Ockham’s Razour states that the simplest explanation of a strategy is the best or put another way the explanation that describes a phenomenum with the least number of assumptions is the superior. Although simple solutions are usually superior it does not mean that the simplest approach to solving a problem is the best and for this reason Ocham’s Razour is widely misinterpretted in the context of strategy.
Strategy planning should be comlpex, the deeper you look into something the more complicated the picture becomes and therefore to get to the root of a problem your strategy has to reflect the complexities of complex phenomena. The solution should be simple yes but the strategy engender thinking that encapsulates as many variables in the equation as possible.
Take Quantum Physics as an example. If you want to understand what is going on at the sub atomic level with a degree of accuracy you need to delve deeper into sub atomic particles where the mathematics becomes exponentially more complicated.If you didnt delve into greater detail like this you would not have a clear understanding of the elements at playand your solution would be lacking.
The same applies for strategic planning – the smaller details need to be acknowledged and the thinking kept complex. Simple thinking will not fully take stock of the complete picture of what is happening and so as in the above example any solution derived from it will also be lacking.
Often you’ll encounter the argument that online resources need to be organised over one centrally defined property like the companies website. Initially it makes sense, a brand to most people is a singular entity that is best off occupying one single space organised within one centrally controlled property but this assumption is fundementally flawed and worse out of touch with the way consumers interact with brands online.
A brand can be defined along the same lines as social psychologists define culture. A culture is defined as the sum total of all things that exist within or make reference to the culture from language to events, places and its people. There are literally thousands of singular elements that make the sum total for defining a culture. So to with a brand, the brand is the sum total of all things that bear resemblance and make reference to the brand and although some elements outweight others, it is not centrally defined and exists more in the minds of consumers than any central location.
Typically the motive for centralising content over one discreet property is driven by the CIO whose cost imperatives of having centrally controlled content management systems are decided on before marketing can even enter the debate (or know what to debate).
One of the most conspicuous aspects of the web is its fragmented nature and the fragmented way that people tend to consume content. Therefore it seems pragmatic to replicate this pattern by distrbuting and hosting branded content throughout a diverse range of locations.
Indeed a cultural idea or meme is percieved as having pervaded its way into a culture further (being stronger as a meme) if it is encountered over more sources rather than fewer. So in the interest of improving a brands standing and its penetration into a culture it is likewise pragmatic to ensure that it is encountered via many sources, the argument for multichannel campaigns.
Most brands see the need to have a presence on social media channels as a base covering exercise, we’ve ticked the Facebook box but the most valuable benefit of utilising social media channels to host branded content is to better replicate the natural fragmented pattern consumers follow when consuming content and reflect the naturally occuring incidence of a meme in a culture.
Whenever I encounter the ‘because you just do” response to something I immediately think its time to challenge the underlying assumptions for acting that way because there’s a good chance the landscape has shifted significantly to require a rethink . The other day a colleague of mine was asked to come back with a list of “why a company should have a website” and it got an interesting reaction from all within ear shot.
Most people laughed and said things like “everyone has one and so you just do” or the one I shared was that the “argument for having a site was such a long time ago that it was just assumed knowledge and almost didn’t require thinking about”. But I then thought that coming up with this list would actually be an interesting exercise because certainly many of the assumptions underlying the reasons of old were now obsolete because of changes to the digital landscape and content consumption habits.
So why does a brand need a website? Blogger Chris Heathcote recently asked in his post Peak Web have we reached peak web? in which inherently lies the question does every brand actually need a website?
The answer is of course “no” – a website fulfills a list of objectives for a brand but that doesn’t mean that a website is the only way to achieve those objectives.
Traditionally the reasons for having a website have been around having a destination to house company information and information about products and services so that a consumer has a place to find this info but if you were to look at the average traffic stats of all branded websites that number would be incredibly low and hardly seem worth the investment.
The proliferation of content and destinations on the web has meant that the overall value of content has gone down as a result of increased supply and therefore the overwhelming majority of brand website content would not be seen by users in significant enough volumes to warrant its existence.
