Why Nobody Ever Chooses Brand X

There comes a point when you can't talk about movies anymore and you actually have to get some work done.

You are faced with a blank slate, and in a fixed amount of time, you must fill it with something interesting enough to be remembered by a customer who, in the course of a day, will see thousands of other ad messages.

You are not writing a novel somebody pays money for. You're writing something most people try to avoid, and that includes your parents and probably all your friends. This is the sad, indisputable truth at the bottom of our business. Nobody wants to see what you are about to put down on paper. People are either indifferent to advertising or actively angry at it.

Eric Silver put it this way: “Advertising is what happens on TV when people go to the bathroom.”

So you try to come up with some advertising concepts that can defeat these barriers of indifference and anger. Maybe it's an ad. Maybe it's an online experience. Or street theater. Whatever the ideas may be, they aren't conjured in a vacuum, because you're working off a strategy—a sentence or two describing the key competitive message your ad must communicate.

In addition to a strategy, you are working with a brand. Unless it's a new one, that brand brings with it all kinds of baggage, some good and some bad. Ad people call it a brand's equity.

A brand isn't just the name on the box. It isn't the thing in the box, either. A brand is the sum total of all the emotions, thoughts, images, history, possibilities, and gossip that exist in the marketplace about a certain company.

What's remarkable about brands is that in categories where products are essentially all alike, the best-known and most well-liked brand has the winning card. In The Want Makers, Mike Destiny, former group director for England's Allied Breweries, was quoted: “The many competitive brands [of beer] are virtually identical in terms of taste, color, and alcohol delivery, and after two or three pints even an expert couldn't tell them apart. So the customer is literally drinking the advertising, and the advertising is the brand.”³

A brand isn't just a semantic construct, either. The relationship between the brand and its customers has monetary value; it can amount to literally billions of dollars. Brands are assets, and companies rightfully include them on their financial balance sheets. In Barry's The Advertising Concept Book, he quotes a smart fellow named Nick Shore on the power of brands: “If you systematically dismantled the entire operation of the Coca-Cola Company and left them with only their brand name, management could rebuild the company within five years. Remove the brand name and the enterprise would die within five years.”⁴

When you're writing for a brand, you're working with a fragile, extraordinarily valuable thing. Not a lightweight job. Its implications are marvelous. The work you're about to do may not make the next million for the brand's marketer or bring them to Chapter 11. Maybe it's just an online banner that runs for a week. Yet it's an opportunity to sharpen that brand's image, even if just a little bit. It's a little like being handed the Olympic torch. You won't bear this important symbol all the way from Athens. Your job is just to move it a few miles down the road—without dropping it in the dirt along the way.

Staring at Your Partner's Shoes

For me, writing any piece of advertising is unnerving.

You sit down with your partner and put your feet up. You read the strategist's brief, draw a square on a pad of paper, and you both stare at the damned thing. You stare at each other's shoes. You look at the square. You give up and go to lunch.

You come back. The empty square is still there. Is the square gonna be a poster? Will it be a branded sitcom, a radio spot, a website? You don't know. All you know is the square's still empty.

So you both go through the brand stories you find online, on the client's website, what people are saying in the Amazon reviews. You go through the reams of material the account team left in your office. You discover the bourbon you're working on is manufactured in a little town with a funny name. You point this out to your partner.

Your partner keeps staring out the window at some speck in the distance. (Or is that a speck on the glass? Can't be sure.) He says, “Oh.”

Down the hallway, a phone rings.

Paging through an industry magazine, your partner points out that every few months the distillers rotate the aging barrels a quarter turn. You go, “Hmm.”

On some blog, you read how moss on trees happens to grow faster on the sides that face a distillery's aging house.

Now that's interesting.

You feel the shapeless form of an idea begin to bubble up from the depths. You poise your pencil over the page…and it all comes out in a flash of creativity. (Whoa. Someone call 911. Report a fire on my drawing pad 'cause I am SMOKIN' hot.) You put your pencil down, smile, and read what you've written. It's complete rubbish. You call it a day and slink out to see a movie.

This process continues for several days, even weeks, and then one day, completely without warning, an idea just shows up at your door, all nattied up like a Jehovah's Witness. You don't know where it comes from. It just shows up.

That's how you come up with ideas. Sorry, there's no big secret. That's basically the drill.

A guy named James Webb Young, a copywriter from the 1940s, laid out a five-step process of idea generation that holds water today.

