there is a hero hiding in your brand

/MANUSCRIPT

GU ILL AUM E VAN DE R ST IGH EL E N /

P ROLO GUE

Somewhere in the early 1990s, there was a Hagar the Horrible cartoon in the newspaper. Hagar is sitting in the tavern with Robin Hood. He’s slumped over the bar, while Robin sits proudly. “It’s not fair,” Hagar moans. “You do just as much pillaging and ravaging as I do, but history sees you as the hero and me as the bad guy.” Robin knocks back his ale thoughtfully, and replies: “Maybe I’ve just got the better advertising agency.”

Robin’s answer got me thinking. And now look what’s happened.

C O NT E NT S

PART ONE: Brands and heroes 1. Where do heroes come from?

2. How do heroes live forever?

3. Can brands be heroes?

PART TWO: Welcome to history.

1. Game, name, fame, claim 2. The Know Why 3. It’s all in the name.

4. Recognition is power 5. The right words 6. You and the human race PART THREE: A commercial break 1. Market forces 2. Creativity as a biological phenomenon 3. Itallstartsheredotcom TONSILS Bullshit detector

PART ONE: BRANDS AND HEROES

C H AP TE R O N E

Where do heroes come from?

Every now and then, I find myself thinking about David.

David was, for want of a better word, brilliant. He didn’t sit at the front of the class.

He didn’t have a funny side parting. He didn’t put up his hand for every single question. He didn’t need to. The teacher asked him anyway. David was the star of the school. He had long hair. He carried his books in an old army surplus bag. He knew as much about Spock and Kirk as he did Virgil and Descartes. He could explain the universe. He could explain people. Or science, history, literature. Anything you could think of. His marks were off the chart. Other classmates nicked his reports from the pile, just to get a glimpse of what perfection looked like. “Finally, a decent one,” he’d joke, every time. Yes. David was even modest.

There was only one thing I never understood about him: why on earth he wanted to hang out with me. I too had broken school records. But they were mainly for detention and lessons missed. I was the pupil even the bad parents warned their children about. And his Dad was some kind of high-up civil servant. They lived next to the nature reserve.

And yet, there we were, spending the afternoons walking his dog through the dunes, with David telling me everything about every plant and animal on the way. There may have been a few signs that David wasn’t entirely perfect. He beat up his brother when he tried to practice piano. And he had trouble saying his r’s. But in my eyes, David was a Class A, Grade 1 star. A true, pure, natural born hero. If you think he sounds good on paper, you should have met him in reality.

I never found out what happened to David. Maybe he’s an astrophysics professor at Mumbai University. Or maybe I gave him 50 cents on the metro this morning without knowing it. Maybe he’s reading this book. Not that he’d believe it’s about him. Or that he’d be interesting in something as earthly as marketing or advertising. But if you are reading, David, here’s why your name came up. Nobody has ever understood branding better than you. You had a great story; you did everything perfectly. And you did it without making a point of doing it perfectly. Best of all were those rebellious locks of hair that hung, against the rules, over your blue eyes. You were proof that maybe, just maybe, even I could make it.

Heroes – some people call them idols – are a funny lot. They come in all shapes and sizes. They turn up all over society, in every class, in every industry. They have

exceptional gifts. They can be heroes to one person – my mum always called me her hero if I hung up the washing. Or they can be a hero to a whole nation. Michael Phelps. Paula Radcliff. Tia Hellebaut. Worship as appropriate. And then there are heroes for a whole generation – Nelson Mandela, for example. All heroes are different. Yet they are all heroes for the same reason: other people gave them hero status. In other words, it’s not their own actions that make them heroes. Their status comes from the need of a certain group of people to see them that way.

That need - that urge - to create heroes, is driven by two things. First, belief. At the end of the day, we’re only human and we have a hard time accepting our limits. We expect a lot of ourselves and each other. And those expectations aren’t often met.

That fuels the faith that there must be someone, somewhere who does live up to these expectations. See? There really is someone in this country who can win gold at the Olympics. There really is someone who knows what I feel and can express it in a song. There really is someone who can make the world’s leaders do something about global warming. There really is someone who has walked on the moon.

We all need to believe in a better world. Heroes may achieve the impossible. But it’s the fact they are still human beings that fuels our faith in them. They have to live with the same rules as the rest of us. They must face the same tests. The same limits. If they didn’t have anything to overcome, they wouldn’t be heroes. George Best had his drink problems. Elvis had his cheeseburgers. Clinton his cigars. The greatest challenge a hero ever has to face is himself. After all, firemen aren’t heroes because they’re born without the fear of heights. They become heroes by conquering that fear.

