dreyers (a Nestle company), within two years they have also a national chain of 'scoop shops' and are picking up Businessmen of Year accolades from none other than that other old counter-culture hippy Ronald Reagan.

Shortly before signing with Dreyers, a swift hippy realignment is established, as the company sets up a foundation and directs a portion of pre-tax profits each year into grants which 'grass-roots' community projects can apply for.

In the 90's however the tide has turned, B&Js is in decline and not profitable for a period.

Seems that the hippy ethical business spurt was a bit of a blip. Something has to change.

It seems that in the cold light of day, far from being the main driver of growth, the company’s social mission was a luxury it could no longer afford.

Despite this in the the mid-90's B&J's is still a $200 million dollar business, but reality bites, the firm is unprofitable so a new shareholder value and growth specialist CEO is appointed, and he engineers the sale to Unilever.

The counter-culture to corporate sell-out cycle is complete.

And the company is now faced with sort of collective cognitive dissonance.

This little hippy company that set out it's stall against the mainstream has got bigger and bigger and become the mainstream. Not only that, it's new master is Unilever.

Unilever, the world's third-largest consumer goods company, subject to the ire of Greenpeace on the issues of deforestation and unsustainable palm oil while also allegedly responsible for up to 4% of global green house gas emissions.

Like Joe Strummer said in Death or Glory (in belated acceptance of his own dissonance, The Clash having being accused of sell-out on the day they signed with CBS/Sony)-

'I believe in this, and it's been tested by research...he who f*cks nuns, will later join the church'.

With Unilever as your new boss, what's a hippy to do?

Let's briefly return to Edmondson's article again.

The author skirts close to the truth when he asks...

'Why does Unilever, the second-largest food company in the world, allow one of its wholly owned subsidiaries to embrace radical street protestors and take other positions that it knows will piss off millions of potential buyers of Unilever products?'

The simple answer is that Unilever knows very well that the hundreds of millions of buyers of Unilever brands have no idea that they are buying Unilever brands, are not even vaguely interested in whether they are Unilever brands or not, and the embracing of radical street protests or whatever of Ben and Jerry's is of little or no interest to the vast majority of the buyers of that particular brand.

Because Unilever knows that the so-called counter-culture is actually the engine of capitalism.

For Unilever to continually find new companies to buy, and therefore continue to oil the machine, these companies have to come from somewhere.

He goes on...

'Again, it goes back to the independent board. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield did not want to sell their company in 2000. They agreed to do it only after Unilever signed a contract that created the board, which exists in perpetuity.'

Presumably the three hundred million dollars was also a factor.

'In addition to protecting product quality, this board also has the legal power to ensure that the company’s investment in edgy political causes continues, and that their spending on social mission activities grows with Ben & Jerry’s sales.'

Well, we all love to believe a good story.

Indeed, the stories we believe the most are the ones we tell ourselves.

For Ben and Jerry's idealist hippy roots the dream is never over.

The story of the global brand that grew by staying true to it's values, never really sold-out and connected emotionally to it's intensely devoted loyal fans.

This makes for a great feelgood story inside the company to resolve the INEVITABLE inner conflict that comes with any sell-out.

And it's fantastic that Ben and Jerry's do these things for their local community, at a grass-roots level. I'm sure we all applaud.

But none of these things have anything to do with why they are one of the most recognisable brands in the supermarket.

But the 'devoted loyalty' story should not be be presented or viewed as some sort of marketing how-to, and the slavish retweeting and sharing but the kum-bya brigade does not lend any credibility to the idea whatsoever.

For a brand that has 40% of the US luxury ice cream market to be sustained by the small group of devoted ultra loyal superfans would mean that these fans would likely to be somewhat on the overweight side given the amount of product they would need to consume.

This is not, in any way, how brands get built.

The real story of the success of Ben and Jerry's is somewhat more straightforward and explainable by universal laws of marketing.

Ben and Jerrys, over time has become a highly distinctive brand, easily noticed and remembered, with great distribution that's easy to buy for lots of different types of people.

Yes, they have some very loyal buyers.

