Results for articles with tag 'eatingbigfish' (2 total)
02/25/2009 11:59:06 AM 
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(1) 3. How many of the challenger brands you first wrote about have survived- what have been the notable failures and do you have any reasons why?
A number of the challengers I wrote about in the first edition have plateaued – Saturn, most famously – and some have simply dropped away (Goldfish, Tango). Others, interestingly, have faded and now resprung, like the Cooperative bank in the UK.
There are a number of reasons challengers can fade, but it is usually to do with one of four things. First, they fail to recognize that they need to change to stay the same. The book I want to write after the next one (about Innovation) is about The Trajectory of Desire: why it is that we love something or someone, and that sometimes that love, that desire is maintained, and sometimes it falls away. In most brands cases, unless they are aligned to a higher cause or ideal in some way, our initial attraction fades quite quickly to complacent acceptance. We like new. And if we don’t get it from that brand, we’ll get it from something or someone else. We have to change to keep the same meaning and strength of affinity. Keep to our core beliefs and values, but change the way we express and engage people with them.
Second, People: the people change (and of course it is people and teams that create great brands, above all), and the people that follow those that made the brand great understand how to maintain what they have been given, but not how to refresh and renew. Which brings us back to the first reason for fading again.
Third, the support from the top changes (if they are part of a large organization). This was a key part of the issue with Saturn by all accounts, and one of the reasons there was an absence of new products to deliver the kind of news and excitement the brand needed to maintain momentum. Look at what has happened to Orange now. It is not just that they have failed to understand Orange as a brand – they just don’t appear to understand how to build a brand at all, let alone a challenger.
Fourth, they lose Thought Leadership to a newer challenger themselves. They allow someone else, a newer challenger, to start to redefine the category agenda against them. Financial people come in and question why they are doing some of the pieces of Thought Leadership they have been doing, when the formal financial justification for it doesn’t seem to be there, and they start to cut away those aspects of the way the brand used to behave that created the word of mouth and perceived momentum they enjoyed on the way up.
4. A lot has changed in the marketing landscape in 10 years, has this made it easier or harder to be a challenger brand?
This is one of the tensions in the second edition. On the one hand, it is tempting to say that everything has changed. Certainly, we are not short of key figures who have said that ‘the old marketing model is dead’ – without anyone having the ability to put a new one in its place, of course. Conversely, what I think people haven’t spent enough time on is how much stays the same. If you look at a new generation of challenger brands, the principles outlined in the book ten years ago still very much hold. The ways in which those brands choose to express them have evolved, but if it is a journey without maps, we do at least have some principles we should still be following. Different, but the same.
The glib answer to the question about whether it is easier or harder is that Web 2.0 should of course in principle make it easier to create publicity and ripples of conversation (Quiksilver Dynamite Surfer), find and build communities around you, and deepen relationships quickly with those that are drawn to what you stand for. And clearly we have a whole new toolbox in terms of the value we can offer customers.
On the other hand, it is going to be harder than ever to be just another brand in the middle tier- what Wal-Mart calls ‘the mush in the middle’. And I am very interested in some of the stuff that has been written recently about ecosystems- how once a brand has become market leader in a category and created a Kindle/ Amazon, iPod/iTunes it is very hard for a challenger to break into that taking on a brand or a product is one thing. Trying to replace an established, Market Leading, self reinforcing ecosystem with another is an entirely different scale of challenger problem,
5. How much do the rise of new demographics have to do with the rise of challengers? (people want brands to reflect them vs. their parents)
It is more interesting to explore being a little contrarian about this, I think. One of the myths about challengers is that they are automatically connected with rebellion. That in archetypal terms they are always ‘the Outlaw’. One of the areas I have tried to explore a little in the book is whether this is in fact true – there was a whole chapter on this which ended up being cut for space reasons, but is available as a download from the site. In it, I look at 12 types of challenger brands – which includes, of course, brands that are self consciously Irreverent Maverick (Red Bull) or Next Generation Brands (Virgin initially, Pepsi at its best) but also other kinds of challengers, whose appeal does not lie in this at all. Game Changers, like method. Missionaries, like Dove. Enlightened Zaggers, like Unilever’s ‘Dirt is Good’ brand. Small and Human challengers, like innocent, or Stoneyfield Farms. These challengers are not about generation against generation. They are challenging different kinds of qualities about the world and the existing category. That is the exciting thing about the new group of challengers – they illustrate the breadth of options that a would-be challenger does in fact have open to them.
6. Do you feel given that now much more importance placed on product performance that getting the product right matters more than the communication?
My old boss, Claude Bonnange (the B of TBWA) used to say ‘The Brand Promises, the Product Delivers’.
