Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina

February is here, and we can hear the gentle pop of New Year’s resolutions expiring all around us. Like soap bubbles that once were full of hope, reflecting a better future, many of our resolutions are now reduced to a moist residue on the harsh pavement of reality.

It’s no surprise that coming up with resolutions is much easier than keeping them. A 2007 study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, even though over 50% felt confident they will succeed at the point of making their resolution.

New Year’s resolutions are commonly articulated as objectives, and just like business objectives, common reasons for failure can include lack of strategy, inconsistent implementation, lack of stakeholder engagement and cultural fixations. But there’s one pattern of failure I’d like to point out: the search for meaning trap.

When we set ambitious change-orientated goals, we are engaging with our definition of purpose. We are articulating various “happy ending” objectives and laying out early chapters for new, life-changing, narratives. In essence, defining resolutions is one of the ways we explore the meaning of our lives.

Similarly, defining business objectives is an activity intertwined with the organisational search for meaning. When we define business objectives we are exploring the purpose of our organisation and redefining a vision of our company’s future. The more critical the objectives are, the deeper we will have to engage with the fundamental questions about our brand. We will discover that in order to make significant changes to the composite and priorities of objectives, we have to engage with the question of who we really are as a company. That’s why in strategic processes you will find that terms like mission, vision, purpose, values, brand story, personality and other terms suggesting deep meaning tend to connect, raising further complexities and challenges.

This is the point where the search for meaning trap kicks in.

Because the search for meaning is a never-ending quest. The meaning you were happy with yesterday, will start to degrade in your mind the moment you leave it be, and even faster if you continue to examine it. Suddenly, the sense of clarity of intent and enthusiasm you’ve felt begins to wane, and you wonder if this was the right idea in the first place… Maybe that brand idea isn’t right, maybe you need to re-examine your vision. Maybe what you lack is a positioning statement. Maybe it’s really the time to revisit your purpose, or corporate mission statement. And what about getting a good idea of how the market has changed since the last time we went through the process of defining those elements? And who’s our target audience again? And what about the different ways different departments or subsidiaries have been going about the same process?

Before you know it, you are running a new company-wide brand programme and engaging everyone from the receptionist to the chairman of the board.

Hang on a minute! Didn’t we go through this just 18 months ago?

Oh but how the world has changed since… So much that by the time you finish this exercise you will have to start it again, just like you did last time you decided to “shake things up a bit”…

Now, you can never accuse a strategist of a lack of love for planning, but I believe that being stuck in an endless corporate search for meaning is the equivalent of moving from one resolution to another, one fad diet or self-help book to the next, without ever achieving any of the intended transformation.

The solution? In one word – Act!

Let go of the notion that you will ever reach a perfect definition of your brand or purpose. You are on a quest, so stay focused on the road ahead and deal with the obstacles head on. You need something good enough which suggests a clear course of action. Little changes make a big difference over time and once your plan is even half decent, the rest of your energy should be focused on coming up with actions that make things happen and get things done.

If I could suggest one new habit for brands in the new year, it would be to stay focused on action. So shift the resources you were planning to spend on your Nth strategic planning programme of the last few years into actual things you can do for your world.

Throw away that self-help book, and start doing.

Cross-Posted on The Crossed Cow

My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps:

1. The wilderness of possibility – The terrain is hectic and full of details. Nearly every spot looks either suspicious or promising. Every nook and cranny may be hiding the answer, but where to dig? Which opportunity to choose?
2. The clueless plateau – The terrain is so bereft of any information or detail, it’s impossible to identify the potential areas where solutions may be buried.
3. Narrow canyons – You may not realise it, but the path is taking you further away from the solution and limiting your exploration to barren areas. You may struggle, but there are so many limitations that the range of actions possible seems extremely narrow, almost as if there’s no way out. A worse incarnation of the canyon trap is when you may think you are choosing the right path, but actually you have a distorted view of the territory. You’re walking trapped in the canyon and you don’t even realise it.
4. The oasis of false promise – This is it, you’ve found a spot that looks promising, this must be it. But actually, there’s nothing there, and you may dig and dig and sweat and nothing will come out of it.

