This Week in Strategy: How do werewolves make bechamel sauce? They start with a rooooooooouuuuuuuux
Hi Strat Pack,
I don't even know where to start with this one (maybe you've seen it already). Scientists taught Spinach how to send emails and it could warn us about Climate Change Wild! Absolutely wild! Through nanotechnology, engineers at MIT in the US have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists. When the spinach roots detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal. This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email to scientists.These email-receiving scientists foresee a world where the spinach could be altered to respond to certain environmental conditions,
What kills me though is this sentence snuck in to the 17th paragraph: "When it’s not busy emailing researchers, spinach seems to also hold the key to efficiently powering fuel cells too." Spinach! It's just like us!
In other, more important news, I recently started following the instagram account @depthsofwikipedia and here's why you should too: This gem they unearthed, buried in the Mambo #5 wikipedia page. This song was initially selected as the theme song of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, but this plan was scrapped due to the possibility of people associating the song with the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal with the chorus, "A little bit of Monica in my life". I'm dead. It's got two citations! I love the internet.
Ok last thing. This is amazing: Demented Toys by Obvious Plant Confront Harsh Realities and the Mundanity of Life. For years, Jeff Wysaski has been littering supermarket and drugstore shelves with his action figures and small games that cleverly comment on capitalism and the harsh realities we all experience, from a birthday for one—it “includes one party blower because that is all you will need”—to a “childless couple” riding matching jet skis. Sometimes parodying pop culture, the elaborate designs are paired with witty copy and a slew of intentional spelling errors, including warnings that “everybody dies, even bird.” I'm obsessed with these. My birthday is on Monday, I'm just saying.
Alright stop messing around trying to figure out how many billable hours the DNC burned on that Mambo number 5 thing. (If it's anywhere like my ahem current employer, I would suspect more than 2,000...). Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Three axioms and three questions that summarise all of brand strategy [Marketing Week]
This is a very smart and very well thought out article. And it's got some great pull quotes from Ritson, like this one: "Beware anyone who has the word ‘strategist’ in their title. It is almost always a signal of someone who has no clue about strategy."
Brand strategy is not complicated, it’s just the systematic application of the basics all marketers are taught. Here’s a simple way to be sure you’re taking the right steps – in the right order.
Axiom 1: Diagnosis first, strategy second
When the Greek military generals of antiquity approached a battle their first consideration was to create a map of the surrounding territory. Only then would the business of battle begin. Those generals, strategoi to give them their original Greek name, knew that discovery and understanding were the perennial parents of a successful strategic plan. Without knowledge of the land on which the battle would be fought, the battle plan would be unlikely to deliver victory.
And that 3,000-year-old lesson provides the basis for the First Axiom of Brand Strategy – diagnosis first, strategy second. The first step in any decent brand strategy is a step back. Commission a new brand tracking survey – a proper one. Update the segmentation. Interview loyalists. Interrogate the perceptual map. Delve into brand heritage. Review the year just ending and ask the question ‘what have we learned from the past 12 months that we should take into the planning for the next 12?’
My first question to any prospective client is always ‘when does your financial year begin?’. It’s not only an odd question. But the right one. The start of the financial year is the start of execution. Work back from that date to allow enough time to get the diagnosis done, propose the strategy, get budget approval and put the tactics in place. It’s inevitable and unfortunate that brand managers are working on the research for their brand strategy long before that strategy will be executed. Often the lag can be six months. But it’s the price good marketers pay to be ready with the appropriate level of diagnosis to enable a strategy to be developed and then executed.
Axiom 2: Strategy is choosing what you will not do
It sounds so negative doesn’t it? But it’s probably the single biggest insight brand managers can take from the world of corporate strategy. There are two things inherent in that simple but brilliant observation. First, that your strategy should focus as much on what you will avoid as what you intend to do. Second, that you achieve that focus by making sure that choices are evident at every possible stage of your strategic process.
