THE QUEST FOR THE NEXT BIG IDEA

What a BIG IDEA is not?  It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and keep drawing on.

The new model of marketing is to do stuff for people and then tell everyone else about it with advertising (solutions, not propositions). Advertising used to tell you how brands could solve your problems. Now it needs to solve problems and tell you about it because everyone knows how most products work.

One example of this way of thinking is Domino’s ‘Turnaround’ campaign. The campaign starts with real customers expressing why they don’t like Domino’s pizza. This leads to a new pizza recipe and an advertising campaign centred on finding the original research attendees and taking them the new recipe for their honest response. While obviously a staged experiment, it is a dramatisation of a reverse polarity approach.

This spread to the packaging, where pizza proverbs from customers were inscribed on the boxes and the menus, which incorporated pictures submitted by customers, rather than staged food shots. The critical thing is for brands to listen to what people are saying and then incorporate what they say, and solutions and surprises to delight them, into content and behaviour.

It raises the question, how do we create value? How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels? How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just brand utterances? We must remember that all aspects of brand behaviour are communicative, and human communication is always about relationships, and less about message transmission than we believe.

The types of ‘meta-communication’ most successful in building relationships are reciprocal (solving problems for people) or imitative (creating behaviours that can be copied). The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an infinite media space are likely to require an understanding of participation – users rather than audiences – and context.

Remember, people are not merely customers or prospects because customers are not the same as people. Customers are to people as waves are to water. ‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people. Successful ideas create customers by modifying behaviour. Conscious or subconscious attention, therefore, needs to be aggregated at scale to change enough behaviour to create significant commercial impact. Ideas spread or die in the attention market.

So, do things for people – solve a brand problem by solving consumer problems. Introduce intermediate behaviours for imitation. Create content that people find valuable, give them tools they can use. Leverage advertising creation and distribution to help disseminate – ‘ideas that can be advertised’, not just advertising ideas.

THE SCIENCE OF BRAND ENGAGEMENT

A brand, from the point of view of a person, may be considered like a memory: every brand experience builds to develop a specific and evolving pattern in a person’s mind called a ‘brandgram’ (also called a somatic marker.)

This ‘brandgram’ is triggered by encountering additional brand cues, and these cues combine to create a new experience. This final experience at point of purchase, when the cue of the product itself combines with the brandgram, will ultimately drive a purchase decision.

Procter & Gamble, for example, calls this the ‘first moment of truth’: the three to seven seconds when you first see a product on the shelf in the supermarket. This instant is one of its most important marketing opportunities as it is at this moment that the totality of all previous brand interactions either pay off or don’t.

So, the nature of the experience is what needs to be considered – what does the consumer require when making this purchase decision? Consumers need different brands to do different things. The vast majority of purchases do not adhere to a purchase funnel at all – they are made impulsively.

When confronted by innumerable choices while shopping at the supermarket, we use brands as heuristics to shortcut decisions. Heuristics are a problem-solving method that uses shortcuts to produce good-enough solutions given a limited time frame or deadline.

Since there is, or there is perceived to be, functional parity among the primary competitors, we need to have only a very slight preference for a brand to aid the decision. Other purchases may have different contextual needs that brands help to fulfil. High involvement purchases, such as consumer electronics and cars, have a longer purchase cycle, although there are indications that it is decreasing thanks to better access to information.

There are always a combination of rational and emotional needs that brands satisfy. Engaging communication that helps to build stronger brand affiliations, a more developed sense of the brand, can help to provide the consumer reassurance, both pre and post-purchase. The needs of consumers and the drivers of their behaviour are variables. Ultimately, by looking at some of the veiled aspects of attention and cognition, we can begin to better understand people and brands, and how they interact.

LUBRICANTS OF REASON

It’s not emotion or reason, but always both. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but without the heuristics of emotion to help us, we would never be able to decide anything. So, it is not that there are emotional and rational sides pulling us in different directions, but that emotions are the ‘lubricants of reason’ – we can’t think without them.

Real-life decision making usually involves assessment, by cognitive and emotional processes, of the incentive value of the various actions available in particular situations. However, often, situations require decisions between many complex and conflicting alternatives, with a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. In such situations, cognitive processes may become overloaded and be unable to provide an informed option. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process.

This suggests that the role of communication could be simply establishing or reinforcing the somatic markers in association with brands so that when consumers encounter the decision of which toothpaste to buy, the somatic marker’s kick in and lubricate the decision. Savvy brands take away the consumers need to choose by covertly biasing cognition, thus making consumers lives easier.

To succeed in marketing, we need to:

• Win prospects’ attention (point A)
• Help prospects create a memory and form an intention
• Get them to act on their intention when decision time comes (at point B).

(Or, Pain Point > Solution > Call To Action)

Note:  It’s hard enough to win buyers’ attention with content at Point A. However, it’s much harder to get buyers to remember your content when they make a decision at Point B.

Great marketing helps buyers identify their own intentions or clarify new intentions at Point A. Make your messages repeatable and frequent, filled with strong emotions, short and simple, and able to easily roll off the tongue. 

NEUROSCIENCE AND RETHINKING MESSAGING

Neuroscience teaches us that memories don’t exist whole but as little bytes of sensory impulses that need reconstruction. Don’t make that reconstruction task more difficult than it needs to be. Though most marketers fear rejection, they should instead fear being ignored.

Let’s face it, most ad campaigns sink without a trace. Most brands don’t register on the radar. That’s not because an ever-fragmenting media landscape is clogged with countless messages. Nor is it because even the most basic of categories offer a proliferation of choice.