There are techniques to mitigate and attempt to get over those traps, and sometimes half the job is realising which trap you’re dealing with. Here are some tactics to deal with the aforementioned traps:

1. Spoilt for choice? Develop qualifiers/filters to make you choosier. Find a system for your roving. (And if that doesn’t work, rove randomly enough to hit something).
2. No idea where to start? Try and generate more opportunities, roam more freely, and stay alert for any clue, however small.
3. Stuck in one direction? Try removing any constraints or reframe the problem and see what new directions open up.
4. Going for a promising direction but not yielding results? To begin with, don’t limit yourself too soon, don’t fall in love too quickly with solutions, keep roaming for a while. Have been focusing on an area of promise with little result? Try moving away, explore a new area and see what new possibilities open up.

Thinking back on brand challenges encountered through the years, I’m surprised to discover that most projects tend to fall into one of the first two types – Either you’re drowning in information and possibilities, with dozens of seemingly exciting alternatives and little evidence to what is worthy of staking a claim, further development or exploration. Alternatively, you find yourself in a bleak “insight desert” grasping for shards of useful information or any clue to point you in the right direction.

Why are the other two types more rare?
Simply because if a client falsely thinks they have the solution already or believe they are on the right path and nothing exists outside the box – they are unlikely to turn to strategic or creative advice in the first place. Instead, those “non-project” situations will sit there, waiting for someone to sound the wake up call of reality (to get out of the oasis trap) or for someone to breakthrough a new direction (to get out of the canyon trap) – either from the inside, or the outside.

Cross-posted on The Crossed Cow

Here is a quote from a recent blog post that I think applies to concept development in general and creative/strategy collaboration in particular:

“Coming up with a Meet the Team short [* animation shorts promoting one of their games. UB] is a lot like a game of Jenga. 99% of it involves making room for an idea and seeing what happens.

Most of the time what happens is the whole structure collapses. Then you have to figure out why it collapsed and rebuild it, this time making sure to add in some structural support for your idea so it doesn’t bring the whole short down.”

(the rest of their post relates more to the specific animated short they’ve been developing)

While working on an article about brand ecosystems, I came across an interview Diageo CMO Andy Fennell recently gave to Marketing magazine.

Here are some choice quotes:

- Given your marketing challenges, what type of agency do you need today?

There’s one thing that we will always need from our agencies – brilliant creative ideas. That’s what we are buying – big ideas, full of flair to surprise our consumers. At Diageo, when we work with an agency it is the number one priority. Sure, account servicing and all that stuff is relevant. But the reason we buy an agency’s service is because of its creative flair.

That said, we can no longer segment the different aspects of an idea in the way that we used to. We need agencies that can see the totality of our engagement with the consumer, whether that is blogger outreach, social networking conversations, long-form content or more traditional advertising. Almost always, we need agencies collaborating with each other around what we end up showing to the consumer.

There are very few, if any, agencies that are able to do everything. So, we need our lead agencies to be able to see the whole idea and collaborate with partners in order to deliver to the consumer something that joins together and makes sense. We talked about integrated marketing for years. It’s been a buzzword in agency land. Now it is absolutely required. If it’s not integrated, the consumer rejects it.

- If it’s all about getting consumers to participate, do you still need big campaigns?

Not big advertising campaigns, but we need big brand ideas. When you have more and more people collaborating, you need a big idea to hold it together. The difference now is that you don’t start with an ad campaign. You start with an idea that allows people to participate – so we talk about ‘participating platforms’.

***

You can read the rest here.

No big surprises for brand agencies there, you might say, but here is a thought…

When the entire marketing world becomes hyper-integrated and idea-driven, two of the core elements that used to set apart Brand(/ing) Agencies in the past become hygienic to the entire creative industry.

The concept of having a “Brand agency” in such a world, makes as much sense as having a “Positioning Agency” or a “Differentiation Agency”. Branding is just too important as a mode of thinking in marketing to be fenced off and left only for one type of agency.

