Make It Easy On Yourself

Martin Weigel is a the Head of Planning ad Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam, and his blog, Canalside View, is one of our favourites. His latest post has as neat a summary of what advertising (and all marketing) should aim for as I’ve seen:

“So perhaps all we should be asking…“What can we do to make this brand easy to think of, and easy to buy?” While the answer(s) might not be simple, could the question really be that simple?”

And we would agree – yes, it could. It’s why we keep going on about making decisions “fun, fast and easy”, and how market research fits into that. It’s the thinking, for instance, that went into our most recent product launch – the System 1 Pack Test – which is all about creating packaging which makes a decision easy at shelf. And as Weigel says of advertising, that ISN’T by freighting it with extra information or messages.

But Weigel’s simple question hides a great deal of subtlety, and not just because the answers are difficult. “Easy to think of” sounds pretty straightforward – but does that mean conscious recall? Can the thought be implicit? Does it imply some kind of positive emotional content? Should only the brand be easy to think of, or its core promises and messages too? Your answers to each of these will determine – for instance – the kind of creative work you commission and the kind of research you do on it.

(Our answers are roughly: “No; yes; yes; just the brand is fine”, incidentally)

As for “easy to buy”, there’s a sly ambiguity there too. It can mean “easy to buy” in a physical, logistic sense – it’s there in front of you when you shop or search a category, for instance. But also in a competitive sense – it’s easier to make the choice to buy one brand than another. Both types of ease need to be addressed in separate, but complimentary ways.

But these hidden complexities don’t detract from the post. In fact I think this is the really powerful thing about Weigel’s question – it unifies advertising, distribution, and point of sale marketing, making them all parts of the same problem. Which of course they are.

(EDIT: Martin has kindly pointed out that full credit for his thinking goes to Byron Sharp, William Moran and especially Andrew Ehrenberg, so we’ll pass that credit on. Here’s a PDF on the “Ehrenberg Legacy” that was going round Twitter this morning.)

“I Can’t Even Remember Whose Ad It Was!”

Scene: A train, or a pub, or an office. A few years ago.

“Have you seen that ad with the gorilla?”
“Which ad?”
“The one with the gorilla playing the drums.”
“Oh! That one! It’s funny.”
“Yeah.”
“I couldn’t tell you who it’s for.”
“No, me either. Bit pointless if you don’t know who it’s for.”
“Is it a chocolate bar or something?”
“Oh right yeah, Dairy Milk.”
“Dairy Milk! That’s it! What’s a gorilla got to do with Dairy Milk?”
“No idea. It’s stupid. It’s a funny ad though.”
“Nobody’s going to buy Dairy Milk because of a gorilla.”

The face that launched a thousand posts.

You might have had a conversation like this. It needn’t have been about a gorilla, of course. It might have been about a pony, or rollerskating babies, or a kid dressed up as Darth Vader.

But chances are you’ve had a conversation in which somebody says that they don’t know who an advert is for, so what’s the point of it? Next to “I never buy anything because of an advert”, it’s one of the things you hear people say most.

Researchers often encourage this line of thinking, by filling up surveys with questions about things like recall, or link to the brand.

We don’t, though. Because if you look at that conversation above, the people are mentioning the brand four times. If you’ve got an ad that makes people feel good enough to talk about, what you’ve effectively done is changed the rules of recall and brand linkage. “Who the advert is for” becomes a piece of information about an ad, rather like “what’s the song in the ad?”.

And it only takes one person in a conversation to know that information for everybody to be reminded of it. Organically reminded, at that. And the act of reminding – being the person who knows the brand, or the song – is a nice bit of social currency. So everyone wins!

Basically, if you’ve made a fame ad – the kind of ad people want to talk about – you’re outsourcing recall and brand linkage to the crowd. You can – in fact, you should – worry about it a great deal less.

(EDIT: Just to clarify, we’re not saying adverts should feature NO branding. We’re saying that in a fame ad, light branding will work just as well as heavy branding – and see here for more on the emotional trouble with heavily branded ads.)