So many marketers end up with a strategy that simply tries to do too much. Faced with the three recurring questions of brand strategy (detailed below), the answer is always the same: Yes. Yes. Yes. We want to target everyone. We want to throw the kitchen sink at our position and have as many brand values and benefits as possible. We also want as many objectives as possible.
So be selfish when it comes to strategy. Don’t be afraid to do it in a way that suits you and only you. And make sure you question and kill anything that does not make sense for you. Delight in doing it your way and infuriating others by refusing to do many of the things that they consider ‘industry standard’. Keep asking yourself in the shower each morning, ‘what else can I kill?’. Morons create and then create more. Good marketers keep cutting the fat.
Axiom 3: Strategy before tactics
While it’s certainly true that a strategy without successful tactical execution is pointless, it’s also true that most marketers fail because they cannot put down the tactical toys long enough to develop a proper brand strategy.
A word on the four Ps. Anyone with a marketing brain and experience knows that product, price, place and promotion are the unequivocal, eternal set of tactical levers. Once you have clarity on what tactics consist of, it is time to put them down. And don’t touch them until your strategy is complete. This may be bad news for a lot of people, but you cannot have a ‘digital strategy’ or a ‘media strategy’ or ‘Facebook strategy’ in any real sense of the words. There is just a brand strategy, which then feeds the tactical choices that follow it.
Question 1: Who are we targeting?
Segmentation, the stage that precedes targeting, is the end of diagnosis. As the name might indicate, market segmentation is about the consumer, not about you or your brand. Targeting, by contrast, is the start of strategy. By looking at the market, the competitors and our own resources, we must decide where we will play next year. And where we will not.
It would be wise to follow Peter Field and Les Binet’s 60/40 split of long- and short-term marketing. That leads to what I call a ‘two-speed’ approach to brand strategy. About 60% of the budget should go to mass-marketed brand campaigns. The remaining 40% is meant to work on shorter-term performance marketing – the sort that is clearly (at least in my opinion) better spent on specific target segments than across the whole market.
But which target segments? And how many target segments? Well, that is the strategy bit. Start with agreeing on your long- and short-term marketing split. Then decide if you really want to spend the long part of the budget on the whole market or not. Finally, work out which segments you want to go after with your shorter-term activation stuff. You have yourself targeting clarity.
Question 2: What do we want to stand for?
You can only answer question two after question one. It’s painful to watch so many brands lose their semiotic marbles with the multiplicitous complexity of modern brand positioning. Positioning is meant to be the intended brand image. If targeting is who we want to go after, position is simply what we want them to think when they think of our brand. A brand needs the consumer to know that it exists and to think two or three things about it. Those two or three things are what we need the brand position to be. Write them down.
Call these words whatever you like – purpose, North Star, attributes, sex stones from Mars. It really does not matter. The point is that you have found a few things that your target consumer wants. That you can deliver. Better or more distinctively than the alternatives this consumer is aware of.
Question 3: How will we achieve this?
Brand strategy is not a goal. Your strategy cannot be to increase sales by 20% or become the number one brand in the category. That is like a football coach telling his team at half time that their strategy for the next 45 minutes is to win the game.
The first part of this challenge is to build proper, customised purchase funnels. Again, you will encounter a lot of people who pooh-pooh the whole idea of funnels. Ignore them. Funnels are the backbone of any decent brand strategy. Identify the four or five stages that take a consumer from ignorance to repeat purchase and advocacy of your brand. Don’t copy the generic awareness to consideration to preference to purchase to re-purchase models. Use qualitative research to understand the specific steps in your business and create a custom funnel.
With the funnel built and populated, write proper smart objectives. If there is one sure sign you are in the presence of a well-trained marketer, it is the existence of three or four pointy, choiceful and smartly written objectives. Some dreary ‘digital marketer’ has 12 objectives that include “increase brand love” and “generate digital advocacy”. No benchmarks, no date, no target, no clue. Meanwhile the gun from P&G with an MBA from Wharton has “increase preference for our brand among the unhappy segment from 12% to 35% by 31 December”.