That’s why if you look across recent innovations and best-practices in brand management, you will find a wide variety of agencies involved.

That’s why the more clued-up about branding clients are becoming, the more they are likely to give branding work to other agencies or even do it themselves.

And, guess what? We don’t get a prize for being the first to realise the importance of those ideas or for being the pioneers of practicing them.

So unless we prove on a daily basis we are the best at creatively combining clarity of definition with the power of execution…

The best at connecting creed, consequence and community.

The best at coming up with “long” integrative ideas for participation and engagement platforms.

Then brand agencies will go down in history as passing phase.

A mere symptom for a moment in the evolution of marketing.

Ah, well… At least our mission should  clearer.

p.s.
1. Slight revision and a similar situation is rippling through the Digital Agency sphere.
2. I think integrated and idea driven may be the two key attributes of contemporary marketing. I would love to hear if you think there are other attributes that are as big. (Action? Community?)

(Previously published on the

“Is our brand more ‘about us’ or ‘about you?’”

Agencies and clients alike, we all love a good positioning matrix.

To begin with, they are dangerous creatures, as their seductive powers come from the brain’s cognitive preference for clear cut dichotomies, and life isn’t always black and white. Taking two dichotomies and using them together is that power squared, but so is the danger.

Love, respect, and fear them—they’re not going anywhere any time soon. However, it will be useful to start rejecting some common false dichotomies that tend to make reoccurring appearances.

The one I want to mention this time is when one axis (usually the X) talks about the difference between "talking about us" (the company/brand) and "talking about you" (the audience/customer).

Usually the assertion will be that the brand is too inwardly orientated, talking about the detail of the products and the history of the company instead of the needs and solutions of the customers, audiences, or stakeholders.

Time and time again?I’ve seen it used as a central dimension to the analysis of positioning, often favoured by research agencies.

The bias is in the question itself, compounded by a guilty residue from an era before customer-centricity. A concept that is now hygienic to every industry (at least as an ambition).

Beginning with the question: the world we live in is just not like that. Most of the best brands you could think of will be neither. Apple talks about its products and culture, but is a brand that cares deeply about meeting needs and ease of use. The same can be said about Google. Coke is very much about the product and the myths that come with it, it’ll be tempting to position them opposite to Pepsi and say that Pepsi is more about its drinkers and Coke more about its own brand. But in truth: 1) Coke has adapted its myths to centre on changing lifestyles time and time again. And, 2) Is it really that helpful to put them on this axis to begin with?

The best brands are both about themselves and about their customers. Apple, on different analysis pieces I’ve seen, is placed on either end of the spectrum—being "about Apple" to differentiate from and "about the customer" as a pointer at the important-but-generic-for-the-last-30-years (at the very least) practice of customer centricity.

Going back to the bias in the question: If you ask customers in focus groups or individual interviews what they prefer, what do you think they’ll answer? Of course they will say: "Me! Me! Talk about me!" But we know that in the mysterious mix required to make them pay attention they also want to know who "you" are and why is it worth paying attention to what you have to say.

So can we just stop using it and pretending that it adds any meaningful insights?
Thank you.

If you have any interest in transmedia storytelling or the future of marketing, what Valve is doing as it promotes the release of Portal 2 (probably tomorrow at this pace) is simply amazing.

Links:
Portal 2: The game
The wiki of the game about the game which is played across social media, other games, podcasts, magazine websites, email, IRC … involving the gathering of clues to aid the gathering of “potatoes” required to overclock the AI antagonist of the game (=Valve releasing the game earlier). But also includes the release of branded content across the other games, new content about the game’s universe and its meta-universe (which is a version of our’s).
Which all results in this accelerated countdown to the release.

Single handily revolutionising the PC gaming industry through their Steam platform (an app store for PC games, installed on pretty much every gamer’s PC on earth) is apparently not enough.
Seriously exciting, ground-breaking and creative stuff.

Update 26/4/2011: And here is a good summary of the Portal 2 ARG by Edge Magazine.