But not proportionately any more than any other brand. It's the same for everyone.

And in the ice cream category heavy buyers will be literally heavy buyers as the probably consume an equal amount of Haagen-Daaz too.

Edmondson's story might make an entertaining book, but at its root it's fiction.

Most of Ben and Jerry's customers only buy the brand very infrequently. But there are millions of these buyers.

This is how they got big.

And for the vast majority of these customers Ben and Jerry's social mission is of no interest whatsoever and has no impact whatsoever on their purchasing behaviour.

I'll leave you with Edmondson's sign-off line.

If I said this in the boardroom of any of my clients I would not be in a position to complain if they chucked me straight out the window.

. 'It’s much harder to run a mission-driven company than it is to run one that is simply devoted to making a profit.'

Thursday, April 10, 2014

a couple of observations on 'f*ck the poor'

I've been intrigued by this 'social experiment' conducted by Publicis in London on behalf of The Pilion Trust, a charity which supports people living in poverty and the homeless.

The premise being a public intervention that challenges people's behaviour and attitude towards 'the poor' and possibly also around charity street collections in general.

The basic idea is - on the surface - reasonably clever from a behavioural standpoint.

Problem. It's very easy for people to ignore calls for charity donations in the street.

However by calling people's self image as caring types into question - the 'collector' wears a sandwich board proclaiming 'f*ck the poor' - bystanders are jolted into action.

Our old favourite cognitive dissonance comes into play.

Because our self-image as caring citizens is not always matched by our actual behaviour.

Until it is provoked by a point of view that contradicts how we see ourselves.

Later, we see the collector with the sign flipped to read 'Help the poor' as he asks for donations. Of course, this time people ignored him.

While the experiment does prove the point about human nature, to an extent, it's been roundly panned by the ad commentators as gratuitous creative award-bait.

From a marketing standpoint I'd possibly argue that it's not necessarily worthy of advertising awards either.

Principally because of the absence of two factors.

While the confrontational nature of the piece means it's salience factor is indisputable.

I would be hard not to notice.

However at no point does the 'collector' appear actually attempt to collect.

What a missed opportunity to convert the attention into a dollar (or pound)!

Coming back to cognitive dissonance.

When confronted with that disconnect between their actual behaviour and their self image people would be almost guaranteed to make a donation in order to re-align.

But they are never asked.

Secondly, the complete absence of any branding whatsoever (even after the bystanders are moved into action) does not make it easy for them to donate - the guy does not appear to represent any organisation, he's just some random nutter.

Without the frame of a brand it's going to be very hard for our befuddled shoppers to have a reason to 'buy' and - more importantly - for the Pilion Trust they get no benefit, in a brand sense (or donations) from the activity.

Sure, the clip has gathered up a significant number of YouTube views but, of course, the evidence to support how this regularly and predictably converts into donations is thin on the ground.

I only say this because it's disappointing to see good creative ideas, grounded in truth that fall over in execution through a lack of some basic marketing chops.

The fatal flaw being in it's own dissonance.

It's a behavioural intervention ('new' paradigm) in one active arena that has been constructed in order to attempt (old paradigm) to change the 'attitudes' of spectators in another - passive - arena.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

the golden age of bullshit - advertising week 2014 keynote with the great Bob Hoffman

This entertaining and correct 30 minutes or so with Bob Hoffman - aka the ad contrarian - is the absolute dog's bollocks.

The talk is a recording of his guest lecture at Advertising Week in London just the other week. The material will be reasonably familiar to those who read him on a regular basis but to have the man himself deliver it, and all his key themes in one chunk is a treat.

And he swears quite well, for an American.

As someone who, for a long time - and up until perhaps 2 or 3 years ago when I called time on it - displayed many of the traits of the bullshitters that Bob calls out with evidence, there is a certain relief at having come out the other side of that social media marketing kool-aid party intact, and a good deal wiser.

Bob's lecture title is very similar to one I had planned to use for a guest lecture that I'm doing next week for some students in Melbourne - 'You can't Shit a Shitter' - which I have now relpaced with something else.

I'm hoping to record the lecture and will post on here if I do.