So a hero has to live up to two things. First, you need to do something that everyone’s hoping for, but doesn’t believe can happen. And then you need a human weakness that somehow you manage to overcome. You need to be living proof that the human race will never stop struggling against its limitations. And you must never, ever call yourself a hero.

Do that, and you’re there. Briefly. Man of the moment. Hero of the hour. Perhaps even a saver of a day. But what about the men and women who have stayed with us years, decades, centuries after their deaths?

That’s what fascinates me. The heroes who’ve carved an untouchable place for themselves in our collective memory. The Joan of Arcs. The Einsteins. The Chaplins.

The Disneys. The Mother Teresas. How did they manage to achieve immortality, while others - who perhaps did just as much, if not more – vanished without a trace?

Perhaps the system for creating heroes is the same as the system for recalling memories that Daniel Goleman describes in his book “Vital lies, simple truths: the

psychology of self-deception”. A drawer we rummage around in rather than search through. We don’t look in it to find anything. We look to find what we think we have to find. We often miss the things lying on top, and find, without any problem, things buried deep in the anarchy below. Add to that the fact that our brains are fundamentally conservative and lazy, happy to function at well below their full capacity, and it’s not hard to see why we’re so happy to shove everything into one drawer. A hero is a drawer. We take someone everybody knows, and credit them with all the heroic deeds we can think of until they’re too important to forget. Whether the hero really performed the deeds is beside the point. The story is all that counts. And casting the same guy over and over again for the leading role helps makes it palatable. In return, the ordinary guy gets to become a god.

It starts when we’re small.

You’re a small boy or girl. You’re late home from school. Again. On the way, you stopped by the canal to kick a ball around with some other kids. The ball went in the water. Someone went in to fish it out. And somehow everyone just lost track of time.

On the way home you think about the royal bollocking that awaits you. And about how you can talk your way out of it. You don’t really want to lie, because the truth always gets out in the end. So you just add some drama to the story.

So. You were racing home via the canal and some kids were playing with a ball and the ball went into the water and nobody could get it out and then this car stops and its Freddie, you know, that swimmer Freddie Deburghgraeve who won gold in Atlanta, Freddie himself and he gets out of the car, takes off his clothes and dives right in after the ball and then he plays a match with you all and then it was suddenly really late so you left without even asking for his autograph.

It’s not a complete lie. Ball goes in canal. Time is lost track of. You just fantasized a little bit in the interest of self-preservation. ‘Rudy from 3b’ just wouldn’t have made the same impression. So you added Freddie. Even though he was nowhere near.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that your parents see straight through your little story.

But there’s also a chance that they’ll believe it. It’s nice to think that your friends and family have interesting encounters to tell. Far better than to accept your son is a good-for-nothing dropout.

Before you know it, the story’s taken on a life of its own. Soon there’s a statue in the village square, dedicated to the great F. Deburghgraeve for all the drowning children he’s saved.

Stories like these show how heroes never make themselves. They are made, through a mixture of three things:

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The unusual abilities of the hero

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The self-interest of the initial story teller

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A group’s collective need for hero stories.

In other words, Freddie has to be able to swim. You had to have a good story quickly, because it’s the billionth time you were late home. And the village has, over the years, had to suffer the loss of children drowning in the canal.

In still other words, these are the fundamentals that drive this book’s overall theme: basic abilities, self-interest, social relevance.

The interplay of these three factors is why Guy Verhofstad, a Flemish politician who obsessed about Europe and lead his party to a landslide defeat, was voted Belgian Statesman of the Year by the French speaking-press. The three fundamentals were all there: a driven politician with talent and an ability to win people over (basic abilities); a King (Albert II ) who needed a strongman to break the country’s political impasse and keep it whole (self-interest). And it was all so deliciously humiliating for the man who would become Prime Minister – Yves Leterme, who’d infuriated the French-speaking community by saying they were too stupid or too lazy to learn Dutch (social relevance). The honour was met with condemnation by the Flemish press. And was, it’s safe to assume, probably quite a surprise to Verhofstadt himself. But that’s the frustrating thing about being a hero: you don’t get to choose what people make you a hero for. You don’t get to tell the story yourself.

Aside from that, it also shows how easily you can become one: you just need to be good at something. Doesn’t particularly matter what it is, as long you’re better at it than someone else is. Somebody needs to have you in their story. And that story must make a whole crowd of other people feel better about themselves.

