The Blog.

ON SCIENCE.

It’s true. I’ve been cheating. You might overhear me making passionate declarations of love for brand strategy, writing blogs about it or just generally, you know, being employed in the field. But it’s time to admit that I’ve been unfaithful to my first love: science. To me, science is modern day philosophy. It does more than ask bold questions; it often answers them. And strangely enough, the more we discover, the more we yearn to understand, perpetuating the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that makes us innately human. This, people, is why we stepped out of the cave.

Given that I write a brand strategy blog, not a science one, I thought I’d use my third love, writing, to attempt to bring these seemingly disparate subjects together. My hypothesis is that you can take almost any facet of science and find a way to pragmatically apply it to brand strategy. As I’m incapable of bending space-time to suit my needs, I’m going to focus on three big ones for today:

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect

The physicist Werner Heisenberg developed one of the most famous tenets of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, in the late 1920s. ‘Uncertainty’, in this instance, refers to our inability to predict both the velocity and the position of a particle at once. The more precisely we measure one element, the less accurate our measure of the other becomes. Loosely tied to this principle is what scientists call the ‘observer effect’, which posits that by merely attempting to measure a particle, we affect change on that particle, thereby altering the measurement itself.

I believe that by attempting to measure a brand or campaign’s success though rigorous testing and research, we often overlook the bigger picture. Clients and agencies become far too focused on ROI and metrics, on short term wins. While we can measure response rates on eDMs or booming sales figures, we can’t accurately gauge brand equity and engagement (no matter what some agencies tell you).

How do you measure the subconscious emotional reaction a person experiences when they notice a familiar logo? Or how many people are humming a brand’s jingle as they do the housework or walk to work each day? While I’m not advocating that we should drop measurement altogether, I am suggesting that the act of measurement can skew our perception of what defines a successful brand. These seemingly small, everyday experiences actually contribute to a larger, more congruous brand awareness that, whilst immeasurable, is crucial to a brand’s success. 

The Theory of Evolution

This one shouldn’t require too much explanation (unless you were educated in the American South). Darwin’s famous tome On the Origin of Species makes the case that all life has evolved over time through a process called natural selection, also known as ‘survival of the fittest’. This is a misnomer though, as it’s never been simply about the weak versus the strong, but about a species’s ability to adapt to its environment and pass on desirable traits to its young. Evolution answers questions previously reserved for religion and philosophy; it helps us understand where we came from and how we got this far.

People, as a rule, are resistant to change; we don’t like re-brands. When Gap in North America replaced its famous ‘blue box’ logo with a more modern interpretation, there was a large-scale social media backlash. Facebook and Twitter fired up to protest the switch and Gap responded by apologising to customers and reverting to their original logo. By attempting to evolve too quickly, Gap wasted millions of dollars of marketing spend and damaged their relationship with the consumer.

Brand evolution must be approached cautiously and undertaken stealthily - just look at how subtly Qantas refines its flying kangaroo every few years. If you’re reading this from Australia, I’d bet you have a trusty tub of NapiSan in your laundry. Or do you? If you take a close look at your tub of NapiSan right now, you might notice something a little different: it’s not called NapiSan anymore. It’s called Vanish NapiSan OxiAction.

You haven’t noticed because parent company Reckitt-Benckiser doesn’t want you to notice – it wants you to adapt. It’s spent millions of dollars and almost a decade slowly transitioning a well-loved Aussie brand into its global brand architecture without upsetting the status quo. And it’s working beautifully. Eventually the NapiSan name will disappear from the label entirely, but that won’t happen in the near future. Sometimes change takes a generation.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor is not a scientific proof or principle, but a heuristic (kind of like a rule of thumb) that helps guide scientists when developing a new theory. Named for William of Ockham, a logistician that frequently used this methodology but did not explicitly name it, Occam’s razor states that when there are multiple possible explanations to a problem, the simplest answer is almost always correct. This can be summed up by an old axiom, “When you hear hoof beats behind you, think horses, not zebras.”

