Originally written in 2009 for LBiQ, LBi's occasional ideas magazine, this article sees where big idea marketing is still relevant today.
Britain’s great marketing effectiveness stories of the 1990s were Orange’s ‘The Future’s Bright’ and Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’. They didn’t rely on product USPs or lovable gag-filled campaigns. Instead they made big statements about their brands’ positions in the world. David Brooks caught the mood in Bobos In Paradise, describing an era in which ice cream companies possessed their own foreign policies.
But while this heroic style of marketing went on to great heights, along came a bunch of branding success stories that challenged the big idea approach.
Innocent Smoothies became a £70million business without having its own election manifesto. Nike revitalized its brand through a series of 10K runs, instead of bringing ‘Just Do It’ out of retirement. Virgin Mobile picked up more customers than any other network by acting fun and irreverent, rather than lecturing people about the future of human interaction. These brands weren’t concerned with communicating their agenda. They were more concerned with connecting with people. They connected through stuff they did, not through claims they made. And they chimed with an increasingly interactive culture where people expected conversations instead of lectures from brands. No wonder that some of the most interesting writers on brand culture – notably John Grant and Russell Davies – were dismissive of Big Idea marketing.
All of which could make Big Ideas feel rather dated: a lumbering approach to a nimble world.
Yet we still need Big Ideas. They remain useful to so many of the constituencies of marketing. Looking at where and why they are useful gives us clues as to how big ideas can be as relevant in today's new media as they were in their 90s heyday.
The argument that brands and consumers need big ideas is well-trodden. Brands need them in order to stand out from the competition, and to glue together their marketing efforts. Consumers need Big Ideas to catch their interest and to guide their choices. This isn’t a sinister suggestion, just an honest admission that people are more likely to warm to interesting brands than to weigh up every consumer choice like a chess computer.
Marketing businesses need them too. Working on a brand that doesn't have a Big Idea can be like sailing without a compass. You have no idea or control over where you're going. You start from zero on every project. You have to sell ideas to brand owners who may have nothing more to guide them than their own imperfect instinct.
Big Ideas lift the potential chaos of working with brands up to higher ground. If you’ve agreed that the brand is going to take a particular position, you start projects from a more interesting place. Want to get skydivers to perform an ad live on air for Honda? Fine. Because we agreed the brand believes in Difficult Is Worth Doing. They help marketing businesses retain their clients. You’d think twice before tinning the authors of your success. And they grow business. It's easier for the custodians of the big idea to pick up another assignment from a brand owner because, well, they're the custodians of the big idea. Procter & Gamble recently offered to hand over entire marketing budgets to agencies of any discipline if they could demonstrate an understanding of a brand's Big Idea and had a point of view about how to divvy the budget across different channels. P&G are both Cannes’ Advertiser of the Year and are the world's biggest advertiser. Now there's an incentive.
Most importantly, brand owners need big ideas. Not just to hold their campaigns together, but to hold their businesses together.
The biggest big idea in businesses is the strategy: how the business organizes its efforts to create value, where it over-delivers, what it sacrifices. As businesses become more sprawling, running them becomes more about steering through complexity. Here the big idea plays a profound role: it's the strategy articulated in a catchy form.
Wait for the blue bubbles to disperse and 02's ‘See What You Can Do’ idea emerges as a statement that 02 will put useful innovations in the hands of its customers. ‘Like No Other’ reinforces Sony’s price premium at a time when every electronics brand offers reasonable quality. The big idea helps the public to find value in the same place where the business is creating value.
A big idea is magnetic north for businesses. It sets a direction for what they should and shouldn't do. Long before the idea reaches the public, it should be galvanizing the people within the business.
Pedigree Petfoods used a big idea to redirect its business. The brand had moved sideways for years as Pedigree came to think of itself as a meat processing business rather than as a dog business. Then Pedigree realized that its true source of value was empathy: prove you love my dog and I’ll let you feed it. Their big idea was ‘We’re For Dogs’. It influenced the organization as much as the public. Pedigree began running dog adoption schemes, staff put pictures of their dogs on business cards, reps took their dogs on sales visits, it even moved out of a Tokyo office that had a No Pets policy. No wonder company president Paul Michaels called it a compass for the organization.
So that's a yes from consumers, brands, marketing businesses and brand owners. But does media need big ideas? I’m not so sure.
