Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Complicity, Content, Context, Creativity, Culture, Curiosity, Effectiveness, Egovertising, Emotion, Empathy, Mum, Mum & Dad, My Childhood, Parents, Perspective, Point Of View, Positioning, Provocative, Purpose
In many ways, this post is a continuation of yesterdays … except this was written 3 weeks ago and yesterdays – in an alarming moment of relevance for this blog – was written yesterday.
So let’s get on with it shall we?
Oh the 80’s.
The decade of excess.
Excess living.
Excess spending.
Excess movie stars.
Excess fashion styles.
Excess exuberance. Excess. Excess. Excess.
But as is always the case, too much of one thing causes a correction and different nations and generations have been dealing with the byproduct of that for the last 40 odd years.
However, over the past few years, there has been a narrative coming from the industry that suggests all this economic instability has changed attitudes and behaviour.
More frugalness.
Less materialism.
Higher levels of thrifting
Greater emphasis on life more than work.
Increased importance on values and purpose.
And while this is absolutely true for millions, to suggest everyone on the planet thinks and acts this way, highlights how the marketing and advertising industry loves to jump on bandwagons and then conveniently ignore – or fight againt – any voice that challenges their view.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’d be less annoyed if people acknowledged there were multiple segments but they were deliberately choosing to focus on one for reasons that suit their values/product/ego … but I am amazed how many orgs and experts talk in absolutes and not even acknowledge there are other groups/ways/approaches.
Nothing highlighted that more to me than this …
Yes, it’s a company that will take your everyday credit/debit card and make it look like an AMEX Centurion – also known as the AMEX ‘black’ card.
For those who don’t know what the Centurion is, it’s a credit/charge card for AMEX’s most wealthy customers.
And while it comes with a host of ‘perks’, you only get to apply for it if your annual spend/payment on another AMEX is US$500,000 per year … and even then, you have to pay thousands of dollars per year as an annual fee.
Except this isn’t an AMEX Centurion is it. It’smore likely a Natwest Debit card with an overdraft facility of £500 … so you may well be asking why would anyone do it, especially because when you use it, I imagine it tells the retailer it’s absolutely not an AMEX card whatsoever. Add to that, more and more people are using their phone to pay for goods, which means no one even see’s what card you’re using and you have to wonder what’s the point. Except it doesn’t take much looking around to see there’s millions of people who see the fake [reframe: replica] and/or toxic [reframe: alt/anti-woke] materialism lifestyle symbols, an investment.
An investment in their ego.
An investment in their belonging.
An investment in their status.
An investment in their ‘in-the-know’.
An investment in their delusion.
An investment in their taste.
An investment in their ambitions.
An investment in their quest for equality.
An investment in their need to not feel being left behind.
An investment in their connections.
An investment in their truth.
An investment in who they are or want to become.
And while we may not understand all of them … agree with all of them … even like all of them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that their views and opinions don’t have any validity [even if it’s just to them], so dismissing them, ignoring them, judging them or being deliberately ignorant to the reality of them doesn’t help anyone, including yourself.
Because nothing sets you up for failure than only choosing to see, relate or value the people who are the same as you, which is why I find it so funny that for all the research companies invest in, so many of them only focus on what lets them them feel better about themselves rather than what reveals the truths and reasons they need to know.
Or at least acknowledge.
And that’s why the older I get, the more grateful I am to my Mum for instilling in me the importance of “being interested in what others are interested in”.
Not because you’ll always agree with them … or even end up liking them … but because when you make the effort to understand how – and why – they see the World, you better understand how you see it too.
We could all do with more of that … because being blinkered often stops you seeing who you can be, not just who others are.
Don’t get me wrong, taking a position is very important … but it only has value if the journey towards that point of view has come from understanding, rather than arrogance and ego.
Talking of 2024 being like the excess of the 1980’s …
There will be no posts next week as I’m off on a ridiculous trip.
Los Angeles.
Sydney.
Melbourne.
And errrrm, Hobart in Tasmania.
I know … I know …
But as I pointed out at the beginning of this post, for every action there’s a reaction … which in this case means you’re free from a week of my blogging rubbish, so if anything should highlight the benefits of acknowledging the different sides of situations, it’s this.
