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The Seven Principles of Creative Leverage By Pat Fallon and Fred Senn Over the past 25 years, these seven guiding principles have helped us increase our success rate in solving marketing and branding problems. Although it's not a step-by-step process, these principles can get you started.  1. Always start from scratchWe often gain more by taking a deep breath and rethinking a marketing problem from the beginning. Consider this: during World War II, military researchers in England carefully charted the damage to Allied planes returning from bombing runs over Germany. Statistically, the tail sections were the most heavily damaged, so the order went out to reinforce the tails. But the team was solving the wrong problem. Because the research focused only on the planes that returned, the researchers were blind to what was happening to the planes that were shot down. Once they deduced that the lost planes must have suffered damage to the fuselage or wings, they were able to take effective action. If you don't start from scratch, you could get stuck in the mind-sets of those who went before you.  2. Demand a ruthlessly simple definition of the business problemIn the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville put a sign on the wall at Clinton campaign headquarters: "It's the economy, stupid." It never became an official talking point or the tagline for a TV spot, but this problem definition guided the campaign's strategy by focusing on the voters' greatest concern that summer. In the language of poets, we're talking about "the one given line." At Fallon we call this "relentless reductionism." In a marketplace where real product differences can be hard to find, much less communicate, simplifying the marketing problem is essential. In Fallon's training program, our account executives learn 127 specific questions in three fields of interrogation to find the one consumer insight that forms the basis for the solution. Go to www.juicingtheorange.com to see the questions we use to guide our situation analysis. 3. Discover a proprietary emotion In his book How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor and a fellow at Harvard's Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute, shows how marketers can learn from the science of how our brains work. Zaltman points out that market research is often conducted as if decisions come from pure logic, with emotion playing only a bit part. As it turns out, our emotions play a crucial role in coding, storing, and retrieving memories, which in turn form the foundation of decision making. "If the idea doesn't have emotional significance for us," Zaltman writes, "we're not likely to store it, and therefore it won't be available for later recall." Marketers who favor reason over emotion will find themselves quite literally forgotten. That's why we push to discover what we call a proprietary emotion. We first examine the category for any thread of emotion that the competition has under-leveraged or overlooked. Then it's time for the preemptive strike – a bold and engaging message that connects our client's brand to how people live their lives. By the time competition catches up to the insight, our client already owns the territory. 4. Focus on the size of the idea, not the size of the budget Unlike scotch or beer, vodka once was a blank slate in terms of having a product image. Then in 1981, TBWA ran its first Absolut ad in The New Yorker. There were no product claims about taste or smoothness, only the mystique created around the unmistakable silhouette of the Absolut bottle. In the absence of meaningful product differences, this brand grew to dominate its category on the strength of its advertising, and more specifically on the strength of the idea TBWA created in the consumer's mind. The Absolut campaign was creative leverage through design. With nothing more than the shape of the bottle and some clever wordplay, Absolut invited people to participate in an evolving visual story. What could be better than having your audience wonder where you were going to take this next? When this campaign launched in 1981, Absolut shipments were a little more than 100,000 liters a year. By 1989, they stood at 29 million liters, and a decade later they reached more than 58 million liters. All the super-premium vodkas that have come out since owe their success to Absolut. 5. Seek out strategic risks In 1990, General Motors launched its Saturn car company to compete with Japanese compacts, but aside from workmanlike quality, not much in Saturn's design or engineering warranted America's attention. Ad agency Hal Riney, however, discovered during its market research that people were not interested in yet another new American car. What they wanted was a different car buying experience. Today, the notion of "A Different Kind of Car Company" seems logical and intuitive, but GM and Saturn took a risk in basing their branding not on the car but on a radically re-thought relationship between buyers and dealers. This brand position required the total commitment of employees, dealers and salespeople (and they pulled it off gallantly), but we argue that the real risk would have been for GM to ignore the emotional truth that Riney's planners had uncovered. (But then, after its initial success, Saturn marketers began to neglect this advantage they had created. They now sound like everyone else. What a pity.) As marketing problems become more complex, creative leverage demands a higher tolerance for risk. If you don't take risks, your competitors will. 6. Collaborate or perish On April 19, 2005, when the U.S. government released new dietary guidelines, two smart "marketeering" teams in the Pepsi portfolio were ready. The day the announcement made headlines in the press, Quaker Oats and Tropicana Orange Juice collaborated to run a half-page ad with the banner, "Get half your daily fruit and whole grains before you're even out of your slippers." Clearly, media, PR and advertising people in two separate companies got more bang for the buck by collaborating on the joint ad and timing their message perfectly. Collaboration isn't a choice any more; the question is how good you can be at it. For many years, Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University has been asking people at a wide variety of companies the same question: "What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?" In 1986, the answer was typically about 75 percent, but by 1997, the portion had slid to 15 to 20 percent. 7. Listen hard to your customers (then listen some more) The only way we know out of the commodity trap is to listen to your customers so you can improve the value proposition without lowering the price. Big box consumer electronic retailer Best Buy, for example, looked at the competition and didn't like what they saw. Wal-Mart made it tough to compete on price, while Amazon.com had a head start on the convenience of online shopping. So, Best Buy went out and talked to customers to find out what kind of shopping experience people wanted when they were looking for consumer electronics. They went further and did "shop-alongs" where the researchers acted like anthropologists observing a foreign culture. They asked what they could do better. The market researchers listened to customers in both their own stores and their competitors' and found five different segments, each with its own information needs and shopping preferences. Best Buy then revamped their entire operation to serve those five segments in distinctly different environments. For example, Best Buy is exploring their understanding of the kind of shopping experience and technical support a soccer mom is looking for. It's starting to pay off. In 2005, the pilot stores had twice the growth rate of their old model stores. Consumers have never been smarter about marketing. If you engage them early enough in the research process and ask them the right questions, then you'll never be far from figuring out how best to connect with them. |
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