Isn't it amazing! Just fancy! Who would ever have believed that things like Red Bull, SMS, Starbucks, Hotmail, Google, Amazon have all become billion dollar businesses despite not having any conventional marketing support? Of course we dare not face the more dreadful possibility - that it was the very absence of conventional marketing support which made them so successful.
We all know the phrase - that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. But can apparently good advertising also kill or wound a good product?
Imagine for a moment it's the late 1990s. The decision has been taken to enable inter-network SMS on all the major UK mobile networks. And a budget of £20m or so has been put aside to promote the newfangled art of text messaging - hitherto the province only of a few geeks and weirdos (and me, incidentally).
What would the assumptions have been in the room? I can't be sure, but I can safely bet that two of them would have been as follows: 1) that this is a youth product, to be explicitly promoted to teenagers and 2) that the product needed to be given a kind of USP to clarify the message - a single compelling reason why it's a good idea.
Happily, that never happened. Because if we fast-forward ten years we shall see that 1) text messaging is far more than a youth activity, being surprisingly infra-demographic and that 2) even with hindsight, nobody even now can advance one single universal reason, logical or otherwise, why they like doing it. As St Augustine might have said, "Texto quia absurdum est".
What a lucky escape for the mobile industry. Not only did they save themselves a few million pounds, but they also avoided the unseemly gaffe - cf. WAP - of strangling a new technology at birth.
Remember that any advertisement which depicted a bunch of teenagers of various ethnic origins excitedly texting (an aside: multiculturalism in advertising generally means you show people of widely different racial backgrounds yet all of exactly the same age) would have implicitly conveyed the message that texting was unsuitable for any other age group. And a single USP would have suggested that any other use of the technology was somehow slightly deviant.
We too often forget the power of advertising to alienate. When we are all "deluged" with communication, our first reaction is often to find a reason to reject it. To anyone over 40 these days, a good deal of advertising simply provides them with a licence to ignore it. We all accept that 25-year-old hoodies pay little attention to long-form ads for funeral plans on Sky channel 973; we may forget that the same happens in reverse: whenever we decide that young people are the only audience which matters, we lose the largest and richest swathe of the population.
Too often we give thought to rifleshot targeting forgetting that (in non-discreet media, at least) this same rifleshot deafens the people it does not hit.
A few years ago, when my agency worked for Boots, we sent a mailing to male Advantage Card holders. Someone suggested we tested a minor change to the front cover montage - simply removing any photographs of mascara, lipstick or blusher and replacing them with non-feminine items. In truth, I was not much excited by this change as it seemed to me rather, um, cosmetic. In the event, the defeminised piece generated eight times more sales than the control. Note that nothing had been done to make the creative explicitly masculine (you didn't get the chance to win an Iron John weekend in Nottingham or anything like that): all that was done was to remove anything that enabled a recipient to go "obviously not for me." It was a vital lesson that, in defining a target audience, there is a fine line between focus and tunnel-vision. And that personalisation can be a negative act - how can I avoid making this person think me irrelevant may be as sensible an approach as trying to hold up a mirror to your audience.
In the event, with no excuse to reject it, people discovered their own various reasons for using SMS. For some people it saved money; for school kids it was a furtive way of messaging in class; for grandparents, interestingly, it became a non-embarrassing way to communicate with grandchildren. Today you can even used the medium to pay for car parking and the congestion charge. It is a triumph of universal adoption. And of not advertising too early.
I have made the point before that great brands are like great pubs. One of the requirements is that they cross a demographic divide. You might be quite a good pub if your only clientele is Fulham Estage agents who went to public school and failed their A-levels (in fact you'd be called the Pitcher & Piano) but you can't ever be great. To be great you need a few rich folks and a few poor folks; a few oldies and some young people.
Nike's extension of their brand belief to all sexes and ages is not a cop-out. It is proof of the brand's greatness. As Andy Warhol said of Coca Cola, "The great thing about Coke is that the president of the US drinks the same Coke as the bum on the street."
Those other brands I mentioned have prospered because people have been allowed to often discover them for themselves, without being told too explicitly who and what they are for. "If you don't mind, I'll discover my own USP." The street finds its own uses for things, as someone once said.
And isn't it interesting how many successful brands eschew user imagery. easyJet works hard to deposition itself - to be socially neutral. Apple uses dead people or sillhouettes. BMW for years had a rule that no people could be shown in its ads (an especially wise move as not even BMW drivers like other BMW drivers - or anyone else for that matter; note to BMW.... don't try starting a social network).
Is Red Bull an energy drink or a mixer? What is the user-imagery of Amazon? Who is the typical Google user? What makes Google better? The fact that we cannot answer these questions simply would typically be considered a flaw. We should come out with trite definitions: "She's young, fashionable, contemporary - she moves with the times...." Actually the fact that we cannot sum up the brand in an aphorism is something of a success.
Isn't this a little odd coming from a direct marketer? Not at all - I am a massive advocate of more refined targeting of messages, and of discreet media used to tell complementary brand stories.
The problem arises when the creative work is more targeted than the media it appears in. Because then you are forcing the majority of your audience to view your brand from behind a velvet rope.
