Vision is a difficult thing. It is perhaps the single most important ingredient to success in business. It is what makes good ideas great and great brands famous. Yet, it is rare, misunderstood, and at times, even vilified and run out of town. We all admire a few of the canonized default-heroes like Jobs and Hsieh, but rarely do we find that kind of vision on display in our own organizations, core teams and break out rooms.
As the discipline of “Planning” emerged in our industry in the mid-90’s, so did the infrastructure of the Planning Department. It has traditionally been reserved for the highly cognitive individual, usually yielding cerebral or trite presentations. Like many specialties and specialists, I’m convinced some things are intentionally done to preserve their integrity or their value in the food chain.
Pick a brand. Any brand. What do you like best about it? Most people with a strong brand affinity can point to a tactile or emotional experience that describes how that brand makes them feel. That experience is the product of a thousand small gestures – a series of brand affirmations at each customer touchpoint, which includes social media, traditional advertising, event marketing, point-of-sale, retail experience, word of mouth and so on.
It’s not difficult to find reasons to heap praise upon Google’s assent and reign as one of the world’s preeminent innovation companies. Pundits and analysts inside and outside The Valley have scoured their online thesauri for superlatives that can do justice to the rapid prototyping, relentless innovation and market- moving force multiplier that is Google.
There has been much written about start-ups, entrepreneurs and companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter driving most of the innovation in America. In fact, the National Science Foundation documents only about 9% of all U.S. companies innovate. Experts further explain, in and of itself, this information technology-based innovation has not led to the manufacturing of innovative products – in either industrial or consumer products, bioscience, nanotechnology or the alternative energy spaces. In other words, our significant investment in innovation has not led to a commensurate amount of “valuable” output. As a result, it has produced sluggish job creation, real declines in income, an increasing trade deficit and overall, anemic growth.
Let me state this as simply as possible. If you want to create fun, award-winning advertising, find a hot agency known for their brilliant scripts, give them a pile of money and enjoy your 30-seconds in the spotlight. But if your goal is to create great branding, you need to start with a great story.
In our business, we have traditionally admired the mavericks, risk-takers and magnificent bastards who make big bets, take big swings and are happy to tell you all about it. But in the modern marketplace, there is relatively less room (and fanfare) for the cowboys and relatively more whitespace (and retweets) for the pragmatic tweakers who nudge their brands toward efficiency and resiliency in far less bombastic ways.
In the heyday of mid-sixties to mid-seventies advertising, titans of the industry like Burnett and Oglivy created characters, archetypes and caricatures to represent their brands. Collectively, they became known as “critters” and soon became a standard trope in the advertising lexicon. From the Jolly Green Giant to Charlie Tuna to the Pillsbury Dough Boy, these quirky, bizarre creations saturated advertising and the culture itself as they made their way to T-Shirts, lunch boxes and even early forms of content creation models.
As I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, it occurred to me that it has become much more than a football game – it’s a platform for us to embrace, grieve and celebrate human emotions. With this in mind, I watched the commercials through a different lens. There are many definitions and objectives of advertising. By way of most traditional models, it starts with “awareness” and ends with “action.” Translation - the desired result is sales. However, not everyone has the same goal, and this is necessary to understand prior to fairly judging any commercial. Unfortunately, it is not disclosed by advertisers.
What does it mean to be a “tech company” – if indeed it means anything anymore? Like almost any other slang term that enters popular dialogue, “tech” and “technology” have started to lose their meaning through overuse. From bankers to ball bearing manufacturers, companies of almost every type have started to apply the term – or the broader lexicon around it – to their businesses, with widely varying degrees of relevance.
Domino’s Pizza was never a brand that invested its intellectual capital (or its actual capital for that matter) into its marketing and branding. They focused instead on real estate and operations. Franchises popped-up in every C- and D-county strip mall across the country, and the key selling proposition became “30 minutes fast or free.” This is hardly a claim of quality or commitment to craft and the customer. It was a one-dimensional dare instead of a fully formed vision of company purpose that can actually be of some value to the customer’s life.