But it doesn’t end there. All heroes may be created equally, but not all of them have what Malcolm Gladwell calls “stickiness”. That elusive quality that separates the flash in the pan from the Olympic flame.

And that’s the fascinating thing about our greatest idols: the unstoppable worship.

Ordinary people end up living forever. They become other heroes’ heroes. The history-makers.

But how do mere mortals qualify for entry into this unique club?

Ever-lasting mass worship can be yours, on one condition: you must be easy to stay in people’s memories, and your story must speak to their imagination. Or, to use Carl Lewis’ words:

Today it is not enough to be a champion. You must also look like a champion, talk like a champion and act like a champion.

He’s talking about stickiness. Unlike basketball, golf or baseball, his sport wasn’t that brilliantly paid. If you wanted to stick in people’s minds, you needed a good story (he was born with a weak leg), you needed to stand out (bright blue running kit, Grace Jones haircut) and you needed to act right (Lewis stayed clean, while steroid-fuelled Ben Johnson robbed him of the gold medal he’d promised his dying father).

But even Lewis sometimes underestimated just how much people expected him to ‘act like a hero’. In Los Angeles 1984, he was booed by his countrymen when he took gold. Everyone had hoped he would finally break Bob Beamon’s record. High expectations: the occupational hazard of the hero.

Is the quote actually even his? That’s something I can’t say with any real conviction.

But, as with all hero stories, does it matter? After all, it did suit my current story so perfectly…

C H AP TE R T WO

How do heroes live forever?

Let’s get back to Robin Hood and Hagar. They both burned villages to the ground and kidnapped women from castles. Yet while the world nowadays can’t get enough of wonderful Robin’s brave heroics, the Vikings have gone down in history as bloodthirsty hooligans.

They deserved better.

The men of the north were true heroes. They discovered America centuries before Columbus was even born. They were tough, chiselled guys who built tough, chiselled boats that could take on almost any storm. They were wild men, brave men. They didn’t wear tights.

And yet public opinion in the early 21st century sees them very differently.

It’s hardly fair, is it? The crowds carry one guy up on their hands, and chase the other out of town. Even though they’re both just as guilty, or just as heroic. After 25 years working in advertising agencies, I’ve seen this unfairness at work many times.

Companies with brilliant products that never get any recognition. Amazing people who are doomed to be ignored.

Where does this unfairness come from? And more importantly, what can you do about it? Because if you understand the forces that drive it, perhaps you can start making them work for you.

Robin and his gang were, above all, brilliant storytellers. They knew how to turn their man – a man whose ultimate cause didn’t go much further than getting his hands on a certain maiden – into a hero. They gave him a unique skill - shooting arrows - and coupled it to a good cause - freeing the people from tyranny.

But Robin also had good designers. The hat. The feather. A child can bring him to life on the page. Which is why they do. Robin’s iconography is his most powerful weapon.

So distinctive. So deadly simple.

Thirdly, Robin had a good copywriter. “Steal from the rich to give to the poor” sounds a lot more convincing than, “Check out the size of my bow, Marion”.

And let’s not forget his name either. Robin Hood. A strong name. Easy to say. Just what you need if you want to play the hero in a fairy tale for 200 years. And don’t forget that what a ‘hood’ actually was – it covers your head and keeps the rain off.

Even for a generation raised on hip-hop it makes sense: Robin, your local neighbourhood hero.

Those four things are what makes a hero “sticky”. A catchy name. Something visual to recognise. A good story that people can get behind. And the right words.

Four elements brought together around one good story. Now it’s easier to see where our Scandinavian friends went wrong. Take the visual element, for example. The helmets with horns. The poor guys didn’t even wear them (they drank out of them).

But they didn’t give people anything more recognisable. For the religious and superstitious population of the day, horns would have immediately conjured up thoughts of the devil.

And as for the other parts of the story? Well, the name Viking was originally used to describe thieves who’d attack boats at sea. The story was “raping and pillaging for our own barbaric amusement”. And the slogan was probably “Kill! Burn! Fuck!”.

Can it really be so simple? We’ve all heard Carl Lewis story. But far fewer people know or care who Dick Fosbury was.

He was declared insane. He did the high jump – backwards. In the process, he invented the ‘Fosbury flop’, smashing the world record and establishing a technique that every single high jumper has followed since. He wasn’t just good at his sport – he changed it forever.

