The People Mover by Trey Ratcliff (CC)

‘We converse about nature and ourselves in languages that make it convenient. We don’t see nature itself; our view of it is shaped by our language. Our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.’

(Guest Column in The Drum, 1.3.2013: ‘Ketchup is ketchup, so why does the Heinz brand mean so much?’)

Ketchup is weird, Malcolm Gladwell observed a few years back. It is served alongside mustard, but while mustard is a highly diverse product category, ketchup, as we all know is, well… ketchup.

Yes, it is, essentially, a type of tomato sauce, but it isn’t part of that highly diverse category either. Tomato sauce lives by a completely different set of rules.

So if ketchup isn’t like mustard, and it’s not a type of tomato sauce, what is it then? Ketchup is ketchup. Ketchup is weird. Ketchup is magic.
And Heinz is its magic brand.

Yet Ketchup is not the company’s only magic brand. Heinz dominates the Baked Beans category too. There are few definitive products in our world today, and far fewer still where one brand owns two of them. Maybe Apple has managed to achieve this with the Mac and the iPhone (with two product brand names), but you may struggle to find other examples in the mainstream world (Coke and Diet Coke are variants so don’t count).

Both Heinz Baked Beans and Heinz Tomato Ketchup are operating in ‘categories of one’. Competition isn’t fighting Heinz through differentiation; it is forced down to copycatting. Heinz, with its dominant presence and rich, long heritage is just too strong.

From a design perspective, Heinz marries its definitive products with brand identities that are textbook case studies in the long-term management of iconic brands.

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Tend to it. It’s this custodian mentality that keeps these definitive brands alive and well.

In 2009, Heinz retired the pickle from the Ketchup label, where it stood for over a century. An illustrated tomato replaced it.

How many consumers even noticed that move? Have you? If you haven’t, it’s because the overall integrity of Heinz’s brand identity system is so carefully maintained. Maintaining the iconic shape of the label, choosing illustration over photography, carefully crafting any tweak to the classic typography to make it look even more classical-cool.

The case for baked beans is similar. The development of the design has stayed loyal, increasingly going back to its roots and making the best of them – identifying what is truly iconic and adding the playful touch of illustrated saucy beans spilling out of the holding shape.

There’s a lot of retro-style design in the world of marketing. Much of it is simply derivative. What effective retro does, is to recreate the past by identifying the timeless elements, distilling and elevating them to create something at once fresh, familiar and rooted in a long-standing truth.

If you want an iconic brand, get your iconography right. Then celebrate it across your communications channels to the point of worship. Heinz’s marketing leaders know they are custodians of a heritage dating back to 1875. When they introduce change, or extend their product ranges, they do it with reverence.

The delight of creating meaningful innovation against strict and well-argued constraints is all too rare in the marketing industry and the briefs it produces. More often we meander between “revolution” (eg the 2009 Tropicana fiasco) to meaningless tweaks, which slowly dilute the integrity of the brand (eg bursts, gradients, condensation marks and other offences).

“What we’re looking for,” marketing managers often tell agencies, “is an evolution rather than a revolution”.

Tough luck. There is no evolution in design. Evolution moves at a glacial pace. It’s a truly bad metaphor to hide your fear of change behind. You change or you don’t change. Just make that change count. Make sure you identify what made you great, and give it the respect it deserves.

By respecting the heritage of your brand you are showing you respect the audience who remained loyal to it and the product that made it great in the first place.

A 19th century Heinz Baked Beans trade card reads: “The beans are actually BAKED, not boiled. The quantity for each can is weighted to insure uniform proportion of beans and sauce. No such flavour found in any other.” That may read a bit quaint today, but communicating this level of care must have been truly differentiating at the time.

A lot of the things that made the mass production of food revolutionary during the 19th century are taken for granted today. They are hygienic, table-stakes, no pun intended.

The level of care and consideration people expect from food today is represented by brand design, which communicates a certain promise. Loyalty to a design heritage is a way of showing you still care about your original promise, that your product can always be trusted to deliver in the same way its audience expects it to.

