Not a title to endear me to WACL, but it raises an important question nonetheless: does your brand need a Clause 4 moment?
The film you will see when you click here shows Shigeru Miyamoto, the eminence grise behind the Nintendo Wii. This extraordinary man (he is predominantly a game designer, not a marketer) describes the thinking behind the creation of the Wii - an incredibly brave decision which involved (in BBH parlance) making a massive Zag where XBox and Sony had both Zigged.
His thinking ran as follows.
1) In Darwinian terms, if all three gaming platforms adopt the same strategy - that of pursuing ever greater graphical realism through increased processor power - it essentially creates an insane arms-race between the three contenders. This in turn will lead to an absurd market eco-system - rather like a prehistoric world only inhabited by three large, carnivorous dinosaurs with nothing to eat but each other.... and no mammals or other life forms of any kind. Platforms would become increasingly expensive, indeed prohibitively so for all but the most committed gamers.
2) In any case, Miyamoto felt the other two platforms were too fixated by the opinions of hard-core gamers and their preoccupation with power and graphics; in obsessing over this core market, they had overlooked the potential to grow the overall market for games via people who actually had jobs, children, lives, etc. The kind of people who would occasionally break from gaming to visit the lavatory.
Through this he came up with the wife-o-meter - measuring each aspect of the Wii against the simple question: how much more likely would this be to encourage my wife to become a gamer? (To defuse the cries of sexism, I should point out that Mrs Miyamoto not a doormat - she is formerly a senior executive with Nintendo: it just happened that she was hitherto not into gaming; wife-0-meter is furthermore an inexact translation from the Japanese.)
In other words Miyamoto adopted a very simple approach to innovation: let's not obsess about enthusing an existing market - instead, let's create a new one.
It's a simple approach. One which says "To hell with your core target audience - you can usually afford to take them for granted anyway - and instead let's use innovation to look for business elsewhere."
It's an approach that has worked for brands as diverse as The Labour Party, Apple and Nike. And it's worked accidentally for hundreds more brands.
Apple? Surely not? Absolutely. It was called the iPod. Try this, if you don't believe me: go back to the day the iPod was launched and visit the mac online forums. The Mac fanatics hated this thing. "Just what the world needs, another music player" sneers one. "Steve has really lost it this time." whinges another. More heinous still, remember, iTunes even ran on a PC. This was, in a way, Jobs's Clause 4 moment.
The same applies to Nike. The brilliant Michael Tchao, GM of Nike's Techlab Group, came up against resistance from hardcore runners at the very idea of Nike+. Several even claimed that "If you listen to music, you're not a proper runner." Yet, as many times before, Nike has deliberately courted audiences which are miles away from their "core target audience" - the old, for instance.
On many more occasions, innovation has reached new and unintended audiences entirely by accident. I don't believe that easyJet's passenger base would be anything like as upmarket as it is had the Internet not been invented. Booking low-cost travel online is a wholly different experience - and vastly less demeaning - than using the phone. Yet even the farsighted Stelios resisted using the web for several years, claiming it was just for geeks.
Likewise the internet has taken the whole mail order proposition dramatically upmarket too. Nothing to do with conventional positioning - simply the emotional effect of using one channel rather than another.
Argos would be another example. Men traditionally are supposed to hate shopping. And yet Argos amazingly has as many male shoppers as female. Why? Because Argos uniquely offers offline shopping in a format that does not alienate men.
Why has no other retail brand attempted this? Why do my M&S corduroy trousers not simply contain a URL and a reference number if I wish to reorder them? Or allow me to order a second pair by text? I'll happily give you my money - just don't make me spend two hours in a bloody shop - probably in a queue behind someone from WACL wondering whether something is also available in a 12.
The fact is that innovation in the form of delivery, or in some other technology, can massively change the audience your brand or product appeals to. And so the idea of innovating with a core audience in mind may be a dreadful mistake: as if Tony Blair had decided to reinvent the Labour Party by first consulting the Mining Unions.
One of our clients was a train company. Every time they performed research, they eliminated all rail-rejectors. I always thought these were the very people we should have been talking to.
The Post Office is perhaps the most guilty organisation in terms of focusing on one target audience to the exclusion of anyone else. "The People's Post Office" it calls itself, in a line reminiscent of Mao's China. Yet the people it has in mind don't seem to include people with a job, people with a car, people under sixty, people with footwear not lined with sheepskin. For God's sake, I am delighted to see lots of Post Offices serving the community, but could you just make 5% of outlets cater to people for whom time has a value. Maybe you could create special premium post offices for fat Welsh wankers in Jags where a first class stamp costs 1.50. I'll happily pay it. It can be a drive-through window, if you like. Just give me somewhere which stays open after 11am on Saturdays.
Please, for a second, just try ignoring your "core target audience."
