This Week in Strategy: If you boil a funny bone it becomes a laughing stock. That’s humerus!
This is a real pun in a bouillon joke!
Hi Strat Pack,
Mark Pollard tweeted yesterday: If your strategy writing is flat ...
1. Push yourself into a heightened emotional state - anger, desperation, love
2. Find more emotional stimulus - interviews, customer reviews, art, comedy - and write in keeping with what you stimulate yourself with.I loved that New York Magazine 78 new emotions article and the other New York Magazine article about corporate garbage language because I think they approach tendencies that are profoundly human tendencies with a skeptic's eyes. Which as strategists, we could all benefit from. So I'm going to try looking for more 'human truth' pieces that help set the table for when you need to develop an insight. This dream article isn't chock full of insights. But it illustrates common human tendencies that could be the jumping off point for your next brief. Or my next brief.In that vein - here are 10 Common Recurring Dreams & What They Mean While our conscious mind switches off as we catch some zzzs, our unconscious mind reveals images that can offer insight into issues we might be blissfully unaware of in waking life. My favorite recurring dream explanation [Ed Note: I do have recurring dreams just not this one]: "I dream about a car swerving out of control"
"While there are many factors that contribute to the interpretation of this dream, generally being in an out-of-control vehicle conveys a feeling of being off track and exhibiting a lack of control in waking life," says Bowes.
Perhaps you’re doing something to excess – shopping, drinking, working out – so dreaming that you can’t control the vehicle you’re in suggests you are being 'driven' by your current 'addiction'. If you are worried that you can’t get a handle on your behaviour, seek professional advice to get back on track.
In other news, I think I need to buy Ezra Klein's new(?) book, Why We’re Polarized. I came across an excerpt on Vox dot Com that I am absolutely fascinated with and think you should be too. The most interesting line in the article was "The more interested you are in something, The less representative your beliefs about that thing are". Now that's an insight, baby! Here's a short passage of Klein quoting the always fucking brilliant Jia Tolentino:
The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.
This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out what kind of dreamcatcher I have over my bed. (For your information, it's a poster for the not-quite-hit-and-actually-quite-bad 2003 movie adaptation of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, all you needed to do was ask!). Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The Three-Hour Brand Sprint [Google Ventures Library]
This is a great in-depth article that goes into detail on how to conduct a half-day (I wish!) sprint. Bookmark this and come back to it whenever you need to run a session. It's geared for startups but I think it's even more successful for traditional large, *cough* highly matrixed *cough* organizations. As long as you have the right people in the room.I love it.
The point of these exercises, it turns out, is to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete. After doing the exercises, the team gets a common language to describe what their company is about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier.
This post is a D.I.Y. guide. You can do these exercises with your own team, without any special expertise. At the end, you’ll have a set of diagrams — a simple brand cheat-sheet — that you can use to make decisions. It’s not a replacement for a good branding agency, but it’s a heckuva lot better than nothing. And if you do hire an agency, the cheat-sheet will make you a better, smarter client.
2) Coronavirus won’t hurt Corona, it will actually boost sales [MarketingWeek]
Of course we're going to have an item about Corona/Coronavirus. Of course we are. It's from Ritson. It's a Ritson Ripper (patent pending). Click through to read the whole thing. He really came out swinging in this piece.
Brands from Marmite to Peloton have shown negative publicity is beneficial if it doesn’t undermine your core image, which is why Corona will be fine but Burger King is heading for trouble.
Every shit researcher on the planet is currently ignoring the most basic rules of survey design in order to find out something, anything, of interest. Most surveys appear to be showing very negative brand sentiment and a significant decline in purchase likelihood.
One company – that famed behemoth of scientific marketing, 5W Public Relations – has been increasing its own salience with a survey showing that 16% of Americans are confused about whether Corona beer has anything to do with coronavirus and that 38% of American beer drinkers who were surveyed said they wouldn’t buy Corona “under any circumstances”. That 38% figure was widely cited over the weekend by a global media, only too ready to write about the indirect damage that the pandemic will do to Corona’s sales.
The problem with this kind of research – if I can massively over-summarise, overstate and oversimplify Daniel Kahneman’s work for a sub-sentence – is that it is very much a ‘System 2’ measure of a ‘System 1’ situation. Ask people if coronavirus will affect their feelings for Corona and their reactions might be statistically significant but externally invalid.
The massive salience boost for Corona that is now happening will propel the brand to top-of-mind status for millions of beer drinkers for many weeks to come. That’s important because System 1 thinking is how most of us buy most of our shit.
