Do you know why some companies are performing better in the crisis than others? And do you know why those same companies will emerge from the crisis in an even healthier position than before? It’s because they have strong cultures.
It is about having a vision, a belief system, an attitude and a worldview that is shared by the entire company. More than a simple guideline, it is a set of values. When a company has a strong culture, everyone in that organization not only supports decisions made by the CEO – but could have made the same decision in his or her place. In our digitalised, open-sourced society the culture is the brand. You cannot fake it.
Some of our clients have the strongest cultures of all. I have to mention Apple, because it’s such a great example. Thanks to the vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has a culture of creativity and innovation. ‘Think different’ was far more than an advertising slogan. It went to the heart of a way of thinking that has transformed the company. By thinking different, Apple shrugged off the notion that it was a mere computer maker and embraced the idea that it was a provider of tools for creative people. The result, of course, was iTunes, the iPod – and later the iPhone. These were radical new departures for Apple, but they were perfectly in tune with its culture.
Apple is well known for the loyalty it engenders among consumers. Needless to say, its employees are equally evangelical. When you go to an Apple store, you can tell the staff love working there. Why? Because a strong culture attracts the best employees. And when the economy crumbles, you want those people by your side.
So how do you build a strong company culture? For one thing, it takes time. You can’t just bolt it on. When you start a company, the culture is already taking root. In fact, very often, company cultures are created by strong leaders. The system may stay in place long after that person has left, but usually it can be traced back to a single inspiring figure.
At TBWA our culture is based on Disruption, which is all about questioning conventions in order to find a new path towards a larger share of the future. But when we organise Disruption exercises (we call them ‘Disruption Days’) for our clients, we do not ask them to change their cultures. In fact, we ask them to look deep within their cultures and identify their key points of difference, a vision and belief-system that sets them apart, makes them likeable or creates a campfire. In this way, we can unlock untapped potential. Companies often tell us that they have ‘found themselves’ after going through the Disruption process. It’s a liberating experience for them.
Take Kraft, who we recently invited to attend a Disruption Day when the company was reviewing the strategy for its Tassimo hot beverage maker. We transformed our Berlin office into an apartment, with a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a kid’s room. Read more…
Roustam Tariko, now a famous Russian billionaire, started out as a distributor of imported premium alcohol brands, including Martini and Johnnie Walker.
As the company grew, he realized that the Russian vodka market – despite its long heritage and the large number of brands on offer – lacked a genuine premium vodka brand with Russian origin. So decided to launch his own product, and in 1998 the result was the first Russian premium vodka brand: Russian Standard.
Because vodka advertising was highly restricted and banned from TV, Tariko came up with a smart trick by creating generic copy for his Russian Standard brand. The following year, 1999, Tariko opened a retail bank, as this was also very young and profitable sector. The bank was also named Russian Standard and Tariko’s company became the Russian Standard Group.
All communication activities, had no direct link to either vodka or banking, instead focusing on the idea of “Making the Impossible.” Only at the very end, in tiny print under the logo, was the bank mentioned. The copy’s main aim was to build awareness of the name and the logo and link them with a premium lifestyle image – which was successfully achieved.
Recently, both the bank and the vodka have followed a more conventional marketing approach. Yet the original trick was so smart and successful that other companies tried to emulate it – such as a brand of mineral water and even chocolate candies with a vodka brand name. That’s one way you can be sure that you’re an innovator: you attract imitators. But only innovators that do not fall into the trap of convention will be able to build sustainable results.
Donald Gunn asked Jean-Marie Dru to contribute an essay to the latest edition of the Gunn Report, the only independent report on creativity for the advertising world. Enjoy Jean-Marie Dru’s thoughts on mad-blog.com:
The economic crisis on the one hand, the digital revolution on the other…
Our profession has never been so shaken. These two circumstances create multiple effects. And we are all wondering what tomorrow will look like.
Concerning digital, communications groups are developing varied, often opposing strategies. Some, through a series of acquisitions, attempt to create a technological barrier between them and their competitors. Others, like our Agency, are putting digital at the very center of their conventional activities. Neither strategy is, by definition, the winner. There are different ways to succeed. What makes a strategy effective is the quality of its implementation, and the commitment to it.