Although those factors don’t help, the reason most messaging and brands are invisible is that people filter out almost all the world around them. It’s a coping mechanism. As humans, we are hard-wired to focus on what really matters and that is highly unlikely to include a message from a brand.

Given this reality, it strikes me as odd that marketers continue to create and invest in messaging that is built on worried unrealistic foundations. 

Why, for instance, do marketers continue to treat humans as rational beings making reasonable decisions based on knowledge? Why do marketers obsess about communicating a clear proposition and engaging consumers with what they have to say? Why do marketers bother measuring how well that information is delivered, or how engaged the audience is with their message?

The answer is because it’s comforting. It creates a sense of control over what is a scary and uncertain endeavour. It feels good to get all rational about the business of developing marketing messages. But the reality is that people don’t make buying decisions the way marketers make messaging decisions.

Humans have neither the time nor the processing power to do so. Instead, the brain devises intuitive strategies to help us make instant decisions driven by unconscious emotional reactions. At best, rational processing is used to justify and make us feel good about the emotional decision we’ve already made (this is the so-called intellectual alibi effect).

The bottom line is, marketers are obsessed with information – even when psychology tells us that humans are non-consumers of information. We really should be thinking more about motive and alibi than proposition and support.

If we make decisions in an emotional and intuitive manner, then it follows that brands need to be built the same way. Brands are not explicit memory palaces, but implicit memory traces. Therefore, brands need to be built on sensory experiences and associations, not on awareness and communication.

Moreover, any strategy needs to influence the intuitive nature of decision-making, to focus on the impression we want to make rather than what we need to communicate. Basically, we should pay less attention to information and more attention to context.

Why?  Because ads work by creating or strengthening implicit associations in the brain. That means we need ideas that exist in popular culture, ideas that create a pattern in our psyche, ideas that are adopted not force-fed. When developing messaging, ask yourself the following five questions.

First, how can you disrupt? The power of creativity is in its ability to surprise people. Surprise leads to fame and fame leads to brands being chosen on autopilot. Most marketers are worrying about being rejected when they should be worrying about being ignored. You’ve got to grab people from the get-go, so use disruption to increase attentiveness and memory formation.

Second, how can you stir emotions?  Surrounding a brand with emotion amplifies its level of mental availability because the stickiest memories are formed not from facts but from emotional responses. So, what visceral reactions can you stir in people?

Third, how can you make choosing you easy? Neuroscience teaches us that memories don’t exist whole but as little bytes of sensory impulses that need reconstruction. Don’t make that reconstruction task more difficult than it needs to be. Link your brand to visual and aural stimuli and other mnemonics.

Fourth, how can you be positive? Again, neuroscience teaches us that we like to feel good, not bad. Don’t fight that. You will lose. Even with challenging subjects, make sure ensure you generate positive feelings.

Fifth, how can you reward attention? The promise of needs met is the ultimate feel-good high, so make sure any emotion you stimulate has a point. It’s not rocket science to realise that people subconsciously ask "what’s in it for me?".

Adopt this basic advice and your messaging will work better. 

A GLOSSARY OF KEY BRAND ARCHITECTURE TERMS

* Note: This list is not comprehensive.

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Brand architecture is the strategy that marketers use to determine which products and services to introduce, and which brand names, logos, symbols, and other brand elements to apply to new and existing products. 

 

Brand elements, sometimes called brand identities, are those trademarkable devices that serve to identify and differentiate brands. The main ones are brand names, URLs, logos, symbols, characters, spokespeople, slogans, jingles, packages, and signage.

A brand portfolio is the set of all brands and brand lines that a particular firm offers for sale to buyers in a particular category.

A brand line consists of all products—original, as well as line and category extensions—sold under a particular brand.

A product line is a group of products within a product category that are closely related because they function similarly, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same type of outlets, or fall within given price ranges.

A brand mix (or brand assortment) is the set of all brand lines that a particular seller makes available to buyers.

A product mix (or product assortment) is the set of all product lines and items that a particular seller makes available to buyers.

A brand hierarchy is a means of graphically portraying a firm’s branding strategy by displaying the number and nature of common and distinctive brand elements across the firm’s products, revealing their explicit ordering.

A family brand, also called a master brand, range brand or umbrella brand is a brand used across multiple product categories but is not necessarily the name of the company or corporation.

A brand extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name.

A line extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name within an existing category for a brand (Tide Pods or Tide Total Care laundry detergent).

A category extension is a new product introduced under an existing brand name outside existing categories for a brand (Tide Dry Cleaners retail outlets).

A parent brand is an existing brand used to introduce new products.

A sub-brand is a particular form of brand extensions in which the new product carries both the parent brand name and a new individual brand name (Apple iPad, Ford Fusion, and American Express Blue card).

A modifier is a means to designate a specific item or model type or a particular version or configuration of a product (e.g., Gillette Fusion razors, Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey, and Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum).

A flanker or “fighter” brand is a brand designed to negate the threat of a competitors’ brands so that more important and profitable brands can retain their desired positioning.

A flagship product is a product that best represents or embodies the brand to consumers. It is often the first product by which the brand gained fame, a widely accepted bestseller, or a highly admired or award-winning product.

A cash cow is a brand that is kept around despite even dwindling sales because it still manages to hold on to a sufficient number of customers and maintain its profitability with virtually no marketing support by capitalising on its reservoir of existing brand equity.