Interesting Times’ Ashraf Mansour explains why the sensible option is not always the answer
I have a confession. From the moment I began following the US Republican primary campaign I wanted Donald Trump to win. Now, before you turn the page in disgust, I assure you I do not agree with his political views or his behaviour. I simply had a point to prove.
When I spoke to people in our industry about the primary I asked them to make a decision based on the candidates’ campaigns. Donald Trump’s campaign can be described as ‘interesting’, while his competitors’ campaigns revolved around ideas that were both true to the GOP brand and the 55 million Republicans that the candidate was to represent.
But in a way it all boils down to a single question: what’s more important? ‘Interesting’ or ‘right’? Nearly all of our colleagues that I spoke to said that being ‘right’ is more important. And it’s that response that inspired me to write this article, because, unlike the marketers
I spoke with, I think that our industry could learn a lot from the
Trump campaign.
The first lesson is that interesting is much more important than right. I am not advocating for brands to lie, but rather I want to challenge them to choose the quality of interesting over being sensible or thoughtful.
When the Cadbury Gorilla was launched, I was in London attending a meeting full of marketing and advertising’s most highly acclaimed professionals. One of those professionals shared the advert with us and everyone, myself included, trashed it. We deplored its lack of branding, comprehension and relevance. It was destined for failure. Of course, earlier this year, Cadbury’s Gorilla was voted “the best British advert of all time”. Not by marketers, but by viewers. The ad contributed to a double-digit growth for Cadbury’s confectioneries. It was interesting.
Or what about the way we market food? Campaign after campaign, we’ve been taught to never utter a bad word about our product or to even be particularly honest. Each bite must trigger euphoria, a gastronomic orgasm. That is until Marmite told us that it’s OK to hate their product and Pot Noodle audaciously declared that “it’s dirty and you want it”. Both of these incredibly successful campaigns told the truth. They were not afraid to polarise or even alienate people. They, like Trump, understood that you don’t need to be liked by everyone, only loved by some. In the fight to win some people’s hearts, you’re going to need to step on others’ toes. Donald Trump insulted the Pope. Advertising has a lot of catching up to do.
But why is it so hard for brands and marketers to do something brave? Because we’re too often guilty of thinking more like economists than advertisers. In classical economics all decisions were based on reason and legacy. The flaw being that human behaviour isn’t always reasonable. Often that behaviour is emotional. And we can’t predict emotions like we can predict numbers. Donald Trump does not merely play to our emotions; he plays to our most powerful emotions. Unlike his fellow republican nominees, Trump dares to constantly be interesting.
A few years ago at Cannes, BBH’s John Hegarty told his fellow advertisers that no matter how much they believed otherwise, marketing is more art than science. Our “scientific” approach to marketing results in boring, tedious work. One only has to look at the proliferation of ad blockers to understand the public’s detest for the work we create. Yet the main problem with our pseudo-scientific approach is that we are not scientists. Sorry to break the news to you.
Of course that’s not to say there is no role for science in marketing, but rather that the industry is not yet structured in a way to embrace recent advances in the behavioural sciences. Again, it’s all our fault.
You see we are an industry stricken with denial. Day-to-day conversations are littered with buzzwords: big data, engagement rates, CRM, loyalty. But somewhere along the way we began to neglect the very basic premise of how communication really works. Don’t forget that after you rifle through all the data that you’ve obtained through your prestigious CSR platform you’re still going to need to speak to your consumer.
Cornell University recently published a bit of research into why business and marketing’s top executives say that they seek creativity (that is, the interesting), only to reject it when it is presented to them. The study found that creativity is new, it’s interesting. However, new and interesting make people feel uncertain and our brains hate uncertainty (CFOs I’m looking at you). They want clear projections, formulas and the full ins and outs. Business is designed to minimise risk. This is why, unless it is part of the company’s culture, brands do the most interesting work when they feel like they have nothing to lose.
Interestingly enough the study also likened a bias against creativity to feelings of racism, which of course brings us full circle. Now that’s not to say that Trump is a racist or that he is even in any way creative, but one thing is for sure: Donald Trump does not allow ideas of ‘right’ or ‘correctness’ stand in the way of being interesting. And that’s something that we can all learn from.
Ashraf Mansour – Founder and strategy director of Interesting Times
