"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" said Ralph Waldo Emerson.
If this were true, none of us would have jobs. What we do is tell people about the better mousetraps. Only then does the world come to us (or our clients).
Something we've noticed at Dazzle Ships recently is that brands don't seem to talk about what they do anymore. Whether they're telco brands, financial service brands, cars, whatever, there seems, with a few notable exceptions, to be a great reluctance to explain to consumers or potential comsumers what these brands do and how they're superior to their competition. No one wants to explain why their mousetrap is better. Instead, they want to give you a brand experience. Or have a conversation with you. Or, better still, both.
The first thing to say is this has been around for a bit. In 1997, Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore published a paper in the Harvard Business Review called 'Welcome to the Experience Economy', which they subsequently turned into a book. The gist of it being that given advances in production technology, there is little or no functional difference between brands, so they differentiate themselves by giving customers experiences:
This exciting new theory was embraced by marketing, advertising and media types as proof positive of the power of the brand. You didn't sell stuff by talking about boring old products anymore, you had to give people experiences.
This has all been accelerated by the rise of digital and social media, and the corresponding rise in the notoriously slippery concept of 'engagement'. In this brave new world, we needed new communication rules and, as everything was now based on social interaction, this provided our start point. Brands now needed to behave like they were your friend, and friends don't talk about themselves incessantly. They talk about stuff that you have in common - shared interests, experiences, goals. Brands needed now to stress that they were just like you, the consumer. So they held up a mirror to consumers' lives and forgot to talk about themselves at all. What they wanted to do was 'join the conversation'.
At the same time, we became obsessed with something called the Big Idea. The problem was no one could show you a big idea until after it had happened, which meant that it was pretty difficult to know if you'd had one or not. The one thing just about everyone could agree on, though, was that a Big Idea was simple. A single uniting thought that brought brands and consumers together in one big happy experience. Something that people would talk about.
Now, all this sounds a little negative. There are, of course, people who have made this work - O2 being the obvious example.
But, as everyone moves into this space, we need to stop for a second and examine some of the premises this new model has been built on. And some of them don't stand up. Here's why...
1. Markets aren't static
Sure, product innovation seems harder. But markets do move, products do improve. People do invent better mousetraps. Linked with this is the fact that people don't always know what they want from a category. Handset manufacturers got blind-sided by Apple, because they were too busy trying to get TV onto phones, and ignored music. As Henry Ford pointed out 'If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'faster horses''.
2. Simple heuristics vs. complex relationships
Brands are intended to simplify. Brands were invented to stop people spending too much time making decisions. In psychology speak, brands are heuristics. In other words, the success of your brand could be directly measured in how little time people spent thinking about it. This still lives on in the Big Idea.
But here's the rub. All our new wave strategies are designed around interaction, involvement and engagement. The complete opposite of a brands original intention. Success is now measured in how much time people spend with it. This requires brands to be complex, interesting and nuanced. If we go back to our social principles, we wouldn't dream of having the same conversation with everyone we meet. The danger of the Big Idea is that this is exactly what happens - it might be simple for us to express - but consumers, in all their infuriating variety, aren't all interested in the same thing.
3. Buzz is the new awareness
We've rubbished awareness as a metric before. The new, new thing is 'buzz'. Given that people don't really talk about brands, they've been frantically allying themselves to stuff people do talk about. Sport, music, film, fashion, all are getting increasingly crowded as brands look to buy interest and crebibility. There's nothing wrong with this, but we need to be clear. Are people really talking about your brand? Or are they just talking about the stuff they've always talked about, that you've now attached yourself to. Oh, and which of these things leads to sales? Honestly?
4. What people talk about when they talk about brands
The irony in all of this is that if we actually stopped and listened to what consumers were saying instead of just muscling our way into the conversation, we would find that the vast majority of people promote brands to each other based on simple, rational, tangible truths about the product or service. This isn't surprising, people find big abstract brand ideas almost impossible to articulate and, even if they could, would never admit to their peers that that were the reason they made a purchase.
Now, it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that emotion plays a huge role in individual brand decisions. But this is not the way people talk to each other about brands and if this is what we're trying to unlock, we have to recognise this.
Our role must be to help those people who have chosen to buy our product promote it. To do this we have to communicate, in clear, unambiguous, tangible language why they have made the right choice so that they can pass this on to their peers.
We have to explain why our mousetrap is better in such a way that it can be easily repeated in pubs and living rooms up and down the country.
-- Toby