You might find yourself at your GP’s office with fever, chills, vomiting and nausea, convinced you picked up a tropical disease on your recent trip to South America. You’ve Googled the symptoms and you could be dying from all manner of fatal infections. Your doctor, however, looks amused as he informs you that you’ve got a mild case of flu. This is Occam’s razor in action.

Brand strategists often delve too deeply into their work. Clients often come to us expecting a grand unified theory and we actually attempt to find one. We create diagrams and charts to show just how much thinking we’ve done about their brand. We look for meaning in numbers and try to apply it to our strategies.

But sometimes a number is just a number. A chart is just a chart. What really matters is a strategist’s ability to be intuitive, to grasp the emotional aspects of a brand and tease them out in a strategy. Sometimes we need to just sit back, ignore the science and use our instincts.

 By Torie de Jong

ON HABITS.

Market research used to consist of locking bored, cash strapped consumers in small rooms with one-way mirrors and watching to see whether they like their cereal sweet or salty. But recently the industry has turned to real scientific inquiry and approaches such as neuro-marketing are fast becoming the norm. One area that science itself had largely ignored until the last ten years was the science of habits. As the latest habit research emerges, businesses are finding new and innovative ways to effectively market their products and services. Whether your habits are bad or good, you can be sure that, somewhere, a marketer is studying and attempting to change them.   

Duke University conducted a study that concluded that roughly 45 per cent of our actions each day are not conscious decisions, but mere habits. That coffee you got on the way to work, the order in which you tied your shoelaces, the brand of fabric softener you bought at the supermarket. These are all automated processes occurring courtesy of the firing neurons in your brain. And now, research is showing that habits never truly disappear. They are woven finely into the fabric of our minds, waiting to reemerge when the time is right. As the Spanish proverb goes, “Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.” The good news for people who want to change a ‘bad’ habit (and for marketers) is that you can override the process.

So, how exactly do habits form? It’s as easy as 1-2-3: Cue. Routine. Reward. The cue is the trigger that tells your brain to begin an automated process – the routine – in order to get the reward. Let’s put that into context with a pretty common habit loop: You might look at the clock and notice it’s 3pm (cue), so you wander over to the kitchen and grab a biscuit and a cup of tea while you have a chat with a co-worker (routine), before heading back to your desk with a renewed sense of focus and clarity (reward). Eventually this routine becomes so automated that you’ll find yourself gossiping in the kitchen with a Tim Tam in your hand, not realising how you actually got there. George Santayana wasn’t kidding when he remarked that “habit is stronger than reason.”

Science has shown that in order to ‘break’ a habit, or to override one, the cue and the reward must remain the same. It is a new routine that must be inserted. For example, if the cue is the clock showing 3pm and the reward is focus and clarity, the replacement routine might be getting up and taking a walk around the office or taking five minutes to do a quick yoga session at your desk. Slowly but surely, new pathways will form and this habit loop will become as automated as the last.

Marketing is about appealing to all three aspects of the habit loop. We might call it a ‘buyer’s journey’ and spin it into something lofty-sounding, but what we are truly doing is inserting our own products or services into the ‘routine’. Take, for example, the recent launch of Spotify in Australia. Most of us are in a rather entrenched habit loop: hear a new band you like (cue), download the album – legally or illegally – (routine), and listen to their music in the car/office/daily job (reward). Spotify, a free music streaming service that allows you to listen to whatever music you like on whatever device you like, identified a step in the loop on which they could improve. As expected, when presented with an easier, cheaper path to the same reward, consumers flocked to the service. Spotify has successfully changed a habit and turned itself into runaway hit.

What does this mean for the future of marketing? Companies like Target and Proctor & Gamble are already stacking their marketing departments with statisticians and neuroscientists and achieving astounding results by applying this new lens to traditional techniques. But while the focus right now is on inserting new routines, will we one day be able to create entirely new cues and rewards with techniques like subliminal advertising? And if so, what are the ethical implications of that? The science of habits is only just emerging, and there are many questions that come with it. However, I’ve just noticed it’s 3pm and my habit loop is calling. Let’s talk in a few years when we know a little more. 