Here's hoping that Bob's vitriol also inspires some new writing round these parts, it's been a bit quiet of late.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

this is a generic brand video

So, this film should give ad people a wry smile.

Particularly when viewed in the context of the whole 'humanisation' of brands lobby that won't seem to go away.

Though knowing that it is indeed a real ad for the company that sells the stock footage used, did leave me somewhat perplexed about what exactly is being communicated.

Maybe I'm over-thinking it.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

come on feel the salience

Whether or not this nugget from Slade guitarist Dave Hill is actually true or not is besides the point.

The way he thought about it is correct.

In their 70's heyday Slade were on UK TV's 'Top of the Pops' every other week.

Each new release would gain a high week one chart entry due to sales coming from the group's large fan base. In fact, it was not unusual for the group to debut at number one or two.

In the early 70's this phenomenon was much more unusual than it is today.

As radio was the predominant distribution channel for hearing new music, songs could take several weeks to build momentum as they gradually got heard by the broader population.

What Slade understood was that in order to sell beyond the fanbase it was important to stand out and get noticed by the less committed music fans, who bought what was popular. 'Top of the Pops' was that opportunity.

In the early 70'S it was the one half hour in the week, on a Thursday night, when the entire nation tuned in to see what the top songs were.

Slade's Dave became known for his outrageous outfits and huge platform boots.

Indeed, Slade once had to cancel a tour after Dave broke a leg after falling off of his boots, such was the height. While a bit of an inconvenience, this tale merely added to the legend.

Anyway, in an old BBC documentary I stumbled on concerning these 'glam' years Dave recalls how he would road-test particular outfits by wearing them while walking round the local Woolworths in his home town of Walsall (a working class industrial town near Birmingham in the English West Midlands).

The outfits that drew the most extreme response from the local shoppers were the one's he wore on TV.

Salience.

Getting noticed, standing out and being memorable.

Adding to Slade's set of associated brand elements that them super easy to recognise (and buy) - even for those with very little 'brand' knowledge - alongside Noddy's mirror top hat and shouty voice, the deliberate disfluency of mis-spelled song titles (Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me etc) and boot stomping accompaniment (even the ballads!).

(It's probably no accident that Slade's eventual decline began around 1976 when they returned to the UK following and long US tour having dropped the Black Country Glam boot-boys look for a more studious laid back Californian soft rocker vibe).

While Dave never wrote any of Slade's hits in their superstardom 73/74 era he is reported to have remarked to principal songwriters Noddy and Jim.

'You write 'em, I'll sell 'em'.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

love action for Peter Pawlett, baby.

With any rule or set of rules there can be exceptions or anomalies.

A social media manager recently presented conclusive proof to us that Facebook sells product.

Sales data over a four week period on a particular item had remained steady until the item was a featured post on the brands Facebook page, then et voila a 30% spike in sales occurred.

Conclusive proof, right?

Not really. We all know now that a brand's Facebook following is made up of mostly its heaviest and most 'loyal' buyers, albeit a tiny fraction of its total customer base.

In all likelihood the vast majority of these 'extra sales' were merely sales 'brought forward', that would have happened anyway. The measure and value of Facebook pages being their ability (or not) to spread a message and bring in new or lighter customers and increasing penetration.

Historically Facebook has never been very good at that, and by all accounts the algorithm changes (much reported by geeky types elsewhere, so no need for my ham-fisted interpretation) now mean a significant acceleration of its transformation from a social network into an ad network as organic reach becomes less and less likely for most brands.

However, one should always expect the unexpected.

While fans of a brand page are among its heaviest and most loyal buyers, what happens when that group generates momentum around the product of another brand, in a completely different category, where there is very little cross pollination of customers?

80's synth weirdos turned popsters, The Human League, woke up this week to find that their 1981 chart topper 'Don't You Want Me' has had a mysterious revival in interest and (at the time of writing) is sitting pretty at number 13 in the iTunes chart having not troubled said charts for 35 years or so.

The principal driver of the revival has been a collective campaign to 'bum rush the charts' (yep, it never gets old) by football supporters on Facebook, to push the song to number one.