And yet, and yet. Fosbury isn’t exactly burned into popular memory. We don’t have stories about him. We don’t quite know what to tell ourselves when his name comes up (wasn’t he that high jump guy?). So he’ll never join the ranks of Mohammed Ali, Björn Borg or Tiger Woods. If only he’d thought more about his -

name (“Dick” was never going to go far)

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appearance (he looked about as distinctive as a TV weatherman)

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story (did his evil stepfather look him up in a dark room where the only way to escape was backwards through a very high window?)

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words (“Any higher than this and the air’s too thin”, for example)

Could it really be this simple? Are these four things the key to an everlasting home in our collective memory? And if they work for people, can companies get in on it too?

Our hero Take Albert Einstein. A name like a chiming clock, with two rhyming syllables. A Jewish surname. Someone who’s either intellectual or rich. Or both. A good name.

That hair. The result of some unknown argument with a hairdresser. That photo of him with his tongue stuck out. An unforgettable appearance.

He wanted to answer the ultimate question for us: the fundamental shape and nature of the universe. Good story.

He could explain it so well. “Everything’s relative.” The right words.

Nobody remembers the man who wrote to President Roosevelt, urging him to develop the atom bomb.

Or, staying with the war theme, what about Winston Churchill? A locomotive of a name, rich in consonants. A good name.

His index and middle fingers, stuck in the air. The victory sign. His sign. Add a fat cigar between those fingers and the man is back with you in an instant. An unforgettable appearance.

The speech he gave on 18th June 1940 sums up his story best: ‘Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, “This was their finest hour”.’

See how poetically he frames gives his unique qualities (saving England) a higher purpose – freeing the world from the Nazi monster. A good story.

He was the master at finding the right words. The internet is full of great Churchill quotes, but here are my two favourite: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

And of course, perfectly in keeping with his story, the best word of all: Victory. If you can say it in one word, why use two?

Some heroes go as far as changing their names when the original one doesn’t fit. The Catholic Church knows the power of a good name. A Pope won’t get far with a name like Ratzinger or Wojtyla. So a name is chosen to fit the project or purpose the Pope will apply himself to.

Boxer Cassius Clay changed his name to Mohammed Ali. Cassius Clay was a slave name and he wanted to free black America from the straightjacket of its past. Ali did everything possible to establish his new identity. He chose jail time over military

service in Vietnam, since the war for him was an imperialist American assault on yet another group of coloured people. He worked hard on making himself visually recognisable – with his dance steps in the ring.

And then there are the words. Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Ali was a poet. And he knew the power of what he was saying. All the more amazing when you think that he punched people’s lights out for a living.

There have probably been better boxers. But nobody knows who they are. Oh, collective memory, how unjust you are.

It gets even worse when you leave the planet. Buzz Aldrin had flown just as long, was just as brave, as Neil Armstrong. But it wasn’t him who said, “One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind”. The footprint in the moondust, the first human mark on a surface beyond the Earth, wasn’t his. So his story belongs to someone else.

Remember the footage of him making giant strides across the surface of the lunar landscape? It’s been used by MTV for the Music Video Awards. It’s even got the nickname “Buzzy”. Yet every single person alive thinks it’s Neil Armstrong.

Water flows down. Hot air rises. There are some rules you just can’t change. You can try until you die, but you won’t alter a thing. What you can do is observe the forces at work, and learn how to make them work better for you.

Or, since you’ve bought the book, I’ll do it for you. The rules for becoming a hero are as follows: -

your wider story must be visible in everything you do

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your name must sound and feel like its part of that story

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you must look different, be recognisable, in the context of your story

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you need to find the words to make your story a metaphor for something bigger

But that’s not everything. If you are the only one to tell your story, it will die with you.

If you want to live forever, someone else needs to start telling it. And an infinite number of others need to pass it on.

The story Some stories get around fast. Others less so. How quickly yours travels depends on a these three things: -

is it actually news (in the cast of heroes, it depends on the uniqueness of their abilities)

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The first person to tell the story needs to tell it out of self-interest

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The story must have some wider relevance to the community

Let’s take a famous example. In 1938, Orson Welles’ radio-play ‘War of the Worlds’ caused widespread panic by simulating an attack on Earth by Martians. News of ‘the Martian attack’ spread all over the world in an instant and it was a while before everyone calmed down and accepted that it was just fiction.

News: aliens invade Self-interest of first teller: Welles wanted to see how realistic he could make fiction.

