A Room With A View[point]

You spend years and millions of dollars carefully developing a brand positioning to help move your company/client to the next level.

You’ve gone through copious amounts of focus groups and internal workshops to end up in a place where all the main stake holders are in agreement.

You run tens of millions of dollars communicating your advantage to the masses via a highly planned integrated brand campaign.

You’ve invested ridiculous amounts of time and money to ensure all markets and staff are ready for the inflow of enquiries.

Then an earthquake happens and it all turns to shit.

Years of work and millions upon millions of dollars down the drain in an instant.

Instead of communicating in the style of your ever happy ads … the reality is now a none-stop stream of bad news.

News that tells people they’re not going to get what they want.

News that can’t tell people what to expect.

In other words, no news … just a standard response that says nothing and commits to nothing.

A response that undermines everything … every research group, workshop, staff meeting, ad and positioning document.

The brands who win are the ones who live via values and philosophies, not speak from powerpoint decks and straplines.

They are the ones who can adapt to change because they are the ones who know you can never ever dot every ‘i’ or cross every ‘t’ in this constantly evolving, ever changing World.

And that is why unless you’re God, creating a strategy in a corporate vacuum is always susceptible to destruction … because a brands success isn’t built on following a 1000 page document, it’s about doing stuff that reflect who you are, what you believe and what you want achieve in a manner that is resonant with peoples requirement and relevant to where the World is.

Which is why we’re deeply saddened how few companies in the travel industry have been able to turn the nightmare of the Icelandic volcano eruption into reasons why people should trust them with their travel needs for life.

Reputation is built more in bad times than good … and yet so few have embraced that opportunity.

Their loss.

Mother Nature: 1 // Branding: 0

Even though the focus of this post is quite old, it’s a great reminder of the power and value of great packaging.

How great is that eh?

We particularly loved the ‘hook’ they placed at the top of the bottle so you could make it into a real glitter ball … or should we say glitter bottle!

This is brilliant stuff – so brilliant that it convinced Robert – a guy who hasn’t drunk any alcohol for over 20 years to buy the bloody thing – which is surely the ultimate demonstration of how powerful great packaging can be.

Well done Absolut … you might not of converted Rob to have started drinking your vodka [the bottle in currently residing in his freezer] but you have converted him into being a fan and that’s more than most brands achieve.

In James Bond movies – there’s always some dasterdly villain who attempts to destroy/rob/exploit the World in some way.

They might have schemes to control the weather … or the media … or simply steal all the gold in banks, but regardless of what their cunning scheme is, their ultimate goal is to create a weakeness that affects the masses so they can disproportionatly prosper.

Well let us tell you, they’ve been doing it all wrong.

Forget those bombs and rocket ships … put aside the ray guns and steel jawed sidekicks … because we’ve found something that could undermine the global economies in an instant and it’s available for about twenty quid from some weird shop in Japan.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, ambitious criminals and potential dictators … let us introduce you to pure evil genius:

We are big believers that experiential advertising shouldn’t be approached interms of wanting to make people ‘feel good’ about the brand [though obviously it has to do that too] but in finding ways that continually proves the brand is sincere in what it says, believes and does.

Note the word ’CONTINUALLY’ … because doing something positive once, doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it again till you feel the brand is on the wane.

That’s why we like Tesco’s so much, because they continually fight for their customers loyalty – not just through pricing – but through innovation, reinvention and a constant desire to find ways to be relevant in current social/cultural/political and economic circumstances.

[See their 1990’s ‘Computers For School’ promotion as an example of how they infiltrated culture [not just shoppers] and stated to position themselves as a community champion, not just a food retailer]

Anyway it’s for this reason that we prefer to call/approach experiential communication as Brand Truth ideas … and the reason we bring this up is that whilst it is not exactly fighting for youth optimism on a grand scale, Coke have just done an experiential activity/experiment that not only brings the brands position to life, but makes people probably look a bit differently at Coke vending machines for quite a few months to come.

Three years in the making …

This is the poncy European version – but now it’s out, the more practical Vietnamese edition will be [fingers crossed] coming up fast.

We’d write more, but we’re actually not allowed to – not at least till the ‘proper’ version sees the light – but be glad about that, because when/if we’re finally allowed to open our mouths, we’re going to win the biggest bores of whatever year it is.

If you don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, either click here or go to an agency blog that is less egocentric – if that’s not an oxymoron. Thank you.