Jack Neary, Chief Creative Officer, and Jay Bertram, President of TBWA\ discuss Nissan Juke and the importance of brand belief and brand behaviour. They also share their views on how to get into the advertising business during an interview with Tom Ritchie of AdBuzz Canada
As you’ll see, the firm’s principals enjoy a great rapport that lends itself to the strong agency culture described here.
AdAge today called Apple “Marketer of the Decade.” The list of reasons why our client earned this significant award is long, but one highlight is worth repeating: “Apple’s TV spots from the past decade are like a hit parade of the most memorable ads.”
And why are these ads so memorable? Because, “brands must resonate emotionally across media.” This quote comes from a timely Lee Clow interview that appears on the MAD blog. Lee is Global Creative Director Media Arts, TBWA\Worldwide and a key contributor to Apple’s marketing successes.
As he puts it, “Finding the disruptive idea for a brand, which usually comes out of its emotional centre, and which we call the ´brand belief`, is the first step to creating a powerful multimedia brand.”
Judging by AdAge’s Marketer of the Decade award, Apple, and TBWA, knows how to emotionally connect brands with customers.
At TBWA we look at brand belief and brand behaviour to help develop insights for our clients. Does the brand belief drive brand behaviour and ultimately, does that belief effectively convey why anyone should believe in a company and its products? It’s not about what the new product is, it’s about the belief in why the product exists and why it should matter.
The business advantage is clear. Just look at our client, Apple, which doesn’t focus on what its products do but instead focuses on the brand belief and behaviour. To paraphrase Simon Sinek who uses Apple, and Martin Luther King, as an example of inspirational leadership: Apple is exceptionally successful because as a brand it believes in challenging the status quo in everything it does and it believes in thinking differently. This brand belief drives brand behaviour that includes making beautifully designed products that are simple to use.
As you’ll see in this interesting TED Talks, it’s the “Why” that inspires.
Over the years I have been embroiled in many discussions about brand ambassadors. You know, the high-volume heavy-user consumer that Clients dream about – so passionate about their bathroom tissue that they will leave their kids standing in the rain at the bus stop so they can cross eight lanes of busy traffic to let an unsuspecting stranger know that their brand of TP can transform a run of the mill dump into BM euphoria. And the best part of it all – they will do it for FREE! Sounds good right?
But what happens when you can’t hand pick the “loyal user” that starts representing your brand on their own, or more importantly how they represent it?
Let me tell you a story…. picture it, Pearson Airport one blistery winter morning, waiting for a charter flight to the Dominican Republic. I’m traveling with my friend Kristen for a much deserved break, and we find ourselves sitting in the airport bar having a Mimosa and judging the people we are about to be trapped with for the five-hour journey south.
Like a gift from God, they arrived (in retrospect, God seemed to be taking the sport out of our cattiness, but I digress). We couldn’t help but notice the four women who walked into the bar area, mostly because they screamed at the top of their lungs “We’re going to Punta Cana!” over and over again. Each was as lovely as the next: big Aqua-Net hair, no bras, hot pants that were certainly not hot, bedazzled tank tops, and…wait for it….real Cougar tattoos on their arms. All four. No joke.
Trouble quickly ensued. Once we all got seated on the plane they started drinking. The funny thing was that the in-flight bar service hadn’t started yet. They got rowdier and rowdier, cowing for all to hear “ We’re Cougars!” with the requisite, shrill “Wooo” to punctuate their proclamation. The only thing that kept Kristen and I sane was the comfort in knowing that we would soon be rid of them. We would land, they would go to their resort, and we would go to ours.
Curiously when we did arrive in Punta Cana they got on the same bus as us. Surely they would get off at a different resort, right? As the bus made its milk run and disgorged pasty white Canadians in the series of disproportionately large tropical lobbies we encountered on our route, they remained. Fate is indeed a bitch. The last stop was ours and we found ourselves standing next to four slurring Cougars at the check-in desk. Good times.
