22

Shaking the box side to side

It is seldom the best product that wins. People rarely if ever know which is the best product; we don't even generally know what it means for a product to be the best. Is the car that is best the one that is the cheapest, the fastest, the best looking, the safest, or the most exciting to drive? And how do you judge different combinations of these characteristics? Instead of making the best product (whatever that is in fact) it's about making the most attractive and appealing offer that you can. In the study of the importance of brand reputation, we saw earlier how two characteristics of the offer are decisive for it to be perceived as attractive. Firstly, the offer needs to be well known, which means that consumers quickly think of it, and it must be easy for us to understand what it means. Secondly, it must be perceived as unique in the sense that it has no other obvious alternatives.

To create an attractive offer, in other words, requires that you highlight the characteristics of the product or brand that people can relate to directly but which other competitors have not yet been able to realize. This chapter contains a number of exercises aimed at finding different characteristics that you can accentuate in your offer in order to create new platforms for your product and your brand. You can find these characteristics in your own brand, the product itself, or within the target group for the product, or even in another company's brand or other product categories.

Don't forget that success begins and ends in the mind of the consumer. It's about coming to mind rapidly and as often as possible among consumers. You do this by offering a concept that creates meaning in people's minds. This does not have to be anything particularly revolutionary or big in any concrete sense; what's important is that it makes people sit up and take notice and remember your product. As you will see, several of the exercises that follow will result in quite way-out and/or contrived concepts. Don't dismiss these too quickly. They can be very useful precisely because they get people in; get them interested and curious about your brand communications because of their entertainment value. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter why people think about your brand. The most important thing to do is create the right conditions for them to do so. A contrived communications concept can serve to create a space for coming into contact with people so that you can then accentuate the real benefits of your offer.

Change the brand voice

This exercise is very simple and straightforward and a good warm-up for working creatively. In management, ‘living the brand’ is an expression that is often bandied about, and describes the importance of practising what you preach and letting the brand values and associations permeate every aspect of your company's operations. However, it can also have an inhibiting effect on creativity and your capacity to innovate. Because the brand has its own gravity (as we saw in Part II), it can lock you into certain ways of perceiving, thus creating very powerful thought tunnels and riverbeds. But in the same way that your own brand can lock you in, other brands can lead you into mental patterns that you might otherwise never have thought of, pointing out a whole new range of possibilities. By changing the brand voice and describing your offer in the way that a certain brand in another product category might do, you can utilize that brand's conceptual fluency to identify new aspects of your offer.

Changing the brand voice has several benefits. Firstly, it opens your eyes to new characteristics and benefits in your product. Secondly, it helps you to formulate offers in new ways that extend beyond the obvious in the product category. Thirdly, it is excellent training in itself. In the same way as you learn to play a musical instrument, or kick a football accurately and powerfully by imitating the styles of the best players, you can learn to communicate and package offers in different ways.

Do the Following

Select a number of brands from different product categories (not your own). For example, select those brands that you come into contact with on an average day (at home or at work or those that you see advertising for regularly). List the characteristics and associations of each brand. Then take your own product and examine it on the basis of the characteristics and associations of each of the brands. What can you find in your product that could be dressed up in these words? Which words have no equivalent in your product, and how might they be incorporated if you innovated your offer?

As an example, we can try matching up the Harley–Davidson brand with a supermarket chain brand. The Harley–Davidson brand has associations such as ‘rebel’ and ‘freedom’. This brand could be used to offer a supermarket that does not focus on its own brands and the two leading brands in each food category, as the logic of the supermarket would normally have it. Instead this supermarket offers more and different brands, giving the customer greater freedom of choice and the opportunity to rebel against convention and express themselves more through their purchases. If we took Barclays Bank instead, this is a brand that stands for ‘tradition’ and ‘local presence’. So matching up the supermarket chain brand to the Barclays Bank brand would mean something like adapting it to the local environment, by letting customers provide a ‘wish-list’ of products (also a smart way of creating a commitment to the supermarket), such as, for example, offering personal shopping and home delivery in the near vicinity. Of course you would need to work further and incorporate knowledge about the industry and its economics to develop the offer into something that would be attractive and would work in practice, but the example serves to illustrate how easy it can be to find connections between brands from other categories and your own business.

