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The wisdom of aphorisms

The wisdom of aphorisms

I like aphorisms. Not for nothing are these compact little sayings the finest means of wisdom delivery known to mankind, in service since preliterate times to ensure the accurate transmission of ideas from person to person. So much so that you could even suggest that aphorisms are the original virals.

And they are pretty helpful in the brand advice business.

For account handlers they are of immeasurable help in getting people to do things that they might otherwise be disinclined to do. Ogilvy was a great aphorist, famous for suggesting to clients intent on writing their own copy 'Why keep a dog and bark yourself' or when in negotiations over the cost of keeping that dog 'If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.' While my favourite Bernbach aphorism is the astonishingly contemporary idea that 'We should stop believing in what we sell and start selling what we believe in.'

For creatives I would suggest that the aphoristic form builds brand lines more likely to be accepted, remembered and transmitted to others. There is clearly something of the aphorism about lines like 'You know when you've been Tangoed', 'Impossible is nothing' and 'Try something new today.'

And for planners, well, I think there is no finer way to communicate our thinking and have it remembered than framing it in aphoristic form.

Being aphorisms they bear the following characteristics. They are brief to the point of being terse. They are definitive as there is no place for half measures in the world of pithy one-liners. They are personal and they aren't necessarily true. I mean them as little mind grenades, created to provoke a response and start a debate. As Francis Bacon observed, 'Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to enquire farther.'

EVERY GREAT DIALOGUE STARTS WITH A GREAT MONOLOGUE

Monologue is a bit of a dirty word in the world of fashionable marketing. Brand monologues are thought to be narcissistic, self-referential and disrespectful. Well, I want to make a stand for the brand monologue.

The greatest speeches of our time and throughout history are of course monologues – inspirational and passionate statements about the speaker's beliefs, and clear exhortations to action on the part of the listener.

Speeches so powerful and motivating that they are often known simply by their most famous passage: Churchill's 'We will fight them on the beaches', Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for you' and Mandela's 'An ideal for which I am prepared to die.'

These oratorical masterpieces are all monologues. They are monologues that began a million conversations and changed our very history. Monologues provoke, inspire, move, motivate and set agendas. They are the essential beginnings for something else. I don't want to see fewer brand monologues as the age of conversation progresses; I want to see more and better brand monologues.

NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN YOUR POSITIONING, ONLY IN YOUR POSITION

If you want something truly narcissistic and self-referential try the average brand positioning on for size. Honed as they are in dreary brainstorms and plonked in the centre of some ghastly little brand schematic. These days people are naturally rather keen to understand the position a brand takes on the things that they care about and it can deliver against. That's what I mean by a position – the brand's point of view. I respect people with a point of view, and I respect brands with one too.

It is time that big brands, from Anchor to Andrex, told us what they care about and what is important to them over and above cows and puppies. After all most of the new brands that we are taking to our hearts and our shopping baskets, from Innocent to Dorset Cereals, have a strong point of view right at the heart of the offering.

Frankly, if the brand formerly associated with diminutive trombone players, otherwise known as Lurpak, can do it – standing four square behind the merits of real food – then so can you.

Remember there is no such thing as a low-interest category only low-interest thinking.

TODAY'S BIG BRAND IDEAS ARE TOO BIG FOR ADVERTISING

I like a big brand idea. At their best these are the driving philosophy of a business and not just the strategy for marketing communications.

That's how the Campaign for Real Beauty seems to me, as if it were the reason that Dove exists in the first place. The same goes for Honda's 'Power of Dreams', Land Rover's 'Go Beyond' idea, Vodafone's belief in making the most of now and Persil's much maligned 'Dirt is Good' philosophy.

However, I am increasingly of the view that while a brand idea can never be too big, it may well be too big for advertising.

Advertising has always seen itself as the window into a brand's world. However, really potent brand thoughts now seem short-changed when forced into the format of an ad. More than this, the desire to communicate the entire brand experience can often compromise advertising's ambition to sell.

Maybe it is time to free advertising from the need to represent the entirety of the brand idea and recognise that other disciplines are capable of doing this in a richer and more rewarding way.