Who. What. How. Basic brand strategy. I’m not going to be getting on a plane any time soon to help you with it. So why wait? Get on with it yourself. There is literally nothing more essential or valuable right now if you work in marketing.
2) Do agencies need planners and not strategists? [Campaign]
(Compare and contrast this with Ritson's take above!)
We’re often surrounded by opinions lamenting a focus on tactics over strategy. But as Dave Trott argued last week in his latest column for Campaign, exalting strategy over tactics is not necessarily such a good thing either. Trott believes it is this tendency that has led agency departments and job titles to opt for the word “strategy” over “planning”, a discipline he points out requires a command of both strategy and tactics.
Perhaps there is an innate bias that causes us to regard strategy as more significant, maybe even more noble, than tactics. Tactics are associated with short-term gain – and the value of resisting short-term gratification for long-term benefit is something that is hammered into everyone as they’re growing up.
Mastering that skill is perhaps as hard for adult marketers as it is for kids; most people in the industry recognise the arguments made for the importance of long-term brand-building by the likes of Les Binet and Peter Field, but are often swayed into short-term decision-making by immediate concerns such as stagnating sales.
With that in mind, the choice to emphasise strategy in the job titles of industry leaders such as most of those below is perhaps not such a surprise. But Trott is surely correct that tactical thinking is a vital part of their work – perhaps the majority. So is he right to lump them in with Japanese war criminals?
Nicole Armstrong, Executive strategy director, R/GA London
I don’t see these as two different roles. I see them as two different mindsets, and it starts by being a great problem-solver. We need to be the person who enters the room (or, rather, the Zoom call these days), who can hear the client’s ask, synthesise that information and begin to shape the type of solution required. Then at that point we can decide if we are to be the strategist or the planner.
Tom Roach, Vice-president of brand planning, Jellyfish
You need both. Marketing loves a false dichotomy (brand or performance, creativity or technology) – let’s not add another. You need a blend of people with a smorgasbord of superpowers, from the strategic skills to set an exciting new vision to the tactical skills to make it a reality.
There’s a world of untapped opportunity out there right now for strategy. We have a seemingly infinite variety of tactics at our disposal today. But strategy has barely scratched the surface in terms of maximising the impact we can make across them. There’s never been a greater opportunity for strategy to help weave them together to achieve something far greater than they ever would in isolation.
3) Quick HitsThis week's edition is already getting pretty long so I figure let's just shut up and read the hits.
This is exactly how much sleep you need to avoid cognitive decline, says JAMA study [FastCompany] A new JAMA study says nope, because low sleep correlates with lower cognitive function—the permanent kind. The resulting curve is a U-shape centered around seven hours of sleep: People who get less or more sleep have lower cognitive functioning. And people who reported sleeping around four hours or over 10 hours per night showed not just lower functioning, but also speedier cognitive decline. Agh.
I’m a social media manager. Facebook and Twitter have made my job an ethical nightmare [Also Fast Company] From the Very Smart Amy Brown (@arb on twitter) who basically gave Wendy's it's social persona. The relationship between social media manager and platform is almost parasitic. Our companies funnel millions of dollars to Facebook and Twitter. When we go viral, it generates positive PR not only for our brands, but for the platforms themselves. How many companies pivoted their strategies and funneled more money to Twitter in the wake of the Sassy Wendy’s tweets? How many sales decks has Twitter included it in? I’m betting it’s a lot. Our work shapes the success of these platforms, but when we need their help, it’s clear nobody is listening.