Change the category voice

This exercise is similar to the previous one. It's about utilizing the logic in other product categories to find new ways of communicating and formulating offers. By selecting and using the perspective of another product category, you can utilize its thought tunnels and riverbeds to lead off your thinking in other directions. The positioning that is typical for one category can be quite atypical and thus stimulating in another. For example: ‘healthy cereal’ is a typical positioning in the breakfast food category, but ‘healthy soft drink’ would imply an innovation of this concept and people would probably sit up and take notice.

By taking on the voice of another product category you can also utilize its conceptual fluency, making it easy for people to recognize and understand your new offer. It can also be used as purely and simply a communications device. Studies of advertising show that this does in fact make communications more effective. Firstly, people find it entertaining when they recognize the voice but can't quite place it, and subsequently they feel clever when they guess it correctly. Secondly, by doing so, you break through the communications ‘schema’ that characterizes many product categories, causing advertising for those categories to become very homogeneous across all competitors.

Do the Following

Variant 1

Choose a category and list how offers tend to be formulated and sold within that category. What characteristics are accentuated, what channels are used, what are the factors that differentiate competitors, what payment models are offered, etc. Then mark the characteristics that you don't find in your product category. Match them to your product: How can your product be sold using each of the characteristics that you marked?

By using the category voice for cars, you might be able to sell hotel rooms by letting potential guests put together their own package based on a basic model to which could be added various sorts of equipment to your heart's desire (using a form of modularization, you can easily move beds in and out, offer different styles of sofa, stereo systems, etc.) so that all guests get the room they want with all the details they want – their own self-composed experience. A fun thought experiment!

Variant 2

Choose a product category and list typical features of the advertising and communications for its principal brands. Then try using one or more of these features to design advertising or some other form of communications for your product. You can do the same thing with a specific brand (for example, try communicating in the same way as is typical for one of your local high-street clothing store chains, one of your local supermarket chains, or BMW).

For example, you could design advertising for shoes using the category voice for cars by demonstrating ‘walking pleasure’, ‘footpath-holding ability’ and the aesthetic features of the shoes. Or what about advertising for crisps with the category voice of dishwashing liquid by showing a comparison of how much tastier your crisps are, how much cleaner your lap will be after eating your crisps (not as many crumbs), how your crisps last longer, etc.

Change the size of the company

Even if products and offers differ from category to category, the ways in which competition is conducted are almost always the same, no matter the category in which your company operates. That is, the market leader behaves like a market leader, the closest challenger will have similar strategies and ways of behaving, and the various niche competitors will follow a similar set of rules of play. Thought tunnels and riverbeds push perceptions of the various companies in given directions, based on their size and strength in the market. Consequently big companies easily miss out on the creative ideas that may have their genesis in the restrictions on the small company's freedom to act; and small companies are unable to access the benefits that could be derived from setting their sights on brand reputation for example (which we looked at in the section on conceptual fluency), which is an obvious goal for big companies.

By changing the size of your company in your mind, and thinking about how you would react if you were much bigger or much smaller than you actually are, you can break free of the rules and conventions that size creates. By following what is often a very strict logic characterizing a certain (other) size of company, you can lead your thoughts in quite new directions and open your eyes to new tactics in marketing and new characteristics to accentuate in your offer. It's not just companies but also consumers who can recognize the brand manifestations that are usually associated with a certain size of corporation, and in this way you can create a kind of conceptual fluency in their minds by following the ‘logic’ of another size of company.

Do the Following

The very successful example of this was SBAB, the Swedish state-owned bank, which decided some years ago to completely alter its strategy and tactics and transform itself into the market challenger: We're taking on the big banks! By changing its size perception, SBAB started working with everything from the guys operating sandwich stands outside the offices of competing banks, to setting up mini-offices next to the big advertising billboards all over the city and home delivery of housing loans in a box.

