Campaign Planning

Say Two Things

Watching these recent examples and then re-watching this terrific advice, is a reminder that in the big communication outlets we should try to focus on saying only two things. The first is, of course, the key product takeaway. And the second is the tone and emotion that it's presented in for it's what lingers, sells and motivates over the long term.

Aiming For The Heart

The causal role of conscious thought has been vastly overrated. It is often a post hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious. And this experiment shows with rather shocking clarity the huge difference that can exist between the way we think we choose things and the ways that we really choose. We are quite capable of feeling a strong preference for something for reasons which we're totally ignorant of, but we are good at disguising this to ourselves because we automatically tend to create an apparently rational cover story, which we then believe in.

From here.

The Science of Optimism

 

Are people more pessimistic or optimistic? As we watch the nightly news and follow political commentary one might immediately say we're a pessimistic bunch. But science says differently. Human brains are built to tilt toward the positive according to a stellar report by Tali Sharot called The Optimism Bias.

We imagine what could be. Apparently inside our brains our prefrontal cortex and the amygdala work together to keep us looking forward. It's a proactive survival mechanism. Because we are a species that is consciously aware of our pending mortality it is optimism that keeps us balanced. It's what motivated us to move out of caves in the first place. 

From the article:

"Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind. Our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival."

Collectively we can be pessimistic, but when it comes to ourselves, we are mostly optimistic. For example, a recent survey found that while 70% of respondents thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family. 

We are hard-wired to think about what could be. In marketing let's not over think stuff: put the optimistic emotion of the product out there. People want that.

The next thing about optimism is that it's largely constructed out of experiences. The more experiences we have in our lives the more we learn. And the more we learn, interestingly, the more optimistic science says we tend to become. This is because prior experience allows us to find the silver lining in the clouds since we've been there before.

Different experiences also allow us to put things in the proper perspective. For instance, right before I read the Optimism Bias I was scanning an article about Oscar winning actress, Marion Cotillard, who was asked if she prefers the small films or big Hollywood productions...

MC: "Oh, I love both. I have the possibility to travel into so many universes, and that is what really makes the job marvelous for me. I wouldn't say I prefer one or the other. It's the richness (of both) that makes me think I will always have sparkles in my eyes and in my heart."

The value is in the balance and being well-rounded. 

And if we're going to be well-rounded from experiences then that's extra good for organizations. In Change By Design, IDEO's Tim Brown talks about the importance of T-Shaped people in an organization. T-Shaped people are those who vertically specialize in something (the vertical part of the "T") but because they push themselves outside their core competency they also have the ability to collaborate across disciplines (the horizontal part of the "T").

So it's important to seek experiences in ourselves and others... it makes for more optimistic and collaborative groups.

The science of optimism is fascinating. Read the full article here.

Is Expensive Wine Worth The Price?

When drinking wine it is both true and untrue to say that the expensive stuff tastes better than the inexpensive stuff. 

First the untrue. In a recent study of blind tasting, psychologist Richard Wiseman asked 600 people to say which wines were more expensive after sipping. People only picked correctly 53% of the time--the equivalent of a coin flip.

Now the true. We love to rank and score things but we can't really quantify taste on a 100 point scale. The more we know about the wine we're drinking--from imagining the region where it's from to seeing the transporting label design--the more we engage our full brain in the process, thus receiving a better experience.

From Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex who originally posted this research:

The taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of that alcoholic liquid in the glass. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our sensations and extrapolating upwards. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories, wine shop factoids and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars pointed out, there is no reasonable way to divide sensory experience into what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.” When we take a sip of wine, for instance, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisplonk, or thiswineisexpensive. Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their inputs based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface.

And that's how we assign value to brands too. 'We taste everything all at once.'

Read the original post from Jonah here. There's tons of great stuff like this over at The Frontal Cortex.

On A Mass Scale We Choose Emotion

When a company is in it for the long term it's essential that an emotional reason to buy plays at the heart of activity. I call this Purpose Driven Marketing. Others have other names. But what's starting to play out is that over the last several years there have been lots of one-off ideas, cool tactics and tons of "you gotta check this out" moments. These are good. These work. But when the goal is long-term victory and dominance across a vast scale of consumers, then the emotional core is the most fortified of approaches.

