This is a film called 'Trembled Blossoms' made by Prada to launch their Spring/Summer 2008 collection. The illustrator James Jean also worked on designs for the collection and the catwalk shows.
Apparently, the more alien a model looks, the more likely it is they will achieve super-model status. This takes that to the extreme to a parallel universe of some kind of place of perpetual and beautiful cycles of metamorphosis, much like how some would describe Prada is, as a brand.
Typical of the Prada sensibility and brand ethos, the film is not confrontational, but provocative and inviting, and as irrelevant as it might appear to be, I think the film is a good pointer for brands when they try to break out of traditional ways of communicating. Simple, universal, positively inspiring.
This is a link to an article from a 'Cool News of The Day' daily email newsletter I subscribe to from reveries.com
It is pretty clear about describing how P&G are succeeding in marketing to households by inspiring rather than telling.
Amongst many interesting comments from Jim Stengel, P&G's CMO, are these;
“Businesses and brands that are breaking records are those that inspire trust and affection and loyalty by being authentic, by not being arrogant, and by being empathetic to those they serve.” He says the key for P&G was moving away from its traditional focus on “functional benefits” and concentrating instead on being “inspirational.”
I think there's lots to learn here. It's notable that such a big influence on the current conventional wisdom in marketing has found that authenticity and trust play a powerful role in the present and future of fmcg marketing.
This is significant news for all fmcg marketers, and a big encouragement to all who have faith in leadership, innovation and inspiration as drivers to success in marketing fmcg or any brands.
What it also does, is signpost a real change in things - this could be a tipping point in the way many choose to market in fmcg and beyond from now on - we may see a growing wave of adoption of newer, more inspiration led ways. Consumers often play back to us how boring and cliched most advertising is, we know we are in the attraction, engagement and 'generate talkability' game, we know too that 'interactive friction' (as leading exponents in cultural phenomenon creation Crispin, Porter and Bogusky put it), is a great route to deep cultural contact and greater share of consumer everything (voice, mind, word of mouth, word of mouse), but perhaps it takes the likes of a P&G to proactively shift their step, for the world to see this as a significant threshold event.
Unilever, with Dove and Lynx are successful players in the cultural phenonemon creation business, with less emphasis on functionality for either of these brands for a some time now (can you remember when Lynx had a pseudo-science bit? or Dove? no neither can I). It will be interesting to see which brands see this shift and respond, and I wonder which ones will stay stuck in the conventions of product-centric marketing. The risk of being swept into the less interesting for consumers margins as being outmoded and out of touch with a world that looks to brands to be things to be inspired by, believe in and trust, is getting arguably larger.
How we react to this for the brands we work for is a big issue. It's an exciting issue too. How do we link test for inspiration? How do we promote and quantify authenticity and imagination? What metrics do we put in place to measure, "the extent to which I will interact with this and resonate brand love to everyone I know in my social network"?
More on this I'm sure to come soon. It seems that a desire to give inspiration and build trust makes for greater brand loyalty, and what has previously been considered to be a lower priority, emotional nice to have for long term brand equity, has proven to be, for P&G at least, a must do winning strategy.
This is a link to a piece of work that involves a love song hidden behind a sixty foot scratch card type surface, used as part of an interactive exhibit in London, created by Melissa Mongiat and others. I found it about a year ago via a Wallpaper magazine featuring the designer. A bit of googling, and my curiousity being grabbed by both the exhibit title, and the website being called milkandtales.com, took me to find something quite enchanting, childlike and fantastically wonderful.
The title of the exhibit is called 'Hidden Love Song'. It was done as part of the Royal Festival Hall's 'Keeping In Touch' project. It's a great bit of people engaging with creativity, to create something quite special and unique. It would be great to see more of this kind of thing from brands applying sensitivity and art in their communications.
In a world where mentos mints and diet coke bottles get to be performance art ads by whim of an imaginative mind or two, surely more invention and original thinking is not only called for, but actually very necessary for brands to be more interesting in their conversations with consumers.