1. You gather as much information on the problem as you can. You read, you underline stuff, you ask questions, you visit the factory.
2. You sit down and actively attack the problem.
3. You drop the whole thing and go do something else while your subconscious mind works on the problem.
4. “Eureka!”
5. You figure out how to implement your idea.⁵

This book is mostly about step two: attacking the problem.

This process of creativity isn't just an aimless sort of blue-skying—a mental version of bad modern dance. Rather, it's what author Joseph Heller (a former copywriter) called “a controlled daydream.” It's imagination disciplined by a single-minded business purpose. It's this strange clash of free-flowing imagination and focused business intent that makes the creative process such a big mess.

Why the Creative Process is Exactly Like Washing a PIG

I'm serious. Creativity is exactly like washing a pig. It's messy. It has no rules. No clear beginning, middle, or end. It's kind of a pain in the ass, and when you're done, you're not sure if the pig is really clean or why you were washing a pig in the first place.

The creative process is chaotic to its core and, for me at least, the washing-a-pig metaphor works on several levels.

The account person walks in and says, “Dude, the client's coming here at 3:00 PM, and I need you to wash that pig over there.”

So you go online to see if there's any advice or inspiration, kinda hoping you'll find titles like So You Want to Wash a Pig or the ever-popular Pig Washing: The McGuire 4-Step Method.

But you don't. So you find your partner, grab a hose, maybe a bucket, some soap. And you just sorta…start. You've never done anything like this before, so you feel kind of stupid at first. All your first attempts fail messily. The pig keeps getting away from you and for a while you think you won't be able to do this.

Around 2:00 your partner tries distracting the squirming pig with some food, and suddenly between the two of you, you think maybe the pig is starting to get clean. As the client pulls into the parking lot, you're both drying off the pig and second-guessing your work: “Is the pig really clean?”

Usually, what happens here is the client walks in and says, “Did I say ‘pig’? Oh, man, I meant, could you guys wash a warthog?”

You go home wondering many things, mostly why you spent the day washing a pig.

I'm not the only one who thinks washing a pig is a decent metaphor for the creative process. A professor in the advertising department at Florida State University, a fellow named Tom Laughon, agreed washing a pig might make for a good “lab experience” in chaos and creativity. You can see his class in the middle of the creative process in Figure 2.2 and the entire series of photos is online.

In the photos you can sort of see where they figured out the part about distracting the pig with food, which is basically their moment of inspiration that moved the creative job into the completion phase.

Without that little moment of inspiration, the pig's gonna stay dirty. But the problem with inspiration is it visits whenever the hell it wants. It's random. With a handful of creative jobs, inspiration may come quickly, but most days it feels like your muse is sleeping off a crack binge somewhere in the stairwell of an abandoned federal building. It's because inspiration is random that it's so hard for a creative person to say exactly when a job will be done.

It is from this uncertainty that all the pressure and insanity of the agency business is born. In fact, any enterprise where someone pays someone else to perform a creative act has this tension built into it, whether it's a client paying an agency or a studio paying a screenwriter.

This simple observation about the role of inspiration in the creative process, although obvious to most creative people, is lost on many. The fact is, most people have jobs where they can survey the amount of work needed, make an estimate, and then complete the work in the allotted time. We, on the other hand, have to wash a pig. It's really hard to say when the pig's gonna be clean. By three o'clock? Maybe. Maybe not.

My old friend Mike Lescarbeau wrote this about the creative process: “Coming up with ideas is not so much a step-by-step process as it is a lonely vigil interrupted infrequently by great thoughts, whose origins are almost always a mystery.”

So you start to write. Or doodle. (It doesn't matter which. Good copywriters can think visually; good art directors can write; good technical people can concept.) You just pick up a pencil and begin. All beginnings are humble, but after several days, you begin to translate that flat-footed strategy into something interesting.

The final idea may be a visual. It may be a headline. It may be both. It may arrive whole, like Athena rising out of Zeus's head. Or in pieces—a scribble made by the art director last Friday fits beautifully with a headline the writer comes up with over the weekend. Eventually, you get to an idea that dramatizes the benefit of your client's product or service. Dramatizes is the key word. You must dramatize it in a unique, provocative, compelling, and memorable way.

And at the center of this thing you come up with must be a promise. The customer must always get something out of the deal. Steve Hayden, most famous for penning Apple's “1984” commercial, said: “If you want to be a well-paid copywriter, please your client. If you want to be an award-winning copywriter, please yourself. If you want to be a great copywriter, please your reader.”⁶

Here's the hard part. You have to please the customer, and you have to do it in a few seconds.