It would take a major cataclysmic event to topple Heinz from its double-leadership position. As long as any extensions are managed carefully, it’s set up for many more years of growth. And as Western diet, for better or for worse, expands into emerging markets, its success is almost inevitable. “The Inevitables” is Warren Buffett’s nickname for his favourite kind of company investment. A well-suited match, then.

Finally, here’s a top tip: it’s a little known fact, but the 57 mark on a glass Heinz Ketchup bottle is placed on the ideal spot to hit the bottle so the Ketchup comes out faster.

Just another design gesture in a long history of mutual respect between product, brand and a loyal consumer following.

Coming Soon, by Digital Trash on Flickr

(The following post was originally published on Marketing Magazine’s Marketing Blogged blog. It has also been posted on Linguabrand’s Science and Learning section, among a highly flattering group. This is a delayed cross-posting.)

Expanding the definition and remit of sustainable marketing
When initially introduced to c-suites and boards, the allure of sustainability was that it made a certain brutal business common sense. Performance driven business leaders don’t have to love trees to understand that ignoring environmental impact will eventually kill their business: Materials and fuels will get more expensive, regulations will bear down on them and other forms of public scrutiny will become increasingly unforgiving.

Over the years, the remit of business sustainability has expanded from environmental responsibility to include other economic, social and almost any other aspect of responsible long-term resource management and social stewardship.

However, sustainable marketing has so far remained focused on the environmental aspect. It largely stands for paper sources, non-toxic inks, recycling, etc.

This is an oversight as it’s clear a large part of marketing’s impact on our society is not physical. I would like to challenge this narrow view of sustainable marketing by suggesting that just like businesses increasingly look beyond the environmental impact of resource management, marketing should do the same.

The two new elements I would like to introduce into the definition of sustainable marketing are the cognitive and the cultural aspects.

Cognitive overload is not sustainable
A lot has been said about the scarcity of attention and the attention economy. We live in an age where we’re all bombarded by messages and constantly stimulated. This happens even before marketing adds its 3000-10,000+ messages per day (estimates vary) into the mix. As a reaction, our brains have adapted by becoming exceptional at filtering out messages (unconscious) and questioning them (conscious). The implication for marketing is simple: the more people are bombarded with marketing messages, the better they will become at blocking them out completely (e.g. banner blindness), and at questioning and subverting them (e.g. as we often see on social media).

As the cognitive resistance of audiences increase, marketing which sticks to old methods, such as mass-advertising campaigns, will require more repetitions and bigger spend in order to achieve the same results it used to get.

So far, marketing has largely reacted to this fact by sending out more messages through more types of media.

It’s easy to see this isn’t sustainable: doing so only increases the deluge of messages in the world and adds to the “cognitive pollution”, further deteriorating attention resources and making people more resistant.

Increasing the number and frequency of messaging yet again is cutting the branch we are sitting on. It is not sustainable.

Cultural vandalism is not sustainable
To work at all, marketing must always remain fascinated with humanity. Strategic marketing has drawn from a wide variety of sources: from psychoanalysis and anthropology to critical theory and behavioural economics.

With such a rich variety of influences it’s rather disappointing the application of what we’ve learned is often so crass. Once marketing discovered individuals and groups can be motivated by fear, shame and guilt and react quickly to simple, emotional messages, it got into the habit of constantly pushing humanity’s emotional alarm buttons. Marketing habitually targets people’s basest instincts: telling people they are ugly, smelly, not good enough parents and generally inadequate. It parades products and services as magic solutions to an increasingly oppressed and frequently depressed audience. Marketing is shouting at them they’d be fools to miss on this once-in-a-lifetime chance for redemption.

For long, marketing has been content to push any emotional buttons as long as it got the intended response, ignoring the wider cultural and political context for needs like wellbeing, happiness, safety, money, sex or power.

But again – this isn’t sustainable. Looking back at human history – divisive, tyrannical societies driven by fear, survivalism and close-mindedness soon decline into misery and chaos.

The level of exposure and communication frequency many brands enjoy today is equivalent to that which was once reserved for kings and religious leaders. The ubiquity of marketing means we don’t only tap into meaning and emotions – we create them.

