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 Manifesto Ad (US)

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. 

In Part Two the author will propose five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape. Check with us again tomorrow.

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If you have any comments or suggestions please email Tom Morton, Executive Planning Director at TBWA\ London (tom.morton@tbwa-london.com).