This Week in Strategy: I tell dad jokes all the time even though I’m not actually a dad. I’m a faux pa
(I think I'm quite apparent!)
Hi Strat Pack,
I have had a very interesting week. This was my first week off since, well at least since March 2020, and I used this opportunity to do a lot of weird New York stuff. I've long been interested in disused infrastructure. I think the edifice we choose to leave behind can tell you more about a place than the new things we erect.
This week I explored Fort Tilden, a former Army base on the tip of Queens, turned national park (and honestly really nice beach) since 1974. The park is littered with abandoned and overgrown buildings - munitions stores, repair facilities, a launchpad for surface-to-air missiles. But the two standouts to me were these hulking concrete bunkers (which Wikipedia tells me are called casemates) that used to house artillery that could fire 30 miles offshore. It's just wild to think that New York City was investing in coastal defense like, literally during the Jet Age.
And of course, are you even urban exploring if you don't get a cool as hell photo of yourself hanging off a gantry crane? (It's fine Mom, the sign said it was rated for 10 tons)
I've also been watching the Olympics a lot this week. And one story that I want to share with you is that of a woman who produced one of the great diving displays in Olympic history. She's 14 years old. And got perfect scores on every dive she completed. This video is absolutely nuts. The amount of skill and talent this person has is insane. Great story. Great to watch
One final note. Go play 'Super Mario 64' in your browser while you still can (I'm starting to think I should never return to work...). That's right, sports fans. Someone ported the game over to internet, and once you get the hang of using your keyboard, the game is quite fun! It's the full game. Spend a few hours this Friday afternoon, get back to that N64 Goodness.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how many stars I've collected so far in Super Mario (yes you can save your game!). Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) How brands can avoid the curse of convergence [Marketing Week]
Marketers don’t set out to make their brands virtually indistinguishable from all the others in the sector. At least, most don’t. There will admittedly always be some for whom copycat, me-too, status is a fair objective, with an open policy of flagrant imitation of success.
But norms are stubborn things. Norms fight back, in that asymmetrical- warfare way that saps the spirit and suffocates aggression. Gradually, without noticing at first, ground is given by those workshop attendees, and their brave new brands start to conform to the contours of the competitive landscape.
This is the marketing curse of the age – the curse of convergence. Your brand has a ‘naturally effective, three-in-one’ formula. So does theirs. Yours has an ad campaign that ladders up to a big emotional life-theme. Theirs too. You’ve got a purpose that ticks all the diversity and environmental boxes. Yup, your rival’s got that base covered also.
If convergence is not what we want, how come it’s what we get? It’s a multifactorial problem – like most problems in marketing, and business, and life, come to that. But forewarned is forearmed, so here are the five most pernicious convergence-inducing factors to watch out for – along with some thoughts on how keep the fight for differentiation alive.
1. Regs and legislation
In the brainstorm, that open-plan hotel layout, that one-click account opening service, that 100%-natural efficacy positioning looked and felt like the bold thinking needed to power the brand ahead of the pack.
In the bowels of corporate HQ, three weeks later, the regs team is shaking its head and furrowing its brow, as it reviews your excitable PowerPoint slides. Health & Safety, Equality & Human Rights, Food Standards, Building Control, PAGB, FCA, WHO, OPBAS – they name it, you’ve breached it. So ‘adjustments’ will need to be made.
There are no easy ways around this originality crusher. But you could try bringing the regs team into the brainstorm at the outset, with a brief not merely to naysay, but to provide a simple regulations summary upfront, and to help find constructive ways through when the ideas cascade.
2. Supply chain concentration
There are hundreds of beauty brands out there: mass, premium, ‘mastiche’, midmarket, niche. Yet the product ingredients come from a handful of suppliers. In fragrance, there are just three big supplier firms, with the largest claiming to silently serve 4 billion customers a day.
Or flip across to a category at the other end of the spectrum – cars – and witness the same ‘funnelling’ effect, where a breadth of marques relies on a narrow set of original equipment manufacturers.
Where you share suppliers with dozens of your competitors, the prospects for breakthrough innovation are slim. But outsourcing is efficient, so the system isn’t going to change. “And in any case,” says your ops director, “isn’t it the job of you marketers to differentiate with your image stuff?” Well, yes. But the next factor doesn’t help with that…
3. Didactic researchers
Big research companies will have done fieldwork in your category before – lots of it – and they will come to your briefing armed to the teeth with prejudices about what works and what doesn’t.
Some go further than that, with openly declared biases irrespective of category – like the one that claims advertising needs to be emotional to be effective. Not quirky, like, say, Heineken’s ‘Reaches the parts’; not rational, like, say, Ronseal’s ‘Does what it says on the tin’; and not hilarious, like, say, Allstate’s ‘Mayhem’ campaign. Nope. Only emotion works.
Follow their lead and you will end up with a big mushy ad like all your competitors. So don’t. Make it clear to researchers that consumer input is just one piece of the brand jigsaw, and insist they restrict themselves to findings, not recommendations. Better still, avoid standard qual altogether and opt for ethnography or co-operative enquiry. These methodologies are scarier precisely because they are less deterministic. But that way originality lies.
4. Lead-market caution
It is rare that big global brands are a universal size in each market. It’s generally patchier than that – with the brand having a healthy share in some markets, a lesser share in others and a massive share in a single, high-population market like Russia or Brazil.
So guess which market has the biggest say when teams come together to devise a bold new global positioning? And guess which market is the most risk-averse? It’s understandable – if you’ve got the most to lose, you will be the least open to experimentation.
The only solution is time. If the potential global positioning breaks sector norms, allow for many rounds of testing in the lead market – or even for a pilot launch in a culturally similar but smaller market. In global branding there are no quick wins, but that does not mean originality cannot prevail in the end.