To ensure that everything starts with digital, the 180 agency in Amsterdam totally reinvented itself. The result of their actions was even more radical than they had imagined, and the price they paid was heavy, with no fewer than 55 out of their total 120 staff changing. This is a dramatic illustration of the size of the task. The path ahead is narrow, and it is difficult.
Too often, we are more comfortable talking about digital ideas than making the inherent changes that are necessary to provoke the right solutions in the digital world. As Colleen DeCourcy, our Chief Digital Officer, said to me recently: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”
In an industry faced with such challenges, the relevance of award shows, and even The Gunn Report itself, comes under scrutiny. It is a recurring subject. I remember back in the ‘70s, industry colleagues who announced the imminent demise of the Cannes Festival. We know what it has since become. Its turnover increased tenfold, because today more than ever, the celebration of creativity is essential despite of the difficult environment in which we are operating, or rather, because of it. And it’s why, although they avoided awards shows for over 50 years, the world’s leading advertisers now participate actively in them, and celebrate when their own campaigns are recognized.
In a speech I gave in Cannes last year, I underlined that “Big can be beautiful too.” In 2007, both Procter & Gamble and Unilever were awarded a Grand Prix at this festival. Today, a lot of great work comes from large companies. They have internalized the fact that audiences are not captive anymore. If you don’t entertain and engage people, they will simply ignore you. “Safe advertising“ is becoming invisible. At last.
There’s no getting away from that fact that, today, creativity is no longer optional. It is vital to every product category and to every communications discipline.
In fact, there are two factors that are contributing to put creativity in the center. On the one hand, the imminent demise of repetitive advertising, and on the other, the understanding that each and every touchpoint between a brand and its audiences must be creative.
Advertising is part of how brands behave, but brands are judged on everything they do, not just how they appear in advertising.
We need to embrace all the ways to tell a brand’s story: its packaging, its retail presence, the content of its website, its PR programs, the products themselves. And to ensure that everything is creative. This is why, even when an agency is not directly in charge of one of these elements, it must nevertheless feel a sense of responsibility. There can be no room for compromise or mediocrity if you have the ambition to be a brand leader. Advertising agencies will rediscover their original reason for being; they will again become true generalists.
But contrary to the past, they will only achieve this if they learn how to change rhythm. The problem is no longer just to ensure the coherence between the different elements of a brand’s communication, which some continue to refer to as 360°. But rather, to feed a constant conversation with our audiences, 365 days a year. From 360 to 365…it is the very rhythm of communications that digital has shaken up. Agencies need to move from a quarterly to a daily cadence.
We have to organize ourselves to deliver constant communications. A fleet of small initiatives coming together to create an ongoing communication program, generating more frequent conversation points. We need to own these conversations, not just the creative work.
This is one of the coolest examples of todays brand behavior: The Pepsi Refresh Everything Project. See, what they say about themselves: “We’re looking for people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact. Look around your community and think about how you want to change it.” and check it out. Simply click HERE for all the necessary information.
FYI: The Pepsi Refresh Project Round 1 Voting and Round 2 Submissions are NOW OPEN! It’s time to start campaigning for the ideas you like, voting for the ideas that will make the world better, and submitting your ideas for Round 2!
If you have any comments or suggestions please email Rob Schwartz.
On their website the California based company method describe themselves as “people against dirty”, they look at the world through bright-green colored glasses. The two founders Adam and and Eric have put together a humanifesto for method that basically gives direction to everything the brand does. In their most recent e-mail they invited the world to join a great movement and said the following: “if you’re like us, you’re feeling excited about the UN Climate Change Conference that’s happening in Copenhagen in a few weeks. excited, because it’s putting environmental legislation on a highly visible, global stage, where it belongs. so, like us, we hope you’ll join the Hopenhagen community and sign the Climate Petition before Dec. 7th. your signature will show world leaders that when all of us get behind something, there really is hope.”
That’s exactly how a brand like method must behave. Chapeau.