This is a monumental responsibility.

To have a future we must add to our fascination with humanity the elements of compassion and responsibility.

Change is the only alternative
Sustainable marketing is not a matter of choice, just like with environmental issues there is no alternative.

It’s time marketing owns up not just for the physical pollution it causes, but also to non-physical pollution. Just like dumping waste in a river is cheap and lazy, but will eventually kill your business, so are cognitive or cultural pollution.
This new definition of sustainable marketing recognises that the easy solutions, those common habits of marketing, may contribute to a disastrous future for both business and humanity.

Commitment to this new definition of sustainable marketing is challenging, but it is inevitable.

We must grow up and own up. As a famous British brand says about environmental sustainability: There in no plan B.

And just like some big conservative businesses have learned: if we can’t accept the fact we have to do it because it’s the right thing to do, at least we can acknowledge it is the only way for marketing to continue and work for our business.
To put it bluntly: The apocalypse is bad for business.

Just finished Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood.

Postman is a wonderful writer, and the first part, about the historical invention of childhood is truly breath-taking. Just chock-full of amazing insights about the relationship of culture and technology.
I particularly found interesting how the same "dangers" are re-purposed again and again for each technology.

(Narcissism is, apparently, particularly popular, possibly because of the built-in hubris of any technological revolution. I’m sure the discovery of fire and the wheel promoted narcissism too. What with firelight being so complimenting and making us see human faces 24 hours a day and the wheel making us strong and taking us places… But I still need to think this bit through…)
 
However, as he moves to describing the disappearance of childhood he largely misses the mark.

Not because of his somewhat luddite view of technology or conservative views of society (you expect that from Postman) but because although the phenomena he describes to support his arguments are largely true, he completely overlooks the emergence of teenage culture as a transient stage between childhood and adulthood (quite odd for someone who was merely in his thirties in the 60′s). As well as the increasing importance of this stage. And while this stage is "blurred at both ends" to our day ("tweens, anyone?"), and especially into adulthood, you can still see marked distinctions between the culture of prepubescent children (e.g. "toddlers"), pubescent and post-pubescent teenagers.
And any cross-overs don’t change the fact prepubescence is protected on many levels and teens are often overprotected, regulated/policed by adults, and frequently demonised by the media.

Ah well, thankfully today we have people like Danah Boyd who approach youth with insight and empathy.

(Make no mistake, this book is still worth your time. All his books, with all their flaws…)

This is a story about advocacy and rigid leadership-sets.
It begins with a seemingly simple question:
Why do “the usual suspects” keep winning?

“The usual suspects” is a marketing pattern/plot familiar to anyone in the venture capital business:
1. The best venture capital funds get more chances to invest in the best startups.
2. The best startups have better chances to making big exits with big multipliers.
3. Having the best exits further cements a fund’s reputation as being among the best.
4. Repeat.

A virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on a VC’s rank.

A similar dynamic will be found within engineering:
1.The best engineering firms will get a disproportionate amount of opportunities to tender for bigger, better, higher profile projects.
2. High profile projects draw more attention to their best of breed work.
3. Having best of breed high-profile projects further establishes them as an industry leader.
4. Repeat.

How about universities?
1. The best universities are/have the first choice of the best students and faculty.
2. The best students and faculty are mutually drawn to each other.
3. The work/results/success perpetuates the university’s status as among the best.
4. It stays up in the rankings/league tables year after year. (The closer you get to the top of rankings the less movement you will find from year to year).

The usual suspects plot is especially common in professional services and large B2B businesses. Notable categories are legal services (where the leader-set is known as “the magic circle”) and accounting/audit firms (“Big Four”).
Indeed, success begets success.

But what else is there?

The dynamic plotted here is the tendency of big scale advocacy-led categories to have highly rigid leader-sets.
Two questions come to mind: First, what drives this rigidity at the top? And then – What can second tier players and challenger brands do about it?

What keeps the leader-set rigid?