Albert Einstein was quoted saying: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I don’t know any worthwhile stories or conversations that contain one word, or that focus on just one word. Any brand needs more than that to craft its narrative.

I’m tempted to say something like "The age we live in is very much about creating (new) meaningful connections." but actually, that’s what life’s about, isn’t it?
Well, no connections if there is only one thing. Two are a minimum requirement, and you need a third one if you want movement. The math of stories, one could say.

And if you do take one word and try to use it to link yourself and your audience – you already have something that goes beyond this single word, just by making that connection, you have three points of reference. If that’s the case, you’d better have a better idea of what it might be. And an attempt at articulating it, not necessarily only with words.

If your team or agency get only one word, what they get is a wide open brief to do almost anything with your brand.
Sure, great brands become iconic. Talking about one word alone may give an iconic impression. But being iconic is a result, not a cause.

And if you tell me you want to "own" something, then I’m really going to reach for my gun.

Confusing a goal with a strategy.

One can call it an error, but the error, if to be honest, is seeing strategy where there is none.
In the philosophical study of logic, there is a logical flaw called "The bare assertion fallacy". This is the fallacy behind playground sentences like "I am right because I am.". The end/means fallacy works in a similar way.

It is obviously clear to the reader, that the sentence "I will become rich by making a lot of money."  does not cut it as a strategy for becoming rich, yet so many so-called strategies I comes across, especially brand strategies, and specifically "strategic" creative briefs, will have elements of Bare Assertion naively woven into them.

You wouldn’t expect big corporates to fall into such a simple logical pit, but here are some examples of bare assertion coming out of the woodwork, or at least telling sympthoms:

"to become the world’s top/best/ best known/most loved/leader…".
Mission/Vision/Positioning statements that are completely wishful thinking:  Don’t get me wrong, having a goal is important, but having an ambition does not solve the question of how to achieve said ambition. And I’m sorry, even if you’re one of the gullible many who believe in "the law of attraction", we cannot develop creative according to that.

"This brand will be cool, young, fun and fashionable. "
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but if we want to have a strategy to make that happen, then no number of result-orientated aspirations, masquerading as brand values, drivers or attributes, will tell us what makes a brand all those things.

"Our strategy is to become customer centric / human touch champions / design driven / insight driven."
As opposed to all the brands out there who try to achieve the opposite?

"This is about encouraging brand love and speaking with an authentic voice."
"Love marks", is nothing more than branding rebranded, "be yourself" is useful only if you know yourself.

"Our goal in this project is to redefine the brand and maximise value to increase return on investment."
In other words, we want to succeed and get our money’s worth. Thanks for that valuable insight.

Building a brand is a long, trying, quest. Dreaming of the grail feels nice, and, yes, it might be useful to remember why we’re on the road in the first place, but seeing only the grail instead of keeping our senses open to the road  – that’s deadly. We have promises to keep.

P.S.
Don’t be confused by the lack of insight in the examples to think that’s the solution. Insights alone do not make a strategy either, but that’s another story.

Some points regarding the concern that people may have irrelevant (obscene or other) associations for the new mark:

1. Graphical marks always appear in context. There is no situation in which the mark appears totally alone and without any context. When the mark is given in context the chances of such associations prevailing are practically none-existent.
Any graphic brand in the world, when taken out of context can be read in some negative way.

2. The human brain is always happy to give significance, even when there isn’t any context. When abstract shapes are seen, people will always find imagery in them. They will do that even if these are random: ink blots, cracks in paint or mould stains on the ceiling. The difference is that some people are aware of doing that, and others can see only their own interpretation. In reality – it doesn’t happen thanks to context. And even if a couple of times it does, it doesn’t "stick".

3. The only acceptable type of design research is a "disaster check", you present it to people of different age groups and backgrounds who are asked to free associate about it, unless the same negative connotation keeps coming time and time again – you’re safe. The question is not "Is it possible for a person to see THAT in the mark?" but "WILL people likely see THAT?".

The answer is usually – They absolutely will not.

(Oh, and people will make parodies on the net anyway…)