In particular it is time to accept that, for many brands, it is their online experience that should be delivering the big brand idea in all its technicolor glory.

ADVERTISING IS THE NEW BELOW-THE-LINE

If online is the discipline that has the bandwidth, or brandwidth, to best deliver the complete brand story, then advertising has to get more tactical.

After all, one of the wonderful things about this business is that people still come to us and ask us to sell things. Indeed, unlike the way they treat our digital brethren they are quite insistent that we do.

So let's embrace this and be harder on ourselves about the role we are asking advertising to play in the marketing mix. What task within the overall brand idea do we want advertising to nail? What behaviour do we want to ask advertising to change tomorrow? And so perhaps it is time to consign the so-called brand ad to the dustbin of communications history.

Cadbury's 'Gorilla' is not a brand ad, it's a hard-nosed, ramp-up brand salience, tactical ad. And hurrah for that.

EMOTION IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF INTERACTION

 

I've never come across a digital campaign that made me cry. I have been amused, pissed myself laughing even. I've certainly been entertained, involved and stimulated. And most of the time I think the stuff is pretty damn cool.

But beyond the flooding of Second Life to dramatise climate change I don't think I have wept or even found the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

The interactive revolution is of immeasurable advantage to us all in helping people fully understand a brand's point of view, the product promise and potentially driving them to purchase. If consumers actually interact with your brand that has got to be more valuable to them than sodding off during the ad break to make a cup of tea.

It's just that the new marketing mafia often forget that one of the most powerful interactions between a brand and a person is a simple emotional response. After all, it seems to work quite well for movies, books, photography and great works of art, so it might just work for marketing communications.

Take Wieden Amsterdam's Nike Air Max commercial – the one that celebrates sporting failure to the strains of the song 'Hurt' sung by a dying Johnny Cash. How dare you suggest that my response to that ad is anything other than the most powerful form of interaction a brand can solicit.

THE MOST IMPORTANT SEARCH ENGINE IS IN OUR MINDS

And while I am on the subject of the wonderful world of digital marketing, can we all remember this please. Don't let the customer get as far as search – if someone is searching for your category not your brand it implies that you haven't done your job very well. Our role is to get brands up people's mental search engine. If we can do that we can all go home for an early bath.

ONLY BAD ADVERTISING IS PREDICTABLE

For me the enduring attraction of advertising is that when it's good it's like magic. It is one of the very few commercial tools available in which the outcome can be totally disproportionate to the investment.

And because it's magic, it is inherently rather unpredictable. Sure you can predict the effect of a lump of ad spend but not the multiplier that great creative work brings to the party. Good advertising has to have happened for you to know what will happen. That is not to eliminate the need for pre-testing but to remind us that it functions best as a shit check to stop unmitigated rubbish troubling the minds of the Great British people. But I have never known it to accurately predict the power of a seriously good campaign. On Tango we stopped pre-testing because it wasn't telling us anything new; on Pot Noodle we pre-tested every single ad in order to have our instincts rubber stamped. But in neither case could anyone tell us what would happen.

Great work escapes the pure logic of the media plan and lives in the conversations online and offline of the people it touches. It goes feral in the collective minds of the audience. I challenge you to show me a model or methodology that can predict the effect of all that magic.

And if you can predict the outcome of your advertising I'd suggest it isn't any good.

IT IS VITAL TO BE INTERESTING. IT IS MERELY IMPORTANT TO BE RIGHT

Interesting is the spirit of our age. Why should anyone give us, or our brands, the time of day if they are not interested in us? And this is not just about a brand having something interesting to say – though it is a start – but about every manifestation of that brand being interesting.

The successful brands of the future will have interesting product offerings, interesting brand ideas, come in interesting packaging and deliver interesting experiences that reach consumers in interesting ways. Being of interest will be the price of entry to a brandscape where budget cannot buy attention and in which there is no longer a right answer.

And yet as planners we have always prized finding the right solution over the most interesting one. Frankly, I have greater faith that the most interesting idea will be right than I have that the right solution will be interesting.


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