THE FUTURE OF PLANNING
FOcUs
GLObAL bRANd
PLANNING
Emerging brand wisdom
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for value, rather than looking to create brands
Developing markets can teach us how to
that people want to spend time with. Figure 2
shows the result of grouping brand behaviour
engage with brands in ‘brand play’ as
across the globe into six different catego-
ries, from value-led messaging, to nostalgia,
an antidote to western brand-weariness
to optimism. It shows that, in the depths of
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recession, value-led messaging has been by far
the most common behaviour.
by Guy Murphy, JWT all the brands for any individual country and Planning has a job to do. We must labour
create the Time Metric, a score of how much against genericism as we continue to fear the
’m sure many planners have recently time people from each country want to spend consumer hunt for ‘value.’ More importantly,
I
wished they were working in a time with brands (see Figure 1). we must look to create enough difference and
gone by. A time when consumers were You can see that the scores vary wildly, fun in our brands to reverse the slide in devel-
easier to understand (and infl uence), the but you’ll also notice that there is a pattern. oped markets and avoid a slide in developing
media marketplace was simpler, there The countries that are brand enthusiastic tend markets, to a world in which no-one has any
were fewer markets to consider and clients to be from the developing world; the countries time for brands.
were more willing to give agencies power that are the least keen tend to be from the The current dominant marketing view is
over the breadth of their brand activities. developed world. This suggests there is a life- largely determining our approach to brands.
No doubt there is complexity now that our cycle for brands. The longer consumers have This is a view that sees consumers now-
forefathers didn’t face but, as Jeremy bullmore lived with brands, the less likely they are to adays as hugely sophisticated, marketing-savvy
so eloquently points out, it wasn’t as if people still love them. Perhaps people become tired of people. They are disloyal to brands, they are
‘back then’ would simply go out and buy a them, perhaps more interesting things emerge, cynical about brands and are empowered to
product on a charming advertisement’s say-so. and perhaps they begin to object to the notion take revenge on brands and companies that
We are in danger of fearing the situation we of brands. but in places where brands are a disappoint or deceive. consumers are dif-
think we’re in, leaving us peering myopically relatively new idea, they are still novel, exciting, fi cult, mutinous people who will all jump on
through our nostalgia-tinted spectacles. thrilling things. Facebook or Twitter if we get it wrong. In one
I want to take a step back and look at a of the key speeches at the MRs conference
serious, but largely unseen, threat to brands.
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LOOMING PRObLEM
in 2004, this sentiment was clearly expressed:
As planners, our role is to imagine new “cynical consumers are increasingly shrewd
futures for brands. I will argue that these If this is true, and it continues, then we are and articulate instinctive brand managers.
futures shouldn’t be imagined from within the facing a big problem in the future. Eventually, Their message is, by and large, simple: be more
fear of growing complexity and potential for people fall out of love with brands. Not only direct, be more honest, be more transparent,
error, but with a view to building brands that will western consumers’ enthusiasm drain do less and do it well.”
excite people. To do this, we should look to away completely, but we will see the consum- This results in a marketing culture cen-
planning across the globe, and start to actively ers from the developing markets follow suit. tred on ensuring that brands don’t get things
embrace elements of the developing markets’ All these scores are heading towards zero, at wrong. With more data and analytics coming
culture of brand-building. Theirs is an outlook which point nobody wants to spend time with from digital communication, we’re going to
that can help to liberate us, and is a reason brands anywhere. have yet more ability to measure, track and
for optimism. brands need to be original What’s more, this threat has been accel- tweak. but at the same time, there are grow-
and different; let’s look for originality and erated in the clutches of the global recession. ing layers of approval procedures, and longer
difference in a world of ‘brand play’. In response to a perceived heightened search timelines for getting anything done. It’s a logic-
I want to start by introducing a long-term for value by the consumer, more brands have al, linear and, dare I say it, sometimes joyless
challenge for brands and the role of planners. resorted to value-led messages. JWT’s Anxiety method of building brands. stephen King’s
Millward brown’s global brandZ survey gauges Index research has dubbed this ‘the genericis- description in Advertising: Art and Science still
brand enthusiasm by asking, for each of the ing of brands’. If the recession is a ‘reset but- rings true: “What you’re supposed to do is get
10,000 brands it looks at, whether it is a brand ton’, which could change consumer behaviour a lot of little bits, pat each one into shape and
that people would like to spend time with. for the long term, it looks like marketing is chuck them all into the hopper. Then, if all the
With that data, you can amalgamate results for leading consumers down the path of a hunt bits are all right, they will work through the
admap February 2010
ADM Feb 32-34
Murphy.indd 1 1/22/2010 15:50:24
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