Quick example... If you watch network TV on Sunday night you have a viewing choice at 8pm: Secret Millionaire (ABC) or America's Next Great Restaurant (NBC). Both are new and unique. But nearly 6 million more people choose Secret Millionaire. The difference between the two: Secret Millionaire stirs emotions while the Next Great Restaurant is pragmatic.

Back to companies... McDonald's vs. Burger King. Over the last several years BK has focused their marketing efforts on one-off ideas surrounding big food, such as Whopper Virgins and Whopper Sacrifice. On the other side, McDonald's has continued globally with I'm Lovin' It, a comprehensive message that taps our emotions greater than one-off efforts. BK experienced solid sales increases from 2005 through 2009 but today (long term) they are off 2.5%. McDonald's is up 4.4%. Mark Kalinowski, restaurant industry analyst with Janney Capital Markets summed it up concisely last month: "Burger King is a brand that needs to find its voice in the market, and right now it's having trouble doing that."

Another example... Coke vs. Pepsi. Ad Age recently reported how Pepsi fell to #3 behind Coke and Diet Coke respectively. I don't believe this points to what Pepsi did wrong ("Refresh" is genius) but rather what Coke did amazingly well across the world: a global refinement of the emotional positioning of "coke brings joy" across packaging, branding, advertising, sponsorship and engagement. Take this spot or these elements and you can put them immediately into the US, Spain or China and it translates the same. No explanation needed. 

Many brands are doing great work today. This I truly believe. (And if you don't believe it you should probably expose yourself to more work.) But when it comes to communicating across a vast amount of consumers over the long term, one-off ideas can win the round but it's the emotional, purpose driven approach that wins the match.

Photo Mosaic

There's a button on Flickr that allows you to view icons of all the photos taken by other people that you've favorited over time. Above is mine. It's nice to look at a snapshot of stuff that's caught your eye... No rhyme or reason per se, but definitely an overarching theme. (Each of us have themes, of course.) But it's a pleasant feeling to look back at a collage of lots of images--favorited at random times on random days in random moods--and immediately think, yep, that feels about right.

Throwdown

If only a few of the five dozen Super Bowl ads moved you, and you'd really like to see another new ad that positively motivates and celebrates the product and the emotion behind the product, then I present, "Throwdown." Terrific.

Everything We Are Is A Developmental Process

I think this is an important thing to read. Or, at least, it's really interesting. It talks about the ongoing understanding of how our genes and our environment need each other in order to maximize our potential as humans. And how niether genes or environment can be successful alone. You're not just born "naturally gifted" at something. Our genes actually interact with our surroundings to enhance and develop us. 

Science like this re-inforces the importance of micro cultures. And if technology is one of the primary engines enabling more micro cultures it also backs up Kevin's point that one of the most important benefits of technology is that it gives us more opportunities to be our best selves.

Full Mind Engagement

Lately I've been thinking about the brain and how, perhaps, a better understanding of how we make decisions could lead to better marketing. To do this I dabbled in science a bit over the summer. And while many books on neuroscience were difficult to tie back to marketing, the reoccuring thing that kept surfacing was the simple balance of logic and emotion through the engagement of both sides of our brain. So that's where I went... Right now it's a hypothesis only, but it seems like the most effective and talked-about marketing today succeeds because it achieves the optimal engagement of both brain functions. Full mind engagement, if you will.

(I didn't spend too much time on that collection of words. A couple of quick searches. So if you're using it already, please let me know...)

If you don't know much about the brain, as I didn't, I think the most concise understanding for the purpose of marketing can be found in A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. The brain basically works like this...

The left hemisphere handles logic, sequence, literalness and analysis. The right takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, context and the big picture.

And the two need each other.

The book goes on to say...

Logic without emotion is a chilly, Spock-like existence. Emotion without logic is a weepy, hysterical world where the clocks are never right and the buses are always late. In the end, yin always needs yang.

Today, most of us know, in general, how the brain works. But we didn't always.

And before talking about full mind engagement it's interesting to look back into history and see how the understanding of our brain parallels with the development of the advertising industry...

When advertising got its start it was all logic. Advertisers went to great lengths to convey the practical reasons to buy. At the beginning of the 20th century industry pioneers like Lasker and Hopkins began creating 'salesmanship in print.' Ads like this one for Pepsodent (via 20 Ads That Shook the World) were the result...