Its best therefore for brands to execute web based campaigns and create content which is short lived to fit with consumer consumption behaviour of sporadic engagement over many channels as opposed to deeper engagement over a few.
Even progress in rich media executions has meant that click throughs from banners are no longer an imperative. Enough rich content can now be pushed through a banner execution to not even warrant a user going to the site for more information rendering the site obsolete and in many cases an unwanted detour.
Sure there’s lots of brands that need sites particularly ones that require more information by the consumer to make a decision but lets not just jump to the conclusion that a site is a default requirement in many cases a site is not entirely necessary and at the very least I expect 80% of website sub pages out there dont need to be.
[Here's an excellent example of agency Boone Oakley's abense of a website}
This is a follow on from the post “Social media as a guiding principle” which argued that if a brand wants to utilise social media properly it needs to have something worth talking about and if it doesn’t have something worth talking about it should create something.
Recently Proctor & Gamble used social media successfully to market its tampon product by creating a content driven social media portal. The results were very successful as Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research explains.
This is a great example of a brand creating meaningful content by looking to consumer issues peripheral to the product and its use. Its unclear if this campaign was extended to mainstream social media platforms particularly given the nature of the subject. But the ground work has now been laid by the brand to continue a meaningful dialogue with its consumer which is an excellent position to be in as it conveys a positioning of understanding the consumer and a willingness to offer experience above and beyond it’s product benefits.
This campaign fuses two of my favourite things: the clever utilisation of dead space and the debunking of misinformation. This campaign for The Reality Coalition by Crispin Porter + Bogusky achieves just that – it cleverly utilises the otherwise dead space of an error 404 page with a contextually related message via an OTP style banner placement.
Its clear to everyone now that brands can derive benefit from engaging in social media but the important thing for a marketing team to ask themselves before embarking is “have we got anything worth talking about?”
The hard thing about social media isn’t getting marketers to sit up and pay attention to it, they all want to know how to take advantage of all of the hype, its actually executing which is the difficult part and that’s because often times the brand doesn’t have anything really worth talking about over social media. Its a lot like the difference between someone on Twitter telling you what they had for lunch versus someone actually giving you information that benefits you somehow (which is the yardstick through which participants on the medium are generally judged). If a brand wants success on social media it needs to have something worth talking about otherwise like the guy sitting in his office with his ham salad sandwich no one will care about what the brand has to say on Twitter, Facebook or Youtube and their foray into social media marketing will be a waste of time.
Its very well established that a dialogue communication model is superior to the broadcast model so going full circle in the context of the depth of social media penetration if a brand doesnt have something worthwhile talking about then really this is an indication that their marketing is somewhat off compass in terms of creating dialogue strategies and they should look instead to recalibrating and directing their strategy towards something that will yield something worth talking about.
In fact I would go so far as to say that if a brand doesn’t have anything worth talking about on social media like Twitter then they should rethink their entire strategy and select thinking, initiatives and ideas that ARE worth talking about. In this way the guiding principle of deciding on which directions and ideas to promote is based around the notion of whether or not its something worth discussing with and between consumers on social media.
[I'm working on a diagram here to show how this can all fall into a cycle of planning, executing, sharing and evaluating so please wtach this space.]
Marketing and mass media have been awash recently with reports of social media and how brands will need to engage in social media strategies in order to stay relevant. Several articles have shown survey results of marketers indicating their intention to engage in social media strategies or that they see social media platforms as a necessary adjunct to their current activities. This is all positive and really something you’d expect given the magnitude of user engagement with social media but the lack of action from most brands risks relegating them to the background.
As with the notion of first to market advantage so to is the notion of first to channel advantage. Those brands which have the ability and smarts to act quickly and be one of the first to a new platform in the form of a campaign stand out from the crowd and are seen as innovative and keenly aware of their target consumer. This form of return then diminishes over time until the laggards are either seen as also rans or need to up the ante on the incentive for the user to engage in the campaign in order to strike an accord with their audience.
