There are the fragrances you know, which usually have the names of familiar designer brands: Gucci by Gucci, Armani Code and so on. And then there is Etat Libre d’Orange. Yes, you read that correctly: the Orange Free State, named after a 19^th century Boer republic in South Africa, now half-forgotten by history.

Today you’ll find this strange state in the Marais district of Paris. It’s a small store that sells perfumes for men and women. The fragrances all have unusual names and even odder packaging.

For instance, Je Suis Un Homme (“I Am a Man”) features an image of an uncompromisingly phallic pistol. Putain de Palaces (“Hotel Slut”) shows a key inserted into a pink keyhole. And I think you can guess what Vraie Blonde (“Real Blonde”) depicts. Our favourite is Jasmine & Cigarette, whose logo is a smoking flower. Other names include Incense & Bubblegum, Virgins & Toreadors and Dark Sleepless Night. One is literally called “Nothing”.

Despite their teasing names, these fragrances have been created by some of the best perfumers in France. And behind them all is Etienne de Swardt, a young man born – surprise, surprise – in South Africa. Arriving in Paris, he got a job at Givenchy. Later he created a perfume for pets called Oh My Dog. 

Now he’s the creator of this funky little brand, which relies for marketing on word of mouth, a great website, a store that’s also a billboard – and a growing band of cult followers. By the way, the store is also a bookshop where you can buy Taschen tomes or collections of erotic pinups. On the window is the brand’s slogan: Perfume is dead. Long live perfume!

Etat Libre d’Orange, 69 Rue de Archives, 3^rd arrondissement, Paris. www.etatlibredorange.com

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Ulrich Proeschel

One of the strengths of a disruptive strategy is that it changes not just a company’s advertising, but the company itself. 

The classic example is Pedigree. We convinced Pedigree that it should not regard itself as a dog food company – but a company that loves dogs. 

That vision changed everything: the company’s employees began bringing their dogs to work. The Tokyo branch moved its headquarters to a building where dogs were allowed. And the company got behind pet adoption schemes. It was no longer a company that made products for dogs. It was The Dog Company.

This was change that went far beyond advertising.

And what about Adidas? There was a time when the brand was barely visible. Poor management and a succession of owners had left it floundering, handing Nike a virtual monopoly.

Then came a new vision: “Impossible is nothing.” New product lines and new stylists aided the change, but the vision provided an architecture. CEO Erich Stamminger described it as: “Our legacy, our mission and our challenge.”

 More recently, TBWA proved definitively that it was willing to propose risky changes to its clients. For many years, our strategy for Absolut vodka had been based around the unique – and disruptive – design of the bottle. Print advertising featuring that iconic shape had established the Absolut brand and won accolades all around the world. Some people collected the ads as if they were works of art – which very often they were.

Last year, we abandoned the strategy. With the bottle shape now clearly linked to Absolut in the minds of our consumers, it was time to try something new. So instead of focusing on the bottle or the packaging, we took the radical step of positioning Absolut as a symbol of perfection in an imperfect world.

This was a brave move, but it worked. The headline in Advertising Age read: “Breaking With Bottle Fires Up Absolut Sales.”

Not only that, but the new strategy is spot on for these uncertain times. Change pays off. 

Jean-Marie Dru once wrote that great brands are powerful only if they take action. “Great brands are not nouns but verbs. Apple liberates, IBM solves, Nike exhorts, Virgin challenges, Sony dreams.”

I find myself thinking again of the barman at the Sanderson Hotel in London, with his T-shirt reading RECESS IS ON. Shortly after meeting him, I discovered that the hotel group had set up a website explaining its attitude to the economic downturn (recessison.com). 

The home page was very simple. It said: FUCK THE RECESSION

This alone will not make the crisis go away. But it is a statement of defiance. The next step is to take action. It’s time to change.

Nick Baum is Vice President Europe at TBWA. In this series of four posts, he explains why CHANGE is the right way to tackle the recession. If you have any comments or suggestions please email Nick Baum.

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…

What do Richard Branson and an overweighed woman in a toga have in common? The answer became obvious in France in 1990, when BDDP issued one of the landmark campaigns of these years, featuring Anne Zamberlan, actress and soon-to-be voice of the Size Acceptance movement in France.

Let the books uplift us and move us!

Technology will never be sharp enough!

The first poster featured her lying on her side, wrapped in a gleaming toga and holding a lyra, a modern and impressive Euterpe, muse of Music, with the caption: “The biggest record store in France, 52-60 Champs Elysées, Paris. Virgin Megastore. We will never make enough room for music.”

The Champs-Elysées Megastore had opened two years before and Virgin was in France a new brand, and certainly a provocative one, with the image of R.Branson, ballooning rock’n’roll mogul, in everybody’s mind.

But an obese woman in a white toga to promote a trendy record store? Now that’s disruption – all the more in 1990, in the height of the supermodels era. Compared to skinny fashion icons, with the convention being “to be hip you have to be slender”, the voluptuous curves of Virgin’s muse gave the brand a fun and generous appeal. “She has the opulence of an opera”, “an allegro fortissimo” wrote Pierre Combescot, Goncourt Prize laureate writer. 

She embodied all the music, and she made a bang.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Xavier Maldant (xavier.maldant@tbwa-france.com).

Lee Clow – Worldwide Director of Media Arts

We are at the beginning of the most exciting time the advertising” business has ever seen. While lots of people are talking about the challenge of the multi-media future, I believe it is the biggest opportunity for creative minds since the ‘60’s.

New technology hasn’t simply made our media options broader, it’s actually changed the model that brands have to operate in. Our talent is still about storytelling but using new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences that have become opportunities for brands.

First, we have to re-think what we call media. Media used to be simply a way for brands to target consumers, but today, media is the way that people are engaging with the world around them. Really, media is just any space between a brand and the audience. And in fact, I believe the best brands will become media themselves: the places, spaces, experiences people choose to spend time with. Already, the Apple stores are a media experience, and iTunes is serving millions of songs, podcasts and playlists – all media of the brand. And others like Nike, adidas and Virgin are shaping their brands to make themselves a medium through which people experience their lives.

And as brands become media, agencies will have to become passionate across complete brand experiences, not just the media we are currently comfortable in. And we have to stop striving to be media neutral, we have to be media passionate. Read more…