Change the name

At the beginning of this book, we concluded that markets tend to become rigid. Almost all products are found in mature product categories with many well-established competitors. Firstly, mature product categories are characterized by limited growth, which means that competitors must take market share from each other in order to grow. Secondly, any changes in market share are often very small. The main problem is that the category creates a structure in people's minds, which means that they automatically associate with, and think of, certain companies first. This makes it difficult for small companies (consumers might think of them, but too late) and big companies (who are associated in very specific ways to the category) to grow or change.

The solution is to establish a new structure in people's minds that is more advantageous to your company – a structure with new associations that enable your company to come to mind first. In the discussion on conceptual fluency (Chapter 17), we saw that the most effective means of establishing a new structure in people's minds is to combine concepts and categories that are already meaningful to them. Together, these can form a new name that people readily understand, and what use the product is to the consumer becomes both unique and easy to assimilate. Of course many other companies may offer the same actual products, but if they are not communicated in the same way, they will not come to mind as readily.

The new name creates a force you can use in your work and a vision to work towards. It provides common ground that everyone in the company can understand and take in. The new platform also opens your eyes to new products and concepts to develop and creates receptivity for them in people's minds.

Do the Following

Variant 1

First list the characteristics of your product and your offer. For each of the characteristics, list categories that offer the same benefits.

Let's take an off-the-cuff example. Banks offer, on the one hand, a safe place to keep your money and, on the other, investments at varying levels of risk (taking a gamble). You could also keep your money safe in a warehouse or keep it on your person or keep it safe by employing bodyguards. You can also take a gamble at a casino or at the races. Banks could offer wealth warehousing and money bodyguards (combined with insurance against taxes, changes in legislation, reductions in the value of fixed assets, etc.), or business casinos and financial gaming (with direct, discounted earnings on investments at higher risk).

Variant 2

List other product categories that your target group also uses. Combine these with your product.

For example, the bank's customers also purchase exclusive designer clothing and drive luxury cars. This could be combined with, for example, ‘tailoring for your future’ (we tailor your individual financial future to fit you perfectly) and ‘financial mechanics’ (we repair your private economy when it breaks down). These are only two spontaneous examples of how you might bring out certain aspects of the offer in order to create new platforms.

Variant 3

List categories that compete with or complement your product and combine them. What aspects of your product can be found in descriptions of combinations of other categories?

Education, for example, is complementary to bank services (banks can finance education, education makes banking easier), and insurance can both complement and compete with banking services. Or why not groceries? They could be combined to form innovative insurance policies (‘we give you the opportunity and space to grow and develop’), food for thought (‘banking services in themselves give you training in strategy and tactics’) or sweet insurance (‘we make sure that when you really need it, you'll be able to afford the things that make life sweet’). These are three rather feeble combinations of categories perhaps, but they could give rise to new products or concepts. With a lot more work and thought you could probably do much better.

Enhance ‘bad’ characteristics

Most competing products are very similar to each other. They often use similar marketing concepts, which are based on either generic characteristics that fit virtually all categories (for example price or design), or aspects of the specific category (for example, the speedy bicycle or the healthy breakfast cereal). It's natural that the categories will tend to follow suit in concept development, as a consequence of the riverbeds and thought tunnels in our minds causing us to always choose whatever lies closest at hand. That's also why markets easily become rigid. To break free, you must first find and accentuate those characteristics that are not closest to hand, and are not those that a number of other companies have already thought of (and have either conceptualized or thrown out as a ‘bad idea’). There is a very simple routine for doing this: instead of looking for advantages, search for the ‘bad’ characteristics and disadvantages of the product and accentuate them.

The principal benefit of accentuating the ‘bad’ characteristics is to break free of both general and industry-specific logical pathways. You can then find new aspects and solutions that others have not thought of. Secondly, it makes you focus on something concrete in the product, which means that it becomes tangible and people can relate to it easily (instead of finding an abstract concept). You can try this at both the category and brand levels.

Do the Following

List all the genuinely bad characteristics of the product (don't cheat with something like ‘it's cheap, so we lose on it because we have to provide support for it to customers so often’). Ask other people who don't work with the product about its bad sides. Try to elicit as many characteristics as possible, whether they seem important or not, then take each of the characteristics and list the reasons why people might actually demand that characteristic. Don't get bogged down with thinking about how and why people use products in the category. Think more freely: what can you do with this characteristic?