The different categories mentioned are united by two dimensions:

Success criteria: While you are likely to have many players, both global and local, and will see vast differences between small players and big players, they are still judged on similar criteria e.g. successful investments for VCs or successful projects for engineering, and additionally some generic criteria such as quality of service, efficiency, etc.
Overall, brand reputation in these categories will be a compound of a multitude of highly contended attributes.

Buying process: Usually tender based (or similarly structured), the buying process is rational, complex and cautious, even conservative. It also tends to involve multiple stages filtering candidates into a short-list for deeper investigation.

So, while a somewhat rigid leadership could be said for, for example, the automotive category, car brands have a wider variety of segment-dependent success criteria and many more opportunities to differentiate their products and communications then most brands in our case. That’s why while cars are also expensive, rational purchases and advocacy is important in that category as in many others, they do not show the same level of rigidity typical of the previously mentioned categories.

(simply: you can have rigid leader-set without being advocacy-led, but you are unlikely to find an advocacy driven large-scale category without a rigid leader-set)

When the two dimensions are combined, our cyclical plot is put into motion:
Facing a complex and weighty decision, the prospects, often making the choice for an organisation, know they need to deeply investigate a short-list of contenders. To make the process manageable, they will often limit it to the more well known brands, or at least include more of those in the consideration set. Naturally, they will tend to prefer leading brands if they can afford them – the old adage that “no one has ever got fired for buying IBM” is usually true when a corporate chooses a premium service.

As a result – the established leaders will frequently feature in the short-list and get more shots at winning the business. Being included and winning will further establish them as leaders and the cycle is complete.
This how “The usual suspects” are born.

Breaking into the consideration-set

So, if you’re not a “usual suspect” what can you do about it? How do you create opportunity and consideration? At first look, this plot is so rigid that many people doubt whether marketing can make any difference.

The full answer is too multifaceted for a simple blog-post, and, naturally, depends on your unique case. However, there are two simple action routes that are worth mentioning and are often overlooked.

There are two hints leading down those routes:
First, it’s the fact that “best” is a shorthand for “reputed to be the best”, so anything that influences your reputation can (gradually) move you up the ranks.
The second hint is by the fact the terms “leadership set” and “consideration set” may overlap but are not the same.

Combine those two facts together and here are two actions you should take if you wish to get to the point where you are “in the room”, and in many tender processes this would be literally about getting to be in the room for a presentation, pitch or “bake-off”.

Invest internally to cultivate advocacy:
Advocacy is more than word of mouth. It’s positive, focused word of mouth, used with intent. Many marketing managers focus more on communicating existing advocacy – through brand communications using ever shrinking budgets. But even if you had the budgets they would build reputation, and reputation alone isn’t enough to break through into a limited consideration set.

What’s the simplest way to cultivate advocacy over time? Investing internally. This may sound counter-intuitive, but if you are in an advocacy-led category, it’s likely that the biggest advocacy engine is your own people. Your talent creates your brand experience, and positive experiences create new advocates. Encouraging your team to deliver on your brand promises, not only will you cultivate advocacy, you will cultivate the right kind of advocacy, bringing your points of difference to the foreground.

Your name is mentioned in the market in three ways – there are the times you talk about yourself. The times you are a part of a conversation about yourself and the times people are having a conversation about you without you taking part. The last type is likely to be the most frequent and also the one you’re least able to influence through direct communications. The best way to influence throughout the three types is by investing internally and encouraging your talent to improve your brand experience.

The right kind word from a past client or someone who have been in direct touch with your brand and had a positive experience is exactly what can make prospects check you out. It’s stronger than anything else.

Become the wildcard:
Even when there are some good advocates saying good things about you out there, it’s unlikely to happen at the right timing for you to be invited to a tender. If a prospect even asks a third party about you of their own initiative, you’re half way there. But for most second-tier players this would be the exception to the rule.

This is where top-of-mind comes in.
Top-of-mind is often looked down on by B2B and professional services marketing managers (as well as branding agencies) as belonging to a crude world of FMCG, or simply as impractical without the benefits of consumer brand communications frequency.