Social relevance: the survival of the human race was at stake Something similar happened here in Belgium in December 2006. One of the main French-speaking TV channels broadcast a fictional report that Flanders had declared independence. The news created panic in the south of the country, and surprise in the North, where most Flemish people were astounded anyone would actually a believe a story like that.

News: the country was splitting up Self-interest of the teller: provocative programs get more viewers Social relevance: look, there’s proof the Flemish really do want to dump us Negative stories and bad news are fuelled by much the same rules – except even faster and wider. At the end of the sixties, a rumour went round that one of Belgium’s most popular beers gave you worse headaches than other brands. The rumour was a stubborn one, persisting for years. The brand’s market share plummeted from 60% to 20%. The company, of course, did everything it could to kill the rumour. But the selfinterest and social relevance were too strong to overcome.

Every story begins with news - real news of something or someone exceptional (in this case, negative). There probably was a beer delivery that sat around too long in the sun, giving everyone headaches from the extra fermentation. And, besides, everyone knows what alcohol does to you when you overdo it.

But it’s the storyteller’s self-interest that gets the story going. In this case, the brand had been expanding aggressively for much of the decade, buying up small local breweries and sticking its name on them. This didn’t always go down well. In your average Belgian village, the brewer was one of the most popular figures. He was probably the mayor. Generations of villagers had gathered in the village bar after Sunday mass over a glass of his beer. Suddenly his beer – their beer - was gone, and

this new brand was all over the bar and the glass. The new owners of the brewery were also unlikely to have hung out much in the village. After all, they weren’t in business to make themselves popular.

But that approach cut both ways. So when there was something bad to say about the beer, none of the guys propping up the bar had any interest in defending it.

The social relevance of the story isn’t hard to spot: the idea that you get worse headaches from a certain brand of beer works on two levels. First and foremost, men drink a lot of beer. Being able to hold your drink is a sign of virility (for girls too, interestingly). So if your headache turns out to be the beer’s fault, you can be ill without losing any respect. “Three glasses of champagne, two bottles of wine, five cognacs. And then that beer. Shouldn’t have had that, everyone knows it gives you headaches.” It wasn’t the amount of alcohol you drank; it was the beer itself that made you ill.

The second reason it was so relevant was that this was the time that the green movement was kicking of. Everyone wanted to get back to nature. People were leaving the cities in droves, dreaming of gardens and growing their own tomatoes.

Hippies, flower power, goat hair socks. It was all new and exciting. Health food shops and organic bread began to appear on the high street. Industrially-produced food was seen as chemical swill. Local products, including beer, were making a comeback. They felt homemade, genuine and natural. The industrial production needed to make lagers took some of that appeal away. Visiting the trappist monks making beer at their abbey is a nice day out in the countryside. Visit a pilsner maker and you’re in just other factory, overwhelmed by the noise and smells of an industrial process, the huge volumes of product rolling of the production line.

Now, that isn’t of huge importance when all you need is nice a refreshing beer. And besides, drinking nothing but strong local ales isn’t always a great idea if you’re out with your mates. Instead, what people needed was to a way to distinguish between the good guys - the small local brewers - and the bad guys - the big industrial producers. In the haze of a Belgian bar, it seems almost logical that the biggest beer producer also gave you the biggest headache.

The story also had everything it needed to self-replicate.

It was about a big brand with a pretentious-sounding name. The brand had a strong visual identity (still does). And the headache story was a cast-iron way of describing its story. What’s a brand to do?

The marketing director at the time was Michel Uyttendaele, a man I learned a great deal from and who sadly passed away far too young. He asked me what he should do.

I went away and thought about it. I went to a lot of bars and watch the men behave. I came back with a proposal. Commission an academic study that proves the following: 1. Alcohol causes headaches (as everyone knows) 2. Women suffer more than men do (also true, because women weigh less. And also acceptable, since women complaining about headaches fits nicely with the clichés that men perpetuate about them.)

There was silence. I think I heard Michel gulp. He’d been expecting a nice TV commercial or something. I carried on: make sure that all the results are published absolutely everywhere. The next time someone at the bar starts up with the beer gives me a headache story, his mates will immediately yell: fag! (Not a pretty word of course, but this was 1983, long before gay marriage was possible in Belgium.)

Michel took a deep breath. It’s either madness or genius, he said. Either way, I’ll never be able to sell it to the board.

It was just an idea, I said. I didn’t know as much about how stories spread themselves. But what I was doing, however unconsciously, was forgetting what I thought was right, and trying to see what we love to call ‘the target audience’ thought was right to do.

People like telling stories and use the biggest names they can to give them power.

