Baby Evie is sleeping in her own room now and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Which means, oh joy, reading books in bed. I drive to work, I'm busy - bed is the place I read.
The backlog is considerable and has been driving me mad, just sitting there taunting me - the bedside table is just the smallest tip if the iceberg.
Anyway, just finished Norwegian Wood. Perversely, I've read and loved tons of Murukami but never got around to the book that took from him from cult to huge. I've always loved his surreal approach and despite this book being much more straightforward at first, there's as much going on with this book as any other, in fact, possibly more. It's a real skill to pull the extraordinary out of the mundane and he does it in spades here.
And there's a quote I'll take with me forever, "only arseholes feel sorry for themselves". Quite so.
I grew up at the fag end of the golden age of tennis. Just old enough to witness Connors, Borg, McEnroe, Lendl, Becker and the very young Agassi and Sampras. I always admired Lendl the most because he had the least talent and probably did the most with it.
Lendl wasn't a natural and certainly didn't have the advantages as poor Czech boy. But he pulled himself and MADE himself great. He was never an unstoppable talent like Becker or impish genius like McEnroe, but he made himself into a tennis machine that was never a jaw dropping joy to watch, but was always reliably consistent. His trademark killer forehand and rocket serve just never let him down.
There's lots to be said for being more of a Lendl is this business and less of a McEnroe.
On an agency level, there are 'hot' shops that burn very brightly for awhile then fizzle out, because they have had some amazing moments of inspirational genius, but can't get consistency. When they're good, they're very, very good but when they're bad, they're horrendous.
Only a few achieve both excellence and longevity. Yes, they might have famous iconic examples of genius, but what's more important is a look at the whole portfolio.
The actual money often comes from clients who are not ready for 'out there' work and more importantly, their agencies know when solid work is more important than the the fireworks.
Look at the portfolio of long terms successful agencies, the ones that are not money making network behemoths, and you see consistency. Eventually hard work, determination and high personal standards always win over rampant creativity and waspish genius.
I wouldn't be the first to propose the notion those most market research about what people say they want or will do is pretty useless. It doesn't matter if that's NPD, creative development research or whatever. Research based on watching customers, observing them in their own environment, living with them can expose all sorts of opportunities. Expecting them to tell us what they want will not. Because they can't. We're all useless at predicting what we'll do,want or feel like because our frame of reference is how things are right now, or how they were. Look at Star Trek from the 60's and how archaic it looks, because it's based on how people looked and behaved in the 1960's.
Not to mention, we post rationalise what we've done anyway. Our memories work to make us feel about the past, for example believing we weren't that happy in a relationship when we get dumped - or believing we made a choice from careful consideration rather than gut instinct. Men have been proven to change their minds about how they felt in a sad situation - believing they were less emotional than they were because culture teaches us that 'men don't cry'.
So customers are pretty bad at creating the future for companies. And much of market research is about mentally removing risk for marketing folk. It's a placebo. It's snake oil.
Brands are accepted as future building tools though. But the idea of a brand doesn't always help that much either.
Companies spend a massive amount on 'brands' because they're seen as massively valuable when it comes to the bottom line. They have a point since for some of the biggest organisations, a significant proportion of the market capitalisation value (if they sold up) lies in the name, the reputation and the symbols in people's heads. If Coca Cola's entire production line blew up, they could still sell the company for billions on the name, the blood red colour and the instantly recognisable font next to the swooshy ribbon thing. Of course, maybe they would need to hold onto the secret recipe. Yep, brands can be seen as an 'asset' along with real estate, infrastructure or the R&D team.
But the people that own these brands are besieged by those who are, in many ways, nothing more than charlatans. Brand consultants, internal 'brand health directors' and the agency, design and, these days even digital partners who like to think of themselves as brand guardians.
It seems that every single one has their own version of how brands work, and, lets be honest, change it week in week out. From brand triangles, wheels, and onions to more exotic species like 'blueprints', 'disruptive brand idea', 'brand health pyramids' and even molecules.
Every week, if you follow the trade press (and hopefully you don't bother too much) there's a sparkling new methodology, tool or weird chart unleashed on the marketing universe, with all the furrowed brow gravitas of the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the key to cold fusion.
Brand people tend to have their own unique, all conquering recipe that will prevent, cure and eradicate all sorts of commercial problems.
Now only a fool would say 'the brand' is not a good idea, it's just that most have forgotten what that idea actually was. The way that mos claim they work and tend to use them is, at best, doesn't work and, at worst, causes more problems than the ones they're solving.