Top of mind is important as it will often be the spark that moves you from the long-list to the short-list. Prospects often want to include a “wildcard” in their short-list. They may do it to seem more considered by senior management – less automatic in their choice of candidates. They may do it just to “spice things up”, because seeing the same brands every time gets boring. But whatever the reason, consideration sets tend to include a token wildcard candidate. By standing out and being different, you can increase the likelihood of being top-of-mind for the role of wildcard.
After a couple of wins, you may start getting closer to being a usual suspect, at least for that client. With time and advocacy, you will climb the ranks.

At this point you may think that the second advice is a bit obvious. Isn’t it simply the classic principle of differentiation? To a degree – you are right.
However, ask yourself this:
From the total of your current actions and communications, how much is dedicated to setting you apart and making you come across as unique, and on the other hand how much effort is spent on ticking generic boxes just to prove you’re as good as the first-tier players on things most clients take for granted to even remotely consider you?
Thought so.

These may be just two courses of action, but because they are so often overlooked, you will find they are likely to include surprisingly cost-effective activities considering how versatile they are.

And what about the leaders, “the usual suspects”, who are already “in the room” and likely to be named as top of mind? Those brands are big, established and often seemingly identical. Can they be content in their sameness while the RFP’s just roll in?
Not at all, but their story will be told another time.

In the meantime – know that you can challenge them.
No player is protected against a wildcard.

Cross posted from “The Crossed Cow” (The Partners blog)

The book Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (previously titled: Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People) contains an exploration of the common personality traits of creative people. The traits are articulated as a series of ten paradoxes. Before listing them, he writes:

Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity.
What makes us different from apes–our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology–is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognised, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

You’ve got to love the man, I’m sure he’d be against speculative work and 6-way creative pitches.

The list itself is delightful on its own, and will feel intuitively familiar to anyone who has an appreciation for creativity and creative people. An interesting thing, is that while going through the list you discover that the principles apply not just to creative individuals, but also to innovation and to creative companies and organisations.

So here are Csikszentmihalyi’s Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality, translated to the the traits of creative companies.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

Creative companies balance a great capacity for doing and action with time for focus, reflection and a healthy work-life balance.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

Creative companies retain a sense of wonder and innocence. This allows them to attempt the impossible even when “they should know better”. It sometimes results in great breakthroughs.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

Creative companies realise fun and experimentation are just as important to the bottom line as budgets, KPI’s and deadlines. However, when most companies think of creativity, they only think of the fun part, the truly creative appreciate all the work involved in making the idea a reality.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

Creative companies continually imagine, reinvent and plan their future, but they also acknowledge that “A goal is a dream with a deadline” and that “Vision without action is an hallucination”.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

Creative companies look outside as well as inside. They tell stories and look for the limelight, but are also great listeners and willing to learn from anyone (and anything).

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

Creative companies know their self-worth and don’t shy away from tooting their own horns, but they also keep their eye on the next challenge and know that their status should be continually justified. They acknowledge their debt to those who came before them, while not afraid to carry out their own vision.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

Creative companies actively seek a healthy gender balance – both in term of staff mix and cultural style.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

Most organisations will be either rebellious or conservative, but truly creative companies stay loyal to their values while challenging and often revolutionising their markets. A deep understanding of your business, requires you to be immersed in its history, principles and mechanics. And then you have to challenge them – a rare quality.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

In a creative company, people passionately defend their work and are expected to do that, but they are not ashamed to step down or make changes when someone has a better idea, because creative companies are “all about the work”, so when the work can be improved, there’s no reason for conflict.

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Creative companies can be a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, but have the biggest potential to provide fulfilling work experiences (and, in turn, great customer experiences). In creative companies people are not afraid to be themselves, allowing themselves to show vulnerability (for more about the importance of vulnerability to creativity and happiness, see Brené Brown’s smash hit TED talk.)

Being at forefront of your business will expose you to a lot of criticism, unless you can handle it, your creativity will be squashed very early. In a truly creative company, the thought that things can be better and you’re not aspiring to make them so is unbearable. This requires a certain sensitivity. Companies with a culture of compromise, rarely exhibit creative breakthroughs.

These are but initial analogies? What do you think?

