This Week in Strategy: Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two tired!!!!
Hi Strat Pack,
What a summer. The sunsets in New York this week have been absolutely nutso this week. Really vivid colors and like a blood red sun and moon. Unfortunately I found out that this is because of soot (particulate matter...) blowing east from the western wildfires raging in Oregon. Which is of course a major league bummer and very much a sign of climate change. Happy Friday.
Let's move on to some good news. The Hubble Telescope is back, baby! My favorite Space Telescope (don't @ me Chandra X-Ray Observatory) malfunctioned a little over a month ago and NASA has been pulling people out of retirement to try to get it fixed. The thing that's wild to me is how comparatively weak Hubble's main onboard computer is compared to like, an iPhone. It's got an Intel 486 computer with 25 megahertz speed, and 2 megabytes of memory. This is less than one-tenth the processing power of my iPhone. And yet it's responsible for some of the foundational discoveries in cosmology. Wild. Hubble does have a better camera though...
Last but not least this has nothing to do with advertising whatsoever but I really want to read Collision Course — the sensational downfall of Carlos Ghosn. Check out the book review. I'm hooked! Collision Course, written by two journalists with long experience of both Japan and the auto industry, is among the first attempts to sensibly chronicle and contextualise this remarkable episode. The briskly paced result is quick to set the scene and also to reassure us that while there will be no shortage of colour and insight on Ghosn himself, one of the outcomes of the drama has been to reveal the inner workings of “Big Auto”. More specifically, it shows the dysfunction of the Renault-Nissan alliance that might have become the biggest automotive group in the world. Born in 1999 through the French carmaker’s rescue of the Japanese giant, it was held together by Ghosn for two decades before his spectacular downfall. Alongside serious analysis, Hans Greimel and William Sposato never lose sight of how fundamentally jarring it was that a company and country that celebrated Ghosn as one of its greatest-ever imports can have been so fiercely instrumental in laying him low.
Whoa!
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how big the suitcase would need to be to sneak me onto a private jet. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) The New Formula For Fandom [Zoe Scaman - Google Slides]
The New Formula For Fandom = COMMUNITY X AUTONOMY X EQUITY
(You can access the deck in Slides by clicking here or by using the link above)
A really smart deck. Even if you don't think you care about Fandom, you should. Some highlights below to convince you to click through.
As our needs start to change and as creators and communities alike look to foster more reciprocal ties, self-sustaining spaces and mutual value, we're realizing that the current social platforms just don't tick those boxes and so a new cohort of community-based tools are arriving to deliver upon those demands
What if letting fans in and allowing them to navigate and recreate led to the unleashing of bigger, better, and bolder thinking that could take us in new directions we haven't even begun to imagine? This may seem utterly terrifying to the owners of IP and ideas, the concept of losing control of a narrative is often met with reinforced steel gages and official legal letters crying for a 'cease and desist'.
Thanks to three different but overlapping trends from fan-directed experiences, to the democratization of IP development, and the arrival of headless brands, this new uncontrollable, creative, and chaotic world is already upon us. And it's glorious.
2) Ehrenberg-Bass: 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your products [Marketing Week]
[ED Note: so this is a bit of a misleading/clickbait-y headline. The point is that B2B advertising is disproportionately focused on short-term sales effects, while they should be following much more of the B2C model of a healthy mix of long term and short term advertising. Binet and Fields recommends a 60% long term / 40% short term split. But that's a while separate article]
The vast majority of B2B marketing messages could be falling on deaf ears, with up to 95% of businesses not in the market for most goods and services at any one time.
This deceptively simple fact has a profound implication, according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Professor John Dawes, author of the latest installment of a major new study carried out for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.
According to the report, companies change their providers of services such as banking, legal advice, software or telecoms around every five years. This means that only 20% are in the market for those services in a given year and just 5% in a given quarter. The other 95% are not in the market at all.
Advertising mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to a brand – rather than by directly driving sales. This means when customers are in the market they remember brands which have advertised effectively in the past, and usually over a long period. “If your advertising is better at building brand-relevant memories, your brand becomes more competitive,” he explains.
Namechecking the likes of Unilever and Procter & Gamble as companies that really ‘get’ branding, Schwarz argues that lots of companies don’t treat brand building as a strategic, entrepreneurial initiative and so they leave a lot of value on the table – especially in B2B.
The B2B sector often concentrates too hard on sales without really understanding brand, he adds, with investment in brand seen as discretionary. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We all know from real life how much trust and confidence in a brand is important. And how it is about building memory structures in the long term,” Schwarz says.
He describes this latest installment of the research as a “mental model” marketers can explain to a CFO and CEO, whereby he or she will immediately get it. “One of the problems marketers have created for themselves is that they speak in a language that they understand, but no one else seems to comprehend,” Schwarz adds. “This is how you get the CFO and CEO to pay attention to you.”
Schwarz believes successful business strategy is about creating an unfair advantage, meaning it is in the interest of established companies to continually invest in their brand to protect their position. “Once you have a strong brand you want to make sure that the mental availability of that brand continues in perpetuity,” he adds.
3) Strategic planners, lateral thinking and stand up comedy [in vacant or in pensive mood]
Strategic planners have this innate habit and drive to connect seemingly unrelated dots and try to make sense of the world around them. No wonder that they immerse themselves into so many different kinds of things - and each will find its way into the work they do. Either it's in the brief, in the strategy deck, in the consumer insight, in the quest to simplify complicated thoughts and behaviours, anything.
It's almost as if this constant need to connect dots and look for patterns is our coping mechanism to find meaning in chaos. It helps us understand the world better.