Scientists Have Finally Made Quieter Velcro [Gizmodo] Does this have anything to do with advertising or strategy? No. But as a friendly reminder, Velcro is a trademarked term. And undoing it stealthily can be annoying. Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands have come up with a new design for Velcro, inspired by mushrooms, that doesn’t shred fabrics and is a lot quieter to tear apart. Pulling inspiration from nature is clever and I like it. Nice feel good article
4) Department of Great (non-Super Bowl) Work
So here's the truth. I've been slammed this week and haven't even had enough time to watch the Tide spot. So I'm going to do what 99.4% of Americans do, which is not look through Ad Age to pre-judge all the work. That said, here's the one piece of Super Bowl creative we should all watch before the Big Game. Shannon Fielder just nails what it's like to work in advertising and watch football. It's so perfect.
Coca-Cola China Inspires Shifts in Perspective with 'CNY Confessions' for Chinese New Year [Little Black Book] Man these CNY spots are good. The turn around the 2 minute mark is predictable but I thought that they landed the plane nicely. And there was a little moment around 2:51 that really reminded me how far behind the US is in dealing with Covid. Many Chinese youth once saw Chinese New Year as an obligation, a routine. In 2020, Covid-19 changed all of this, taking away something that many youths once took for granted, and inspiring a shift in perspective of what truly matters – family, friends, connection and love. As a brand that stands for togetherness and optimism, Coke saw this as an opportunity to ignite the values of our brand, by capturing these confessions in Chinese youth within our film. From McCann
AMV BBDO goes into battle for Macmillan Cancer Support in a Covid-dominated world [More About Advertising] As Britain’s under-resourced and (arguably) over-managed NHS struggles with the latest wave of Covid-19 (Germany has about four times as many critical care beds) some cancer patients are getting a raw deal as operations and treatments are cancelled. So cancer charities have to fight their corner. With so much Covid on the airwaves attention is at a premium. It's an emotional piece of film. Well done. From AMV BBDO
JetBlue shows it means business with its new Transatlantic Mint product [The Design Air] Remember travel? I miss it. Friends of the newsletter know I'm a huge Delta fan, but also know i'm not above booking a bargain basement seat on Norwegian (RIP) and disappearing for the weekend. But man I might have to become a JetBlue loyalist after this. Their new transatlantic Mint seats look incredible. Private suites with a sliding door for every Mint customer, a custom-designed seat cushion by Tuft & Needle, and countless design touches that help every customer feel at home in the air. From Acumen Design Associate.
The MTA Has a New Citywide Memorial for Its Workers Lost to COVID-19 [Curbed] The MTA—an agency whose essential workers were especially hard hit by COVID-19—is opening its own memorial, a project that will be on view throughout the subway system through February 7. Portraits of MTA workers who’ve died from COVID will be displayed on the screens that normally show maps and service changes, along with a newly commissioned poem, “Travels Far,” by the U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. From the MTA Arts & Design Department
5) Platform Updates
Hey, look what's back, it's Platform Updates! It's been a while! Not sure if I'm going to go back to making this a regular feature or not (what can I say, the platforms haven't been making very interesting updates), but hey, its a new month in a new year.
Instagram confirms it’s working on a ‘Vertical Stories’ feed [TechCrunch] In many ways, vertical swiping feels more natural than taps and horizontal flicks. It is, after all, how users navigate much of the mobile web, as well as other key features across a variety of social apps, like Facebook’s News Feed or YouTube’s home page. That said, turning Instagram Stories into a vertical feed would be a notable change, and one that could potentially set the stage for a shift away from more static content — like the photos and reshared Feed posts that still often fill the Stories section today. In a “Vertical Stories” feed, on the other hand, Instagram would likely prioritize video posts over images to better compete with TikTok, just as it’s currently tweaking its algorithms and overall design to prioritize Reels.
Influencers told not to use 'misleading' beauty filters [BBC] Filters should not be applied to social media adverts if they exaggerate the effect of the product, the British Advertising Standards Authority has ruled. It said the ruling means that brands, influencers and celebrities should not apply filters to photos that promote beauty products if the filters are likely to exaggerate the effect the products are capable of achieving. The ASA said that filtered beauty content could still be misleading, even if the name of the filter was referenced in the Instagram story.
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