Why is this so?

An interpretation of the song has been adopted and sung by the fans of (my beloved) Aberdeen Football Club throughout this season.

The latest highpoint of said season was the League (no pun intended) Cup triumph last weekend, when Aberdeen edged it on penalties in a semi-local derby against Inverness Thistle at Parkhead (renamed for the day as ParkRed, again a fan-driven modification in recognition of the fact that 90% of the 50k match tickets were held by Aberdeen supporters).

The phone video clip below will reveal all.

The latest in a long tradition of pop songs adapted with football lyrics, Dont You Want Me is replaced with the name of star Aberdeen attacking midfielder Peter Pawlett. Hence 'Peter Pawlett, Baby'.

(As another aside, one of my favourites of this nature is sung by Chelsea fans to visiting Liverpool fans. To the tune of the famous 'Do They Know it's Christmas' charity song, Chelsea's version goes 'Feed the Scousers...'. Also worth noting that Aberdeen have some form in this terrace meme department having invented the 'ten men went to mow' thing, later adopted - with somewhat less gusto - by Chelsea)

What examples like you see in the clip also clearly demonstrate is that social influence is less the 'hub-and-spoke' model as the common Gladwellian 'influentials' notion suggests - ie a small group of influencers directing the many - but much a more fluid and mutual influence, all happening at once. It's much more akin to what Mark Earls describes as the behaviour of the 'influenced' (and their perspective) counting for more than that of the 'influencer'.

For those in the crowd who may have not known what was going on they could quite easily get it because of what they see ordinary others around them doing, in the moment.

Then following that mutual influence there's a further action available, Buy the song.

So, yes, Facebook can sell.

Just not in the way we think (or perhaps would prefer).

And what we, as marketers, can learn and apply is probably something like this.

Understand that it is impossible to try to predict random events. Instead, it is essential to make peace with uncertainty, randomness and volatility (as Taleb would say).

This is, in effect, the essence of the 'real-time marketing' opportunity.

Not the one where every brand in the world huddles round the Oscars or such-like waiting for the thing to comment on.

The one that, when it comes along, the smart brand takes it.

Certainly for The Human League a chance to capitalise on some unexpected newsworthy-ness among a public (many of whom will never have heard of Phil Oakey and gang, and many who had forgotten) getting acquainted and reacquainted with the brand - it's all about those associated memory structures, after all.

And for Aberdeen FC a fan driven vehicle to further attract the 'light users' that are critical to brand growth.

40,000 supporters made the trek to Glasgow for the cup final, whereas the average attendance at home matches is closer to 10 or 12,000.

There's a huge market of lapsed or infrequent customers who can, and should be nudged to buying a little bit more.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

a note on brand frames and anchoring

In the clip above, Aussie discount retailer Best&Less hosted a pop up store in a Sydney shopping mall.

However, ‘The L&B Experiment’, was designed to look like more a boutique fashion store (with the, naturally, hefty boutique-y price tags). The twist being that the clothes for sale were all regular cheapo Best&Less products.

The 'real' price was revealed at the point of payment, around a third of the actual ticket price.

The happy shoppers were, of course, delighted to discover this.

But it's worth remembering what we know about brands as frames.

The amount that we are prepared to pay over and above the objective value of any product is usually equal to the value of the frame that the brand provides at the moment of purchase.

This why we have brands. It makes buying easier.

Framing operates implicitly, hence the shoppers in the clip are not aware of its influence.

Therefore, while the percieved value of the product is greater in the context of this 'designer' store, what happens when the products return to their natural habitat? The Best&Less store.

When returned to their original 'frame' does their percieved value change back to what it was in its original context?

Nice bit of anchoring (with a priming effect) on the price tags, though.

But it remains to be seen what this will deliver from a brand standpoint.

it's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good

Fly6 is an interesting idea that's come from a couple of cycling enthusiasts and inventors out of Perth, here in Australia.

Their product is a rear bike light with an embedded HD camera that 'aims to discourage bad behavior on the part of motorists by warning them that they’re being filmed'.

