This Week in Strategy: Never scream into a colander. You'll strain your voice!
Hi Strat Pack,
Like you (I assume), I've been watching a lot of TV in the last, well really thirty-something years, but now more than ever especially now. And I've been hammered by these Kim Crawford wine commercials. And to be honest the whole conceit asks a lot more questions than it answers. But my main question was: is that Kim Crawford in the commercial? No, dear reader, it is not. Kim is actually the husband in husband and wife pair Kim and Erica Crawford. I don't know why it's his name on the bottle. But it doesn't matter because he left the brand in 2007 she left in 2009. And here's the crazy part: they make a competitor wine! I'm also assuming that by deduction the commercial actress is also not Erica Crawford. But still. What was wrong with the original Crawford, boy Kim? The plot thickens.
In real news, I bought a pair of shoes today that I am extremely excited about. These Adidas Ecofriendly shoes launched today, though based on my credit card bill, they are not an April Fools' joke. (Or perhaps just a really committed one now that i'm thinking about it....)
Friends of the newsletter know that I'm a huge Muppet-head. Look at them! What's not to like?? I'm so excited. (That's it..there's no advertising angle, or commission if you purchase through the link. I'm just really excited about these).
It was Passover last week, it's Easter this week, Holi on Sunday and my dad had a birthday at some point. But yesterday was April Fool's Day. And I discovered one of the best pranks ever the other day. From Wikipedia:
The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled"
This is fantastic. Great content. I love it. Oh and Fernando Machado said he's stepping down. No word on where he's going. But I hope they are able to provide him with a wardrobe when he gets there.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how much Crawford wine I consume while writing this. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) You’re doing it wrong: Emotion doesn’t mean emotional [CMO Australia]
If you’ve been around advertising long enough, you’ve probably seen (or written) a slide which says: “They won’t remember what you say, they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
But it’s wrong. Our understanding of how emotion is used in advertising has been ill informed and poorly applied.
Let’s rewind. It begins, like most strategy presentations, with The Long and Short Of It. In their seminal book, authors, Peter Field and Les Binet, suggest there’s only two types of advertising: sales now or sales in the future. Direct response, or brand building. Short, or long.
With this came the 60:40 rule of thumb (60 per cent of your advertising investment in long, 40 per cent in short) and direction on how best to execute in both. Short tends to be most effective when it targets tightly with rational persuasion. Long works best when it reaches broadly with emotional priming.
Those last two words are where the trouble begins. As with most business books, readers jumped on the headlines and pretty charts, but overlooked the detail.
The word 'emotion' is not well understood. “Our brand ad must be emotional” is a generic statement that leaves too much to interpretation. Let’s bust some myths of what 'emotion' in advertising isn’t.
3 incorrect uses of emotion in advertising
1: Ads do not need to make people feel something for your brand
It sounds nice in the boardroom, but real people don’t ‘love’ brands. Most people don’t even ‘like’ brands. Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts has long been debunked, we know loyalty is a symptom of penetration. An emotional connection with a brand is rare, and certainly should not be an objective. Aim to get the people who don’t buy you at all, to buy you occasionally.
2: Ads do not need to communicate an emotional benefit.
For this I think we can blame the Benefit Ladder. Many of us were taught to climb as high as possible when writing briefs, beyond the product’s features to the rational and emotional benefits. While a helpful tool in unpacking the consumer problem, there’s little evidence to suggest the benefit being communicated must be emotional. The best ad of all time is a product demonstration, the message is rational. “Our trucks are really stable.” [ED Note: While the Strategy Editorial Department does love this ad, we're not sure it's the best ad of all time. I mean look at that Crawford ad above....]
3: Ads do not need to show emotion.
Having someone cry on camera can elicit emotion (more on this below) but it’s not the only way. Having a killer soundtrack works too. So does telling a good story. Or a joke. Even a rational message or fact can cause an emotional response. Your ads don’t need to show emotion to trigger emotion.
Emotion is a tool to make memories stronger.
The intention of long advertising is to build and refresh memory structures. The goal is mental availability, allowing people to easily recall your brand in future buying situations.
But consumers don’t really think through most purchases. They run on autopilot.
Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, would call this System 1 Thinking - instantaneous and driven by instinct. Here is where we process and recall memory automatically. And here is where we absorb messages not through deliberate and conscious processing, but rather, emotional response.
Emotion is a tool which helps encode memories.
An emotional response is not the goal of long advertising, but a means to an end. Getting people to feel something helps them build memories. Ideally you do this to attach your brand with a Category Entry Point (a fancy way to say 'need state'). Emotion builds muscle memory. Or as Claire Strickett, whose tweets largely inspired this article, explains more articulately: “Emotion is the ink memories are written in.”
Consumers won’t remember the ink, but they will remember the words. Likely without realising it, on autopilot. So no, consumers won’t remember how ads made them feel. But moving them is how you build strong brands that are recalled easily and often.
We need a better word than 'emotion'.
The word 'emotion' figuratively comes with baggage. It’s a big concept, not easily defined and therefore easily misused and abused. I propose instead we use the word 'reaction'.
If the objective of short advertising is action, then the goal of long advertising is reaction. An emotional response to build memory, associating your brand with a need.
Next time someone says we need to use emotion in our ads, ask them for a definition first.
2) Mental Health at work
Here's a collection of articles I want you to read. Are you an employee? I am. And it is definitely getting more difficult for me to motivate. Part of it is being inside for sure, but part of it is that the wheels feel like they're coming off with office decorum. Nobody knows what they're doing anymore. We're all just bulls in the china shops of each others' emotions. And I think it's important to recognize that.