Cross-posted on The Crossed-Cow (The Partners’ Blog)

I wonder if the structure of the singularity argument could be extended to other areas. For example, I think it’s safe to say we’ve pretty much hit the content singularity. Social media percolation is increasingly so efficient, that stories that once took days and weeks to move from the margins into mainstream media can now take minutes to do so. Once something is deemed interesting or important it gets liked/re-tweeted/etc and at a certain point bound to be broadcasted by one of the big connectors, mavens or salesmen and just take off. It’s on the next news bulletin and in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Unlike with technology, a state of absolute efficiency is not very far from where we are right now.

One area of business and marketing that is noticeably affected is cultural trend analysis. Trend spotting used to be a highly specialised area reserved to a small group of experts and gurus who made a nice living postulating the next big thing. Nowadays, the next big thing simply is or isn’t. Everybody has access to pretty much the same information, social media makes emerging patterns explicit on an unprecedented level. The trend forecasters still around differentiate at best by having access to unique data or analysis tools ; at worst by trying to come up with cleverer titles and quirkier examples for the same trends reported everywhere else.
If this isn’t enough, trends develop so quickly that you’re always bound to have trend and counter-trend occurring simultaneously: Eating in and eating out, well-being and indulgence, thrift and luxury, and so on.

One interesting side effect is that with many industries, it’s very clear that innovation has become almost regimented. Everybody is spotting the same trends and are therefore identifying the same opportunities and addressing them in increasingly similar manners.

Traditional business paradigms require sound arguments behind any decision. A business plan behind every development, backed by compelling market data. But what happens when a lot of the data we all have access to points to the same content? Naturally, it will push to the front similar reactions to similar opportunities.

But what if a business chooses to do the opposite. What if instead of heading to the obvious opportunity in the market you headed in the opposite direction?
In our creative development processes, we often talk about “tackling the elephant in the room.”, heading intentionally for the least comfortable area. We try and bring in ideas from completely different categories or suggest new and strange analogies.
What is the thing people are least likely to think of while wearing (or paying for) cashmere? Goats! People not visiting the National Gallery? Let’s hang priceless masterworks in the streets! The client asks for a screensaver? Let’s turn off their screens!

We seek out the contradictions, the paradoxes, the conflicts and we often find that getting out of the comfort zone yields the most interesting results.

The silver lining of “Trend Singularity” is that, increasingly, businesses will be pushed to take more risks if they want to maintain their competitive edge. Try different things, be more experimental, and dare we say – creative?

It’s no longer enough to identify opportunities, you must now create them.

Cross-posted on The Crossed Cow

Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina

February is here, and we can hear the gentle pop of New Year’s resolutions expiring all around us. Like soap bubbles that once were full of hope, reflecting a better future, many of our resolutions are now reduced to a moist residue on the harsh pavement of reality.

It’s no surprise that coming up with resolutions is much easier than keeping them. A 2007 study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, even though over 50% felt confident they will succeed at the point of making their resolution.

New Year’s resolutions are commonly articulated as objectives, and just like business objectives, common reasons for failure can include lack of strategy, inconsistent implementation, lack of stakeholder engagement and cultural fixations. But there’s one pattern of failure I’d like to point out: the search for meaning trap.

When we set ambitious change-orientated goals, we are engaging with our definition of purpose. We are articulating various “happy ending” objectives and laying out early chapters for new, life-changing, narratives. In essence, defining resolutions is one of the ways we explore the meaning of our lives.

Similarly, defining business objectives is an activity intertwined with the organisational search for meaning. When we define business objectives we are exploring the purpose of our organisation and redefining a vision of our company’s future. The more critical the objectives are, the deeper we will have to engage with the fundamental questions about our brand. We will discover that in order to make significant changes to the composite and priorities of objectives, we have to engage with the question of who we really are as a company. That’s why in strategic processes you will find that terms like mission, vision, purpose, values, brand story, personality and other terms suggesting deep meaning tend to connect, raising further complexities and challenges.

This is the point where the search for meaning trap kicks in.

