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Young Men reject Old Image
The Observer
‘One of the reasons programmes like Cold Feet and Coupling have been successful’ believes Hall, ‘is that for the first time the media is portraying men trying to come to terms with the changes in the male stereotype.’
Young Britons ‘looking more to Europe than US’
Financial Times
‘The reputation of the British is ‘ reluctant Europeans’ may be about to change after a report revealed young people in the UK are increasingly looking to continental Europe rather than the US as a model’… As Halls says, ‘The single currency is no longer and abstract concept and young Brits are beginning to ask rational questions as to how it will effect their lives.’
Does the Butt Stop Here?
The Independent on Sunday
Using the slogan ‘Truth’ Hall and his team helped to create a campaign that encourages teens to look beyond the images the tobacco barons project and ask why… Teenagers have been encouraged to take on the barons themselves; the campaign featured as acclaimed television advert of a teenager telephoning the marketing manager of a major tobacco company demanding to know why he was personally trying to kill him and his friends.’
Honey, we forgot the consumer
The Marketing Review
A couple of years ago an article in the New Yorker described the lifetime work of a statistician called Dr. John Komlos who’d spent the best part of 50 years collecting data on people’s height. He’d been around the world harvesting numbers, often manually, from such diverse databases as the recruitment forms of 17th Century Dutch soldiers to 18th Century newspapers articles that included the height of run-away slaves. What was striking from this article was that, were it not for the efforts of Dr. Komlos and a few other academics within his field, (called anthropometric history), the link between height and a country’s GNP would remain undiscovered. We wouldn’t now understand the direct link between economics and physical well-being or that the Dutch have grown from being some of the smallest people in Europe to the tallest people on earth, ( 6’ 1” in case you’re interested). More worryingly we wouldn’t know Americans are shrinking, which says a lot about our diets and fast food.
But why is this important to Brand Management you’re probably asking. Well quite a lot actually. In much the same way that crucial insights into living standards would have lain undiscovered were it not for the efforts of the good doctor, so critical insights relating to consumers, brands and marketing lie undiscovered in the avalanche of data collected by market research companies each year.
It’s not as though we aren’t asking the questions. It’s estimated that more than $6 billion was spent on market research in the last year alone. That’s up by 15% from the year before. There can hardly be six people in Uzbekistan who haven’t been in a focus group for fruit yoghurt and the good people of Lima, Peru are sick of being asked about their internet banking habits.
The issue is obviously not about asking questions, or even asking the right questions. The question is: what are we doing with all this data? What does it all amount to? Well, it’s telling us that consumers are growing indifferent to what marketing has to offer. While the marketers search for ever-more cunning ways to reach their customers, consumers find increasingly fiendish ways to avoid them. Brand managers, advertisers and all the other parties charged with getting a brand to market are drowning in a sea of data whilst watching their customers sailing into the distance in search of something new.
It’s a frustrating situation and not a little embarrassing, yet the answer to this dilemma lies all around us if we only knew where to look. Like Dr. Komlos’ data, there are stunning insights to be gained if we can find the time to collate it and analyze it in the right way. But rather like those 3-d pictures of dolphins that were all the rage a few years ago, we have to stop focussing so hard in order to see the pattern. We’re standing too close to the problem to see the big picture.
Not being seeing the forest for the trees is an occupational hazard for any brand manager who spends every waking hour of every working day thinking about his or her brand, but it’s a problem that we have to consciously have to break out of if we are to get to new insights. This is probably an apocryphal story but it illustrates the point very well. A few years back the London agency Allen Brady & Marsh’s pitched for the humongous British Rail advertising account. So the story goes, on the day the Very Important Client came to the agency, they were greeted by a slovenly receptionist who kept them waiting in a dirty, noisy uncomfortable seating area. The time of the meeting came and went, but nothing happened. Whenever the Very Important Client asked when they would be taken into the meeting the receptionist would say ‘in a minute’ before returning to reading a magazine and chewing gum. It’s not clear how long this went on, but it was sufficient time to get the point across. Just before getting up to leave in disgust the Very Important Client was stopped by the Agency’s Chairman and it was explained that this experience was exactly what the majority of passengers felt every day when they used British Rail trains. Allen Brady & Marsh won the account by successfully shifting the focus of running British Rail away from the operational issues and towards the consumers’ real world experience.
It’s a nice story because it demonstrates how customers are so often relegated to the sidelines whenever brands managers get together. In fact that reflects the first and most fundamental law of marketing. With power comes hubris: As management self-regard increases so, there is an equal and opposite reduction in the ability to understand consumers. Simple really.
A lack of consumer understanding is apparent across the whole spectrum of today’s marketing activity. The energy has gone out of brands. Like jaded lovers, consumers feel less involved. They grow more distant, more disenchanted. The thrill has gone. Yes, the couple might look happy enough in the snapshots taken at the focus groups but those smiles are increasingly forced and no-matter what the advertising, the fact remains, there’s something missing in this relationship.