5. Flawed casting
Not all convergence-inducing factors are extraneous. Some are to be found in the makeup of the marketing team itself – too long steeped in the sector codes and cues to think outside them.
Marketers know that, which is why they generally invite the agency to those brainstorm workshop sessions – expecting some of out-of-the-box pyrotechnics. But agencies, too, will often have spent too long inside the sector tent, and invariably turn up with too fixed a view of the consumer.
The best approach is to broaden the workshop casting far wider, to include anthropologists, semioticians, medics, social scientists – people who have no insider category knowledge and who are unafraid to ask seemingly obvious questions. ‘Intelligent naïves’ is what challenger-brand originator Adam Morgan calls them, and he is right that they can bring unexpected themes to the table, with potentially exciting results.
Unconverge if you can. It isn’t easy but it is a thrill – the way marketing should be. When you pull it off, though, and your brand is doing extraordinary things in its own unique space, watch out for the prospect of rival brands desperately trying to copy yours.
That’s annoying, for sure – but it’s a whole lot better than the other way round.
2) 4 loops that cause creative struggle [Janis Ozolins - Twitter]
3) Department of Quick Hits
Guy Who Reverse-Engineered TikTok Reveals The Scary Things He Learned, Advises People To Stay Away From It [Bored Panda] 2 months ago, Reddit user bangorlol made a comment in a discussion about TikTok. Bangorlol claimed to have successfully reverse-engineered it and shared what he learned about the Chinese video-sharing social networking service. Basically, he strongly recommended that people never use the app again, warning about its intrusive user tracking and other issues. Considering that TikTok was the 4th most popular free iPhone app download in 2019, this is quite alarming. The headline is "TikTok is a data collection service masquerading as a social network." I mean. I still use it. But, caveat emptor!
DoorDash and Grubhub are now dealing with imposter restaurants that sling pricey meat [The Verge] Ordering delivery through an app like DoorDash or GrubHub saves the trouble of cooking and lets you be a little picky — you can order from your favorite restaurant. But imagine receiving your food, sitting down to eat, and it tasting... different. And then, following your gut, you learn that you’ve been duped by a fake, an imposter restaurant that stole its name. For many people ordering from two Japanese restaurants in San Francisco, that exact thing may have happened, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. Fake restaurants aren’t the only surprises potentially awaiting you in food delivery apps: some legitimate brands have also tried to entice diners by changing their name for delivery. Remember, that pizza you purchase from Pasqually’s actually comes from Chuck E. Cheese.
The Pixar Pitch [Richard Shotton - LinkedIn]
4) Department of Great Work
TBWA\Chiat\Day responds to a “dehumanising” bill with 22 posters in support of the trans community [It's Nice That] TBWA is an advertising agency that operates in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and Mexico City. It was also founded on the belief of allyship and equality, so when a Nashville-based employee raised concern about dehumanising, degrading and transphobic Tennessee Bill 1182 to the agency’s leads in diversity, equity and inclusion, the team decided to respond. The bill requires Tennessee businesses to add “warning” signs to bathrooms, if those bathrooms are multi-stalled and allow transgender people to use them. As this bill would impact nearly every public space in Tennessee, the agency took action and created 22 signs voicing supportive messages to the transgender community.
KFC Imitates Ikea to Get People to Visit Its New Restaurant [AdWeek] When KFC was preparing to open a new restaurant in a shopping mall on the Spanish island of Majorca, there was one problem: few people had heard of the location. To capture attention, the fast-food brand decided to imitate the area’s most popular resident. KFC erected a billboard on the island that combines its initials with the Swedish retailer’s typography and colors—so the ad says KFC, but at first glance it looks a lot like Ikea. Beneath the fake logo a line reads: “ya sabes dónde estamos,” (which translates as “you know where we are”.) Very clever. From Spanish agency PS21.
This Milky Way ad from the 90s [Twitter] Top ten all-time ad-banger. Every word indelible. Still drives sales to this day. Obeys all the rules: Distinctive & differentiated. Emotional free sample of the product. And not a brand purpose in sight. I cannot find the agency but the music was done by Mcasso. Read an interview with the CEO (who wrote the jingle) here.
Why Rapunzel and Cleopatra Really Could Have Used Amazon Prime [Muse by Clio] These ads are so hyper british that I typed 'adverts' at first. What would Rapunzel, the fairy tale princess with super-long locks, do with a subscription to Amazon Prime? And how might Cleopatra, ruler of Egypt from 51–30 B.C., make use of the service? But Prime answers such questions in a pair of diverting ads developed in-house with creative agency Joint London and Hungry Man director Wayne McClammy. Reappraising myths and tales of yore, with postmodern panache or through a progressive lens, feels right for our wearying times, and brands are going all in. So, Cleo orders gifts for her subjects (inspired by Coming 2 America on Prime Video, of course!). And Rapunzel buys a ladder to escape that lofty tower (better luck next time, sweet prince).
Psyop's Luca Vitale, Kylie Matulick Mobilize Anime “Fry Force” For Taco Bell, Deutsch [Shoot Online] In an homage to this year’s Olympics taking place in Tokyo, the anime-styled commercial depicts the struggle to save Taco Bell’s Nacho Fries from evil forces. In this :60 spot, Rei’s brother Kosuke is taken by Nacho Fry devouring monsters. Rei must push through her hunger and lead the Fry Force, an elite squad of mecha pilots to keep the monsters at bay. But when the monsters unexpectedly overtake the team, Rei finds herself face to face with her long-lost brother. Now that he’s consumed by a primal hunger for Nacho Fries, Rei must decide what she’s willing to sacrifice in order to save Nacho Fries and the world. Oh and there's a PDF Manga too. From Deutsch and production house Psyop. This spot rules.
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