*Charles Duhigg has published a brilliant book on habits, without which I could not have written this post. Go check it out if you want to find out more. 

By Torie de Jong

ON POLITICS.

Politics. It’s a topic best shied away from at family affairs and first dates, and with good reason. Political persuasion is increasingly becoming a part of our personal identity, shaping our worldview rather than being shaped by it. Swinging voters are fast becoming an urban myth and parties are widening their ideological distance from the political centre.

 This issue is amplified in the United States, where Republicans are bought by mega-corporations and the Religious Right to do their bidding, and Democrats try but fail to restore economic and social equality while losing seat after seat in Congress. These factors make American politics a fascinating study in the art of marketing.

Republicans usually run on a platform of combined fiscal and social conservatism. What’s unusual about this is that the best interests of these voter groups are often at odds with one another. Fiscal conservatives (who truly control the party) want large tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, resulting in tax hikes for the poor and middle class. Social conservatives, for the most part, are the poor and middle class. But they vote Republican anyway.

One of the most fascinating things about social conservatives is their rabid hatred of universal healthcare, social welfare programs and gay marriage. This fervor is matched only by their great affection for the American military and tax cuts for the wealthy.  These are people who claim to be ‘God-fearing Christians’, doggedly fighting to spread the word of Jesus, even if it means violating the constitutional separation of Church and State.

I’m no theologian, but from what I hear, Jesus was about love, peace, caring for the poor and healing the sick. Doesn’t that sound a lot like freedom to marry, diplomacy, social welfare and universal health care? Somehow, I don’t think Jesus would have been a Republican.

So, why do social conservatives vote in such a cognitively dissonant manner? Emotional engagement.

Marketers have been conducting studies for decades about rational versus emotional decision-making. Every study finds the same thing: emotional ads and brands are more successful in every measure – whether it’s recall or sales figures. People don’t just want facts and figures; they want to feel something.

When marketers talk about building an emotional brand, they want the customer to feel excited, comforted, special and so on. We usually only think about the positive emotions we want associated with our brands. What the GOP has discovered is that negative emotions work just as well, if not better.

Republicans now deal in the currency of fear. Positive messaging is completely absent from their campaigns. They have painted Democrats as godless heathens coming for their guns and bibles; they have claimed there is a ‘Muslim conspiracy’ in Congress; that America is in danger of bowing to Sharia Law. If you want to scare a conservative, nothing works better than telling them Obama is coming for their guns and Muslims are coming for America. 

One of the best illustrations of Republican marketing is the defeat of Bill Clinton’s health care plan. In 1994, Clinton had been trying to push through a progressive health care plan that would insure millions of Americans. The Republicans began a campaign claiming the plan was the beginnings of socialism in America. For Australians reading this: socialist is one of the worst things you can be called in US politics (they’re still fragile from the Cold War).

The Wall Street Journal conducted some research in which participants were given the details of the Clinton and Republican plans but not told which was which. Clinton’s plan was favoured overwhelmingly. Fascinatingly, public opinion showed the opposite – Republicans had done such a good job smearing it that the public believed them. It’s not too dissimilar from the famous Pepsi/Coke blind taste test in which most preferred Pepsi, but they continued to buy Coke.

So what can we learn from the Republican Party? Marketers certainly don’t want to use fear tactics to win customers, but we do need to rethink the way we view emotional engagement. I think it’s clear that while humans may think with their heads and feel with their hearts, they choose with their guts. Marketing is about the guts. This is why negative political ads work, but also why Kleenex’s adorable Labrador puppy engenders so much brand loyalty. What does the puppy have to do with toilet paper? Nothing. But he’s so damn cute.

*I understand this is more of a rant than an examination of brand strategy, but I needed to write about it.

ON IMMORTALITY.

When I was little I loved nothing more than hearing my father’s stories. He would tell me of the pranks he played at school, his days scavenging at the tip for radio parts, the bike that his father built for him and the tomato soup his mother would make when he was sick. There were better tales – of princesses in castles, of outlaws and heroes - but none resonated like my father’s.