And we do this so often that most often - it's on auto mode and spontaneous. While we do this daily with the knowledge we assimilate along the way, we rarely utilize it to generate newer ideas when required.
Ideas happen when there's a chaos, conflict. And when there's too much order, especially since a planner's head is seen as this organized, well knit brain that is designed to concoct well articulated and well thought through ideas - there's little room for chaos, and therefore little breeding ground for ideas.
The ability [of lateral thinking] to fuse 2 absolutely contradictory words and thoughts, to create an exciting idea is often seen in stand up too.
A stand up artist has the innate quality of speaking about something very mundane and regular but looking at it from a completely different perspective. The comic can take 2 complete opposite words and create an absurd, humourous, thought provoking or entertaining idea.
Most famous bits of comedians leverage this behaviour. Their premise is most often the first thought, their set up will be about a completely contradictory opinion or thought - and bam - the punchline is when you see how they have connected the 2, forming a completely new, unique opinion and idea.
The ability to look at 2 contradictory perspectives and views or thoughts and combine them to create something totally new is something that comes quite easily with the creative folks.
But I truly believe that we need to make it more visible within strategy itself. For starters - there's nothing original in our strategy in any case. We are constantly trying to create a new path but it's not technically a new path - it's just a new one for the brand we are working with.
And the more we bring together opposing forces - the easier it will become for us to identify a bolder strategy for the brands we work for.
4) Department of Great Work
Liev Schreiber Warns Americans of 'Junk Sleep' in Trippy Mattress Firm Spots [Little Black Book] "When I read the Junk Sleep scripts, I literally laughed out loud," said Liev. What an endorsement! Hopefully, this campaign serves as a wake-up call for the millions of workaholics, night-owls and over-thinkers who are deprioritising sleep. The message is pretty simple: it's difficult to live a healthy life if you aren't sleeping well." The campaign supports Mattress Firm's long-standing commitment to helping people get a better night's sleep and live happier and healthier lives. But what is 'junk sleep' exactly? It's that tossing and turning sleep, the wake up feeling awful instead of recharged sleep. Junk sleep is why your nine to five feels like nine to 500. Very good. From Droga5
This ingenious Oreo packaging makes it easy to hide your cookies from your kids [Fast Company] This week, the brand unveiled what it calls its “Thins Protection Program.” The newly disguised packaging for its Oreo Thins cookies makes it look like anything but a package of tasty treats. The brand teamed up with other companies like Ford, Hanes, Green Giant, and Better Homes & Gardens to disguise the cookies as packages of Hanes t-shirts, a cookbook, cauliflower rice, even a truck manual. I love it. From The Community, MediaMonks, 360i, Weber Shandwick, and VaynerMedia.
FKA twigs Directed Facebook's Olympics Ad About Skateboarding [Muse by Clio] FKA twigs goes behind the camera to direct a short film for Facebook, one of four ads from the social networking giant that will run during NBC's coverage of the Tokyo Olympics. Developed with Droga5, the campaign focuses on skateboarding, which makes its Olympic debut this year. Promoting the Facebook App, "Longboard Family" presents vibrant scenes of freestyle skate-dancing on the streets of Seoul, Barcelona and Los Angeles. (It's a neat fit for twigs—who knows a thing or two about putting bodies in motion.) The work casts the company as a facilitator of human connection, spanning the globe to tell stories of folks who embrace boarding as a way of life (though no Olympians appear). Another winner from Droga5
Pornhub's Museum Tour Highlights Nudes from Classic Art [AdAge - Article is 100% Safe for Work] As cultural institutions begin to reopen their doors, adult streaming site Pornhub is helping to promote appreciation of the arts, too—at least some of the raunchier works in museum collections, anyway. Many works of art considered to be masterpieces involve the nude human form or people engaged in various acts of coitus, so Pornhub has created its “Classic Nudes” initiative, a guided tour of naughty—and only naughty—works of art in museums around the world, including The Louvre, The MET, The Prado, The Uffizi Gallery, The National Gallery and the Musee d’Orsay. "Some porn may be considered art but some art can definitely be considered porn" Very very interesting insight. From Madrid agency Officer & Gentleman
Visa Rebrands for the Digital Economy [AdWeek] Embracing the acclaim it has accumulated over the past 60 years, Visa has unveiled a new global brand identity built on this recognition and trust. It then probes further to “Meet Visa” in a marketing campaign led by advertising giant Wieden+Kennedy and a film directed by Malik Hassan. Drawing on 60 years of brand history, the new identity doesn't stray too far from the branding we know, but rather exploits the recognisability of the Visa blue and gold colours by separating the brand symbol from the wordmark to create two separate assets. Creative from Wieden + Kennedy, The new brandmarks were created in partnership with design firm Mucho.
Miss the smell of Gasoline? Ford just launched a Fuel-Scented Perfume especially for EV Owners [Yanko Design] In a bid to out-weird Elon Musk’s Tesla Tequila, Ford just announced a perfume that vaguely smells like gasoline, designed for EV owners who miss the wafting aroma of fossil fuels. The perfume even comes in a gas-pump-shaped bottle, and is rather cleverly named Mach-Eau, a play on the word “Macho” by combining Ford’s Mach-E with the French term ‘Eau’, often used to describe perfumes. Although the company hasn’t really put the Mach-Eau up for sale yet. Maybe it’ll come included with Ford’s next set of cars? Who ‘nose’. (get it? nose! knows!). From, I swear, renowned fragrance consultancy Olfiction.
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