Where’s the BIG idea in your communications?

It’s disappointing that there is such a high percentage of brand communications that simply don’t have a good idea. That’s shareholders money, bonuses for employees and funds for research and development going down the drain. Marchitects make sure that every marketing Dollar or Euro they spend counts to the bottom line.

It doesn’t matter if these brand communications are from consumer packaged goods companies, pharmaceutical brands, or medical device brands—the percentage of those that contain a real idea is pretty low.  How do we know?  We survey brand communications on our own all the time and our clients share their own (and their key competitors’) communications with us all the time.

Sometimes it can be quite frustrating because it’s necessary to hard-sell marketing colleagues on the “value-added of having an idea.” That means ensuring that there is an idea that works for communications in the form of advertising, digital media, merchandising materials or sales aids or any media through which you communicate with your target market.

Marketers are supposed to be ideas people, so it becomes hard at times to understand it is necessary to sell marketers on the concept that they have to have an idea as the foundation for their communications. Perhaps there is no one or simple answer to this question. But one thing is for sure, leading brands are successful in many cases because they actually do have communications with an idea.

Why is having an idea so essential? Here are some of the most compelling reasons for having an idea in the brand’s communications:

A communications idea can create perceived competitive advantage with a parity performing brand. A good example is Master Card’s “Priceless” idea. The idea has to ring true with the consumer, but when that emotional idea resonates – it’s priceless.

A campaign idea can mean the difference between the consumer only being acquainted with the brand or the brand being able to build a lasting relationship with the brand. Think about how the idea behind the Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty” has transformed the connection between the brand and its consumers.

A big idea can create significant differentiation in brand positioning in categories where the brands are hard to distinguish. HSBC has successfully created a meaningfully differentiated positioning using the “Local Customs” idea.

We prefer good positive reasons for taking action as a MArchitect, but let’s also think for a moment about what happens when you don’t have an idea – when you communicate the brand’s values and positioning, but it’s not supported by the foundation of a good idea. What opportunities are lost? What is the negative effect of failing to create a campaign around an idea?

Brand communications that don’t have an idea

• Disappear and get no cut through: It does not matter you’re your media agency promises, a campaign without an idea is a campaign that almost no one notices and even fewer remember.  We see this more with campaigns using static media. Where you are using printed materials, like magazines, professional journals, and selling brochures the temptation is to fall back on similar images and ideas: how often do we see smiling faces, happy or ‘cured’ patients, packshots or brand schemes and repetitive/prescribed layouts? Because brand managers are the owners of the brands, and their policemen campaign ideas very often suffer from being required to comply with the brand guidelines and the brand manual. It is argued that color palettes and ad layouts are distinctive and permit the consumers to easily identify the visual clues week after week, year after year. Perhaps, for some brands this is true: for many which are not globally recognized power brands, all that happens is the communications disappear. Browse through a leading fashion magazine and you will quickly find that most branding schemes look a lot like everyone else’s. A few years ago I commissioned a massive painting – it’s 4 meters by 6 and full of bright vivid colors. I stopped seeing it every day, a long long time ago. Continuing to do what you have been doing is a weak excuse for not having an idea.
  
• Are usually full of junk: When you have a lot of space to fill, but no idea to fill it, what do you do? Without an idea occupying space, there is a question about what content to include. We see this increasingly in social media campaigns where content is being published for the sake of publishing content. We just have to get into the conversation. It’s also a problem in brochures. Once you have paid for the space it’s almost as if there is an obligation to use it. Printers sell documents in 16 and 24 page impressions – when was the last time you saw a document with 10 pages because the content, the message only fills 10 pages? The result is that instead of a striking metaphor or visual pun that delivers the brand’s benefit, they publish an intricately detailed graph or listing of bullet-point product features (some not even related to the brand’s benefit).  An additional complaint is that some brands, especially in the Pharma area brands who consciously avoid ideas in favor of information overload. Pharmaceutical marketers insist that their brochure or sales aid should enable the Sales Rep to provide the doctor with the important scientific information or to answer data-related questions.  Back in the days when drug Sales Reps actually spent time with doctors, you have to wonder how many of these same-same, overloaded brochures they saw in a given day or week…and of those, how many they really recalled. Yes, we know that long copy always sells more than short copy, but please, please give us an idea before you simply provide every known fact about the product.
  
• Leaves the brand open to competitive attack: Anyone involved in any sport will tell you a moving and well defended target is much easier to hit than a target that is static or moved in a continuous and obvious way. Think about it. Products in many categories have parity performance which means that the products end up making similar claims – including some claims that may well be noticed – like, “Removes 50% body fat in two weeks!” If you campaign without an idea, you present an easy target for your competition. That’s why Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” was so compelling. Dove’s basic beauty products perform no better than Nivea’s or Olay’s or L’Oreal’s; some might say that some Dove products performed even below those of these other leading brands.  Yet, where did the Dove Brand source its incremental share from during the idea’s 3-year heyday?
  
• Don’t reach their potential: If you have an idea in addition to a meaningful and differentiated benefit it can take a brand to levels of growth it never imagined.  I met the CEO of a prostate diagnostics company last week. According to the CEO, the service is revolutionary. The product provides such a dramatic reduction in the time of and reoccurring need for testing that all he said he needs to do is get the news out…and doctors will adopt it on the spot.” I hope it’s the case for him, and while that’s not the way things normally move in the Pharmaceutical industry I am confident that working with them to create a campaign supported by a big idea will make the launch even more successful.  We have seen it before in with certain ailments or conditions so problematic that it only takes an “announcement” (with the corresponding proof of claim) to get volume soaring.  Look how quickly Lipitor added the billions in volume by merely presenting their large drops in total cholesterol triglycerides, and LDL.  That volume might, however have been significantly higher if the launch news was communicated in a compelling, capture-one’s-imagination idea?  More of than not, having a good communications idea takes a brand to even greater heights.
  

So, what’s the way forward? What behavior should MArchitects demonstrate to improve the return on investment on their marketing spend?

1. Commit to always developing a campaign idea: It makes no matter what the media you choose, commit yourself and your agency to developing an idea that can run through your brand communications. This means taking a proactive step like scheduling an informal Campaign Idea meeting with your team and the agency within the first 2-3 weeks of creative development.  At that time, ask the agency to demonstrate show a number of ideas and explain how they fit to your brand and communications strategy.  If nothing else, ask to be invited to your agency’s internal idea meetings (you know, the ones they always have but never invite you to), you are more likely to learn a lot more there than in any other meeting with the agency.
2. Create a category wall: There is not a lot that is more revealing about how differentiated your communications are from your competition than seeing them sit, side by side on a creative wall. Identify where your communications are compellingly differentiated. If you cannot, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Whether you are significantly and relevantly differentiated from the completion or not, set up an idea assessment session. Challenge yourself and your agency to assess which brands on the wall have an idea and which do not.
3. Distinguish between communication ideas and information: Try to articulate what distinguishes a communication idea from mere communication information. Set some basic criteria that everyone should expect from a communication idea. One technique is to require each idea to have something that is not a part of any of the current category communications by having something unexpected or out of the norm.
4. Practice, practice, practice: We have to be realistic and accept that if this the first time you are doing this you are not guaranteed to get better results. Just because you develop an idea it is not an immediate recipe for success, because the idea might not be a good idea. The odds getting good ideas get a whole lot better when the team has already developed the habit of expecting an idea every time and in challenging yourselves to come up with better ideas all the time. Don’t forget, there will be a lot of your competition who continue to communicate information that is not supported by any idea.