billington cartmell. the thinking brands agency

About the Author

Dan Machen

When you look back on various exams you faced over the years, there was one thing that was always delivered with unerring excellence. Something you can look back on and think, 'I really nailed that' (in all its colour-coded glory).

I refer of course to the revision timetable.

Now there is no doubt that proper planning is essential, (I'm not after a P45.) But it is also a question of balance. So often, marketers and agencies are guilty of spending so long worshipping at the perfect brand pyramid / onion / temple, that we leave precious little time for crux of what we should be doing - identifying distinct brand activation spaces and creating powerful communications ideas that inspire consumers to buy into our brand.

What is needed is a fundamental change in emphasis from what we, (as custodians of a brand), want consumers to do, to looking long and hard at what really motivates consumers. Thereby creating genuinely insightful activation space and consequently communications that really matter to consumers (in the context of real lives).

'We Make Brands Matter' is how we sum this up at Billington Cartmell. For us, it is about giving greater focus on discovering an enduring, ownable and valuable connection between brand values and consumers. This is made all the more imperative by increasingly hectic lifestyles and particularly by the revolutionary changes in communications channels. The rise and rise of digital communication gives consumers and marketeers an unprecedented number of channels and choices to communicate via - each with their own unique opportunities and pitfalls. Brands which get top marks, are no longer always about a rote 'matching luggage' answer fired off down the same old channels.

Rather, today's marketplace requires an approach that is sensitive to more consumer choice and greater potential to ignore anodyne messaging. This increasingly necessitates planning that strives to reach genuinely ownable activation spaces that define new culture, rather than follow it. (Don't surf a trend, create a tide).

'We Make Brands Matter' puts meaningful focus on the consumer and exploitation of new channels. But the emphasis is on meaningful. Many brands flag plant on Youtube, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, but we must ask ourselves what value does the brand add to the channel and vice versa? If the answer is nothing, then you can expect a pretty robust, negative reaction. (Skittles placing its entire digital presence on Twitter without adding to user experience, was ignominiously greeted by this punchy one word tweet - "Shittles".)

We've all 'eaten the Big Fish' and 'tried the Purple Cow' - but again isn't this just more language to reassure us how clever we are? There are great principles in both books, but let's not make them our master - the consumer should be. As David Ogilvy so perfectly cautioned, "We sell...or else" and more often than not, brilliantly simple ideas sell best. Our ambition increasingly is to couch communications ideas in simple language that gives the brand and agency team a crystal clear understanding of the brand activation space and critically how that space connects with consumers. After all, if the idea's hard for us to rally behind, we won't stand a chance with consumers.

So planning is paramount, but to be successful in today's marketplace, agencies and brand partners need a philosophical shift that recognises and respects the changed nature of consumers and communications. Keep it simple, make it uniquely salient and sell. It's that simple. In the final analysis, we can have the cleverest revision timetable in the world, but it doesn't matter, if our output fails to impress our chief examiner: the 21^st Century consumer.