What do we know About Love?
by Erkki Izara, Director of Product Marketing
Our job is to make people love stuff. The main tools we use are intuition and humour. The way we organise ourselves to do the job is through layers of creative teams and directors. The higher we are in the food chain, the smaller the chances we meet the people we’re trying to charm. So, how can we claim that we know anything about their love?
I met a real person, an actual consumer, for the first time in 2008. The night before, the thought started creeping upon me. For the first time in years, I was nervous for professional reasons — less confident than before meeting any CEO. Getting to sleep was harder than before any first date.
I would meet a student girl at her home. I only knew one thing about her: she couldn’t afford the product we were working for. She was picked because she was a fan. Would I really be able to talk with her about ideas and professional views? Would it be a waste of time? Or, would ad-talk make me look like an idiot? It’d probably be an embarrassment to everyone.
Meeting people, discussing ideas with them, and observing them in their own environment is what designers call design ethnography. We at 358 implemented it into advertising work. We called it co-creation. We weren’t the first ones to use the word but, to my knowledge, our real-life office-wide experiment of bringing ad making and product making together was a first.
Art Directors and Copywriters share the title of “Creatives”, but the way to make advertising is so established that the C-word is hardly the best one to describe it. Why did we want to challenge, and eventually change, the way we work? We wanted to understand what people really think about the companies we worked for. Research gives you answers to the questions you ask but a chat can give you something you don’t know you need to know.
Many creative minds get to ideas through discussing. If you do that only by staring at the sneaker soles of your partner, you’re missing an opportunity. Talking to recruited consumers at their own homes can make your head spin in just the right way. Loads of ideas start pouring out and you need to hurry-hurry-hurry to write them down.
The result could be all kinds of ideas — both traditional advertising ideas and unconventional things that could be interpreted as advertising: an app, a festival, new packaging, a service, or even a tweak to the product itself. Our first motto at 358 was “anything that helps people like a company is advertising”.
Our second motto was a little more empathic: “We help people and companies to like each other.” The bit that made the real difference was “each other”. No love catches fire as fast as an ad man’s love to the product that he’s assigned to work with.
But do we love the people who’re supposed to love the product?
We have to adapt our love to them to make them love us back. Most of us are convinced that our own sense of humour is the best (ad men seem to be even more convinced than others). Those who are right get pretty far. But if you can adjust your humour to the target group… you’re considered a sell-out! And that’s scary. An ad man should never have a recognisable style. If you do, you can only hope the clients who really need your style will find their way to you. If not, you’ll be neck-deep together with architects and other style-nazis — sooner or later you’re alone defending your own aesthetics.
Talking about ideas with people outside advertising serves both as inspiration and a reality-check. It helped me avoid several stupidities. For example, I might have suggested printing pictures of money on the floor of a supermarket for a campaign. Co-creation made me understand the customers would have felt intimidated.
After the chats with the consumers, we distilled insights from all the quotes and ideas in “synthesis sessions”. They often led to solid and understandable common sense strategies. A CEO of a bank once said: “These are just like my own thoughts but written better”.
When we reach out to people for help, inspiration and ideas, it doesn’t mean we’re handing over the steering wheel. Both agencies and companies still need strong decision makers. Informed decision making just makes more sense. Especially when it comes to love affairs. Why give tulips to someone who likes lilies?
In this case, love is not just a two-way thing. It’s a threesome between people buying the products, marketers and product makers.
To understand product making, imagine a diagram. I’ve borrowed it from the guys we hired from IDEO. Can you see the classic three circles that all overlap each other? A successful product needs to be a) technically feasible, b) financially viable and c) desirable!
These days, everybody is so aware of financial realities that we can skip viability for now. Technical feasibility is traditionally the job of R&D guys and engineers. Desirability is often left to marketers alone.
Once, a Marketing Director briefed me by showing a comic strip that said: “Now, do the trick called marketing!” He basically outsourced desirability.
Designers think about both desirability and feasibility. Sometimes they are also great marketers, but more often not. Regardless of how good they are, they should always be involved.
Together the whole gang should go to meet the people who use their products. We gathered the troops to understand where the music business is going to sell beer. We also did it to develop an alternative to beer … and for beef. We explored the category boundaries of a fishing brand while pitching for it. We found out that a design brand was mostly bought as a gift. And we built the whole marketing strategy of an operator around ‘recommending’ because they had the happiest customers.
What happens during this processed chatter is as important as the outcome. The whole gang gets shared understanding of the consumer; they start to share empathy. What do people need? What do they think about us? Why is that student girl our fan?
Companies are not empathic by nature. They’re companies. You need that process and shared principles to become empathic. This leads us to the last motto of the day. “Implementing empathy” was kind of the “Intel inside” slogan for us. Without empathy there is no love.
The above was taken from the “Creativity” section of our latest book, Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief: Advertising’s Next Generation, which features chapters from 35 leading creative directors and business owners giving their views on the big topics shaping the future of advertising and brands.