 

During the time of the Pepsodent ad we only had just started to study the brain. But what we did know then, thanks to neurologists like Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, was that the left side of the brain controlled many of the key functions that separated us from other species, like speaking and understanding language. We were logical beings and logic was how we moved through life and how we made our decisions. Hence the ads of the day.

It wasn't until the 1950s that we learned the right side of the brain had a role too. It helped us understand patterns, interpret emotions and be able to absorb non verbal expressions. This was thanks to Roger Sperry who received a Nobel Prize in medicine for that discovery. 

Somewhat ironically, advertising then began tapping those right brain functions in the 50s...

This was great.

But then, during the 1960s, something terrific happened: we atom-smashed both logic and emotion together for the first time. Thanks Bill.

Terrific.

And then, I think, we never fully went there as an industry. Didn't go 100% down the road that the creative revolution paved for us. Many became overly wrapped up in creativity for creativity's sake. Went for the shock. Wanted to "stand out." Others thought we needed to be fully logical.

Cut to today...

It seems what's really working is communication that, once again, fully atom-smashes both logic and emotion together at once. Like this recent ad for Jeep:

Or this...

 And this...

 

They all work because they play to an audience whose brains are far more alert than ever before.

And a lot of this is due to the sharable nature of the web, of course.

One of the best things the sharability of the web has brought us is the desire for marketers to work harder and give us more. Engage us emotionally and factually. Give us more information to talk about. More things to feel. More succinct pieces of communication that matter rather than volumes of generic marketing-speak. Things that make us smarter: that little bit of information that we can tell others...

The ones who do that stand out. It's the reason, I think, this works so well:

And why ads like this have helped Ford achieve record quarterly profits and, just this week, Marketer of the Year...

All of which brings me back to full mind engagement...

There are certain categories where emotion obviouly trumps logic (fashion) and others where emotion is a bit of a force-fit (interest-based financial products). But achieving both is what really engages us. It draws us in more effectively for a good brand minute, as Simon recently wrote.

So... I guess it comes down to addressing two questions early on in development:

What's the key super interesting and relevant logic point that people can carry around and spread?

What's the desired emotion that makes people relate?

We should strive to always do both.

After all, as it states in A Whole New Mind...

Put the two (sides of the brain) together and one gets a powerful thinking machine. Use either on its own and the result can be bizarre or absurd.

Art, Creativity, Marketing and Such

via

If you work in advertising (especially account management or brand strategy) I think you'll find reading Tolstoy's What Is Art? a valuable use of time.

In this relatively short book the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina articulates a guide that helps distinguish between what is indeed "art" and what is not.

As you can imagine, it sparked lots of debate and criticism in the early 1900s upon release but it's a fascinating read with Tolstoy's key definition of art coming down to this:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art.

I like that.

What it's basically asking is: Did the artist communicate with clarity that which was intended?

Tolstoy's definition preceded film... But this is probably art:

Moving beyond art, I believe the same guideline should be used today when we call something "creative" in marketing. Labeling something as really creative is, of course, an accolade for the idea. Is it creative? Well, are we clearly and concisely conveying our intentions? 

This sure did:

But we use the word 'creative' all the time. Perhaps too much. We just all assume everyone universally knows what it means. What Is Art? talked about this tendency too...

As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word with the greater self assurance do people use that word pretending that what is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not even worthwhile to discuss what it actually means.

Isn't that the truth when you think about it? "Cool" immediately comes to mind. (A good definition of that can be found here.)

Anyway, I revisited What Is Art? after I read Newsweek's much forwarded article, "The Creativity Crisis," which is simply the best article on creativity I've read in a very long time.

The first key takeaway from the article is their rather simple definition of creativity:  the production of something original and useful.

Excellent.

But I'm really interested in how that definition turns the corner to define creativity in marketing which is why I loved the second key takeaway from the article:  that creativity is about problem solving.

And the good news about that is, interestingly, the process of creative problem solving can be taught and practiced. It's a way of thinking that engages both sides of our brain, not just the right hemisphere.

From "The Creativity Crises":

...When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate...

So taking all of this in, I'm currently thinking about creativity in marketing as:  The creation of something original and useful that successfully solves a business problem.

I dunno... I may not like that next week but I'm going with it today. After all, a recent IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future so it's good that we all try and concisely define and understand what creativity means in 2010...