I've categorized this under 'not enough time to be bland' because for me it is a big watch out for brands. The opportunity for brands to step up to the plate on having a big idea and being imaginative about how they bring it to life, will always be there - the Royal Festival Hall could have spent the money on a poster campaign, or maybe a tv ad about what was on there, but they did a sixty foot, old tech, interactive, music playing, scratch card instead. This was an ad people had to touch, feel and be moved by, it delivered intrigue and provoked stories and wonder. Importantly, it was a metaphor letting people make their own meaning from it, and not a lesson, and it had an idea to be true to, not a demographic to connect with, in mind.
If it were branded, it would have conferred a great deal of joy and optimism on the brand associated with it. It would probably have made the brand feel like a positive thing to listen to, probably giving the brand thought leadership kudos, challenger brand and innovative thinking points too. I suspect it would have made people a little more interested in finding out what was on at the Royal festival Hall as a result too.
The power of a sticky, innovative and inspiring idea arguably makes the RFH's direct marketing or the Sunday papers' listings ad's job a lot easier, and it probably makes those, and all other channels in play, marketing their offer, more effective too. But of course this chaotic synergy of brand behaviour is not something traditional marketing approaches are used to measuring, so a 'too hard to do' or 'not what we do' attitude often means support for the non-traditional is kicked into touch. Great. That means bravery still wins, and the imaginative few agency/client partnerships are the ones that will be the leaders. But, not so great, in that the bar doesn't get raised higher very quickly, and mush in the middle bland brandedness continues to be what most of us get.
These sorts of magical things get to happen where there is a belief that doing interesting things in culture is innately a good thing to do, and those that excel at it are those who believe that inspiring and innovating is mission critical for their business success.
There's a great quote by organisational ecologist Michael Hannan which says, 'Natural selection only works on available diversity'. Technology is making product functionality advantages pretty small and short lived, and people are putting more value on innovation and inspiration from brands as both badges of belonging, and beacons of clarity in confusion. This means the iconic success stories will be more likely to be found in the brands who are most obsessive about being interesting, genuine, innovative and inspiring in their thinking and doing.
In another post, I've mentioned P&G going for inspiration and emotion, rather than functional and rational messaging and marketing approaches, for sound business reasons and making a success of it. That and this piece of art-meets-communication is the stuff marketers need to be inspired by to rethink and enliven models and processes to produce magic of their own for their consumers. If they are not amongst the leaders in shaping and pioneering marketing behaviour, in the current cultural appetite for genius, brands better be in the early adopters group at least, following inspired bits of public engagement like this. Staying in the mass middle ground of the herd of usual marketing behaviour, or getting too late to the game, will mean having to shout loud and compete on price in the blur of sameness - end result is a low margin, high risk game.
For most it's 'do what we know' high measurability, low risk, high traditionality. For some it's 'heck we'll try stuff, and we must, otherwise we'll be as boring as them'. I suspect both sides will be adamant about their way being the best way, and have numbers to prove it. Perhaps its more about faith.
Melissa Mongiat was one of Wallpaper's breakthrough designers for 2007.
A click on 'The Long Tail' link in the 'interesting things' list here, showed up an article by Chris Anderson, Wired founder and author of 'The Long Tail', about why he quit second life. I clicked to that and the reason given was nobody was there - so confirming the commonly held view on the pre-Facebook era, internet flavour of some months back.
But Wagner James Au came right back at the article with an argument, using The Long Tail principle of many little positives, over many niches, over time, making up a massive more significant consumer effect than big fame for a short time.
Chris Anderson seemed to concede a little but I got distracted by a link to someone he clearly rated as a writer and thinker on the matter so, I followed that to this link to an article by Rich Karlgaard, in Forbes.com about 'The world's worst disease'. In the article, I was reminded about media and ideas and how getting the two to gel to create big cultural usefulness, is for some getting apparently a harder and more fraught thing to do, while for others, it seems that some kind of 'anything is possible' utopia has arrived. His assertion that a lot of good writing and thinking happens outside the constraints of systems and a culture of zero sum thinking, is intriguing when you think about the dilemna of media agencies at this time.
This is an exerpt from that article in Forbes about limited thinking and to my mind a scarcity, rather than an abundance mentality, to coin an idea from Stephen R. Covey's 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'. Whilst being a bit 'Little House on the Prairie' for some tastes, Covey's Abundance v. Scarcity thinking seems to be very applicable here, and Karlgaard seems to share a liking for the more optimistic outlook too.