All marketing thinking tends to have something of a pendulum swing from one side to another over time. When I was researching the first edition of the book at the back end of the 90s, everyone on the agency side, and a lot of packaged goods marketers, told me ‘product is dead’. All product was the same, they said – now it’s all about the emotional connection with the brand.
Over the last ten years there is clearly a resurgence of ‘product’. It has evolved of course – it is not just about ‘working better’ any more; it is as likely to be about being beautiful (Apple), being startlingly useful (Google), being true to what you say you are and believe in (Patagonia), or giving you a platform of participation to express yourself with other people like you (Scion). And clearly there is an emphasis on getting the product right first. Yet I think that this has always actually been true for real challengers. In 1997 Jim Jannard of Oakley said in my interview with him ‘Product Obsession is Primary’. He might not have been changing his algorithm 400 times a year, but he genuinely was obsessed with a better quality, better designed product than anyone had ever seen before. And I also think that while there are brands whose product strength is such that they don’t need to communicate in mass market terms to be successful (Zara, Costco, Google), there are plenty of examples which show that brilliant communication has as great a power as ever it has before. Look at Mini, for example. Or Burger King. Brilliant examples of the power of communications to build more powerful relationships with a good product.
7. What has happened to The Challenger Project?
The Challenger Project is the research study into challengers that all of us in eatbigfish have been doing for the last 10 years – the interviews for the second book were shared among us. One of the things that frustrated me about Agency life was that agencies never committed to R&D. And you could argue that they paid the price for it as other kinds of business partner like Management Consultants usurped their authority with clients. So we are very committed to the time and expense of our own kind of R&D. But there are a number of exciting developments to The Challenger Project that we are only just really leaning into.
For the second edition of ETBF, we filmed about 35 of the interviews, so have some really good quality, in depth material there – we are creating a whole e-learning (terrible word, but there isn’t a better one) capability there, with tools and exercises, which looks wonderful . We are turning East a little more (and not before bloody time) in the project, and doing some fascinating interviews there. And I am very excited by the possibility of a quantitative analysis of challengers and how they succeed. Peter Field, who helped us start eatbigfish, and recently has written two very important books (Marketing in the Era of Accountability with Les Binet, and Brand Immortality with Hamish Pringle) on the basis of his work analyzing the IPA databank, and now the Effies, thinks it would be possible to analyse the same data in terms of challengers as a sub sample, and then compare them to Market Leaders. That would be fascinating. It is just a very expensive piece of work to do, because of the time involved in reworking and analyzing the data. We’d better start saving up.
Posted by Ed Cotton
02/24/2009 02:42:05 PM
The book is now 10 years old, thankfully there's an updated second edition that comes out tomorrow.
Adam was kind enough to answer a few of my questions in a great amount of detail that reveal some interesting insights into his background and the genesis of the book.
Here's Part One of a two part interview.
1. Can you tell us a little about your background?
In my last year at University I did a summer job in the men’s underwear department at Harrods. It was interesting for two reasons. One was I managed to sell 1,200 pairs of Zegna men’s silk boxers, mostly to women who appeared to have no idea what their husband’s girth was. And the second was I started going out with a woman in the tartan department whose dad, it turned out, was in advertising. He was frighteningly impressive, particularly over a breakfast table, and I’d always hankered to be casually intimidating, so applied for a few agencies.
I was part of the graduate trainee intake at BMP in London (now part of DDB) in 1982. I started out in fact as the worst account handler in the history of advertising. I switched to planning after 18 months, and loved it. in those days planning at BMP was heavily involved in strategy and advertising development research, so you were very, very close to your consumer – I did 105 groups with beer and spirits drinkers in my first year alone, mostly (as I selectively remember it) in skittle alleys in the windowless basements of Welsh working men’s clubs. It was a great experience. Perhaps more to the point I got to work at a very early stage with John Webster, one of the four or five greatest creative talents in the history of British advertising. Very challenging, hugely rewarding.
After four years I left to join a small, punchy agency called Still Price Court Twivy S’Souza, because I loved the energy and small size of the place. I was the 33rd person to join. They had a great run for a few years, and were then acquired by IPG and merged with Lintas. We were the first ‘log on the Lintas fire’ as Frank Lowe went on to describe it later. We were very naive, in retrospect. We thought we could go in to a large company like Lintas with long-established client relationships and just turn the quality of thinking and work around in about six months, and in reality of course many of the clients didn’t want that at all. We had some great talent – the planners I worked with then were for the most part astonishingly good – but never quite managed to produce the creative work to turn it around.