They stop us solving genuine problems
Most brand models have the brand as an end in itself. You move people from being 'unaware' through to considers to, God forbid, evangelists. Huge budgets are spent on brand objectives, 'awareness' 'consideration' and so on, without addressing real business issues. Decent advertising builds brands, especially stuff that makes people talk.If it uses relatively consistent symbols, themes and tone, it builds up long term recognition and distinctiveness. But this is an consistent outcome of all advertising (and I use advertising in it's broadest sense - DM, telly, digital, social etc) not the ROLE of advertising.
We're all here to use creativity and communications to solve business issues, mosty around how to grow sales. Thinking just in terms of brand issues gets in the way. I love this Chrysler stuff, love it. But I'm sure the brief for this wasn't 'we need a new relevant brand idea' but more like, 'People are put off buying our luxury cars because they don't want to be seen as ostentatious in times like these'. And it's not based on some ethereal brand idea, it's based on a truth - the cars are made in Detroit. This based on solving a very real business issue, not brand scores.
This was created to solve solve the issue that fashion has straight hair wasn't the fashion must have it once was and we needed to demonstrate the product could do a lot more.
Not solving brand problems, solving commercial problems in a way that continued to build the brand.
Claims on how brands work are exaggerated and in many ways, plain wrong anyway
The efforts of many organisations into measuring brand scores often come at the expense of delivering sales - assuming that if we get the brand scores right, sales will follow. Yet I've worked on more than one brand where the brand health scores are through the roof but sales are declining. In one case becaue penetratio in the one price bracket the brand was in has maxed out and was under attack from competitors. Leading to the search for product innovation.
Another argument is that if we get strong emotional loyalty, the more loyal and frequent their buying behaviour will be.
But both are not really true. In this book we discover that brand image etc tends to happen AFTER the actual purchase, how people's score brands alters from months to month anyway and loyalty in any category are pretty constant. And around half of sales come from people who don't very much ergo don't think about brands very much.
Just on the brand thing therefore, assuming no one is interested is by far the most sensible approach but still - solving brand problems rarely solves business problems. Solving business problems does!
Brands about your history, not your future
This is the source of biggest blockage to business building ideas. All that brand essence, values stuff is designed to be immovable. Unlike the rest of culture, brand are designed to stand the test of time. When in reality, people, markets, culture and economies are always changing and moving on.
At the very least, that requires re-evaluating the brand to new contexts and challenges. For example, I think Levis' Go Forth work moved from being a slightly sexualised symbol of youth rebellion through what you wear - very much part of you are what you wear - an irrelevant hangover from th 1980's and 1990's to a fizzing catalyst for the young to come together around and actually CHANGE stuff apart from just looking like they did.
The most stupid thing anyone can say is, 'That's not on brand' when they means it doesn't get a brand onion tick.
So, yes, brands are useful. They're useful to people because they help them not think about stuff. They're useful to organisations because they do add to things like market capitalisations rates, they do enable a measure of coherence. But they do not solve busines problems on their own. Building brands is an outcome, not the goal.
I read an article the other day in Market Leader that basically had a go at communications in general and ad agencies specifically for falling far short of their claims to be 'partners' with their clients and generally having little commercial acumen or real world business experience.The article also has a go at planners, for example the quote, "Most agency planners don't understand the dynamics of business - they are about communications'.
On the face of it, I can't disagree with much of that. On the other hand, I'm not sure this is the problem.
Sometimes I do wonder if the problem with agencies on a macro level is trying to be commercial at all. Agency people are different to client people and this is a good thing. We can do what they can't and to be honest, they can do what we can't too.
I'm lucky enough to own a house. There are things I can do to it to keep it looking okay and even repair the odd thing. I can just about paint, I can fix a shelf. Can do plumbing? Can do the wiring? Can I draw the plans to my extension? No.I hire people who devoted considerable time to learn their craft and do nothing else for a living.
It's no different with agencies and agency people and their clients. I have tremendous respect for most cleints and all the things they do I,to be honest would rather slit my wrists than do all day.
The article implied that agencies having no MBA's in them was a bad thing. Why the hell do I need an MBA? Do clients need to done the APG Network to have a reasonable conversation about comms strategy?
But I and my colleagues in departments can do things they cannot. If they give us genuine business issues, we can apply understanding their customers and what they care about, leaps of imagination, technology ideas, empathy whole brain thinking to solving them.
We fill each others gaps. Just as planning suits and creatives should do the same (with a healthy blur).