Essentially a nudge-like move that (in theory) works in much the same way as speed cameras do in managing the speed limit.

Although on consulting Mark, our resident cycling expert in this office, we were reminded that innovations such as this will only be effective as a deterrent if widely adopted by cyclists and 'mentally available' to the mass of car drivers.

Until that point there's still value for the cyclist should they be the victim of dodgy driving, they will have the evidence on film.

But at a $169 price point and limited distribution mass adoption is probably a way-off yet.

Until the $25 knock-offs arrive.

Friday, February 21, 2014

the seven thousand names of wah

We've talked about nominative determinism in this journal a number of times.

As a recap this is mainly a pseudo-scientific bit of psychologist humour, the origin is often attributed to Carl Jung who said to have noted the 'quite gross coincidence between a man's name and his peculiarities or profession.'

Jung kept the gag going by noting the phenomenon among psychologists, including himself:

"Herr Freud (Joy) champions the pleasure principle, Herr Adler (Eagle) the will to power, Herr Jung (Young) the idea of rebirth…"

The label itself is reported to have been coined in 1994 by science mag New Scientist, and explained thus:

'We recently came across a new book, Pole Positions - The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by Daniel Snowman. Then, a couple of weeks later, we received a copy of London Under London - A Subterranean Guide, one of the authors of which is Richard Trench. So it was interesting to see Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester stating in the October issue of The Psychologist: "Authors gravitate to the area of research which fits their surname." Hunt's example is an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon.'

Fast forward to this week and a new University of British Columbia study featured in Science Daily finds that 'we prefer voices that are similar to our own because they convey a soothing sense of community and social belongingness'.

This comes as no surprise, given that we know about the 'liking' principle in the psychology of persuasion.

People prefer to say yes to someone they like, and we like people who are similar to us.

Sharing something in common before you start negotiating is the classic tactic.

And as Kahneman noted 'good mood and cognitive ease are the human equivalents of assessments of safety and familiarity'.

And familiarity breeds liking.

Anyway, after perusing the report, which also concludes 'the findings indicate that our preference for voices...are about fitting in to our social groups' we were unsurprised to note that the authors name was Molly Babel.

Monday, February 17, 2014

'like' if you love cheese is not dead

Thanks to those cheeky Facebook data scientists for our Monday morning chuckle of the day.

AllFacebook reports on the introduction of the 'Pages to Watch' feature available to page admins.

Essentially the feature will alert managers when a post on another page they are watching (ie competitors and suchlike) is getting large amounts of attention and engagement (sic).

This little tactic is designed to activate home bias (aka the keeping up with the joneses effect) in hapless page admins, now futher driven to distraction.

In their paper 'Keeping Up With The Joneses and the Home Bias', Lauterbach and Riesmen (2003) describe this effect as follows:

'We argue that when individuals care about their consumption relative to that of their neighbors, a home bias emerges, that is investors overweight domestic stocks in their portfolios. Domestic stocks are preferred because they also serve the objective of mimicking the economic fortunes and welfare of the investor's neighbors, countrymen, and social reference group'.

The authors conclude 'The basic idea is that if investors care about their consumption relative to that of their neighbors, they would bias their portfolios in the direction of securities correlated with their neighbors' wealth.'

Perhaps 'like if you love cheese' is not dead after all.

Friday, February 14, 2014

smart ways to do occasion based marketing

The more effectively you can associate a brand (or in this case a brand and a behaviour) to more consumption or behavioural 'occasions', the more you win.

Never mind the demographics/psychographics etc etc, here's the occasions.

'Dumb Ways To .......' ain't going away any time soon. And correctly so, the occasions potential is pretty infinite.

commitment devices

Some readers will no doubt be familiar with The Rule of Reciprocity, often cited as a way to improve conversions and suchlike.

The formula is usually described as follows:

Give something away — a gift, a service, valuable information, assistance — to create in the other person a feeling of indebtedness.

In theory the recipient of the favour will then be more inclined to comply with a subsequent request from the initial giver.

In most circumstances it's the person or company that gives first that is then in control.