We might bang on in focus groups in a fantastically System 2 manner about how our mothers, life goals and modernity influence our toothpaste decision. But as soon as we are out the door of the focus group facility we are back to the brutal invisibility of System 1 buying.
Earlier today someone asked you whether you wanted a flat white or a cappuccino. Within a millisecond you shot back “flat white”. You don’t know why. I don’t know why. You just said it. System 1. Drink your coffee.
And that’s how most people buy beer. Of this I am certain. When you walk to a bar the question is not ‘does this pandemic make you feel different about any of the beers on the following list?’. The question is: “What can I get you?” Or, if you drink in working-class pubs that have dogs and dartboards, a vaguely intimidating nod in your direction.
Either way, the answer that will spring to mind for thousands of drinkers in the current and coming months will be “Corona”. Not because of what it stands for. Not because of the negative associations it evokes. Just because that was the first beer that came to mind. The reptile brain wins again. And so – if this column is correct – will Corona.
3) We're just not as good as we used to be [If this is a blog then what's Christmas]
Yes, there are lots of other reasons why the work has worsened, but the reduction in talent and ability is obvious. We used to be able to attract the best and the brightest; people who could enjoy their job, see their stuff on TV and get well paid, while still finding the time to spend afternoons in pubs and mornings in bed.
Now we offer smaller salaries, minuscule production budgets, briefs for the kind of ads that routinely ruin your day, and the opportunity to work evenings and weekends; not because you love your job and want to do it better, but because your boss can’t afford another copywriter, so needs to get double the work out of you.
Which path would you choose? Yes, there are still good ads out there, somewhere; and yes, the salaries are still much better than 90% of jobs, but this is all relative. Things ain’t what they used to be, and in terms of motivation, attraction and fuel, shit in equals shit out.
And it doesn’t just mean the ads are worse. crucially it means that clients no longer have confidence in us producing 10/10 work. The last decade has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that your agency is unlikely to produce anything like the work that made it so cocksure in the 1990s. Every substandard ad is another nail in the coffin of trust between agency and client, so they expect less of you, give you fewer chances to prove you can do something great, give you less money to make work that will probably be 7/10, and the vicious circle spins on.
Maybe it’s time for all of us to take a good look in the mirror and ask if we’re doing everything we can to be good at our jobs and, beyond that, do we care enough to do more?if you don’t, it’s OK. I understand. The job isn’t what it was, and you probably can coast through 90% of it and still pick up a decent pay packet. The client is frustrating, your ECD has ‘never done anything good’, most work is shit anyway, the pub is calling…
But that path leads to an unhappy you and a worse industry. Here’s an idea: if you don’t like the job, don’t respect it, and don’t see the point in putting in the effort, why not do something else? Your three score years and ten are ticking away far too quickly to waste them doing something that gets you down.
Then again, you could literally choose to make the best of it. You could work harder, read more, ask more questions, fight your corner, learn when to use a semi colon in a headline (pretty much never) and spend a night emailing Jean-Paul Goude references to your director.
In short, you could learn to love your job, become proud of it, become proud of yourself for doing it and go to work with a spring in your step. Then, when people wonder why the ads aren’t as good as they used to be, they’ll stop thinking it’s because of you.4) Quick Hits: A few articles that are concise, important, interesting, impactful, and I'm not going to write long descriptions for them.
The Emotion of Breathing, and Its Role in Music and Sound Design [Muse by Clio] A breath can express so many emotions. Think of an exhausted exhale. Or a sigh of relief. Or the sexiness of a breath. If you don't remember, rewatch Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" for John F. Kennedy. Even before she sings the first note, she only needs to take a deep breath to make the crowd go wild. There's also a breathing sound for craving. "Girl" is one of the most melancholic songs by the Beatles. As John Lennon deeply inhales during the chorus, you can sense his longing for that one dream girl who'd one day turn out to be Yoko Ono. In Paul McCartney's description: "John wanted to hear the breathing, wanted it to be very intimate, so George Martin put a special compressor on the voice."