The mistake agencies made wasn't being commercial enough it was trying to convince clients they were just like them and sell them linear, reliable, professional process. When great stuff really comes from chaos and serendipity.
The bit that's fair in my view is that bit about planners wanting to just talk about communications. I'd apply that to agencies too. Communications solutions, brand solutions (is there such a thing? Really?) start with business issues. At some point, mostly before I started in this business (but not entirely) agencies started having conversations about how to solve a pre-defined communications problem, rather than using creativity to solve a genuine business problem.
Somehow we colluded with the madness of only measuring brand health and other softm namby pamby targets.
I don't know who started this.Was it clients? Was it agencies? But as things stand, it's not entirely fair to just point the finger at agencies. So many briefs these days have much of the big strategy done, by peopl without the creative skill to do it well - clients and reduce planners to 'execution tweakers'. Some planners are complicit in this of course and become 'shrills for the work' but to be honest, many clients don't want to have a conversation about anything else.
That doesn't mean of course that we should give in.We'll only get 'upstream' if we start adding value, asked for or not and going beyond the tight briefs we tend to get. Asked for or not, taking to understand where the profits are, where revenue tends to come from and what the board cares about.
But that doesn't mean beautiful lies about being business partners. It means doing what the other cannot and fully appreciating the other.
Yes, agencies need to grow up and want to have business conversations, but then if clients only want talk about communications there seems little point.
I don't think I've mentioned that I've actually gone swimming about three times in the last 4 months. New baby, having a job and demanding toddler have just meant something had to drop.
I've been doing the gym and getting on the bike, but to be honest, it's been killing me not doing what I really love.
Which is why I'm extremely thankful the mini sabattical is nearly over and we're in a place where I can start to go on a morning again.
To be even more truthful, I'm also a little nervous. For a while, by body will fiendishly resist what I want it to do. It will hurt. I'll be slow and weak.
Which will mean patience and a little determination, and there's nothing like a meaty goal to keep you going.
Not like The Great North Swim and chasing times I did when I was a kid, like before. Something both realistic and sufficiently out of reach. So I'm going to work towards doing a 400 metre medley.
That's four lengths of each stroke in succession - butterfly, backstroke, breastroke and freestyle.
The last three are easy, it's the butterfly bit that's the challenge. I reckon right now, I'll just about be able swim two lengths. Rubbish (to put it in context, when I trained as a kid we used to do 5 x 8 lengths with about 15 seconds between as standard training).
So the first challenge is just to get strong enough to do four lengths fly.
Then be able to continue and do the whole thing without my lungs bursting.
I used to be able to do it in around 5 and minutes. I'll never get close to that again.
Lets see if I can do 7 minutes by the end of the year.
I'm sorry if banging on about kids is boring, I guess it is. Funnily enough I remember, in the days when I used to moderate focus groups more, going mental with parents who couldn't talk about anything without seeing it through their kids' eyes. It's remembering stuff like that ensures I'm determined for myself and Mrs Northern to always have some part of me and us that remains just that. We were two people who wanted to be together way before children and still do.
But, oh, they make you happy. From 4 month olf Evie laughing for the first time this weekend, to 2 year old Will going sledging for the first time on the same day. From him nearly exploding when he got a beleated Christmans present in the form of Lighting McQueen and Mac to Evie pulling at my arm if I dare to talk to someone else when I'm holding her.
I realised something this weekend also. As much as we like to think we educate our children, they do a pretty good job of teaching us things, or at least re-learning them.
For example, it's so much more fun to give than receive when you get older. Every blue moon, something comes along that excites me, that really captures my imagination and makes me really happy (but I have my eye on a new bike). But nothing like it did when I was a child, or even ten years ago. But when you make or buy stuff, or just think of things to do with children, you get outrageously excited for them, or with them and the reaction you get is worth a thousand Prada bags or limited edition trainers.
But despite this, kids are the purest evidence that doing stuff always trumps having stuff. Will always goes back to his little box of metal cars, no matter what we buy him, but nothing will ever match what he was like going to an aquarium for the first time, or the bi-weekly visits to the pet store to see the parrots, or just walking in the park looking for sticks to throw in the river. And as for going swimming.........
Will doesn't know anything about status or fashion, he doesn't even suspect that people are not all nice. The only clothes he really loves are anything that has Thomas the Tank Engine on or Cars. He doesn't second guess anyone or anything. He just gets on with it. One day he'll suffer the same insecurities as the rest of it, but he still reminds me how superficial image and status really are and how liberating it is to see the best in everyone rather than the worst.