The way I picture it is this: It's as if you're riding down an elevator with your customer. You're going down only 15 floors. So you have only a few seconds to tell him one thing about your product. One thing. And you have to tell it to him in such an interesting way that he thinks about the promise you've made as he leaves the building, waits for the light, and crosses the street. You have to come up with some little thing that sticks in the customer's mind.

By “thing,” I don't mean gimmick. Anybody can come up with an unrelated gimmick. Used-car dealers are the national experts with their contrived sales events. (“The boss went on vacation, and our accountant went crazy!”) You might capture somebody's attention for a few seconds with a gimmick. But once the ruse is over and the salesman comes out of the closet in his plaid coat, the customer will only resent you.

Bill Bernbach: “I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.”

The best answers always arise out of the problem itself. Out of the product. Out of the realities of the buying situation. Those are the only paints you have to make your picture, but they are all you need. Any shtick you drag into the situation that's not organically part of the product or customer reality will not be authentic and will ring false.

You have more than enough to work with, even in the simplest advertising problem. You have your client's product with its brand equities and its benefits. You have the competition's product and its weaknesses. You have the price–quality–value math of the two products. And then you have what the customer brings to the situation: pride, greed, vanity, envy, insecurity, and a hundred other human emotions, wants, and needs—one of which your product satisfies.

“The Sudden Cessation of Stupidity”

“You've got to play this game with fear and arrogance.”

That's one of Kevin Costner's better lines from the baseball movie Bull Durham. I've always thought it had an analog in the advertising business.

There has never been a time in my career when I have faced the empty page and not been scared. I was scared as a junior-coassistant-copy-cub-intern. And I'm scared today. Who am I to think I can write something that'll interest millions of people?

Then, a day after winning a medal in the One Show (just about the toughest national advertising awards show there is), I feel bulletproof. For one measly afternoon, I'm an Ad God. The next day I'm back with my feet up on the table, sweating bullets again.

Somewhere between these two places, however, is where you want to be—a balance between a healthy skepticism of your reason for living and a solar confidence in your ability to come up with a fantastic idea every time you sit down to work. Living at either end of the spectrum will debilitate you. In fact, it's probably best to err on the side of fear.

A small, steady pilot light of fear burning in your stomach is part and parcel of the creative process. If you're doing something that's truly new, you're in an area where there are no signposts yet—no up or down, no good or bad. It seems to me, then, that fear is the constant traveling companion of advertising people who fancy themselves on the cutting edge.

You have to believe you'll finally get a great idea. You will. You'll probably fail a few hundred times along the way, but like director Woody Allen said, “If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.”

And there is nothing quite like the feeling of cracking a difficult advertising problem. What seemed impossible when you sat down to face the empty white square now seems so obvious. It is this very obviousness of a great idea that prompted Polaroid camera inventor E. H. Land to define creativity as “the sudden cessation of stupidity.” You look at the idea you've just come up with, slap your forehead, and go, “Of course, it had to be this.”

It's All About the Benjamins

Solving a difficult advertising problem is a great feeling. Even better is the day, weeks or months later, when an account executive pops his head in your door and says sales are up. It never ceases to amaze me when this happens. Not that I doubt the power of advertising, but sometimes it's just hard to follow the thread from the scratchings on my pad all the way to a ringing cash register in, say, Akron, Ohio. Yet it works.

People generally deny advertising has any effect on them. They'll insist they're immune to it. And perhaps, taken on a person-by-person basis, the effect of your ad is indeed modest. But over time, the results are undeniable. It's like wind on desert sands. The changes occurring at any given hour on any particular dune are small: a grain here, a handful there. But over time, the whole landscape changes. At other times, an idea can change a brand's fortunes very quickly.

In the 1980s, after Fallon McElligott's Hall of Fame print campaign, “Perception/Reality,” was up and running, publisher Jann Wenner was reported as saying, “It was like someone came in with a wheelbarrow full of money and dumped it on the floor.”

This is a great business; make no mistake. I see what copywriter Tom Monahan meant when he said, “Advertising is the rock 'n' roll of the business world.”

Brand = Adjective

Each brand has its own core value. Dan Wieden says it another way: Brands are verbs. “Nike exhorts, IBM solves, and Sony dreams.” Even Mr. Whipple, as bad as he was, helped Charmin equal soft.

This is an important point, and before we talk about strategy, it bears some discussion.

People don't have time to figure out what your brand stands for. It's up to you to make your brand stand for something. The way to do that is to make your brand stand for one thing. Brand = adjective. Everything you do with regard to advertising and design—whether it's creating the packaging or designing the website—should fall under that one adjective and then continue to adhere to absolutely draconian standards of simplicity.

