Brand onions and other barriers to creativity

THOUGHT 1: MARKETING COMMUNICATION PROCESSES ARE OVERLY REDUCTIVE TO THE POINT OF BECOMING SELFDESTRUCTIVE

All of us love our big multinational clients despite our reservations over their semi-scientific systems, their brand keys, pyramids, wheels and onions.

And they in turn love their onions. The marketer's job is to enforce message consistency and to develop metrics to answer accountability issues: in other words to try to predict effectiveness and work out which half of the budget is wasted.

It's sensible as an approach but what happens inevitably in a big company is that it stops being an approach handled sensitively by the people who were in at its conception, and hardens to become first a set of guidelines, then a belief system, then a theology and before you know it a theocracy. The onion starts to rule the company.

The problem is that, as with any religious cult, new recruits quickly suss that the best way to get on is to dogmatically follow the path of the onion. These onionistas come to believe while still in their early twenties that they are already much smarter than any of their suppliers and certainly they know more than the creative director of their ad agency.

They say things like, 'That's a good point Chris, is that a consumer insight or a product insight?' You reply, 'Thanks I suppose it can be either.'

This was the wrong answer. They look at you with disappointment. ('You poor sad man you know nothing of the way of the onion.') They say things like, 'I'm afraid we're going to have to push back on that insight classification to enhance its usability.'

Apart from the gobbledygook the main problem with this kind of 'brand science' is that it doesn't appear to have delivered yet. All those brand onions haven't made the ads any more effective. Although they've undoubtedly made the corporation more efficient they've mostly made the ads worse.

The Fetish of the One-Sentence Benefit

The fatal flaw lurking at the dark heart of the onion is the fetishisation of the one-sentence brand benefit. This one sentence, more often a string of adjectives, is always a consumer benefit. Brand onionism is consumer centric not brand centric.

Agencies are instructed to communicate that core brand benefit in the ads and expect to see it paraphrased when the pre-test asks people 'What was the main message?' If people can't play the desired benefit back then the ad 'fails'. We've all seen it happen many times despite the fact we have know for 30 years that it is a bogus criterion.

All of which means creatives have to work with one hand tied behind their backs. To ensure people can consciously process and articulate it, they have been forced to point the camera at the benefit depiction.

Creative people can't use the deeper metaphors and associations that build the most powerful, most effective engrams in our brains. Those deeper emotional, even instinctive elements are very hard to pick up in pre-tests because they are hard to identify and hard to articulate. People don't know what effect advertising will have on them.

Evidence is More Easily Refuted than Faith

Some of the more startling implications of neuroscience are that the most effective brand-building messages, the best ads, are the ones you don't understand because you can't consciously process and dismiss them. The stuff that you just believe, feel, know, without knowing why, is more powerful than the stuff you can rationally analyse. Evidence is more easily refuted than faith.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink demonstrated a similar theme to a more mainstream audience. His experts know when a tennis player will double fault or when an antique is a fake but they don't know why they know it. We've all read this but are we acting on it? I doubt it. It's too big an idea to handle.

So the most effective ads may be the ones that pre-test worst! The IPA Effectiveness Databank is the biggest database of marketing effectiveness in the world and famously shows a negative correlation between pretesting and effectiveness.

The IPA case history proves that it was Stella Artois' quirky, distinctive advertising approach that built this Belgian lager into the most valuable grocery brand in the UK. So it surprised us when researching it how many loyal Stella drinkers didn't understand and even hated these demonstrably effective ads.

Luckily Stella's UK brand owner Interbrew (now Inbev) didn't have any brand onions because the onion would have had to state something like: 'Poverty-stricken, plague-ridden French peasants drink Stella, so buy some today.'

THOUGHT 2: LET'S TALK ABOUT COOL

Much of the time the biggest differentiator in a parity market is which one is coolest.

Doing some research for a utility company back in the spring we found that older people were worried about service and company reputation, but twenty-something new-home owners didn't expect their utilities to go wrong. They just wanted to be with a brand that was not a sad old 'dad's brand'. We went round the group asking who their utility supplier is. They were all with minority brands, in effect indie brands, and the winner was the guy who was using a company called Atlantic simply because the others had never heard of it. It was like he was first to discover the Atlantic Monkeys and download all their tariffs.

With more and more markets at parity, being the cool, alternative brand is often the strongest positioning, selling what economists call a 'positional good', a product or service where a major benefit is 'distinction'. For more on this read The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, a terrific book that shows how the idea of alternative has always been the driver in most markets.

If I had lots of capital I would try to identify dull markets where there's room for a cool, alternative brand. In effect this is what Virgin did a generation ago but there's room for new brands to repeat that trick. Why isn't there a cool utility or car insurance brand? Why don't more brands have 'To be the coolest' as an objective?

THOUGHT 3: LET'S TALK ABOUT ENERGY

Just as it would be good to see more brand owners embracing the importance of cool, so it would be good to see more talking about energy. A couple of years ago we were getting lots of briefs with objectives that talked about needing to inject more energy into the brand. That trend seems to have passed. Shame.

It's a very valid concept, especially in low-interest markets (and remember every market is lower interest than we think).

Everyone loves to hate those cheesy Michael Winner ads, but they built esure into a big brand because they communicate this company is bursting with energy and hungry for your business.

You tend to get risky high-energy advertising out of start-up agencies, but overall there's not enough of it around. Other countries have more energy in their advertising and have overtaken the UK in the rankings on global creative awards.

People say it's the fault of too much planning and research but actually planners are smart enough to see the value of energy and it's extremely easy for us researchers to pick it up. You can quickly sense in qualitative research which brand, which creative idea has the most associated energy (and cool).

So let's talk more about energy.

THOUGHT 4: LESS TALKING ABOUT BRANDS AND MORE CREATING THEM

Everybody in this industry has highly transferable skills.

Admen and women often go on to a second career as a successful brand owner. Adland friends of mine have set up Myla lingerie, Ren cosmetics and Rapha cycle clothing.

The most topical example is Innocent, set up by Richard Reid and colleagues from DDB. Imagine if DDB had maintained an association, a minority share in the brand, got some kudos from it. How cool would that be? Clients would want to talk to DDB and talent would flock there.

So my final thought is that agencies should be encouraging people to leave them and start up brands. It may sound disruptive but the advertising industry will always have a high churn and it needn't be the end of the world. McKinsey calls it spreading alumni and it builds its business model around it.

If the agency promised to keep paying a salary for that difficult first year, plus help out with mentoring and some venture capital – that could often be worth 10% of the equity.

Planners are best placed to lead this. If I was back in planning today I would hold a brainstorm once a week in the boardroom, all invited, free sarnies. We'd brainstorm ideas for brands in a different market each week, this week it's car insurance, next week utilities, the week after that online social networking.

It's easy to conceive of an agency team incubating YouTube in February one year and selling it the following October for $1.65 billion.

That sort of thing would put advertising and brand communications agencies back at the top table, being listened to, and no brand onionista would be able to stop us.

This article featured in Market Leader, Spring 2007.