Finally, he reminds me that defining yourself by your work is really stupid. To him his Mum and I are just Mummy and Daddy, his world basically (though Evie is creeping into his affections). I like what I dom but it's impossible to take it seriously next to the feeling of being his (and her Father). Nobody needs me like they do. Nothing matter more than being able to hold him when he falls. And I'll tell you something else, the feeling of satisfaction when you win a pitch, see your work run and stuff pales next to seeing him wolfing down the food you cooked or learning to throw.
I've felt other things as keenly as the things I feel around them, but you get more jaded as you get older. Kids remind you what it felt like to be young, when you felt really alive and nothin mattered more than having fun. When the scariest thing in the galaxy was Darth Vader and you ran everywhere because you couldn't wait for the next thing.
Of course, kids make you miss things like going to the cinema when you want, holidays where you please yourself and being able to read a book a week. But that stuff is inconsequential.
Kids remind you the difference between happiness and pleasure.
I once met Amanda Holden. Let's be precise, I fainted 5 yards away from her for reasons I won't go through here.
And no, I wasn't star-struck. In fact,I didn't like her. Based on what I'd read and what I'd seen on TV. Which means I didn't like HER I didn't like her image or the accepted wisdom of what she was like.
When I fainted in front of her, it was in a busy hotel reception, she was been fawned over by loads of assistants and was about to sweep outside to the waiting press corps (they were filming Britain's Got Talent). But when I did my sparko act, she stopped what she was doing, picked me up, asked if I was okay and got her assistant to get me a glass of water, plus she wouldn't leave until she was sure I was okay. Amidst all that showbiz hurly burly and the waiting journalists outside, she showed genuine concern and helped a muppet like me.
Which made me realise she probably anything like I was led to believe. She was probably quite nice. She'd certainly been nice to me.
When I was a student, I spent 3 years months not really talking to what I thought was the most pretty girl in the swim team because I couldn't see what she has to do with me and she seemed very aloof. It was only at a reunion thing 4 years after we graduated that she asked me why I never talked to her and admitted she had a 'thing' for m (no I don't know either). I found out she was very shy and found it hard to make friends because everyone assumed she was super confident, super cool and super elite.
Yet again she was nothing like what I'd expected, or even like my superficial impression.
It's a bit like that with research and 'consumers'. Data, segmentation, analytics and all that are great. So's listening to social media conversations etc. But if you think you'll understand what people are really like and what they really care about from this stuff, you're sadly wrong.
Take social media. So much of what people share on these platforms isn't what they're like,it's an idealised version of who they are, or who they'd really like to be. You won't get much truth from that. Just like the 'conversations' you see do not have the same conditions as real life (being anonymous, or at least not face to face makes you do and say all sorts of things you wouldn't do in the real world).
More to the point, I've banged on about the need to tap into what people really care about, not what your brand's agenda is. Much of that will come from habitually absorbing everything you can in popular culture, but also fishing where other don't fish. Anthropology and sociology papers are a useful bet for example. Not to mention dabbling in behavioural economics and stuff like that.
But nothing beats meeting them. In their own environment. As soon as you take them out of that, you affect their behaviour, just like a monkey isn't anything like what it's like in the jungle if you put it in a zoo.
In particle physics, one of the core pillars of quantum mechanics is that you can't pinpoint both a particle's position and momentum, by measuring one, you're interfering with it and affecting the other. It's just like that with people, if you want to know what people do or think, you need to meddle with what they're doing as little as possible. An artificiality lit room with 7 other strangers talking about stuff you never usually discuss or have really thought about is as nearly as much 'meddling' as I can think of.
It takes patience and you have to develop the skill for striking up conversations with people you have never met, which is tough for shy people like me, but who said this job was easy?
For example, I spent half a day hanging around a motorbike retailer, talking to the staff and customers. I was shocked by how many women came through the door and completely changed my view of them. From reckless idiots that get in the way of my car to a weird tribe that see themselves as the last wolves in an overly cushioned world of sheep. They all wanted to feel something in a jaded existence. I began to admire them in fact.
I've learned more about Mums over 35 and coffea/tea and biscuits by being around when my, maternity- leave enjoying, wife has her cronies over than any segmentation study (and you know what gents, they don't talk about us).
Just like I was in no real position to judge what Ms Holden was like until I met her, I don't think you can really say you know your customers until you've spent some time with them in their environment.
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