Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change.” There is only one strategy riskier than change right now – and that is retrenchment. As we’ve seen time and time again, companies that cut costs or simply stand still during a recession emerge far weaker than their more courageous competitors.

Of course, every recession is different. The marketing book on how to behave today has not been written. This is possibly the worst financial crisis in history, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better. Nor is advertising a global panacea. But a strong advertising strategy can provoke much-needed change.

That’s where disruption comes in. As the inventors of disruption, we are the owners of a methodology for change.

The three most important words to a company during a recession are TRUST – the trust of your consumers – TRUTH – the transparency that will enable you to retain that trust – and INNOVATION.

Look at this list of the top five most innovative companies in 2008, published by Fast Company magazine.

Read more…

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. Read more…

If you want the idea to serve as the backbone of successive campaigns over time, then you have to take it a step further. You need more than an advertising idea – you need a brand idea. Two examples of this are “Impossible is Nothing”, for Adidas, and “Dogs Rule”, for Pedigree.

Campaign launch: Muhammad Ali

We launched “Impossible is Nothing” on the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Avenue in New York. I remember it well, because I was there at the time. I was surprised to see that kids still perceived Mohammad Ali as a star. Of course, he has a big personality – which enabled him to become a legend.  

Rather than just being a slogan, “Impossible in Nothing” is actually an affirmation that you’re ready for anything. Big ideas have another advantage: a strong brand idea can inspire a lot of executions. 

For example, we constructed a giant “Oliver Kahn Bridge” – an enormous image of the German goalkeeper – over the road near Munich airport. And the Cologne train station ceiling was painted with a celestial soccer match in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Athletes impress us by succeeding against the odds. This is the “Impossible is Nothing” spirit. The manifesto is very simple. It says that “impossible” is not a fact, but an opinion. 

We also launched a manifesto for Pedigree (as well as a book called Dogma). People love their pets so much that they’re often featured in family photographs. Who better than Pedigree, the biggest pet food brand in the world, to celebrate the affection that people have for their dogs? 

So Pedigree adopted an ambitious stance: “Everything Pedigree does is done for the love of dogs.” That changed a lot – not only in the brand’s positioning, but also in its behavior. For instance, Pedigree employees were now invited to bring their pets to work. Salespeople could visit their clients with their dogs. The company even changed its Tokyo offices because dogs were not allowed in the building. It would be hard to find a stronger example of commitment to a brand idea. As Paul Michaels said, Pedigree went from being a “dog food company” to a “dog company”. 

To “Impossible is Nothing” for Adidas and “Dogs Rule” for Pedigree I could add “Shift” for Nissan and “Think Different” for Apple. All these ideas are “big”. They’re big because they have an internal as well as an external effect, and because they work across media, from a billboard to a TV screen to a CEO’s speech. 

So what about a brand like Apple? For me, Apple is an example of a company that has grown big, while staying in touch with its small side. It combines the innovation of small with the energy of big. 

In the 1960s Bill Bernbach taught us that, in the words of his legendary ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, “Small is beautiful”. But Cadillac ran a much older ad, in 1915, called “The penalty of leadership”. It suggested that when you are at the top, everyone wants to knock you off. So you have to try harder. The result: big becomes beautiful. 

I talked about P&G at the beginning. Not only because it was named Advertiser of the Year – but also because it stands as genuine proof that big can be creative.

Click here to read Part One.