i [love] marketing.

the problem with the big idea, contd.

Last week after I posted this, I continued the conversation about the decreasing importance of the "big idea" in marketing campaigns with Noah, and I figured that the conversation is interesting enough to post here. And, of course, as many many other things invented on the Internet, this format was first seen at NoahBrier.com :) Ok, so this is how the story goes:

From: Noah
To: Ana
Date: June 23

on your big idea post:

Interesting ... Will need to noodle on it for a bit ... I generally agree, though I think the reality of the situation is that you often need a big idea to sell a series of small ideas in, even if you back into it.

Also, check this out: http://www.doohan.com/kdoohan-blog-kevindoohan/2009/6/21/does-your-brand-rent-or-own.html ... Interesting client perspective on where/how a brand should live.

And do you think this is dependent on the brand at all? Can you make a blanket statement about telling stories versus building utilities? (I honestly am asking ... I don't know the answer.)

From: Ana
To: Noah
Date: June 23

um, weird re: posting on my blog - thanks for letting me know. hope it's a temporary problem, because i like having your comments there :) 

And yeah, I completely agree -- I am not sure what the right answer is myself. This is something I have been thinking about a while ago, and now resurrected it. At the time, I was convinced that the big idea makes sense. Yesterday, I couldn't find a valid justification for it.

Here's the thing: utility of whatever idea/tool an agency develops is bound to its context of use; there are ton of different contexts people will use the tool/API. Then, the contexts then also range from very specific to very general (people's life). In that situation, we are designing for the context -- and not for the idea. 

How those things are tied together is bound by 2 dimensions: how do you connect diverse contexts horizontally, and how you connect them vertically, going from specific to general. Ultimately, it's patterns of use that tie them, not some abstract idea. And if we know how people use stuff, track it, and measure it, that's what defines success of individual solutions. Where does the big idea come in here?  

Idea can be helpful as an internal communication device for the team, to get everyone on the same page. After that, I'm not sure.

Re: brand, I found this yesterday in some presentation (the link is below): "Today's audience prefers brands to seduce them little by little, revealing themselves slowly, intelligently, and teasingly. Brand is a cluster of efforts all working towards a common goal ... The future of brands lies as much in the creativity of the communication as in the uniqueness of their value" This is nothing new or original, but I ultimately believe there isn't ONE answer or one solution or one blanket statement. I think that is the whole point of digital branding; you can't say what exactly it is or what's not. And that's okay.

http://www.slideshare.net/helgetenno/a-bigger-idea-branded-context-and-brand-situations

From: Noah
To: Ana
Date: June 25

Okay, a few things.

1. I don't totally get what you mean in what you're saying about utility, but I ultimately see your question in where does the big idea come in?
2. Yes to idea as internal communication device.
3. I still think everything is ultimately built off some basic brand idea, right? I mean you can't stray so far from the brand (at least not without context to explain it). So there is some big idea there.
4. On that level I think a big idea does hold some value, it helps keep the brand together across multiple touchpoints so that at least there is some consistency and you're not spending a bunch of money building different brands in consumer's minds (that are actually just one).
5. I don't know that any of this is specific to the web either. I think Geico does it on TV.

From: Ana
To: Noah
Date: June 25

just a quick reply.

While I did not had this in mind when I was writing that post, this crossed my mind just now: Nike+ created different tools around the idea "be a better runner". All those different tools (chip in the shoe, ipod, tracking online; community of runners; inspirational stories by running professionals; Nike running stations; Nike Human Race). While the "big" idea is "be a better runner", how those different "touchpoints" are interacted with and connected with each other depends on individual behavioral patterns (serious runner, casual runner, and everyone in between). Some people use tracking and community; some use just events; some go there to watch videos. There is continuity between points but it is up to individual use. Brand coherence is similarly achieved, through users themselves connecting different points to fit their running style.

While Nike claims that this system is the brand, I do not necessarily agree DailyMile does the same thing for runners as Nike, minus the shoe. Only shoes are branded in the traditional sense, everything else revolves around users' patterns of interacting with different tools on the site.

