Brand, Like Humans, Need To Be Nurtured

It’s pretty easy to think of the brands you love.

But not so easy, I suspect, to recall the ones you don’t really like…

Advertisers are finally getting it – the most powerful brands connect on a human level.

And, done well, social media blurs the lines between digital and human interaction, which can immediately amplify the connectivity between people and brands.

Isn’t that the one thing we’ve always wanted as marketers?

That’s why social media is one of the most amazing tools we can leverage for our clients today.

Not convinced?

I manage several digital channels. But unlike many brands out there, the channels I manage begin from actual events. Events were real people meet and share their passion.

So all these people are united – at their core – by what the marketing people call ‘passion-points’.

And it’s a brilliant thing too, because this is where the brand comes in as an enabler. An enabler that unites people, in-person and via digital channels.

It highlights people via social media, telling their story and sharing their passions while connecting them: before, during and after the event. Again, in-person and digitally.

On one hand, we still have traditional brands with products that are hard to define, with nebulous functions. And on the other hand (another extreme), we now have ‘social influencers’ that are just about themselves, trying to shoehorn a product that doesn’t really fit into their lifestyles.

Yet as disgusting and fake as the second category can be, I see many refreshing learnings coming from this end of the lens.

Because the reality of life remains: we all just want to connect on a human level.

Alex is building the Grapple Asia social channels and hopes you’ll check them out.

It's Not So Much What You See...

You really do have to know why you’re here – in Ad Land, I mean.

For me, there’s much excitement in the creative process, especially the moment the idea unlocks.

It starts as a pinhole of light – barely perceptible, but there nonetheless. Slowly, as the minutes and hours tick by, it begins to materialise, finally moving centre stage bit by bit.

It was nice to hear an intern say: “Let’s just do what we do best, and write some lines.” What a great way for a young writer to get his head around the brief.

So off they went to start cracking out headlines, platform lines, and discovering copy bits that might not have fit into either of the above, but still made great body copy points.

And from there, with a bit of pushing, a bit of itchy-scalp-syndrome and a good measure of procrastination, the idea for the campaign simply unlocks.

Sometimes it’s like that nagging feeling you have just after leaving the house that you forgot something, but you’re not going back anyway because you’re not sure what it was in the first place.

I’ve seen it hit like a tsunami, and you just know you’re there. You jump up at your desk and exclaim something highly irrelevant to everyone around you, and no doubt they all think you’re crazy. But you don’t care.

Other times, it’s mostly there and staring you right in the face, but for whatever reason you don’t fully see it. Until it rears its head again in another form and makes itself painfully clear. You probably slap the table and chuckle quietly to yourself, and here again your sanity is called into question.

Some call it ‘The Eureka Moment’.

Then you just lay out all the thoughts that work best for that idea, tweak the ones that can be saved, and happily exclude the ones that don’t fit into the group.

Getting there, though, sometimes seems a chore. You have to know where to look, and I think that simply comes from experience propelled by persistence.

So you let it go… but then it comes back, and finally you start to see the bits and pieces of information on a wall in front of you. And slowly, slowly, your subconscious connects the dots until a clear picture is revealed.

I heard a story many years ago from a senior creative I have always admired. He said he went to India and decided to buy one of those little hand-carved elephants used as an ornament or paperweight.

So everyone he asked said that one particular old man’s famous ‘elephants’ were the best you could get. He found the man and bought one. And it was true; it was a remarkably perfect wooden elephant.

Amazed, he asked the old man: “How do you make your elephants so perfect?”

The old man replied: “I take a block of wood. I take my knife. Then I remove everything that isn’t the shape of an elephant.”

And then that’s it. You know you’ve found it. All that’s left is to build it and push it forward and really make it come to life for others to see.

I like the sentiment that the some ads almost write themselves. This thought suggests that we, as thinkers, are merely architects of the ad, and the content for it has always been there anyway – all we are doing is putting it together in a fresh or meaningful way.

The answers are there, all around us, I believe, it’s just a matter of finding a way to see them.

Anyway, this job isn’t just about answers, it’s also about how you get there.

Alex enjoys the process, even if it is occasionally painful.

Who killed TUNA IN WATER?

Here's another one.

“Can we have a generic look?”

“Can we have a generic headline?”

What does that mean? Do we not have a USP? There is, at the very least, a logo on this ad somewhere…

Remember the generic branding of the 80s? The whole idea was that if consumers didn’t have to pay for advertising, they’d save on costs, and that certain products like BEANS, or BEER, or TUNA IN WATER, or CHOCOLATE CAKE MIX, were all basically the same in terms of their so-called generic contents.



A generic product does not have a logo on it and almost always has a black typeface on a white background. Many foods were available as ‘generic’ in the 1980s. They have now been replaced by house brands, which are non-marketed brands that mimic the name brand items.

But consumers didn’t like it. They wanted ‘Planters Peanuts’. They wanted to have a ‘Coke and a Smile’, not a COLA. They wanted ‘Clorox’, not BLEACH. They wanted ‘Evian’, not MINERAL WATER. (Insert your own examples here.)

Even drugs, like Tylenol, or Advil were their own brands – although one could argue that the molecular makeup of these items were basically still the same.

Most ironically of all was that the generic look was incredibly recognisable and created amazing cut-through.

When every can of soup in the aisle is coloured red or yellow, and then you have a generic soup that just says SOUP on it in Helvetica black, visually, it will pop right off the shelf.

The prices were good too.

Still, consumers didn’t buy it. They reached for the brands they knew. The ones with the catchy jingle. The ones with the special ingredients. The ones with a USP.

Consumers drive demand, and they’re always willing to pay for the brands they love. The brand killed ‘generic’.

So too is the case in the office. The ad/work simply must start from the product, or at least an audience insight that links to the product. There’s no way around it. And there’s no such thing as ‘generic’, so please stop using that word.

I’d be a lot happier making the logo bigger – at least that’s about the brand.

Alexander remembers that even his dog didn’t like generic DOG FOOD.