What to do when 'product' story is a mandatory

It's all well and good having wonderful proof that messaging and product benefity type stuff gets in the way of effective brand communication, how not even 'emotional' stuff does as well as 'fame', stuff like this, this or, if you forgive the self promotion this School of the Web project. Not to mention, banging on about cultural strategy and exploding category when so many (most) of client briefs insist on having the exact opposite as mandatory.

Yep, the reality is that most briefs insist on telling people why the product is better, and making sure it's grounded in what is familiar within the category.

Despite the fact that the real challenge for most advertising and stuff is making anybody care in the first place, cutting the default response to try and ignore advertising and, most critically, insert something in the long term memory (the specifics of how the brain remembers and what how we make decisions means this needs to be rooted in feelings and associations, while the Fame stuff can be boiled down to the fact that if people are talking you, they assume you're leading the category, so they naturally assume you're better, in fact, because brand choice is part if identity construction, they WANT to believe you're better and humans naturally justify every intuitive decision they make).

So what do you do when, not if, a brief like this arrives? There's no point telling the client they don't get how brands work, nobody persuades anyone towards their line of thinking by telling them they're wrong and implying they're stupid.

Nope, you find a way to talk about the product in way that's culturally provocative plus tonally and emotionally relevant to how  people feel about the brand, or could be credibly made to feel (ASDA will never be cool, Converse will never be sensible).

In fact, to be honest, you should be doing this anyway. Too much work tries to do the fame/culture thing but forgets to make it credible to the brand. Looking to bring the product to life in a way people will care about isn't just a good place to start, it's the best.

When you look at the forensic data shared in Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow. Much of how advertising  works is based on building clear brand links and memory structures. In other word's, get people to think about a brand and give them clear triggers in long term memory when they get anywhere near making some sort of choice. That mean consistency of feel (Honda and optimism, Coke and happiness), developing memorable long term cues (McDonalds Golden Arches, Coke's ribbon) and let people know what the product looks like.

 

 

A great example of achieving a leap forward AND keeping long term cues is Mother's Stella Artois 4. It's still based in a sophisticated Gaulic world (continuing the massive artistic licence of Belgium not being anywhere near France), but it takes it to a place more relevant to today's young men for whom beer is a badge. The badge is now 'smoothness' which is linked directly to the main product attribute.

That brings me to option 1. Don't fight against the product story, embrace it. But don't just dramatise it in a way that can't be missed (but of course that's a start), link it to something in culture that really matters to it's audience.Like Stella 4.

Also like Old Spice. Yes, it's got masses going on about male identity and relationships between men and women, but at it's heart, it's relevant to the brand's experienced, masculine heritage (Axe wouldn't be credible doing this) and it's really about the key product attribute - it smells manly. Not to mention the big fat pack shot.

 

This is also a useful way to get around the 'category relevance' question. You just need to prove to the client that people don't respond to the same images and cues, what they really care about when they think about the category isxxxx. For example, every fucking hair commercial out has glassy eyed models swishing their hair, and because they do, clients asks for more. When actually, hair is tied up with self confidence, belief about your capabilities and all sorts of feminist issues. That's the category rule, not fake science and fake women. Limitations to what you can do with hair inhibit what you think YOU can do.

 

Option 2 is where you dramatise the product, but don't provide an answer to some sort of tension in culture, you tap into something people are already interested in.

 

Coke Zero here communicates that it tastes exactly like the original, tapping into the vogue for ironic, deadpan, slightly uncomfortable mockumentaries.

 

 

Fox's biscuits implies premium and attention to detail, while tapping into the ever present fascination with mob culture AND ironic characters that don't know they're being funny, Alan Partridge etc.

 

Cravendale dramatises superior taste and amplifies the youtube craze for funny cat videos.

Then there is option 3. The riskiest and most commercially debatable - dramatise product in a way that is pure, original entertainment, made to make people stand up and pay attention. Of course, the very best examples work incredibly well, but the failure rate is high. Also, I'd question the absolute long term benefit. People might talk about the advertising rather than the brand, which, MIGHT, generate short term sales, but not the long term memory cues that are advertising's real benefit.

 

These Curry's ads create impact of course.They tell you something about the product service. But it doesn't make me feel anything about Curry's. There is not relevance to Star Wars, apart from a brand raiding my childhood in search of sales (in my opinion). I don't see them seeping into popular culture. Maybe because it all feels a bit forced.

I always liked this Nokia stuff, but it while it dramatised the product attribute brilliantly, it never made me feel anything about Nokia and seemed to clash with some deep, fuzzy 'Nokianess'.

 

 

These commercials for Tesco told people that the range was much better and more diverse than they thought it was, but it did it with pure entertainment. They were so funny, people loved them with no discernable 'cultural' resonance.

 

 

And then of course, there's Honda, but notice how 'brand up' this is. I'm not saying pure entertainment isn't a viable route, but perhaps the most risk free approach is making sure it works from the brand out.

Unless you're sure you have something like this:

 

Or this

 

(but I might argue that the feeling of freedom and release in the increasingly oppressive big city is a cultural hotspot, but this might too implicit)

Every product has some sort of story. It usually isn't better than something else, but if you tell it in a way that taps into something people REALLY care about, or deliver in a way that adds to what they're interested in, or, big ask, makes them talk so much it becomes culture, which is VERY hard to pull of these days, you can still create ads and stuff that have real, long term value.

Comments

[Martin]

Lovely post.

"Every product has some sort of story". Great words to live by.

"makes them talk so much it becomes culture"...

I hear that from a good number of planners.

BUT:

What does that really mean?
Is that a means or an end?
Which bit of culture?
Slow culture - those deeply embedded categories of inherited meaning?
Or fast culture - the every changing ephemera of popular culture?
How can we evaluate whether its become part of culture?
Does becoming part of culture drive business results?
Or is it all bullshit and rhetoric?

What do you think...?

[toto]

Yea, Northnern, what ya think ?

[northern]

yep good point, perhaps I was being too kind of proponents of point 3, since I think it's the strategy of the lazy and deluded. I don't know how you would agree some hard measures to evaluate it and it feels like it runs the risk of, if it actually ends up pas part of popular culture, not building up long term memory structures, so people just remember the advertising and not the brand. That's a big criticism I have of Mother's approach and some of the work they do.
It also reminds of the conceit in Media Arts - stop interupting what people are interested in an become what they're interested in. Brands just won't become that.
Being old enough to remember the so called golden age of advertising when ads were alledgedly more loved than they are now. That's always felt untrue. Most stuff wasn;t any good back then, it isn't now. Perhaps people were less cynical then and accepted the dark arts more, but they don't know, therefore I buy the 'becoming culture' approach even less.
Oh, to be specific, I think Fame strategy drives business results, specifically, ads people talk about. But even that can be the lazy argument, as ads that get talked about are pretty useless if they don't address a specific problem- what people don't think or do right now. Famous for what I guess.