So I recently did a project with SONY where I used students of the quite wonderful Prof Mark Chong from Singapore’s SMU Uni. [Far left in the photo above]
The brief I gave them was to find cultural / lifestyle insights that they could use to unlock dramatic sales growth for either SONY Walkman or SONY HD Handycams … WITHOUT the need for advertising.
How they transformed these insights into consumer motivation was upto them … but it had to be within the realms of reality, not require billions [or even tens of millions] of dollars of investment and dramatically differentiate the products from the competition.
Well, without going into what the guys came up with [because we are looking at actually making it happen] what they developed was far more powerful and interesting than alot of the output currently being seen from the big brand R&D departments!
Infact, the guys behind the Walkman idea came up with something so simply brilliant that I’ve been beating myself up for weeks – because I know I would never of come up with something that great in a million years.
In a World with lots of self-professed Idea/Marketing gurus … I love the fact that in a few weeks, a bunch of students with no ‘real-life’ experience came up with concepts that I truly believe could change the face of business – especially SONY’s business.
For years I/we have been banging on about the value of intelligent naivety … where a company involves smart people in the ‘development phase’ of products/brands [even if they have no in-depth experience of the category] because their ability to approach a problem ‘without category-convention blinkers’ allows them to see opportunities others may miss.
It is for this reason that we’ve found ourselves being involved in such wonderfully varied projects as creating televisions for B&O, designing interiors of planes for Virgin, developing none-harmful weaponry for the British Military of Defense and now … helping a bunch of students come up with great ideas for SONY.
Ad agencies talk about ‘ideas’ … but they’re not really … they’re advertising execution ideas, and that’s quite often a very different thing altogether.
If the industry is to reclaim the respect it deserves, it has to look at ideas in the context of something that solves a particular client problem then using advertising to communicate that solution rather than jumping straight to ‘the ad’.
Don’t get me wrong, some ad campaigns really have a fantastic business driving /consumer benefiting idea at the heart of them … Orange [the original campaign], Tesco’s, AA [4th Emergency Service], Virgin to name but a few … but now it seems we are getting more and more ads that communicate nothing more than what the client wants to shout about even though it has no real benefit [or consideration] for the consumer.
For me, the best ideas of the past few years are the one’s that have addressed lifestyle/cultural insights, not just category ones.
That’s why I love the French Insurance Company who taught their counter staff sign language because they learnt a relatively high percentage of French people had hearing difficulties … or the US bank who automatically rounded up their customers money to the next dollar [putting it into a savings account for them] because they knew anyone on a budget tended to ’round up’ their expenditure to ensure they didn’t overspend … or even LG, who created a mobile phone with a digital compass within it, because they knew followers prayed towards Mecca numerous times a day and sometimes needed to know which way to face. [4 million phones sold!]
Those are ideas … sure they still needed advertising… but at the heart of them was a real idea that answered a clients business problem by understanding and motivating consumers via a message based on more than just category conventions.
I really, really hope we can make the students SONY ideas come to fruition, because apart from them being brilliant [especially the Walkman one] nothing would make me happier in proving to the so-called Guru’s, that no one has the monopoly on good ideas – people just need to be embraced, educated and encouraged!
* And yes, the 2 dodgy blokes at the back of the photo ARE Freddie and me!