I became very disillusioned with advertising, and rather fell out with the CEO, and by chance was rung up about a job at Planning Director at Chiat Day in LA, and flew out for an interview. I fell in love with it almost immediately – with its mythology, with the Gehry building (how can you say no to a three storey pair of binoculars?), with the charisma and ideas of Lee Clow, Bob Kuperman, Jane, Newman and Jay Chiat, and frankly with the idea of having part of Jay’s art collection – a Stella or a Rauschenberg – right in the middle of one’s working environment. But I wasn’t sure the creative department really wanted planning, so hesitated for about five months before making the jump.
When I arrived in August, the brief there was to rebuild planning, take one’s time do it properly. And then about two weeks later we lost Reebok in NY, and the brief changed to something rather pithier and immediate: ‘Pitch’. I imagine there will be a lot of planning directors who will be familiar with that situation. So we pitched, and lost the first two, and then we just started winning. We had Lee and Kupe in the room on most pitches, and they had the ability to turn a room on the day. Every agency needs one of those people, and we had two. For the next couple of years we were more or less unstoppable – I think we only lost one pitch in LA over that time, and in fact twice had to stop pitching for several months to bed down the business we had won. And the planners I was working with unearthed some great new talent they brought into the agency – Rob Klingensmith, Bonnie Wan, Mia von Sadowsky. A really exciting new generation of thinkers underneath us all.
It was a very inspiring environment. Jay and Lee created a sense of possibility around thinking and ideas that has stayed with me every since.
2. What was the original inspiration behind Eating The Big Fish?
After a few years there, Omnicom bought us and we were internationally merged with TBWA. The inspiration for writing the book came from a new business credentials deck that the European New Business Director of TBWA , a very smart woman called Kate Marber, shared with me while I was still in LA. On page three of the deck was the statement ‘We specialize in challenger brands’. It was the first fresh thing I had seen in a creds deck for years. I leant forward- couldn’t wait to see what was coming next. But as it turned out there wasn’t another reference to challengers again.
I said at the end to Kate that I had been very struck by that idea, which was true for both TBWA and Chiat/ Day, and we talked about it. I said I thought there was a much bigger idea in there to be played out in more detail and substance; she agreed. And we went away to think about it.
Developing the thinking took a while. I presented a prototype of the principles outlined in the book, in the form of five credos (rather than the eventual eight) as part of a pitch to Montgomery Ward, which we lost. I had been working with some of the LA planners on a presentation called ‘Creativity as a Business Tool’ and a lot of the upfront analysis was great for the front end of the book. Kate did some work on it in Europe with David Wright. And we had a very good two day session with a lot of the TBWA planners talking about challengers. Yet the real imperative was for two things: first, some primary research with important and influential challengers, and second to move more deliberately beyond advertising as the ‘solution’. Of course a strong idea and creative breakthrough would be an important element of it, but it was clear that the way challengers broke through was in considerable part about what they did before they even thought about communications, and we didn’t really know enough about that.
As it happened, I was going through a phase of taking a sabbatical every five years to try to write novels, and had a six month sabbatical coming up, so I decided to use it to research and write a business book instead, about challenger brands. I reckoned (wrongly, as it turned out) that if I was published in business it would be easier to get published in fiction. And the agency management said they would support the challenger idea being the broader agency positioning when I returned there after my sabbatical. And so off I went: I identified 50 challengers I wanted to talk to, from Cirque du Soleil to Fox to Goldfish, a group of whom the agency had worked with or still did, and started the research and writing.
In fact, while I had a great sabbatical, it didn’t go well after that for a long time. By the time I came back to work six months later, I had only half finished the book. My wife and I had bought a large house in London, which needed gutting and completely redoing and so I was writing in brick dust in the evenings and weekends, spending too little time with my young family and a lot of time - three days a week - in Amsterdam on Nissan and Apple. It was a very, very painful process; took me about a year more to actually finish it. As it happened, when I finally finished the book, the Global Agency Management didn’t want the positioning anymore – they felt it was restrictive, and would limit them from pitching for market leaders. And to make matters more interesting they asked me to lead to a team to come up with a different positioning altogether.
I am an easy going bloke, but for a long time I was very angry about this. To put eighteen months of your life into making something, and then to have it very casually ignored was something I found very hard to take. Even by the time Ieft, only three of the six key players had had the courtesy (I can’t think of a better word) to sit through the presentation about challengers that came out of the book. Only Alasdair, my European boss, was really supportive, so for a while we used it as the positioning for Europe, with the exception of London. And then we merged with BBDP in Europe, and Jean-Marie Dru took the helm, and it was clear that if I wanted to pursue the ideas in the book I would need to leave. He obviously had a fierce philosophy and book of his own – Disruption – and no agency needs more than one good philosophy. Jean-Marie in his own way was very supportive too, and allowed me to leave the agency with the rights to the thinking and the book (note to agency authors: check your contract as to whom owns what), on my own terms. I left a month before the book came out, and started eatbigfish with four friends.
Articles for tag eatingbigfish (2 total).