As he spoke I would try to imagine him as a young boy, a child just like me. I would conjure up images of his mother, his friends and the tiny fibro house he grew up in. But they were never more than ghosts – wisps of imagination that would vanish if I grasped them too tightly.

My father was a ghost too. He was there but he was not. I could not reconcile this man with the boy in old photos, creased and curling at the edges. He was a stranger to me, and I to him. I would never know him. That boy was lost to me.

My ancestors are all lost to me. I don’t know the names of my great grandparents, let alone their values or character. When they died, their memory faded with each generation, until they were finally forgotten forever.

My generation will not suffer that fate. We will live on in the ones and zeroes of the Internet. We are the Immortal Generation.

Much has been made of Facebook’s ability to connect people across the globe, changing the way we interact and communicate with one another. But when Facebook implemented its ‘Timeline’ functionality, it ceased to be a mere communication tool. It became a living history of us.

I have friends that pride themselves on rarely using Facebook. They believe it’s too mainstream; it glorifies vapid self-interest; it’s for people with too much time on their hands. I disagree.

Socrates said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ – a mantra I have lived by since I was thirteen years old. To me, Facebook is the ultimate opportunity to document the life I am supposed to be examining. I can share thoughts, achievements, events and photos with the people I care about. More importantly, I can preserve them for myself.

I can go back in time and relive the elation I felt when I got my first job. I can read posts from far away lovers and remember what it felt like to be missed. I can laugh at videos of my friends and I dancing in the living room and feel grateful to have known them, even if we’ve grown apart. For the examiners of this world, Facebook is the ultimate textbook.

But Facebook has a larger role to play than that. It’s been around for such a short time that we cannot yet envision what it will become decades or centuries from now.  One thing that I am pretty sure of is that my descendants will be able to know me the way I never had the opportunity to know my ancestors.

I would love nothing more than to reach into the depths of history and come out knowing my forebears a little better. Why did they come to Australia? Where did they live? Were they happy? Were they in love? But I can’t.

However, my descendants will see photos of me and say, ‘So that’s where my nose came from!’ or, ‘Dimples must run in the family’. They will know that I loved reading and politics and animals. They will know my friends and family. Most importantly, they will begin to know themselves. They will get one step closer to answering the question: ‘Where do I come from?’

In the story of where we come from, we’ve opened a book of inky smudges and empty pages and begun to fill them up in technicolour. The Immortal Generation, as I have dubbed it, will change the future of the past. The past will no longer be out of reach. It will be right there waiting to answer questions we never knew we had. The band Alphaville famously sang, ‘Do you really want to live forever?’ It might be time to answer that question, because forever starts now. 

ON NAMES.

‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by another name would smell as sweet.’ William Shakespeare may have mastered the art of theatre, but I doubt he’s got the goods to make it as a brand strategist. Naming is an ancient custom that has existed since humanity developed the means to communicate.

A common notion in history is that naming something or someone gives you power over that thing or person. The world’s best-selling book, the Bible, claims that God granted Adam and Eve the right to name all of the animals, thereby exerting power over them. In the fifth century, certain sects of the Christian faith taught that merely speaking the name ‘Jesus’ repeatedly would bring on a state of religious ecstasy and oneness with God. The power of names persists in modern Judaism, where the name of God is considered sacred and is unable to be spoken aloud, or to be erased or destroyed once written. This notion is not restricted to religion; Arthurian legend tells us that a knight would not reveal his name until after defeat in a duel, as to reveal it prior was to hand his opponent the balance of power.

Now that we’ve got the history lesson out of the way, what does this mean for your brand? It’s clear that there is a great deal of power in a name, so it would logically follow that you must choose yours carefully. My own mother realised the significance of this when she considered naming me Victoria, but then changed it to ‘Torie’ when she saw that my initials would have been VD (for the Gen Y-ers out there, this is Gen X for STD).

