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In Adweek July 18th- Warren Berger wrote an interesting piece about the potential mid-life crisis of the ad biz.

"There are lots of tough questions companies must confront in dealing with a consumer who's more engaged, more informed and more concerned with social issues than ever before. Among those questions: What does the company stand for? What does it believe? How does it make its products and treat its employees? Is it being straight with us in its ads? All of these points are part of the larger conversation people are now having about brands."

This isn't a crisis inflicting advertising, it comes from somewhere, it's a corporate identity crisis- could corporations have lost track of their reason for being?

You sell stuff, we know that, but it's not enough.

What's your reason for being?

What do you want to do when you get to work in the morning?

Does you brand have a cause?

To the bean counters and the analysts on Wall Street, these things seemingly have nothing to do with the revenue and margin numbers they care about, but they do. The hard sell has gotten so pervasive and old, there's a load of white noise out there with people "selling", but doing nothing more. We are over-supplied with stuff and the noise that surrounds the perpetual consumer cycle is tiring people. They've found ways to cancel the noise and to find alternative sources of information. People want and need more and there's so much more brands and their corporations could do.

It seems like we've confused marketing with purpose, that marketing is something that helped us out when we didn't really have a clue about who we wanted to be and what we wanted our businesses to stand for.

Marketing was there to plug the holes and provide some sort of wrapping around the business. It created dreams, controlled thoughts and allowed business to make stuff and forget what they really stood for.

Sometimes marketing got close to capturing a real idea of what the brand and company stood for, there were moments when companies genuinely believed they were the "Human Element", or whatever tagline their agency gave them, but it was fleeting, they soon lost interest. They found it too hard to genuinely believe in the idea and they probably felt that consumers didn't really believe it. In the end, the marketing guys had created a hollow promise, something the brand or corporation couldn't and didn't want to live up to.

What about starting from the center and working outwards? Instead of asking your ad agency who you are, what about asking yourself some tough questions? This isn't a marketing function, it's a corporate function. It needs to start from the top and fan out across the organization, everyone plays a part because they are living proof of what the company believes in.

The time has come when brands need to stand up and be counted for something and they need to be disciplined and committed to that cause. They need to break free of the formula that's guided their thinking for 50 years and get back to basics. They need to find a truth that's something for the long-term, something that will be relevant today and in 20 years time and is real, honest and provable.

When the world around you is getting more confusing and scary by the day, you've got to be certain of who you are, without that, you are going to be lost at sea.



Posted by Ed Cotton The idea of producing less stuff, but better stuff is a hard one to grasp, but something that makes sense to people outside the marketing world.

Nicholas Nova discovered this interview with legendary designer Dieter Rams, who lays the blame on marketing for pushing more stuff out there.

"no one wants to admit that at some point they have reached the end of the line. Yet you can’t always be making a new shaver or a new coffee machine unless you come up with a real innovation - and here I’m not talking about tinkering with the shape or the colour. And then people think that this will increase sales a bit more. They’re dreaming! Yet for all this it seems as if most managers still believe that just having a sheer mass of products on the market achieves something. Right now, that is the problem with the car industry. They have been shoving more and more cars onto the market yet it is obvious that the markets have long been saturated. And yet these are precisely the development programme targets being set by the design divisions of larger companies. But I still maintain that the way is to produce less, but better. “

Posted by Ed Cotton There's a recent article in Ad Age that talks about the ANA meeting where CMOs vented their frustration with ad agencies over their responsiveness and the increasing opportunity they believe exists with media companies.

"Agencies and ad networks came in for some rough treatment at a CMO roundtable during the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference on Saturday as executives vented their dissatisfaction with agency models and ad-network performance. The chief marketing officers of Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab openly mulled the attractiveness of bypassing agencies to work directly with media companies and other experiments as they look to fix an agency model they see as broken."

In my view there's some truth to the argument that agencies are somewhat tied to a time intensive process that has to change, but in terms of thinking and ideas, I don't believe media companies can replace agencies.

The reality today is that great ideas matter way more than fast ideas.

Creativity is needed more than ever.