Ok Google, Show me a Human Truth [Sentient Decision Science] Remember the Super Bowl?! Interesting take on Google’s “Loretta” Super Bowl ad. I enjoyed reading about the emotional triggers even if I don't fully buy into the methodology. The storytelling is so captivating and memorable that viewers sat glued to their screens, willfully letting waves of positive and negative emotions wash over them for a full minute and a half during the Super Bowl. Beyond its obvious engagement value, the ad also delivers a significant emotional lift for the Google brand
Measure Your Distinctive Assets [Ehrenberg Bass Institute] And oldie but a goldie from Sharp. Distinctive Assets are creative-friendly ways to signal the brand. Developing a distinctive asset requires a commitment from marketers to keep these elements consistent. Distinctive elements do not become assets overnight. Instead, consumers need to learn the link between the element and the brand. This requires reinforcement and refreshment over time.
5) Department of Great Work
This Hand Sanitizer Aims To Stop A Bigger Threat Than Coronavirus [AdAge] The global spread of the coronavirus may not qualify as a pandemic just yet, but the World Health Organization says there’s an even bigger threat right now: the racism and xenophobia that always accompanies these kinds of illnesses. Because this particular virus originated in China, people of Asian descent have been physically attacked in places like New York and London, despite the fact that Asians are no more susceptible to the virus than anyone else. Chinatowns across the country are also experiencing a decline in visitors. From The Hive for Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice
Apple made an ad to highlight the history of MacBooks in anime [The Verge] Apple Japan has made a new commercial featuring MacBooks (and MacBook-like laptops) from popular anime. he video spot shows how pervasive Apple laptops have become in popular culture. I found it particularly interesting that even though many of the laptops featured don’t actually have the Apple logo on them, they’re all instantly recognizable as MacBook-esque because of their clean silver lines, black keyboards, and some kind of small logo embossed on the back. I can't find credits so I'm guessing this was done in-house
Arby's starts a turf war with McDonald's over fish sandwiches before Lent season [USA Today] “Fish is meat, too; it’s just ocean meat,” said Deborah von Kutzleben, Arby's vice president of advertising, content and core menu. In recent days, Arby's started to quietly target McDonald's by responding to consumer complaints about the Filet-O-Fish on Twitter and offering a free Arby's sandwich to make it right. In a tweet Feb. 12, Arby's Guest Support account responded to a customer who said the sandwich was missing the fish patty. "We at Arby's are truly sorry for this situation and resolving it is very important to us. Do you mind sending us a (direct message)? We want to give you one of our fish sandwiches."
Propelling Laterally: New Logo for BMW [Brand New] Not great, but a big change.The biggest change is the loss of the black background, which I feel is what made the BMW so iconic and elegant, adding a rich contrast to the white and blue. Without the black and the concept of transparency for the new logo, it literally looks like something is missing. The non-transparent version that appears on white, with the strokes in half of the quadrants looks, sadly, terrible and demonstrates the kind of struggles this new approach will yield. I think abandoning black was not the best choice — on their website, which is the sole corporate application available, the new logo gets lost. Perhaps further applications will make better use of the logo and the image directly above may be the one glimmer of hope in this as there is something really unique about the hollow badge on the car and I’ll admit that it looks pretty good. Other than that, there is nothing yet that makes you gasp in awe of the German engineering evident in the cars — just not in the identity yet. Done in house (I think)
6) Platform Updates
Apple now allows push notification advertising, updates dating app review guidelines and more [9to5Mac] Push notifications can now be used for marketing purposes, as long as the user authorizes it. Developers must also provide a method in the app to allow users to opt-out of receiving such messages. Great.
Twitter Introduces "Fleets" — The Instagram Stories of Tweets [Digital Trends] If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if it works for one social media company, it might work for another. And another. Like Snapchat and Instagram Stories, fleets are located above the typical timeline, appear as a bubble with the user’s icon, and are only visible for a relatively short period of time. This is the first new feature Twitter has added to its platform that isn’t its distinctive 280-character tweet.
TikTok influencers are telling people to stop using the app [Input Mag] It seems clear that TikTok, with its young user base, is determined to avoid some of the mistakes made by YouTube, which has been accused of targeting children with highly addictive, and sometimes inappropriate, videos. But such moves seem like a cynical attempt at virtue signalling, argues Purdue University academic Colin Gray, who monitors apps’ dark patterns — the tricks used to encourage you to dwell a little longer on their services — and their addictive design. “This latest development is perhaps a good example of social media apps wanting to have their cake and eat it too,” Gray says. “They first build knowingly addictive patterns into the core of their app, then add patterns that, while quite paternalistic, also make it seem as if they are being good internet citizens.”
As always, the full archive is available here. Was this email forwarded to you? Want to start getting this on a weekly basis? All I need is your email, everything else is optional.Thanks for sticking around as always. See you next week!