From: Noah
To: Ana
Date: June 26

That's a good point ... Honestly I think the bottom line is it doesn't matter that much (and never really did). Lots of people talk about the value of total brand coherence, but I can give you good examples in both directions. Ultimately the big idea was always a better story than fact and lots of the very best ideas likely backed into something big, especially on the web.

from ownership to use*

* This dichotomy, or a 'transition' if you will, is part of the Adam Greenfield's list that I came across over at his blog. It reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago, and that's Marx's theory (yea, I know, whatever). At the time, for whatever reason, I got reminded of Marx's analysis of use value and exchange value. For Marx, exchange value is the basis of capitalistic production, and indirectly the reason of all inequality in relations of production. Use value refers to the literal utility of a commodity. Exchange value is its price that can, but not necessarily does, reflect its use value. So now if I rewind to the digital world, and its economy, it turns out that this Marx model gets turned on its head. 

What people deem valuable online is stuff that has immediate practical value for them (is this worth my time & attention? does it help me do something? does it help me do something better than before?). There's no value before use. And, there's no value if it's not delivered right there and then when someone needs it (maybe this is why advertising does not work -- it promises some value ("buy product, be happy"), but delivers none at the spot). 

Then, what's deemed as valuable online is stuff used by the most people. The thing here is that different people value different things, and since there is ton of stuff on the web, what's most valued by most people can mean that: a) those things are indeed superior in delivering value in their category of goods/services (Google, Dopplr Netflix, etc.) and/or b) those things exhibit network effects, so the more people use them, they become more useful to everyone involved (Facebook, Twitter). Neither of these two scenarios has any exchange value. No wonder it's hard to make money on the web :)

Since utility seems to be one of the core values of the web economy (and not necessarily "sharing" and "collaboration" which are great concepts in itself but don't really explain the value of digital stuff unrelated to content - e.g. applications, tools, services, and social networks), I'm wondering why marketing people don't kick in and start making their campaigns accordingly. Ultimately, I think they would make much more money with their products/services in the offline world if they reverse the economic rationale of their campaigns in the online world. 

But I may be totally wrong.

p.s. The photo above has nothing to do with the post. Obviously.

the problem with the big idea

I am certainly not the first, and absolutely not the last person to ask this question. I was thinking about this a bit, mostly in relation to digital branding. Then I also thought about it in relation to digital marketing campaigns.

So, in relation to digital branding, I pretty much reached the conclusion that big idea is not that relevant, although I am sure ton of people will disagree. But I have in mind all those successful brands that care more about being useful and usable and providing delight in small, surprising details (and you know who those brands are!!). They kind of don't have any big idea - or a story - behind them, they just work really really well. Their idea is their execution. End of story :)

Then I started thinking about marketing campaigns and the situation became a bit trickier. After all, people plan a marketing campaigns because they want to draw people's attention to something specific: a new product, or a new positioning of that product, or to promote a line of products, or to get more people to use more products more often. So, if the main purpose is to change people's actions in relation to brand's products, then the best way - agencies thought - is to tell people some awesome story. That is, change of behavior was expected to happen through the change of perception. Totally legit.

Except that digital does not necessarily work that way. There, a change of behavior happens through, well, the change of behavior. Something like moving away the mediator. It's much simpler online: a person does something, gets a feedback, then maybe a trend of those feedbacks, and then after doing stuff that works repeatedly, changes his or her behavior. In this scenario, brand perception is the outcome of positive interactions, and not their cause.

Big ideas, on the other hand, love to command people's attention. They require their own domain on the web, and they rule it (and to avoid any romantic notions, by ruling it I mean mostly practical stuff: not being connected, or referring to, anything or anyone else online; being built from scratch for a gigantic budget; not really being optimized for measurement; etc). And yes, it goes without saying that they expect people to come to them.

In contrast to big ideas model, there's this. It has now almost become a mainstream to think that data and applications and fun stuff live outside the web page, and roam freely on the web (and outside of it, in the physical world -- just ask Russell Davies and Matt Jones). So now the challenge that a marketing campaign has is to build a lot of small fires that people will hopefully interact with. Building a lot of small fires may require a bit more creativity than coming up with one big idea (because, honestly, it is harder to work with what's already out there than to dream up some crazy stuff at the back of the napkin). But, there is also something else. Where the real challenge starts is how to connect all of that stuff together. After all, the task is to build a marketing campaign, and releasing all different things online with a logo on them won't really count as such (just ask the Cannes Lions jury ;).