The reason for this is the massive increase in the volume of micro-interactions (emails, Tweets, Facebook updates, viral videos, channel surfing, radio surfing,etc...). I am not going to suggest we are reaching "Information Overload", or that we are suffering from "Future Shock", because I believe in our ability to adapt and manage. However, it's a simple fact that the more stuff you have the harder it's going to be to remember it and just "being there" in a media sense, I believe is no longer sufficient to generate interest, recall and to persuade.

This isn't about just showing up in a media, it's about placing a brilliant idea in media that is contextually right and relevant.

Brilliance has become a mandatory, because without it, there's no way your brand is going to be recalled or make an impact, it will simply be just another message that's ignored and goes in the trash, most of our email.

It's likely the CMOs in the article are merely reflecting back the pressure they are under and things taking time to get to market can add to that. However, the ad industry employs some of the smartest, brightest idea creators around and if clients aren't demanding and using that brilliance, they are missing something that's essential in today's tough times.




Posted by Ed Cotton Homogeneity and it's close relative, consistency are cited as critical components of brand success.

Many analysts tell us that brands have to deliver consistent experiences if they want succeed and that homogeneity is what consumers want and desire.

It's therefore interesting to read about the demise of Starbucks in Australia.

According to the BBC..

"The mighty Starbucks coffee empire has been handed a heavy defeat by thousands of small Australian cafes in the fight for a nation's taste buds.

Eight years after it began selling its espressos and frappucinos in Australia, the US giant has succumbed to powerful financial and cultural pressures and has closed 61 of its 85 shops across the country.

Savouring a morning cup of coffee has become a ritual for millions of Australians - yet one that Starbucks failed to capitalise on, in spite of the way the chain had become a global cultural phenomenon during the 1990s.

"It was maybe too standardised," says Michael Edwardson, a consumer psychologist in Melbourne.

"Early on it was unique and different, but as it became a global chain the standardisation made it lose some of that coolness and edginess. It was quickly copied and lost its lustre.”

What does this suggest for brands?

Perhaps brands need both consistency and inconsistency; they need to flex and play with both elements. It's clear that consumers today probably need a mix of both. Certainly parts of brands need standardized elements, but they also need to surprise and delight their customers. They need to get ahead of the curve, rather than behind it.

This is incredibly demanding and challenging for brands; the idea of staying ahead and bringing surprise to consumers depends on having great intelligence and brilliant execution, not to mention the investment required to support change.

Too often, brands sit back and wait too long to make changes. Instead of getting ahead, they wait until the last minute to do something. They try to get away for the longest possible time without making changes.

As this story shows, culture has the power to move much faster than brands. Brands need to recognize the rapid pace of change and invest not just in the intelligence to stay ahead, but act on it before it's too late.


Posted by Ed Cotton Innocent Drinks has always thought differently about the relationship it has with its customers.

It's constantly looking to level the playing field, which can be something of a challenge as the company grows.

However, they are continuing to innovate in this area of outreach, as witnessed by its announcement for an AGM in April.

"We’ve always liked to know what you think of our drinks. That’s why we ask you to ring the banana phone or pop into Fruit Towers. And it’s great when you do because we get to have a chat, and find out what you’d like to see innocent doing next.

This year, we thought we’d go a step further and have our very own AGM. It’s not going to be particularly formal (no men in suits telling you about profit engineering). We see it as being more like a get together in a village hall where you find out what’s going on, have a bit of a debate and then vote on a few things.

We’ve never done anything like this before, but the general idea is to try and get about a hundred of our drinkers to come along and find out a bit more about life at Fruit Towers. And, more importantly, get involved in voting on what we should be doing next as a business. 

So you get to tell us what to do, and we’ll give you lots of free smoothies. And that’s it really. It would be great if we could get every single person who ever drank a smoothie to come along, but we think it might be a bit of a squeeze. Which means we’re going to have a ballot where everyone who fancies it lets us know their name, and says why they’d be a good person to have along on the day.

It would be great to hear your thoughts about what you’d like to know about most. And if you don’t get picked, we promise to make sure we update you on everything that happened on the day, and give you a chance to have your say too."

Posted by Ed Cotton Please share your top 5 predictions for marketing and brands in 2008.

Post your thoughts in the comments section and we will publish them in a forthcoming series of blog posts.


Posted by Ed Cotton