The article's a good read and a nice point of view on why positivity existing outside systems, with fairly little control, are the places from which big evolutions can come - a kind of tinkering around the edges by enthusiasts that creates breakthroughs we eventually all benefit from in the hearts of our expert worlds. I imagine a hobbyist, self-funded r+d type of open-source, intellectual property development realm of ideas rubbing off on each other and becoming new ideas that shift culture. Not a million miles away from garage electronics tinkerers being the birthplaces of companies like HP, or Bill Bowerman's famous pouring of rubber onto his wife's waffle iron to make the first revolutionary waffle soled Nike running shoe.
Here's the excerpt:
"Meanwhile, the most energetic, original and positive writing has been migrating to the Web and to blogs. No surprise here. Anybody who creates a blog is: (a) an entrepreneur and thus probably NOT a zero-sum thinker; (b) a producer first and a consumer second. These two attributes alone guarantee that the blogger probably has a more accurate view of the world, and how it really works, than does the zero-sum thinker toiling away at his MSM position.
Economists and professors compete for a limited number of tenured university spots. This warps their view toward zero-sum thinking. It is no surprise that the top business mind of the last 50 years â Peter Drucker â by and large operated outside of the university system. Drucker, who escaped Germany in 1937, was no Pollyanna or stranger to evil. But he saw that evil had its roots in a belief system of limits; in the Naziâs case, a belief that there was room on the planet for one ideology and race.
As we approach Thanksgiving, let us give thanks to our divinely created bountiful world . . . and to ordinary people, who by their daily optimism and creative actions, add to the worldâs abundance."
'We could do' people just seem to do more interesting things than, 'we have to' people.
Thanks to Carolyn Miller for telling me that the Lynx Jet idea came out of a discussion where someone from the media agency said, 'we've got a jet we can do something with'. Recently, I saw a presentation on the fragmentation of media, the proliferation of gadgets and the tivo-ing of the TV world as we know it. All roads pointed to a shift to engagement from interuption, to a marketing imperative to pull from push.
We were shown a 'Minority Report' future of chips and code readers, and embedded info rich things, that was like a Willy Wonka world of possibility for media - anything looked possible in terms of tracking and getting information to people in handy digital formats. It strikes me that this is a great time to be a media agency because of the vast numbers of new toys to play with, and the fact that screen based moving image is becoming less reliant on TV, has to force brands to be better orchestrators of the channels. But to what end?
To take a musical analogy, it feels like good media agencies could be like great arrangers or producers and also great record companies. The way the song gets played or delivered can make all the difference to its success - like Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Trevor Horn, The Beatles and Sir George Martin, or Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle, the composer and producer partnership can be legendary if both parties bring expertise and respect to the table. If there is stuckness, closedness, or limited thinking and scarcity mentality going on, things tend to be derivative, safe and ultimately a bit dull and predictable. But when there is openness, trust, a wide vista of imagination and a sense of appetite to do great work, a spirited and positive kind of collaboration between media and creative agencies creates a big blur of possibility between them where magical things can happen.
Then there's the clever distribution bit, the right advertising or brand engagement message product having been made, now gets the smart media/creative company mix playing the great place and promotion game. Rejecting the conventional stuff between the idea and the sale, Radiohead innovated the download experience of their 'In Rainbows' album by cutting out the middle machinery of the music business of A+R, launch schedules, retailer networks, product manufacture, handling and inventory issues like trucking millions of bits of plastic around the globe, by going straight to the consumer via the internet. Not a new innovation really but letting consumers pay what they feel is ok for a download of the album certainly was. Again, 'we could do' out innovates 'we have to'.
I've a lot of time for the Howies brand. They do interesting and sound things, which is a good thing to have around in a 'buy-me' world saturated with self-interested sales messages. It's also good to have in a society that increasingly looks to brands to signpost, and hold our hopes for, a better world - a world with better corporate social responsibility.