If the story has the right structure, it lives. Its main characters, good or bad, become immortal.

Summary: -

The hero must have unique qualities.

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It must be in someone’s interest to give them the main role in the story

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The story must have relevance to the community

Robin Hood had the right abilities (firing arrows). Someone needed a story in which he starred (Richard the Lionheart was in prison in Austria for crimes in Jerusalem, and it suited him that there was an “evil” brother back home). And there was more than enough relevance to the community: people could be freed by force from an unjust ruler, if only they wanted it.

So that’s why the story began spreading. And it continued to thrive in our collective consciousness because:

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He fought for a higher purpose

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His name was easy to remember and say

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He was recognisable anywhere

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He had the right words

Replace the word “hero” with “brand” and “story” with “advertising”, and you’re rich.

C H AP TE R TH R EE

Can brands be heroes?

Somebody cycled into my local bar the other day. Right up to the bar. With a folding bike. Had the thing folded flat before anybody could even blink. Sat down and put the bike under the stool next to him.

Now, I’d been thinking about getting a folding bike for my boat. All I’d discovered was that they’re either small or good to ride on. Both is almost impossible. My wife brought one back home once. It had been on offer in the supermarket. I took it aboard once. And that was already too much. I suspect it ended up in our daughter’s bedroom, quietly rusting to death.

The guy at the bar saw me looking at his bike. I clearly wasn’t the first.

“It’s a Brompton,” he told me. “Don’t even think about buying another brand. They thought up the folding system and nobody’s allowed to copy them. That’s why they’re the only ones that aren’t rubbish. You’ll be able to cycle miles on one of these.”

While saying this, he’d folded the bike open and shut at least three times. He let me pick it up so I could see how light it was. His wife had one too, apparently. They go to the coast together with them. Cycle to the beach, fold it up, take it with them. So easy and so much less money than renting a bike or car. And if you don’t feel like going back, take the train. You don’t have to pay any extra to put it on. Plus it rides just like a normal bike, although you have to watch out for cobbles. The wheels are too small.

But you expect things like that. Bromptons are just the best, mate - don’t you worry.

Especially on the boat. He should know. He’s a truck driver. Stores the damn thing on the shelf behind him.

Amazing stuff. The guys I’m drinking with, also boat owners, try the Brompton out.

Once again, open and shut in seconds. Sold. I get home and find a dealer in Antwerp.

Send him an email and he replies back immediately, even though it’s Sunday night.

Two left in stock.

The next day I’m in New York and I see a folding bike with the same curved line. “Is that a Brompton?” I ask the colleague who was riding it. “Sure,” she says. “They’re the best.”

I tell her about the truck driver. She’s not surprised. “Pieter has one too, in Brussels.”

Now, what you have to realise here is that Pieter is probably the most up-to-date guys in the office. He has one of the most read blogs in the country and has not so much a finger on the pulse and as a whole hand. If he has one, then that’s saying something.

End of story. Brompton sold me two bikes. They’re onboard now.

Or maybe the story doesn’t end there. Because Brompton’s now in the book that you’re reading. And everyone we come across on the water soon finds out about the Bromptons and discovers that they must have one too.

In less than a week Brompton became a hero in my and my wife’s lives.

One more anecdote to finish. Less than 24 hours after their arrival, one of the bikes was already at the bottom of the harbour in a village called Steenbergen in the Netherlands, blown in by a strong gust of wind. (Let’s just say, don’t buy a Brompton for the stability of the stand.) But - and it’s a big but - after I fished it out of the water, and drained all the liquid out of its frame, there was never any sign of rust. Not a speck. Just one more story that contributes to Brompton’s untouchable position as king of folding bikes.

Nothing can beat having one - you can finally combine the Netherlands’s beautiful water and amazing routes paths. It’s our story. With Brompton in the leading role.

There’s nobody we know who doesn’t know the benefits of having free bikes available in every harbour in Holland.

The mechanism for eternal fame is remarkably similar for both people and brands.

Our collective need for companies with special abilities is no less great than our collective need for people with special abilities. And it’s not just the status and amazement that are the same. Just as people want to see better versions of themselves in their heroes, they project their hopes and dreams onto successful brands. It comes to us so naturally. Brompton never sent me a brochure or made an advert that caught my eye. The only creation of these I saw apart from the bike was the website. Which was about as interesting as the phone book. At least they list their dealers on it.