In the current climate of uncertainty there is an opportunity for brands which are able to understand new channels quickly and execute well over these channels to capture market share as most of their competitors retreat into more conservative strategies. There is obviously perceived risk in doing this as there will not be an abundance of case studies to support the effectiveness of relatively new channels but there is always risk the greatest being doing what you have always been doing while the rest of the world is changing around you [i.e lack of adaptability]. Marketers should adopt an entrepeunerial mindset whereby they are constantly on the lookout for new channels and new ways of engaging their audiences. This will yield big returns for those brave and clued up enough to act quickly and leverage this first to channel advantage.
I think its in Buddhism that they talk about the illusion of control – that as much as you think you have control of something its just an illusion. The current sentiment from many brands in response to social media participation is that they fear losing control of their brand by letting themselves go on social media like Twitter.
Brands can influence the idea of the brand through communications, advertising and PR etc but ultimately the idea of the brand isn’t its logo or latest ad campaign it exists in the mind of the consumer. So much of the control a company thinks it has over its brand is lost when it comes to peer to peer evaluations of brands and individual experiences with the brand.
In my opinion we really should be well past this point in the debate as it is now clear to most that pariticpation in a conversation about you is better than it happening behind your back when you aren’t there to defend yourself. So really it’s time that comapnies realised the best way forward is to let go of the idea of control of their brand and instead just focus on positively influencing consumer sentiment through every channel available to them.
I submitted an article to a company blog about this website over a year ago but it’s still one of my favorites and I wanted to have something about it on this blog.
If you look on www.thefwa.com these days the number of video background sites are too many to count but back when this site was launched it was one of very few. Its just so on brand, forget that a video background (don’t know of there is an actual name for these) site is a great way to sell clothing & footwear because it can sell an image, the skate industry has been generating branded content for decades which its target are very used to consuming and so electing to use this format was a good choice. The skate, surf and snowboarding industries were doing branded content decades before other brands had even heard of it and by using branded video content as the background to the website Vision have nailed it. Skaters sit around watching skate videos when they aren’t skating and they pick up on what the pro’s are riding and wearing, so duplicating that in the website itself was a great idea. If you click on the products section it wont just show an image of the shoe but someone wearing the shoe skating.
This is a great example of selling not on product attributes, you can hardly see the shoes in some of the footage but on brand attributes, emotional payoff and image. Its a cool way to show the shoes and that’s what counts – the emotional side it triggers. It makes me want to bust out my old Tony Hawk from the late 80’s and scuff my knees up.
Many of you would have seen the Reebok NFL Fantasy League viral video where a handful of NFL players perform super human feats of skill (see below) which has been hugely successful which I gauge through the fact that I have been sent it via about 4 different peer to peer channels which to me suggests its saturated my peer group at least. The use of cgi to create an effect where the skills in the video look super human but almost not (they are world class athletes after all) is a sneaky trick that results in very high levels of engagement and can be explained with basic 2nd year psych theory.
According to psychologists in the area of human information processing when we view an object or scene we do not process all of the information in front of us but rely on a bank of previous information which we attribute to something based on expectation. For example when you see a car your brain has hardwired into its neural network information about cars you have seen and experienced in the past. It then looks for the bits that are missing or new and processes those elements rather than processing the whole concept again, much in the same a proxy will cache information. This explains how anything new is more likely to be interesting to us because we are busily engaged trying to fill in the information gaps and form the concept. In the case of something like the NFL Fantasy League viral there is a more of a dissonance because unreal elements have been introduced into the mix which therefore means there is more of an information gap which requires filling and hence greater engagement in order to close that gap and form the concept in our brain.
This partly explains why a campaign like this is so engaging and so popular, not only is it cool and very well executed but this slight dissonance where you’re forced to some degree to ask the question, hang on is that for real? prompts a deeper level of engagement. In effect it opens up information processing channels and the message cuts through far more efficiently. There are surely other ways this kind of cognitive gap have been exploited even offline but with the success of this viral and a very similar one by EA Sports to promote Fifa Street we might just see a few more like it in the near future.