Let's take a couple of random examples. Small cars – for example, electric cars – do not have a lot of room. People might want cars that do not have a lot of room because they won't ever have to use them to do any bulk shopping, give rides to friends, or help their friends to move house. These cars are purely pleasure vehicles, for the individual alone. Daily newspapers, on the other hand, are often big and a lot of space is required to open and read them. Many people prefer large newspapers so that, for example, they can create space for themselves on buses, on the underground, or at the breakfast table. The big daily newspaper becomes your own personal refuge. These are two simple examples that illustrate how, with some careful work and insights, you could discover a whole new platform for your product.

Many of the world's most revolutionary products have come from accentuating bad characteristics. As we know, Post-it notes originated from an adhesive developed by 3M that they were not happy with because it didn't stick well enough. And this turned into a fantastic product – paper that sticks, but not very well. You can stick it onto whatever you like because it's easy to remove. The multi-million dollar pill Propecia for treating hair loss came out of a prostate medication with the ‘bad’ side effect of increasing hair growth – a bad characteristic that became worth its weight in gold once it was accentuated. The accentuated side effect that became Viagra is probably well-known to all. What is less well known is that this medication was originally intended for regulating blood pressure.

Enhance specifics

This exercise is a variant of the previous one. It's also based on extending yourself beyond the ‘usual suspects’ for a certain product category. We often become blind to anything but the product's overarching characteristics, and base our ideas on certain given concepts, and purposes (generic and category-specific) that the product is intended to fulfil: ‘What is it that makes us cheaper? Better looking? More useful?’ By doing so, we merely reinforce our prejudices about what the product can be and what it can offer. Begin instead at the opposite end of the scale and examine your product in its every detail. What are its peculiarities? Look for the specifics that make your product unique and enhance them.

By focusing on the specifics of your product, you can find new concepts and ideas that do not follow preconceived formulas. When you get right down to the specifics of your product, your platform becomes more meaningful and people can relate to it more easily. It can also lead to concept and product innovation, accentuating and utilizing even more of the benefits represented by those specifics.

Do the Following

List all the product's physical attributes. Make sure you don't omit anything. Take a moment to recall the exercises for expanding your consciousness and don't miss out even the smallest, apparently insignificant details or any of the product's more obvious attributes. For example, imagine that you are describing the product to someone who is blind. Then take each of its attributes and list associations and the areas of application they make you think of. Don't get bogged down in thinking that these must be areas of application within the product category. Instead, let your imagination roam free. What new offers and communications platforms do these attributes suggest?

Let's take a couple of random examples. A tiny detail about a milk drink is that the lid makes a little ‘click’ sound when you unscrew it. That could be associated to ‘we just clicked’ (fell in love) and could be the foundation for a communications platform around falling in love (this ‘love potion’ makes you irresistible or – like chocolate – it's a good substitute for love); a new packaging platform (couple packs of two bottles, big bottles that come with two straws, the drink in a package that can be sent like roses), and the creation of new products on the love theme (equivalents of boxes of chocolates, bouquets of flowers, etc.). A tiny detail of Citroen cars is that they ‘curtsy’ (sink down) when you start them. Sinking down can be associated with relaxation (‘sink into those cushions and relax’) and curtsying with courteousness (‘we meet you half way’). These are just a couple of trivial examples that don't involve much thought. With much more work, it's possible to find really ingenious and innovative platforms both within and beyond these product categories.

Communications RAT

We saw earlier how you can train up your creative capacities with the help of an associate test like the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Using remote associations, you combined the oddest assortment of apparently unrelated elements. Similarly, you can train up your communications capabilities by randomly combining unrelated parts of the offer. These random combinations produce unexpected results that induce solutions that would not arise naturally, and which therefore will constitute departures from the usual platforms for the category.

Do the Following

List the characteristics of your product in one column. As always, it's important that you are thorough and don't discard what might appear to be meaningless characteristics and details. Then list associations to the brand in another column. This is your starting point. Now combine product characteristics randomly with brand associations and try to find a common denominator to create meaning for each of these combinations. Combining concrete product characteristics with abstract brand associations is termed resonance in communications psychology. Studies show that communications platforms with resonance are far more effective because they stimulate more thoughts in people's minds, are felt to be more credible (since the evidence is there for all to see in the product's actual characteristics), and engender more curiosity (‘I would never have thought that these characteristics mean this’). You can even add a third column of communications devices (for example, exaggeration, metaphor, negative framing, etc.) with which you are familiar to vary the combinations further and be inspired. This will also increase the number of potential solutions exponentially.