It’s important to underline this fact: brands are a natural phenomenon. If you get to grips with this natural process and expose the forces at work, then marketing becomes a natural way of speeding it up, helping the process play to your strengths.

As marketing has grown more scientific and companies have grown in scale, the natural process has had to make room for procedures. That’s only logical, because it makes it easier to manage. But it’s important, when managing those complex procedures, not to forget the reason they exist: to create brands, just like heroes, for people - not for marketers or advertising agencies.

Process versus procedure.

Procedure is:

Chickens, like other birds, fertilise their eggs via the cloaca. The cloaca is a multipurpose cavity through which urine, stools and eggs pass.

Put the roster on top of the hen, so that their cloacas touch. Once fertilisation has taken place, the egg will hatch. Incubate the egg at a constant temperature of 41°.

After 21 days, break the egg open and you will have a chick.

Process is: Put the hen in with the roster and leave them alone. After around three weeks, there will be chicks.

The problem with procedures is that you run the risk of diverting all your attention to correctly applying each procedure, instead of making sure you get the right results. 21 days for a chick, says the procedure. But the chicks don’t know that. They can develop faster or slower – and if it’s not ready on day 21, it won’t survive the procedure. Of course, if procedure is holy in the company, people will sometimes just have to get used to working with dead chicks now and then.

So the key to successful branding is to understand how natural it is. It demands restraint from advertisers and well-developed observation skills from business leaders.

Restraint matters because it’s hugely tempting for advertisers to think that their brand’s success is down to them. Roosters think the sun comes up because they cry.

Advertising saturates the media just about everywhere in the world, and that fuels the illusion that advertising people are important.

It isn’t always easy for a person to stay modest in such circumstances. That’s why the powers of observation of business leaders are so vital. They need to feel what their company can mean for the public. Otherwise they’ll end up putting their brand in the hands of expensive consultants who’ll use incredibly complex charts to support their ideas. Take this as a plea for more thorough, more frequent market research. Not the kind designed to evaluate a new way of thinking. The kind that shows where the fault lines are in your brand, so that you can evaluate your new thoughts yourself.

Brompton Thanks to a very natural response to the needs of a certain type of bike user, a previous unknown brand spontaneously achieved hero-status for two people. Let’s have a closer look at this process.

Chronologically Unique abilities: A company in England achieved something amazing. A fun to ride, well-made bicycle that folds up in a flash and fits in a suitcase.

Self-importance of the first teller: Someone who already had a Brompton and wanted to share his enthusiasm with anyone who would listen. That person was credible because he was a truck driver and he keeps his bike with him at all times. It was about functionality, not luxury. The truck driver felt good that he had something the members of the Royal Yacht Club of Belgium did not.

Brompton gave him a story: a patented folding system – often copied, but never matched – that came from England.

Social relevance.

Mobility. A fits that goes in a suitcase, or on a train, solves a lot of society’s transport problems. Cycling is, if nothing else, healthy and doesn’t require fossil fuels.

That seems like enough to start a hero story with. But what makes it stick?

A good name: Brompton is pleasant name to say out-loud. Try it. Say it twenty times in a row. It just feels right.

A higher purpose: everything we said above, plus the fact that it can help tackle a tricky social problem: mobility.

Different appearance: that curved frame makes a Brompton easy to spot, easy to remember.

The only thing missing are the right words. At the moment, they say “We are the designers and makers of the Brompton folding bike”. Hardly convincing. But at least whoever wrote it turned up at the right company that day.

Isn’t it time Brompton started seriously thinking more about their marketing and communication strategy? It seems like a decent business and their sales are pretty good.

I don’t know anyone at Brompton. Maybe they’re appalled at how badly I’m telling their story. Maybe they’re about to give up this whole folding bike lark because they’ve lost so much money on it. But let’s put all that to one side for now. What Brompton really can do is to accelerate the natural process they’re going through. To sell more bikes, and, even if they can’t ramp up production, ask more for them. To become happier. And even more proud.

Brompton can give us a story that sticks. One we’ll be happy to keep on telling. A story that tells itself. And ensures that nobody even half-fashionable would dare to arrive in a pub on anything other than a Brompton ever again.

Brompton hasn’t done that yet. But on the other hand, they haven’t done anything wrong yet either. They haven’t thrust advertising images of healthy people with big toothy grins cycling across impossibly beautiful landscapes. With their impossible yacht shimmering in the background.

Of course, you’re probably thinking that, well, they’ve got it easy. A unique bike with an amazing design, that comes out just when the whole world is panicking about ecoapocalypse. Try being a hero with panty liners or toothpaste.

