David Taylor has written quite a few books about brand marketing - brand gym and brand vision to name a couple.
Those other two books are worthy guides to brand marketing, full of bullet points, ten-point guides and other stuff that you can copy into presentations.
But 'never mind the sizzle...' is a much nicer read. It's told as fiction - a story of a guy from sales on a year placement in marketing at a flailing UK company who make sausages.
Bob (our hero) discovers the marketing team developing a product extension (pizzas with sausage on top), wasting time and money with an expensive ad agency. Brand diamonds, meaningless focus groups, media stunts, celebrities, over-the-top ad shoots and a ridiculous tag-line prevail....
But Bob sees the value in their core brand, reigniting it with solid research, genuine insight, and connecting to real people. Oh, and he gets a great job done by a hungry small design agency with no fat expense account.
It's an obvious story where Bob saves the day, the marketing director loses the plot and the ad agency drown in champagne at their soho members club.
But entertaining and strangely instructive nonetheless.
And to be honest, it's a valuable reminder to all of us in ad-land to take a step back on what we're doing and think about how absurd it all is. And that we really are meant to providing a service to people...
Rather sadly, I give you two recent examples....
- My girlfriend works at an agency who have a large mobile phone handset company as a client. She was in a focus group the other day where people asked after about 1/2 hour -
'can you actually use it as a phone?'
- I sat in a meeting last week where we (yes, I'm complicit in this one), honestly recommended 'getting cool people to create art that symbolises the product'.
No comments:
Post a Comment