Systems.
Processes.
Proprietary Tools.
Innovation ecosystems.
Focus Groups.
Bot-driven modelling.
AI driven insights.
Insights.
Effectiveness frameworks.
Our industry loves to bang on about the power of all this stuff and yet – sadly – the US election result shows most of them don’t work.
Or they don’t know how to actually use them. At least in terms of identifying the issues, the momentum, the considerations of the people they claim to know so much about.
Of course, it’s not just them who are lost in their own tunnel vision.
There are the opinion pollsters, political experts, podcasters and, let’s not forget, the Democrats … who sat on their hands for 8 years and then arrogantly thought they could turn it all around in a few months.
I wanted Kamala to win, but It was all so horribly inevitable that Trump would triumph.
Or it was inevitable if you opened your eyes rather than saw the world through your blinkers.
For me, nothing sums up the issue more than these images.
First this.
Then this.
And finally, this.
This last one is particularly telling because of the uncomfortable truth it reveals.
An uncomfortable truth that has been there to see for a long time if we stopped with our own prejudices against Trump supporters and looked at our own behaviours through others eyes.
You see I suspect Trumps voters know he is a hypocrite and a liar.
I also suspect they know he knows he is too.
But it’s much easier for them to trust a person who they see as openly and obviously lying than someone they believe is trying to hide their lies.
For them, Kamala can’t possibly be telling the truth when she is presenting herself – and the Democrats – as ‘goodie two shoes’.
Not just because they don’t like her, but because they believe no one can live up to that level of integrity.
They’re not wrong … especially where politics is concerned … which means they trust open liars more than who they perceive as secret liars.
That’s where society is right now.
That’s where politics is.
Which reminds me of how someone once described the difference between the Republicans and Democrats.
“Republicans want to win, Democrats want to be right”.
People like winners more than they like know-it-all’s.
If a 54-year-old, English man in New Zealand knows that … why don’t the Democrats?
Why don’t the experts?
Why don’t the systems?
Not because they’re stupid – far from it – but maybe because they chose to be deliberately blind.
Choosing to ignore the bits that make them question their own complicity.
Their own prejudices, hypocrisies, inconsistencies.
I hope the Democrats learn from this. To grow and evolve. To win in the future.
But then I hope my industry also learns from this.
I fear not though.
Preferring to carry on as before so as to not have to face the issues and behaviour they could or should do better.
Acting with the sort of arrogance we accuse Trump and his supporters of having.
They say it’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from failure … well, we failed.
Time to learn from our mistakes.
Time to open our eyes and ears rather than rely on the self-serving systems and processes we developed and rely on to make us feel better about who we are and what we know.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, Communication Strategy, Content, Context, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Packaging, Planning, Point Of View, Positioning, Relevance, Resonance, Strategy
This is a shop near where we live.
Now I appreciate the above is basically an adoption of the TK Max strategy – reframing ‘random stuff’ to the joy of discovery and exploration – but I love it.
I especially like that it offers a far more compelling reason for people to keep visiting than simply saying ‘cheap stuff sold here’.
Now I get on face value, reframing is easy to do – but based on a bunch of effectiveness papers I’ve read – it isn’t.
Right now, the basic approach to a lot of strategy appears to be either ‘state the bloody obvious’ or ‘live in a dream-world’.
Logic or fantasy. [Though it’ll be called ‘laddering’ to make it sound smart]
But what I love about the Opportunity Shop is that it does neither of those.
What they’ve done with that name is take something inherently true and then convey it in a way that opens possibility.
Elevation rather than explanation … helping you connect to it because it doesn’t ask you to reject your perceptions, but invites you to interpret them in a new way.
It’s part of the reason why I loved living in Asia so much … because there was so much that operated in similar ways there.
When we lived in Singapore, there was a market near our apartment on Club Street.
A bric-a-brac place … full of stuff like single shoes or jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing. Totally random stuff.
But one of the reasons it was popular was because of the name it had … the ‘thieves’ market’.
How great is that?
A name that not only defines the weird shit you will find there, but also gives you a reason why you would want to keep going there.