Naming, essentially, is the art of identifying what something is. Your name is the blueprint for your brand, a representation of all the elements that make you who you are. What do you want your brand to say; to mean; to feel like? While branding firms will tell you there are four, six or twelve ‘types’ of names, I subscribe to the view that there are only two that really matter: real and invented.

Real names are existing words in any language, like Target or Amazon. The word Jenga may seem invented, but it is actually the Swahili word for ‘build up’. Invented words are conjured up, and can be an amalgamation of existing words (No-Doz), a simple twist on a real word (Flickr) or a totally invented word (Hulu). Both types of names have pros and cons, so it’s about finding what works for your brand.

Real names can be a double-edged sword because they already have meaning associated with them. When the meaning is relevant to your brand and you are in a position to take ownership of the name, you’re onto a good thing. An example of this is the Visa brand, where the word visa has traditionally been assigned to a document allowing you to enter a country. Visa took this meaning on board, then turned it into something else – a financial passport that allows you to spend your money wherever, whenever. Visa took an existing word and evolved it into so much more.

Richard Branson took a divergent route with Virgin – a word associated with purity, innocence and chastity. In a somewhat cheeky maneuver, he created a brand identity that is the antithesis of its name - an impish rogue of a brand; the very definition of tongue-in-cheek. This identity is so strong that its meaning stays consistent across all his ventures, whether it be Virgin Galactic or Virgin Brides. Branson has flipped the Visa paradigm on its head, completely reversing the meaning of the word.

Invented names have the advantage of being entirely ownable; you can make them yours and assign meaning to them as you see fit. Your brand becomes the meaning. In today’s crowded marketplace, it is also essential to have a unique name when it comes to trademarks and web domains. Originality is key when you consider how many applications your name will have, and the legal implications associated with it. Finding a truly distinctive word will work to your advantage when it comes to this practical side of branding.

A great example of an invented name is Skype. The origin of this name comes from ‘sky peer-to-peer’, which essentially describes their service. Skype’s creators have distilled their brand essence into one word that resonates simplicity, easy of use, and blue-sky thinking. By creating such a distinctive word, they have managed the most coveted feat in marketing: Skype has become a verb, vaulting them into the league of greats like Google and Xerox.

One of the most recognised brands in the world, Adidas, is an entirely invented name. While sports fans have debated its correct pronunciation for years, I doubt many have delved into the origin of the name itself. Founded by Adolf ‘Adi’ Dassler, it is an amalgamation of his first and last names. Linguistically, this works due to the cadence of the closed Germanic consonants and the almost palindromic rhythm - A-did-As. New brands should be cautious when taking this route – you can’t just throw any two words together and cross your fingers. Make sure the words are somewhat relevant, of the same linguistic family and that they truly work together to create a new word that you can call your own.

While the choice between real and invented names is important, ultimately you must consider the following questions when developing a name: How does it look written on paper? How does it feel when it rolls off your tongue? How does it sound when you hear someone talk about it? Unlike a logo, your brand name will be heard as well as seen, so it’s vital to consider how it sounds and feels as well as how it looks. You need to try it on for size and make sure it fits in all the right places. Your name is your brand’s foundation, the distillation of your vision and values, and your most important asset. Choose it wisely.

By Torie de Jong

RIDING IN CARS WITH BLOGS

A blog is a heavy burden to take on. It begins with an idea, a thought that you simply can’t wait to share with the world. You know the world’s not exactly tuned in, but you want to put it out there, waiting for someone to find your frequency; to stumble upon your moment of genius.

By now you have committed to a steady stream of thoughts, opinions, arguments. What happens when they start to dry up? Blogs are living, breathing entities that require constant nourishment and attention. Will your blog die when your ideas start to?

These are the questions circling my head as I begin this blog. If things go as planned, there will be somewhat infrequent posts on my opinions and ideas regarding brand and communications strategy. Alternatively, this will go the way that many blogs before it have: into the vast emptiness of the internet, lost to zeros and ones and blackness. I’m ok with either.