Talkable Work Strategy 1: Make New Rules

Here at the agency, we’re formalizing a strategic tool to ensure our work creates conversation.  The kind of conversation that makes it easier for brands to earn trust and advocacy from consumers once they’re customers.  In my last post, I outlined how most advertising is designed to grab attention, but often sets brands up for failure by overblowing claims and preying upon consumers’ fear, guilt, pride, worry or doubt. We developed/researched 8 strategies for creating talkable work. Here’s the first of 8 strategies:

#1 Make New Rules

Sometimes you have to change the game.  Steve Knox elloquently frames it up in the psychological construct of disrupting schema. Jean-Marie Dru and TBWA called it Disruption: Overturning conventions and shaking up the marketplace.  The popular book Blue Ocean Strategy outlines many principles for making new rules.

Changing the rules is bold.  It takes a bold new marketing approach, and sometimes, a bold new product/service. When are brands bold?  When they’re about to die, when they’re challenging larger brands, or when they’re entering a category that has remained unchanged for a long time.  But changing the rules isn’t just about being wild, crazy or unexpected.  It’s a calculated decision and is often the only path to conversation-worthy work.  In a crowded market with steep competition, making new rules is often the only way to succeed.

But, how? Here are two approaches:

A) Create a new space.  This is often rooted in a truly different approach to communicating.  One that goes against the grain of existing options. The key is to be original and go away from the competition.  Do something that has never been done before.

Examples:

Best Buy Twelpforce: Turned their associates into a business-changing digital connection.

Truth Campaign: Gave the anti-cigarette message something it had never had before: an enemy in big tobacco.

My Starbucks Idea: A first for them and their industry; an unprecedented listening-to-action effort

NOTE: This approach takes courage.  It also requires brands to take a step back and question the conventions of marketing in their category.  You have to adopt the “find-a-way mindset” in order to do new and meaningful things.

B) Break a convention.  The key is finding an existing convention and shattering it.  Identify the existing psychological understanding that people use to make decisions in the category.  Most often, they’re not thinking about their choice, rather they’re deciding based on some gut understanding or established idea.

Examples: 

Axe: Before, deodorant was something that made men not stink.  Axe made deodorant something that makes men impossibly attractive.

Jack in the Box: An unwritten rule of having a spokesperson: don’t kill him.  They killed him.

Hyundai Assurance: Warranties abound, so they created a return policy focused on the consumer called Buyer Protection.

Lincoln Financial Group: Instead of a “retirement calculator” based on a ficitious future number, they made the future personal, helping people plan through real-life events. (Disclaimer: client of 22squared).

NOTE: This approach takes insight. It requires brands to find a convention and break it, to identify a schema and alter it.

 Of course, Making New Rules isn’t the only path to talkable work.  Stay tuned for 7 other proven strategies.

Many thanks to David Yeend and Anna Lipmann for their thinking and research.