Apple’s VP Industrial Design about the change of design and the new challenges they are faced with. First time to watch and hear details about the development of Apple’s product design. The design of a product is an essential part of the brand behavior, just like an ad, the layout of the shop or the CEO’s speech.
This year, TBWA is proud to announce we are supporting Movember, a month-long mustache-growing event held every November. Get it?
Originally started in Australia, the aim of the now-global Movember movement is to positively change men’s attitudes about health issues. Men rally together to grow mustaches over the course of a month, while raising funds for the most serious of men’s health issues, prostate and testicular cancer.
In the spirit of Disruption, the most legendary beard in advertising (heck, it even has its own Twitter handle!), will be on the chopping block. Lee Clow has agreed to shave his entire beard off if 1000 TBWA employees register for the event and join the TBWA Movember group.
Go HERE to learn more about Movember or join the TBWA group HERE (be sure to enter ‘TBWA’ as the company/organization/promo code or your registration won’t count towards our official tally).
This book is tougher than it looks. At first glance it resembles yet another theorizing tome written by an experienced adman – in this case John Hunt, a giant of South African advertising and worldwide creative director of TBWA. But it soon transpires that the book has little to do with advertising: the word is never mentioned. Instead, “The Art of the Idea” has more in common with Paul Arden’s “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be”. It’s an inspirational tool, a guide to the creative process for when your back’s against the wall.
Hunt is a copywriter and an award-winning playwright, so the short book is stuffed with memorable epigrams: “No-one orders a bouquet of beige flowers”; “Change doesn’t keep regular hours”; “Trust your instincts or they will go away.” Some of the content is familiar – for example the theory that ideas often come to you when you’re thinking about something else. Other sections are more personal – such as Hunt’s musings on the correlation between diversity and creativity.
The copy is clear and lucid, deliberately avoiding doublespeak. Hunt has enough of a sense of humor to realize that fake intellectuals just end up looking dumb. “Original thinking comes from making a complicated thing simple and not the other way around,” he writes. Actually, fake intellectuals are one of book’s many targets.
And here we get to the crux of the matter. “The Art of the Idea” has an edge. Under its cool prose and beautiful illustrations – by the South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa – there’s a sense that Hunt is seeking to vindicate original thinking. The title could just as easily have been “In Defense of the Idea”. Ideas are portrayed as delicate, ephemeral beings that should be given space to thrive. They are allergic to bureaucracy, politics, over-analysis, compromise and bland furnishings.
What’s packaged as gentle pedagogy is in reality a full-throated cry for creative freedom. It is a defense of instinct against statistics, a call for risk-taking, and a protest against expediency. Hunt famously advised Nelson Mandela during the first multiracial South African elections, and allusions to freedom of thought versus closed minds crop up throughout the text: “Free thought is what [authoritarian governments] fear the most.” More broadly, he warns that cold logic applied too early, “can stop dreamers dead in their tracks”. In that respect, the corporate world will get more out of the book than creative types, who will simply say “Yes, yes, very true” and nod their heads sagely in agreement.
Don’t get me wrong – “The Art of the Idea” is not a rant, far less a whine. Hunt’s tone rarely deviates from one of calm reflection, with occasional recourse to the wry aside. But the book is a reminder that ideas are as fragile as bubbles, and that too many people take pleasure in bursting them. Hunt is simply urging all of us to give ideas room to soar and catch the light. “The real value of an idea is to see how far you can push it,” he suggests. In other words, if you’re looking for an early gift for your client, you may just have found it.
Mark Tungate is the author of several books, including Adland: A Global History of Advertising.
At TBWA our culture is based on Disruption, which is all about questioning conventions in order to find a new path towards a larger share of the future. But when we organise Disruption exercises (we call them ‘Disruption Days’) for our clients, we do not ask them to change their cultures. In fact, we ask them to look deep within their cultures and identify their key points of difference, a vision and belief-system that sets them apart, makes them likeable or creates a campfire. In this way, we can unlock untapped potential. Companies often tell us that they have ‘found themselves’ after going through the Disruption process. It’s a liberating experience for them.