Ad space is a great place to create images and tell people ideas. Media itself doesn’t suit Big Ideas.
Media connects with people through content, not through positionings. You get a much better idea of what a media brand Channel 4 is like from the programmes it screens and the idents it makes than you would from an abstract Big Idea about provocation or freshness. It’s instructive that Channel 4 and Google don’t have strap lines, and amusing that the most famous attempt at Big Idea marketing in television, ‘Fox News: Fair And Balanced’, is balls.
And new media is a less fertile soil for classic Big Idea marketing. Big Ideas have tended to be one-way transmissions – here’s what we believe in – which work less well in media where people expect to explore and enquire. I might be happy to watch an Orange commercial, but why should I bother to find out why the future’s bright? A brand that goes online to repeatedly shout its endline will sound like a pub bore. And what if the urge to explore and enquire leads me to look behind your big idea? It could turn out to be hollow, if it’s no more than an image, or it could turn out to be inauthentic, if the everyday actions of the brand don’t follow the fine sentiment of its Big Idea. Dove introduced the idea of Real Beauty through press and TV, but got caught retouching its models via the Internet.
So the biggest challenge for Big Ideas today is where they take root. Big Ideas with no means to reach people are nothing more than Intellectual Property. They are only useful where we can use them. I'd like to propose five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape.
1. It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line.
Activities thrive better than ads in the new media landscape. So the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities. John Grant refers to this as a Marketing Enthusiasm: a point of view on the world that is bigger than the brand or the product. Persil's 'Dirt Is Good' is more than an eye-catching line. It is a marvelously rich point of view about how children develop through play. For example, its website currently promotes a list of 33 things to do before you're ten. Contrast this with Samsung's alleged Big Idea: 'Imagine'. There's no point of view there, nothing to engage with. So 'Imagine' ends up shoehorned in as the opening to its line of copy. Russell Davies nicely mocked what happens to meaningless Big Ideas online: "It was OK when a Big Idea had to support three TV scripts and some posters, but its flatness shows when the poor digital agency has to turn it into an immersive, online experience, not just a silly game of whack-a-mole with the brand mascot."
2. A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line
This seals the deal for me. The real growth media of recent years - music festivals, mobile phones and Facebook applications - don’t have room for them. The fragmentation of media and the shift to global marketing means that Translation, whether in to different channels or different languages, is the priority.
3. One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution.
Historically Big Ideas came in the form of big executions. I first encountered The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange through an epic cinema commercial. I thought it was dazzling at the time; I suspect I would find it indulgent today. The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity. The same positioning could inspire a series of 'marketing molecules' that make the most of the media and the audience. No one molecule is the high point of the brand; all contribute to it. Nike is the brand of Joga Bonito, 10K and Supersonic. Top Shop is the brand of personal shopping, vintage and the Kate Moss range. To steal a quote from Ben Malbon of BBH: media fragments, ideas don’t.
4. Align Your Big Idea To Your Business
Big Idea marketing is most powerful when it brings people along with the business. A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand. Apple's 'Think Different' works on all these levels. It’s difficult getting an organisation to buy in to a Big Idea if the accountants and engineers suspect that it's just sugar sculpture from the marketing department. It's easier to get alignment and results out of something that is commercially true. I'll bet that Orange's new 'I Am' idea has more trouble taking root in the company than See What You Can Do had at 02.
5. Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour
A traditional Big Idea didn't care who you were or where you were. But today channels make such a difference to how people deal with ideas: quick, useful interpretations of the brand idea for mobile phones; rich, interactive ones for the Internet, visual spectacles in-store. Brand strategists used to understand consumers as consumers of the brand. I wasted my early days in advertising like a Victorian botanist trying to establish whether buyers of Felix cat food were a different species from people who bought Whiskas. Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media. The most useful channel-planning tool today is probably a Venn diagram of how the brand behaves and how the audience behaves. The overlap should always inspire something interesting.
There is a truism that an old medium doesn't become obsolete, it just takes on a narrower role. Letters become the medium for communicating something important; radio becomes our daytime companion. And for a while it looked as though Big Ideas would take on such a narrower role; the hallmark of old brands that prized certainty and uniformity more highly than the opportunities of a more interactive age. But if we realise what Big Ideas can do for business and understand how they work in new media, they can continue to be a compass for brands. And, like a compass, they might just enable us to go somewhere interesting.