Ok, now the question is how to integrate all those different and really separate efforts?  Can a big idea unfold over time through a lot of small ideas? Or, should we let go of the question of ideas altogether?

Then, there is a reality check: the client paying for a marketing campaign, used to seeing their brand live as one big idea, is - almost by reflex - going to ask: "Where is my brand here?!?" Well, we have a problem. The brand is all these different things. What you build is going to differentiate one brand from another, the same way that different 30-second spots promoted different moods, jingles, characters, and storylines to make some brand "alive" and different from other similar brands. Or, to put it simply: it's about moving away from telling a story (about the brand) to facilitating a conversation through providing utility.

Second, and more importantly, it's not the brand anymore that connects all these different things into a marketing campaign. Big idea cannot hold things together. But people can. And they are doing so through the flows and patterns of their everyday user behavior. This is easy to say. Not so easy to build for. Because the context of that behavior comes in (as currently much quoted Eliel Saarinen put it, “always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context ...") and that has much less to do with where people are going to see the tool you've built, and much more with their current 'state of mind', motivations, emotions, needs -- the stuff that's a real driver behavioral change. And now, we can't really know someone's state of mind (and old-school marketers didn't know it either, but hey, they didn't let that stop them). What we can know is how they behave online - their usage patterns.

This brings me back to the start (and I can just hope that I didn't build a circular argument here :). And the start was: use people's behavior in order to change it. Don't give people the IDEA of how they should be (look, feel, eat, behave), just let them do stuff that positively change their life. The desired behavior change is much more likely to occur in this second scenario. Something like a video game: people go through their days and they get different tools to do different stuff, and they get some feedback how they performed and how others performed, and that helps them correct their behavior a bit, etc. It had just now occurred to me that Phillipe Stark said something similar in relation to the role of designers, so I managed to dig out his quote: "In the future, there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant." What he meant here is that the role of designers is to provide tools that improve people's lives.

Um, can the same thing be said about brands? (Just replace designers with brands in the above sentence, and it does not sound so crazy. It actually sounds pretty cool.)

this is a good question.

I've seen this question(s) just now on Joshua Porter's blog, and not knowing where to put it (too long for Twitter, not possible to call this part out on FB), I figured I may just as well post it here. The whole deal with Twitter is "ambient awareness" so what he asks above is a pretty relevant stuff. If you didn't know how many people "heard" what you have to say, would you stop talking? Probably yes, after a while. Not knowing who/how many/what your audience is takes away a critical feedback loop (even if they don't say anything) that let us know that we are part of the social group.

More interesting to me is to think about the quality of statements vs. confidence levels (of which they are delivered) if a person knows that he/she has 3,000 followers. As the saying goes, nothing succeeds like a success (a common translation of the power law), and the person who already has a giant number of followers will have more, which will make him/her think/feel that what they are saying is important, giving them confidence, and making them say more freely and authoritatively more stuff. On the other hand, if someone has 50 followers, they know that not a lot of people will hear what they are saying, which makes them less motivated to broadcast their opinions, and also makes them less confident about the validity of their opinions. So I kinda think that quality/validity of an individual's opinions is a consequence, and not the cause of the large followings. Because, who else is going to validate our opinion if not other people?

Anyway, Josh's post is very good, read it here.  

KFC is crazy?

Or maybe not so much. I came across this today, and while my first thought was, "whoa, megalomania", then I started thinking, just for fun, if Google Maps Satellite View can be yet another advertising channel. Something like geo-advertising. So not that the search for "Arizona desert" will generate some giant audience, but if KFC can do it here, than brands can do it everywhere, so you may want to look at Fiji islands and all of the sudden there is a giant image of Ronald McDonald. Or, if you want to go targeted, a bottle of Fiji water. (what a creepy idea)

Ok, so just now I went to google maps and maybe this geo-advertising thingy is not such a completely dumb thought because honestly there's ton of empty roofs that make outdoors seem so passe. And anyway more people look at google maps than they look at outdoors on Houston street (unless it's some naked Calvin Klein situation). I can see contextual advertising lurking just behind the corner. Literally and figuratively :)