A proper reframe. Not trying to associate with stuff they wish they were associated with but acknowledging the starting point of how they’re actually seen.
Emotional self-awareness rather than blinkered ego.
And that is why most companies get ‘reframing’ wrong …
Because they want to hammer home how they want to be seen.
So they repeat it ad nauseum … regardless of perception, reference, context or reality.
And the irony of this approach is rather than capture people’s attention, imagination and emotion, they kill it.
Pushing people away rather than inviting them in. Kind of like a lot of the effectiveness papers I’ve read.
Where I have to keep re-reading them to try and work out what the hell they’re trying to say.
What their idea is.
Why it’s right.
How it worked.
A constant stream of explanation which – ironically – never really explains.
And while I appreciate effectiveness papers require a lot of information, there’s 2 quotes that I feel everyone should think about when defining an idea, be it for an effectiveness paper or to get a client to buy.
The first is something we heard from a chef when doing research for Tobasco who said: “The more confident the chef, the less ingredients they use”.
The second is even more random.
It’s from ex-US President, Ronald Reagan, who said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”.
[You can read about them more here and here]
Think about those and you’re basically being given the rules to develop a reframe that can change minds, behaviours, and outcomes rather than build cynical – or just indifferent – barriers through rationality, fantasy or bullshit association.
Filed under: Attitude & Aptitude, Dad, Emotion, Family, Fatherhood, Love, My Childhood, Paul
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my Dad on what would have been his 86th birthday.
Paul – my best – saw it and wrote this to me:
“I know a boy who’s 10 feet tall, sleeps in the kitchen with his head in the hall”.
Now you may think, reading that, Paul has lost his marbles – and I get why – but what Paul had actually done was give me a gift.
You see that silly, little poem was something my Dad used to say all the time.
ALL. THE. TIME.
And yet despite this, I’d forgotten it.
I don’t know why.
I don’t know how.
But I had … and that’s why when I heard it again, it felt like I was running into his arms again.
Getting a big hug. A squeeze. A massive kiss on my ‘bonce’, as he would say.
Dad was forever coming up with these little silly rhymes, poems and songs.
Another I remember was his ‘ghost story’.
I can’t remember it exactly, but it went something like this:
The moon is a ghostly galleon.
Tossed upon stormy seas.
He knocked upon the door a second time.
“Is anyone there?” he said.
But all was still and silent, for everyone was dead’.
I have no idea where it came from … or why … but rather than be scared shitless by it, we used to say it all the time. Especially around Halloween.
It became a special, private poem that connected and united us in the most daft of ways.
Now I admit it’s not that long ago that I’d be devastated that these things – fundamental moments of my childhood – had escaped my memory.
But now I’m good with it … because not only do I get to experience them all over again – where they flood my mind with wonderful feelings and memories – but I get to discover the impact they had on others.
Which is why I’m so grateful to Paul – and my cousin Neil – for being so impacted by some of the things my Dad did, even though they were a byproduct of who he was.
Dad was a brilliant man.
Kind, compassionate, loving, smart and silly.
He cared … he was interested, and he was interesting.
Death is obviously utterly, fucking shit … but it’s funny how those little interactions you could write off as a childish or silly quirk of a meaningful relationship end up being some of the things you emotionally connect to the most.
The incidental things that you discover have become everything.
And while I never actually knew a boy who was 10 feet tall and slept in the kitchen with his head in the hall … I am so grateful he existed in my Dads head.
Who now lives in my heart.
Filed under: Advertising, Agency Culture, Chris Jaques, Collegues, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Hong Kong, Imagination
One of my old bosses – the incredible Chris Jaques – told me about the time he took his kids into the office on a Sunday. As he showed them around, they said,
“But Daddy, where are the other kids?”
He was a bit confused and asked them what they meant.
They looked at him equally confused because they were in a building filled with all manner of kid paraphernalia – from toys to magazines to pictures to weird furniture – so who else would be there other than children?
I love that story for so many reasons … one of which being a reminder of the importance of environment, either to encourage creativity or to protect it, but mainly for this.
Happy bloody Monday.