The next task is to maintain that control and then use it to your benefit.

Like most of these kind of rules it's never 100%, but seems to play out a decent amount of times.

When it doesn't work, one typical predictor of failure is when the initial 'gift' on offer is something that has no real value to the recipient or is difficult to redeem in some way.

As in behaviour change 101, the two key factors in moving behaviour are:

1. Understanding the motivating factors in the situation of the subject.
2. Make the new behaviour easy to adopt.

To address the motivator point, it's been shown that often the most effective incentives are the ones that show that the company offering the incentive has gone through some sort of extra effort in order to provide this incentive.

For instance, a software company rewarding survey responses with a supermarket gift card may seem like a decent incentive.

But rewarding the behaviour by offering to send a cleaner round to the prospects office once a month has required significantly more percieved effort on the side of the giver.

I've often used Rory Sutherland's 'flowers and jewellery as commitment device' example in describing this to clients.

In the clip below Rory himself gives an extended riff on the point, just in time for Valentines day.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

intuitive heuristics, pepsi-max and medical mishaps

There's an upside and downside with heuristics.

What we call distinctive brand assets (colours, shapes, logos, taglines etc) are essentially heuristics, mental shortcuts, that help brands get remembered and noticed.

Despite the prevalence of the idea that people pay close attention to brands and seek things like relevance and connection, the truth is we don't think about, or care about most brands that much. A good set of brand 'heuristics' makes a brand easy to notice, remember (albeit implicitly) and buy.

Good heuristics are those that can wrap up useful information in a way that is intuitive to remember and act upon and are specific to their context.

Heuristics that are not so useful are the ones that lead us to less optimal decisions.

For instance, medical professionals are often tripped up by certain heuristics.

Representativeness being one.

In a piece on this topic in the New Yorker the renowned Harvard Medical School Biologist Jerome Groopman writes:

"Doctors make [representative] errors when their thinking is overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates of a disease, and thus attribute symptoms to the wrong cause.'

He goes on to explain how a patient that had reported chest pains the previous day but had been examined, displayed no other symptoms or appearance of health difficulties, given a clean bill and sent home, had arrived the next day in emergency with acute myocardial infarction. Doctor speak for having a heart attack.

The patient survived but the doctor who gave the initial examination was distraught.

“Clearly, I missed it. And why did I miss it? I didn’t miss it because of any egregious behavior, or negligence. I missed it because my thinking was overly influenced by how healthy this man looked, and the absence of risk factors.”

To tie these two thoughts together, onto this nearly splendid film from Pepsi-Max.

The representativeness heuristic is one of the great tricks in the advertising book.

Great for evoking a bit of surprise from the viewer or participant, this one works by taking advantage of how we tend to judge the likelihood of an event by how well it matches our existing belief or stereotype.

When something seems more representative, we'll judge it as more likely or probable.

In the film NBA wonderkid and rookie of the year, Kyrie Irving is disguised as old 'Uncle Drew'.

Pepsi MAX went to a pick-up game in New Jersey under the pretence of shooting a documentary on a young basketball player.

When the player gets injured his hobbling old Uncle Drew comes on as a sub into the game, and after some initial foul-ups to keep it believable eventually turns on the style, to the surprise and astonishment of the crowd.

So while Pepsi-Max used the representativeness heuristic nicely to comedic effect, it's a shame they never took a leaf out of great rival, Coca-Cola's book and applied the daddy of all heuristics, availability.

Advertising need to do two simple things.

1. Get noticed (tick)

2. Be well branded (no tick)

While Coke will always pepper their ads liberally with little brand heuristics (distinctive assets) they are few and far between in the Pepsi spot.

And while Uncle Drew's achievements have been seen by circa 43 million views we have to ask 'where was the branding?'.

By branding we mean the little imlpicit brand cues (bottles, colours, logos etc) that could so easily have been all the way through, in peripheral exposure, without being detrimental to the entertainment.

I'll see you in the sewer

A couple of news items this week reminded us of a story concerning a rat infestation in Hanoi during the 19thC time of French colonial rule.