Howies is an active life clothing brand from Wales (skate and bikes with lots of mud, concrete and the great outdoors), that is arguably fast becoming an icon of world class corporate social responsibility. They have grown from tiny to highly influential amongst a growing and committed group of consumers, to become an exemplar of innovative behaviour and ideas.
It feels like momentum on green issues is about to go through an inertia barrier. In Australia, Earth Hour is getting lots of media attention and intentions to do good by a big idea from the media industry itself. In Monterey, California this talk by John Doerr (filmed in March 07 and posted in May 07) on TED.com, is powerfully cogent and emotional. He talks about how companies are making money from greentech, and it is one of the most moving talks I have seen on this issue.
Meanwhile on the more populist end of the scale, videos like this one I got sent the other day are getting passed around on facebook funwalls, simplistically putting the case for doing something about global warming.
Howies may already be a world class case study of 'innovation and creativity, meets sustainable and substantial revenue generation, from networked communities with a conscience'. They have recently opened their first shop in London's Carnaby Street and they are making corporate social responsibility work for their business.
This brand is about as integrity as integrity gets. A visit to their site is a breath of corporate social responsibility freshness that is modern, entirely optimistic and extremely authentic. I think if there was an epitome of 'Slow branding', like the slow food movement, this brand would be pretty much the standard. Howies has over a number of years been a patient and great grower of a brand. An ideas company that says it's a clothing company.
From a marketer's point of view, they are interesting too. The founders, Clare and David, are both from the creative industries in London, Clare was a writer at brand experience company, Imagination, and David was a creative at the ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and the people that work for them are classic Pro-ams, as Charles Leadbeater would describe them (amateur enthusiasts who are serious about a pursuit like the enthusiastic consumer groups that made 'clunkers' the forerunners to mountain bikes of California).
An activity they did recently involving a blackboard paint covered van is a typically engaging and inspiring Howies piece of brand behaviour that combines corporate social responsibility with marketing ingenuity. They asked for ten cheap ideas to promote the brand and this was one. A skate tour in a white van, painted grey with blackboard paint (cost 120 pounds), with a question on the front about Nuclear Power. One side of the bus was the 'Is it green?' side, and on the other, 'Is it dumb?' and they toured the bus around skate parks where people wrote their views on the bus .
From a marketing point of view again, this is high brand engagement, non-traditional, brilliant blog fodder, no media budget, highly imaginative, hopeful and fresh - completely 'let's do something interesting and positive' thinking. It was a good idea, from an idea led challenger brand, a cause brand, not consumer insight driven, but high ideal driven. Not done before, not part of a campaign with a strapline, no key visual, no functional rtb emphasis, but a definite signature tone of the Howies brand throughout, a rapid low-cost prototype activity that wonderfully exemplifies a 'try stuff often, and always be true to ourselves' culture that has faith in the idea that good business comes from positive and ambitious thinking and doing.
In more product oriented behaviour they are equally as innovative. Good examples being a collaboration with Honda to use metal from old Honda cars to make rivets in Howies jeans. Also Howies sells certain items of clothing where they keep separate bits of the clothing items in stock, so that consumers can replace the bits that wear out as and when they need to, without having to buy a whole new garment. If your jacket has a hole in its elbow, you send it back and get the arm replaced.
In his moving talk, John Doerr talks about his fifteen year old daughter turning to him and blaming his generation for the mess we are in on global warming. Howies embodies a sense of hope that consumers of the solution seeking generation, like John's daughter, might relate to> I think corporations interested in making money whilst doing the right things might learn a lot from this small brand with a big, and very timely, point of view.
If there is a core trait that enables it to trailblaze a fresh way of doing things, I think its their appetite for doing something special and being very open to ambitious and big thinking collaborations with like minded partners. Other brands that have created cultural phenomena and step changes in their competitive sets have also been compulsive big thinking collaborators. Nike+ is a good example of collaboration raising the game.
Like the blackboard paint van with Tom Seymour, and the rivets with Honda UK, other brands that do CSR and social comment well are often at their best when they are in coalitions of high principles and like-mindedness. I think the power of good collaboration is underated by most brands - the constructing a partnerships of rapid prototyping, to coin Michael Schrage, is highly risky, difficult to measure and so it gets the too hard to do tag in more traditional marketer and agency company cultures.