Just as in the standard RAT, this exercise is fairly mechanical, but therein lies its strength. The mechanics of it guarantee a large number of new ideas that are not expected or predictable. As well as this exercise being almost guaranteed to result in useful platforms that you can work on properly later, the act of listing the product characteristics and brand associations is an excellent way of mapping what the product and brand actually offer, and gives a clear picture of what the offer actually contains (and could contain).

An example of resonance between product characteristics and brand associations is Levi's Twisted and AntiFit platforms. They combined the seams (always a signature feature of the jeans) and associations from ‘the original’ to create new and original seams that changed the entire garment. For Twisted, the communications device of metaphor was used, with images of people twisted into impossible shapes, and for AntiFit they used exaggeration (that the jeans fitted really badly and that the wearer of the jeans was a total misfit).

When obstacles become solutions

In the previous exercise, it was mentioned that small companies can often be more creative than bigger companies because their limitations increase the need for creative solutions. In the early chapters of this book, we saw study results which indicated that some pressure has a positive impact on the creative result. Instead of learning to live within these limitations and thus ceasing to think about them, it can be a good idea to draw attention to them and make them an important part of your work. They also serve to give your work a more concrete focus as opposed to striving to achieve abstract goals such as ‘increase sales’, ‘reposition ourselves’ or ‘win market share’.

Do the Following

Variant 1

List the obstacles in the way of your product's growth and success. It's important that you do this thoroughly and in detail. Just as in the exercises about enhancing the specifics and bad characteristics, you must broaden your consciousness so that you can capture concrete aspects and see problems that you might previously not have seen. Don't stop at ‘we're too small’ or that ‘the product isn't good enough’. Take each of the obstacles and place the words ‘I want it to be…’ in front of each one or ‘… means that I can’ after. What associations do you get? The limitation in itself presents you with new possibilities and solutions.

As an example, let's look at obstacles for Burger King. Burger King has always found it difficult to get the better of the market leader, McDonald's. An obstacle to them becoming market leader is no doubt that, in comparison to McDonald's, they have too few restaurants. A solution might be to have few restaurants and instead invest in some other forms of distribution, for example, becoming a shop-in-shop at other restaurants or service establishments with a standardized range. (By standardizing their range of products under the brand, they could become a kind of Coca-Cola of the fast food market, with the product and not the retailer being the important factor in people's choices.) Various parts of the range could be sold at cafes (for example, a ‘lite’ version of their chicken burger, etc.), lunch restaurants (the biggest burgers), department stores (the smaller types of hamburger that can be eaten standing up), cinemas (desserts and their snack range), and so on. Another obstacle for Burger King might be that in comparison with McDonald's they are perceived as taking too long to prepare their burgers. A solution is to let the preparation take time and make (their few) restaurants into proper barbecue restaurants, where people come to sit down and stay for a while. These two solutions together turn the obstacles into advantages and also broaden the offer.

Variant 2

List the obstacles in the way of your product's growth and success. Reformulate the description of the obstacle by asking the question ‘why’ in steps. Be specific. For example, don't say that the product is too expensive but that people think that it is too expensive (cost valuations exist only in people's minds and are both relative and subjective). This will make it easier for you to think of concrete solutions. Continue to ask the question ‘why’ until you have come to a sufficiently concrete answer for which you can directly come up with a concrete remedy.

Let's take ice cream as a simple example. The obstacle for an ice cream company to grow is that there are strong competitors. Why is this an obstacle? Because the market is mature and not growing (in which case you would need to take market share from competitors). Why isn't the market growing? Because the summer season is so short. Why is the season so short? Because at least in northern Europe, the rest of the year is too cold to be eating ice cream. A solution then is to sell ice cream drinks and similar products that you can actually warm up. ‘Our ice cream makes you warm!’