To combat the rat problem the French authorities swiftly acted with an incentive for Hanoi citizens.

For every dead rat delivered to the appointed rat repository, the good citizen would receive a reward.

Of course it was not long until the residents began specifically breeding their own rat colonies for the exact purpose of cashing in.

Now, against my advice, a former client was determined to launch a Facebook page - the nature of their business meant that other tactics were likely to bear much more fruit - however they were adamant so we decided to do our best for them.

Initially the page gained a small group of fans, mostly friends and family of employees and some partners etc.

Upon running a recruitment ad campaign we gained several thousand new fans over a period of a week or so.

What seemed astonishing was the the apparent popularity of this Australian industrial manufacturing firm in places like Indonesia and the Phillipines.

Particularly because their products and services were not even distributed in those regions.

Clearly something was not quite right.

On realising what was going on, I next suggested to the client that if we adjust our strategy and make our objective to simply appear to be popular then perhaps it would be cheaper and less effort to simply buy a ton of fake likes from some dodgy vendor or other and leave it at that.

In this way we use the page as a simple peripheral 'popularity' point, invest no further effort other than the odd post now and the,n and focus our limited marketing dollars on the tactics that might actually deliver leads and sales.

This idea was met with horror.

How inauthentic.

In this clip by Veritasium the science video blog, who went slightly off topic temporarily, but give a nice simple explanation of the mechanics of this Facebook 'likes' click-farm phenomenon, and implicating Facebook themselevs somewhat.

While, of course, we have probably all known this to be true for some time its interesting to see specific data.

On a similar note, Warc reports that Vivek Shah, the in-coming chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told delegates at the organisation's annual conference, being held in Palm Springs, California that 'online traffic fraud has reached crisis proportions'.

He quoted figures from comScore research that suggest something in the region of 36% of online traffic is now generated by machines ie bots, not by humans. Ouch.

People say you shouldn't stay down here too long,
Lose your sense of light and dark,
Lose your sense of smell,
I'll see you in the sewer, the sewer, the sewer...

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

a note on noticing what others don't notice themselves not noticing

Some time ago I caught up with a young planner who had interned with us for a while.

She had subsequently sidestepped advertising and moved into a different area.

I asked what she had been up to and did she miss the advertising business?

'Not really. I've been living in the real world for a bit' she replied.

'Watching TV, reading the newspapers, going shopping. Just doing stuff that normal people do'.

This was a timely nudge.

While we commonly claim that 'getting out of the building' is key to the planning discipline, if we are honest, it's something we don't do as often as we should.

Any insights about shopper behaviour in supermarkets, for instance, are unlikely to revealed by asking questions in the street or in focus groups.

To understand why people are behaving in a particular way, it is important to be able to observe them in their natural habitat.

Data about people's shopping habits is very useful.

But equally; situational factors such as lighting, ambient noise, smells, colours, music, other products on display and the behaviours of others present all also influence how someone feels and what they do.

As the saying goes; not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Because we tend not to discuss what’s not in the data.

We are naturally biased towards the information that we have, or is perhaps 'easiest' to get.

Then, naturally we make decisions based on this information rather than giving full consideration to factors that are possibly more relevant but harder to obtain.

For example, there is often as much insight to be gleaned from looking for things that didn't happen as things that did happen.

I recently had a terrible service experience in a favourite restaurant.

There was a new manager who was either having a very bad day or was completely clueless about how to be a host.

Afterwards we joked 'If she was the 'best' candidate for the job I wonder how bad the other candidates were who were rejected?'

We ignore, at our peril, one of the most pivotal parts of a buyer's purchasing process.

Before anyone buys a product they effectively 'decide' (albeit unconsciously) to not consider the bulk of other brands in that category.

In the same way that we ad people are biased towards make decisions based on the information we have rather than the information we don't have, shoppers don't notice themselves not noticing things therefore can only report on what they have noticed.

So there's a solid argument for getting out of the building more, observing what people actually do, what the real influencing factors are and, most importantly, observing what they don't notice themselves not doing.

And it doesn't do any harm to spend more time with people who think differently than the way we think.

In the real world.