Successful collaborators like Howies though, show that having an appetite for chancing frequent connections with people, who are in sync with your point of view, in the spirit of doing something special, can be inspiring, good for society, and good for business. They embrace the open-endedness of things because it is their very nature to pioneer and explore, which is perhaps why the brand works well in the CSR context as a great brand people can believe in for the long haul, and when times get tough or uncertain.
The fascination with branded content is intriguing.
If it means that the mediocre can be filtered out by the consumer, or the curator/editor doing the filtering or compiling of content on behalf of a subscribing consumer set, then fantastic. And if it means that the pressure is on to engage, in what's been termed the age of engagement, then again, all good.
Great creativity will love the new imperative to create branded content. The skill will be to orchestrate and measure its effect so that marketers will support doing it. It's clearly going to have elements of a long tail argument at times, and at least it will be a very complicated ecosystem argument that econometrics may have real problems quantifying, but the lack of precision just makes the onus on intuition, agility and creativity bigger. There should be a lot of prototyping and risk taking, like Droga5's Honeyshed.
I think intuition, agility and creativity are key things to have because a brand that has a highly tuned intuition to what it's about, what matters to the people it cares for, and the culture it is in, is likely to respond more on target and more inspiringly, more rapidly and with greater efficiency than its competitors.
If a business or brand truly understands that content is king then, being agile enough to act on finely tuned and nuanced intuition and information is a great first mover and innovator's advantage, and having the best and most imaginative minds to hand to concept and create new things that inspire, is the final piece in the capabilities of a game shifting organisation.
Nike + is a phenomenon because user generated content has been catalysed into life by a service created through an imaginative application of technology. Innocent Juices's 'Fruitstock' music festival in the UK is also a service set up as a thank you to devoted consumers that becomes a great big piece of branded content through the experience people have there and what people hear about it.
Ultimately I think the fascination with the 'branded content' phrase is unhelpful. I'd suggest those agencies who are trying to figure out what it means are those well behind those already doing it, those organisations who are completely happy with the idea that everything communicates.
I'm a big fan of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky because they have that view and they have done great game shifting things in marketing brands that have been tagged breakthrough and non-traditional. They've been great at the traditional stuff too. Fundamentally though, they have shown a determination to engage. Media choice has been largely irrelevant, but the driving pursuit of cultural phenomenon creation has seemed to be an aim, by whatever media means necessary.
Everything a brand creates or does is branded content, and the new clamouring for depth and engagement at every moment of encounter is a good thing and a wake up call to those who have been satisfied with not engaging and inspiring people outside the usual opportunities. Traditional media channels clearly aren't dead, but arguably, traditional mindedness certainly is.
A hope for a better future is what great brands sell. They sell it to the children in all of us, and not the adult. The brands that become great brands are those who set us free and not just help us do better in the social mirror. This is pretty much what Mike Byrne implies in his talk at the PSFK conference last year, and I completely agree with him.
Great brands are things that bunches of people create and manage to bring hope for a better life to other bunches of people.
Mike Byrne Creative Director of Anomaly made a great case for brands being the purveyors of physical manifestations of 'Hope'.
He showed three ads as examples of brands selling hope. A Nike 'Just Do It' ad, an Apple iPod ad, and the Coke 'Happiness Factory' ad.
Here's the Nike Ad,
and the iPod ad,
and here's the full 1 minute 31 second version of the Coke ad,
All great examples of inspiration and hope, and great benchmarks of engagement, talkability and cultural phenomenon creation, or whatever new description fits this kind of universally resonant great work. What I find interesting about the ads too,is when you read the comments people make about them on YouTube and the like. They are mostly, if not completely, very positive and many people are clearly inspired, and re-inspired in a timeless way.
The connection doesn't age, and the warmth created between brand and consumer is like the friendship of a trusted old friend that you haven't seen in a while. Even though masses of time has past, one re-putting in the head, or in effect the smallest re-minding, brings the emotional attachment to the brand right back to near original levels of, 'thanks, that's made me feel a really good feeling' in the viewer. What a fabulous thing for a brand to achieve.
