I think it all starts at purpose driven marketing. What is the organization's role in the world? What does it believe in? From that everything else falls... The way the product or service is produced. The way innovation is offered to customers. The way the organization gives back to the world. All these things tie up together.
So, if your organization ran the world, what would it do? Go ahead, be selfish for a moment... What is your organization better at than everyone else? What's the purpose?
If you're Cisco you would probably want everyone to make better human connections because that idea "changes the way we live, work, play and learn". That's Cisco's purpose and it's a terrific one with really no limits. Could a telecom company say this? Probably, but they wouldn't be better at delivering on it than Cisco.
If you're Nike you would probably want everyone to realize that "if you have a body you are an athlete". That's another amazing purpose. Could another athletic company say this? Perhaps, but I doubt they would be better at it than Nike.
Thinking about purposes like these really falls inline with the following quote from Dell's most recent CMO, Erin Nelson, from the ANA convention earlier this month...
"Purpose isn't just good for the soul, it's actually really good for the bottom line. The purpose can become the filter that says 'do I or do I not invest the resources in getting this done, is it going to help me achieve the purpose for which my company exists every single day."
With 2011 right around the corner it's time for organizations across the world to have year end planning meetings with agencies. And when they do, let's talk about purpose driven marketing. And not just the giving back/responsible part of it but the whole, over-arching idea.
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.
I had a chance to catch up on Plannersphere blogs this weekend and I'm always amazed at all the great thinking that goes on over the course of a very short amount of time.
In doing this, there were two thoughts that particularly stood out to me which I wanted to further pass along...
First off Simon made a really interesting point in talking about trying to achieve strong brand minutes with our audiences and how that might help really hone cross-channel thinking. Considering a brand's full moment in time as it affects a consumer is a really interesting way to go about it...
If we stop thinking about broadcast and digital and experiential as separate things and just consider it in terms of ‘brand minutes’ then we can boil down the cross-media debate to one of the time people spend with a brand.
That's a helpful way to think about it, isn't it? As we're crafting ideas we should ask ourselves, 'are we making the absolute most of the time we have on stage and, more importantly, are we giving people the strongest logical and emotional items to carry with them to act upon and tell others?'
Next time you craft a brief it might be worth measuring the strength of the insight against the brand minute in produces in your mind... (And it's imperative that account folks and planners always write the first ad off the brief.)
Brief writing leads me to a second interesting way to think regarding the specialness of you. Or, rather, the unspecialness of you.
I am a fan of real insight, the revelations derived from real ife not research. And the truth is that the very best place to start in deriving real insight is yourself – so called planning from within. Your forensic understanding of your own behaviour and attitudes is your best first step in understanding how to change that behaviour and those attitudes.
The post goes on to say that basically if it turns out you are indeed special in some way outside the norm then perhaps your view of things is far different from the larger audience you're tasked with being relevant to...
I suppose at its heart Unspecial is about how similar we all are. While we all have our idiosyncrasies, we aren’t that special or unique as human beings, we like being part of the herd.
Anyway, I really like those thoughts. And I'm going to try to add them to the ever-refining kaleidoscope.
I really enjoyed this... Learned something new about the VW product line. Loved the same, but different presentation. And I wanted to watch it again. With the web we can do that, of course. Request to watch it again. See something we didn't quite catch the first time. Think about it a little further... Move a little bit closer to purchase. DDB New Zealand created.
Groupings like this are always interesting because everyone naturally pours through them for insight and to find the master formula.
And once you pour through the case studies in this article, what you'll find is... there is no formula.
Isn't that freeing?
Turns out, TV still works to change behavior. Just ask Lays.
That the social web can help revive established brands, like Old Spice and Converse, while creating new ones like Zappos.
But you don't necessarily have to invest in the social web to attract audience love. Just ask Subaru.
Customers can be your stars, like with Microsoft. And the newest technology can co-exist with longstanding tradition, like with Ralph Lauren.
You can destroy long-standing products, like Domino's. And you can create new industries, like Apple.
And per Macy's, you can go back to the ethos of a 152-year old brand nationally while tailoring your value locally.
There's only one right way to do it. And that's probably your way. Do your own thing.
If you invest in whatever your way is... If you nurture it... If you believe in it... If you focus... And if you tie it back to your rock-solid strategy, it will probably do the job.
A great way of keeping it all on track is to write a poster for the idea. It doesn't have to be the next 'Economist Management Trainee', (just give that a go to test your mettle) just simply sum up the idea and strategy. The rule is this: if you can't distill it into a poster it's too complicated.