Because the search for meaning is a never-ending quest. The meaning you were happy with yesterday, will start to degrade in your mind the moment you leave it be, and even faster if you continue to examine it. Suddenly, the sense of clarity of intent and enthusiasm you’ve felt begins to wane, and you wonder if this was the right idea in the first place… Maybe that brand idea isn’t right, maybe you need to re-examine your vision. Maybe what you lack is a positioning statement. Maybe it’s really the time to revisit your purpose, or corporate mission statement. And what about getting a good idea of how the market has changed since the last time we went through the process of defining those elements? And who’s our target audience again? And what about the different ways different departments or subsidiaries have been going about the same process?

Before you know it, you are running a new company-wide brand programme and engaging everyone from the receptionist to the chairman of the board.

Hang on a minute! Didn’t we go through this just 18 months ago?

Oh but how the world has changed since… So much that by the time you finish this exercise you will have to start it again, just like you did last time you decided to “shake things up a bit”…

Now, you can never accuse a strategist of a lack of love for planning, but I believe that being stuck in an endless corporate search for meaning is the equivalent of moving from one resolution to another, one fad diet or self-help book to the next, without ever achieving any of the intended transformation.

The solution? In one word – Act!

Let go of the notion that you will ever reach a perfect definition of your brand or purpose. You are on a quest, so stay focused on the road ahead and deal with the obstacles head on. You need something good enough which suggests a clear course of action. Little changes make a big difference over time and once your plan is even half decent, the rest of your energy should be focused on coming up with actions that make things happen and get things done.

If I could suggest one new habit for brands in the new year, it would be to stay focused on action. So shift the resources you were planning to spend on your Nth strategic planning programme of the last few years into actual things you can do for your world.

Throw away that self-help book, and start doing.

Cross-Posted on The Crossed Cow

My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps:

1. The wilderness of possibility – The terrain is hectic and full of details. Nearly every spot looks either suspicious or promising. Every nook and cranny may be hiding the answer, but where to dig? Which opportunity to choose?
2. The clueless plateau – The terrain is so bereft of any information or detail, it’s impossible to identify the potential areas where solutions may be buried.
3. Narrow canyons – You may not realise it, but the path is taking you further away from the solution and limiting your exploration to barren areas. You may struggle, but there are so many limitations that the range of actions possible seems extremely narrow, almost as if there’s no way out. A worse incarnation of the canyon trap is when you may think you are choosing the right path, but actually you have a distorted view of the territory. You’re walking trapped in the canyon and you don’t even realise it.
4. The oasis of false promise – This is it, you’ve found a spot that looks promising, this must be it. But actually, there’s nothing there, and you may dig and dig and sweat and nothing will come out of it.

There are techniques to mitigate and attempt to get over those traps, and sometimes half the job is realising which trap you’re dealing with. Here are some tactics to deal with the aforementioned traps:

1. Spoilt for choice? Develop qualifiers/filters to make you choosier. Find a system for your roving. (And if that doesn’t work, rove randomly enough to hit something).
2. No idea where to start? Try and generate more opportunities, roam more freely, and stay alert for any clue, however small.
3. Stuck in one direction? Try removing any constraints or reframe the problem and see what new directions open up.
4. Going for a promising direction but not yielding results? To begin with, don’t limit yourself too soon, don’t fall in love too quickly with solutions, keep roaming for a while. Have been focusing on an area of promise with little result? Try moving away, explore a new area and see what new possibilities open up.

Thinking back on brand challenges encountered through the years, I’m surprised to discover that most projects tend to fall into one of the first two types – Either you’re drowning in information and possibilities, with dozens of seemingly exciting alternatives and little evidence to what is worthy of staking a claim, further development or exploration. Alternatively, you find yourself in a bleak “insight desert” grasping for shards of useful information or any clue to point you in the right direction.

Why are the other two types more rare?
Simply because if a client falsely thinks they have the solution already or believe they are on the right path and nothing exists outside the box – they are unlikely to turn to strategic or creative advice in the first place. Instead, those “non-project” situations will sit there, waiting for someone to sound the wake up call of reality (to get out of the oasis trap) or for someone to breakthrough a new direction (to get out of the canyon trap) – either from the inside, or the outside.

Cross-posted on The Crossed Cow