5 ways to be a more likable work-from-home coworker [Fast Company] At a time when 67% of us are facing work-from-home burnout, it’s easy—and expected—to let our discipline slip. While it’s important to to not overthink, not thinking at all can backfire. Take the case of scheduling meetings. As tempting as it may be to write, “Let’s find a time to meet” and leave it to others to figure out the logistics, doing so can lead to an explosion of back and forth emails.
Situations like this are preventable. It begins with taking a page from the world of user-centered design. Designers don’t force users to adapt their behaviors to use a given product or service. Instead, they put themselves in users’ shoes, observe their behaviors, and design experiences around their needs and wants.
Designing user-friendly experiences isn’t just the stuff of designers, though. It’s a mindset we can all apply to our day jobs in order to help others help ourselves. Here are five ways to earn the coveted title of “user-friendly coworker.” (And then click through to find out the 5 things\We may be more productive, but remote work is still missing this [Dropbox Blog] Does working from home make you appreciate freedom from the office or ache for interacting in-person? From a product standpoint, companies need to ask two key questions:
How might we facilitate a continuity of those collaborative relationships in the product?
How might we design solutions so that team relationships don’t fray like they currently do?
“There’s something very unique about building connections in-person,” she says. “As a thought experiment, a design question might be: How might we build solutions so that teams don’t need to be as dependent on these quarterly in-person events? In that imagined world, their sense of cohesion and collaborative trust is so complete that meeting in-person is unnecessary.”
The focus of the workplace environment isn’t just about manifesting maximum productivity,” adds Miller. “There are all sorts of interesting ways economists have tried to quantify workplace productivity throughout the 20th century and so much of what organizational psychologists have brought to the table is an understanding of how teams can work together best. That’s been studied extensively in terms of factories and in-person offices, but we’re on a new frontier in terms of fully distributed organizations. We’re just at the starting point of a lot of amazing technology and evolutions in how we work and what the workplace looks like
3) When Nothing is Something [Rob Campbell - Musings of an Opinionated Sod]
This is a quick anecdote from Campbell. We find our protagonist in China having left his luggage in a cab after a really long day. And scene....
We went back to our hotel tired and hungry. We decided to have a drink in the bar and order some food.
After looking at the menu, we quickly ordered 2 cheese and tomato pizzas.
“Sorry …” they said, “… we only have pepperoni pizza available”.
By that point, we had set our heart on pizza so I looked at the waited and replied, “Could we order the pepperoni pizza but without the pepperoni?”
They nodded yes and soon we were munching on our pepperoni pizza … without the pepperoni … with smug smiles on our faces.
And now I’ve told that story, it’s reminded me of the time I used the same logic to get one over on IKEA Hong Kong, who were trying to fuck me over with a new sofa we bought.
Which all goes to show, the best way to beat a process is to use the process against itself, because for all the ‘experience design’ processes that is all the range right now, most of them are built to protect the company rather than satisfy the audience.
4) Department of Great Work
P&G Widens the Screen to Give a Full Picture of Black Life in Beautiful Film [Little Black Book] The Procter & Gamble Company today announced the creation of an expansive content creation, talent development and partnership platform that enables and advocates for increased inclusion of Black creators across the advertising, film and television industries. Titled 'Widen The Screen', it will include new films and initiatives that feature more diverse storytellers, combat bias against all people fueled by misrepresentation, increase investment in Black-owned and operated media and employ more diverse creators in a way that improves their trajectory for long-term success. The anthem film 'Widen The Screen' premiered during the 2021 NAACP Image Awards on Saturday, March 27th with a call to action to portray a more holistic view of Black life – one that is layered, beautiful and dynamic – not one that simply reinforces commonly told stereotypes. Created and produced by a team of largely Black creators in collaboration with Grey New York, and narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Mahershala Ali.
How Cool Are These Beer Cans That Show The Pantone Color Of The Brew Inside? [Design Father] Graphic designers, beer-lovers and package design aficionados will love these minimalist beer cans and bottles created by Spanish designer Txaber. The can/bottle colors match the Pantone hue of the brew inside. I think this is spec work but I don't care. It's gorgeous
KFC "#UntilWeCanFingerLickAgain" (Mother London) [Campaign Live] KFC UK & Ireland has engaged in a light-hearted Twitter burst, borrowing other brands' taglines to highlight the fact its slogan is still "suspended" while the coronavirus pandemic continues. The brand's Twitter account invited people to suggest slogans from other brands that KFC could use #UntilWeCanFingerLickAgain. As well as posting mock ads on Twitter, KFC booked a London advan and a couple of digital six-sheet panels to show its famous chicken bucket sitting on top of borrowed taglines such as "I’m lovin’ it", "Just do it" and "Gives you wings". From Mother London
Mercedes-Benz: Sustainability Initiatives by Publicis Emil [The Drum] A homage to the wind and the 130-year power struggle with the force of nature, Publicis Emil has created an ad for Mercedes-Benz to announce the switch to 100% green electricity sourcing for production at Mercedes-Benz AG’s factories. The :90 anthem starts off slow but it's ultimately really nice. And I love the line about fighting against the wind. Well done.
7-Eleven and 311 Swapping Social Accounts Is the Only April Fools’ Stunt Worth Your Time [AdWeek] A good joke is still a good joke, regardless of the world’s smoldering trash fires, and a few brands still know how to strike the right balance. Convenience chain 7-Eleven absolutely nailed it today with its April Fools’ stunt. The brand swapped Twitter and Instagram feeds with rock band 311, known for 1990s and early 2000s hits like Down, Amber and All Mixed Up. I feel like this was orchestrated by 360i but cannot confirm/burned through my AdWeek article quota.
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