I was on the phone with a client who works for a nationwide chain of grocery stores. This director of marketing mentioned in passing that the number of brands on the shelves in his stores had just passed 85,000.

That's 85,000 brands competing for a customer's attention—85,000.

This number alone should take the spring from the step of any advertising person whose job it is to make the silhouette of a brand show up on a customer's radar. Until recently, it's been reasonable to assume that the way to make customers remember a brand is to differentiate it from its competitors: “The model of car we're selling has incredible styling, and the other guy's brand doesn't.”

But your competition isn't just the other guy's car.

When you sit down to create something for a client, you are competing with every brand out there. You're competing with every marketing message that's running on every platform on every device on the face of the planet. You're competing for attention with every TV commercial ever aired, every text message ever sent, each billboard on every mile of highway, the entire bandwidth across the radio, and every one of the 100 quadrillion pixels on the Web. All those other advertisers want a piece of your customer's attention. And they're going to get it at your client's expense.

Seen from this perspective, through the teeming forest of brands vying for customers' attention, “cutting through the clutter” may require more than giving your brand a sharp knife edge. It calls for a big, noisy, smoking chain saw. But a kick-ass Super Bowl commercial isn't what I mean by a chain saw.

The chain saw you need is simplicity.

Simple = Good

When you think about it, what other antidote to clutter can there possibly be except simplicity?

Perhaps we should try cutting through the clutter with clutter that's extremely entertaining? Should we air clutter that tests well? Clutter that wins awards or clutter with a big 800 number?

I propose the only possible antidote to clutter is draconian simplicity.

Draconian simplicity involves stripping your brand's value proposition down to the bone and then again to the marrow, carving away until you get down to brand = adjective. Make your brand stand for one thing. Pair it with one adjective.

But which adjective?

If you ask people in focus groups to talk about buying a car, well, with sufficient amounts of free Dr. Pepper and M&M's, they'll amaze you with their complex analysis of the auto-buying process. I'm not kidding. These groups go on for hours, days. But if you ask a guy in a bar, “Hey, talk to me about cars,” he'll break it down to a word—usually an adjective.

“Yeah, gonna get me a Jeep. They're tough.”

Porsches, they're fast. BMWs perform. And Volvos, they're…what?

If you said “safe,” you've given the same answer I've received from every person I've ever asked. Ever.

In every speech I've ever given, anywhere around the world, when I ask audiences, “What does Volvo stand for?” I hear the same answer every time: “Safety.” Audiences in Berlin, Reykjavik, Helsinki, Copenhagen, New York City all give the same answer. The money Volvo has spent on branding has paid off handsomely. Volvo has successfully spot-welded that one adjective to their marquee. And here's the interesting bit: In the past couple of years, Volvo hasn't even made it onto the top 10 list of safest cars on the market. So here's a brand that, having successfully paired its logo to one adjective, rides the benefit of this simple position in customers' minds long after its products no longer even merit the distinction. Such is the power of simplicity.

The adjective you choose is key. Once it's married to a brand, divorce can be ugly. On the good side, once it's paired with the brand, that one square foot of category space is taken and nobody else can claim it.

If you find yourself in a position where all the good adjectives are taken, don't settle for the second best. (“ ‘Refreshing’ is taken? Oh well…can we have ‘Quenching?’ ”) Second best won't be different enough. Try a polar opposite. Or consider a flanking move. In ketchup, the adjective everyone fought over for a long time was to be the “tomato-iest.” Then one day Heinz came along claiming it was the “slowest,” and sales went up—and stayed up.

Find an adjective and stick to it. But it's the sticking to it that so many brands seem to have trouble with. The problem may be that, from a client's perspective, there are so many things to admire about their product.

“How can we narrow down our brand's value proposition to a word? Our product lasts longer, it's less expensive, it works better. All that stuff's important.” Yes, those secondary benefits are important, and, yes, they have a place: in the brochures, on the packaging, and two, maybe three clicks into the website. All those other benefits will serve to shore up the aggregate value proposition of a brand, once customers try it. But what they're going to remember a brand for, the way they're going to label it in their mental filing system, is with a word.

Find that word.

You may argue I have oversimplified here. And I have; I'll accept the criticism. Because I'm arguing for purism in an area where it's often impossible to think that way. Many brands do not lend themselves to such clean, theoretical distinctions. All I'm saying is you should at least try; try to find that one word. You're trying to own some real estate for your brand in a very crowded neighborhood. I like how John Hegarty defines it: “A brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world: a corner of someone's mind.”⁷

Find that word. You're going to thank me when it comes time to sit down and come up with a big idea.