So you are wondering where in the world I am going with this story. Patience, it’s coming. It’s day two and we are ready for the beach. Kristen and I are looking great, bags full of books and trashy mags, and we head to the shore. We plant ourselves strategically away from other people yet mere steps from the service area of the beach bar. All is good and right in the world. We started chatting about the Cougars and decided to name them so we could keep track. A stray beach dog happened to stroll past and we were inspired – from then on the ringleader was referred to as Mange, with Minge, The Hump, and The Hanger-On rounding out the group. “Ha ha ha,” we thought. “We are so clever.”
As we basked in our smugness, some obscure shapes began looming from down the beach. They got closer and closer, louder and louder, until the proximity alert began to scream inside our heads. Mange and the gang decided to plant themselves right next to us. Again I say, good times.
As they unpacked and got settled it was very clear to us they were ready to par-tay. With towels down and g-strings revealed, it was time to go to the bar. And that’s when our Cougars transformed themselves into ambassadors. They each reached into their beach bags to retrieve the secret to their success – oversized Tim Horton’s thermal mugs. Bright, new, and high-capacity pieces of Canadiana perfect for a weeklong Margarita marathon.
From there on in, those mugs didn’t leave their hands. When we found Minge passed out on the lawn topless after falling through a hedge, Tim’s was there. When Mange took her top off in the dining room because it was chafing her sunburn, Tim’s was there. When they decided to go on stage to sing their garbled interpretation of “It’s Raining Men” at the resort talent show, Tim’s was there. All week they proudly thrust their Tim Horton’s thermal mugs at anyone who couldn’t run away, while espousing the wisdom of “bringing your own” to an all-inclusive 5 star resort.
So this brings us back to the debate – Were Mange and the gang self-appointed “brand ambassadors” or did they function more like Typhoid Maries? They were passionate and proud believers in the brand, they kept it with them at all times, they exposed it and tried to sell it to both new consumers & lapsed users, and they even extended its presence into non-traditional uses and environments. But did their behaviour rub off on the brand in a negative way? Did it contaminate the brand’s equity and potentially alienate consumers?
What do you think?
Wow. Ralph Macchio never kicked that high.
Hollywood always seems to have a shotgun approach when making movies. Produce as many of the same type of movies as you can, for a window of time, to appeal to the peak of a core audience’s interest and then see what breaks box office records and what will inevitably be abject failures.
We saw it in teen angst, war epics, disaster films — natural and unnatural, slasher flicks, comic book adaptations and action movies. Usually, these trends stem from specific genres, having had an initial successful standard bearer and everyone else trying to catch the new wave. This time around, Hollywood decided to focus on a specific time period, one that had every genre listed above. The plan is to update them, stylize them for a new time, and hopefully cash in on the nostalgia.
In the upcoming months, for those of you reminiscing about the good old 80s when big hair and bigger shoulder pads took the world by storm, we find ourselves in the midst of reliving this decade. Most notably in the box office as this summer season and the next one to follow, ushers in remakes and updates that will most likely resemble little of the 80s at all.
Re-imaginings of Clash of the Titans, the A-Team, Karate Kid, Nightmare on Elm Street and Tron are set to be released this year as directors are encouraged (if not eager) to work on the same projects that they grew up watching only a few decades ago.
And these are only remakes. There are further examples of an homage to 80s filmmaking, as popular action stars from the decade (eg. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren) team up for an old-style action movie called the Expendables. Michael Douglas has a new prodigy when he comes back as Gordon Gekko in a sequel to Wall Street. And finally, a new team is being hunted in Predators – which screenwriter and producer Robert Rodriguez stipulates is only a sequel to the first Predator released in 1987, ignoring the rest in the franchise.
This growing trend isn’t losing steam as remakes to Commando, Red Dawn, The Evil Dead, Conan the Barbarian, along with many more, continue to move into preproduction as part of the production schedule for the upcoming years.
So, as the summer comes and goes and moviegoers flock to their local multi-plexes, they’ll most likely be an accurate barometer that will determine the longevity and sustainability of this 80’s trend.