Let’s tackle that first point. A Brompton isn’t that unique at first glance. If you hadn’t heard this story, you wouldn’t even think of giving a folding bike a second look to see what make it was.

And as for the second point, pantyliners and toothpaste are – in terms of product development and innovation – far more revolutionary than Brompton. Just ask anyone who knew what life was like before them.

All the same, why not see if the hero mechanism works for Always?

Always Exceptional abilities: The artificial gauze, it can be worn not inserted.

Self-interest of first teller: Isn’t it finally time we talked about my periods for once?

Social relevance No matter how closely connected menstruation may be to the start of all human life, the male-dominated world has degraded periods into something unclean. The Jewish religion forces women to undergo ritual cleaning once a month. For the Christians, women suffer periods as punishment for Eve’s sins. The Koran says this about menstruating women: “It is shameful. You will stay away from the woman during their menstruation and not touch her until she is once more clean”. Young boys, of all ages, make dirty jokes about menstruating to each other. And the fact that we still call a monthly-recurring bodily phenomenon by its latin name speaks volumes. Time, ladies, to end the taboo about periods.

That’s a powerful story for any brand. But what makes it stick? Or in this case, not stick.

The higher purpose, the mission, isn’t hard to find: periods shouldn’t be taboo.

The name: Always. With you at every moment. Not just once a month. It’s something for all women, all of the time. There’s nothing abnormal. Nothing to fear. Let the men keep their silly superstitions. Always feel good.

Visual identity: acceptably assertive purple, a wavy background with a font that wouldn’t be out of place on an ice cream box. Feminine and dynamic.

(A quick aside here. Until now, we’ve only talked about visual recognition. But it’s much wider than that. Every sense plays its role. Tarzan’s identity was a yell awowowaya! – as he swung through the trees. Douwe Egberts coffee has its aroma.

Always feels different.)

The right words: “Always® offers great protection throughout your menstrual cycle to help you live life to the fullest — without interruption”. Better known to us as “that dry and safe feeling”. The idea of feeling “safe” is intriguing. Are women so scared by their periods? Yet, that’s the word that makes the story stick. It could be that Procter & Gable think Always should have a different line. (In the Netherlands, it’s “Every day can be a good day”.) But when I asked five women what words they associate with Always, they all replied “For a dry and safe feeling”. Safe? Women are indeed mysterious creatures.

You might imagine that it’s easy to build brands this way. You buy some airtime, let your users talk and make a story from their stories. It makes perfect sense: unusual abilities, self-interest of the teller (they’re paid) and social relevance. Shove it on TV and you’ll create an instant national hero.

That’s called a testimonial ad. And it’s used so often that’s it hard to have much impact with it. Unless you’re P&G and can throw unlimited money at it.

Next. Toothpaste.

Colgate At the beginning of the 1990s I had the chance to think up a campaign for Colgate. I worked with Peter Sutherland, an art director from Sydney. And Ian Ferguson Brown, a Scottish account director. The client was based in Park Lane, New York. But for this campaign we worked with Ian Cook, who was then CEO of Colgate and based in Scandinavia.

Ian had, according to his overlords in New York, the best nose for advertising around.

And it was true. The campaign had to run worldwide. Across every border. In every language. And every culture. It appeared everywhere from Norway to New Zealand (and a few places in between). It’s up on Youtube.

It was Ian who set us on the right track. After we’d completely messed up, he said, “Our most successful campaign ever was about fighting cavities. And on top of that, we’re the most sold brand in the world.”

Together that gave us a line, “The world’s number one cavity fighter”. And a campaign idea: it’s hard to find a hole where Colgate has been.

Unique qualities Toothpaste that protects against cavities Self-interest of the teller: I don’t have to be scared of going to the dentist. He never finds any holes.

Social relevance The world’s biggest brand launches the global fight against cavities. (Compare it to how G.W. Bush sold the Iraq invasion to the world: the fight against terrorism.)

So the basics were all there (cheers, Ian).

The higher purpose was clear – free the world of cavities.

The name. Colgate. Not much you need to do. It’s a good name, it’s earned its reputation.

Visual identity A globe with a smile drawn on it in toothpaste.

The right words The World’s N°1 cavity fighter. It’s hard to find a hole where Colgate has been.

Bingo.

Ian Cook is now worldwide president of Colgate. And he all his own teeth.

Brands and heroes. They’re so close to each other. A brand is a name on a product or a service that makes people believe in its special abilities, before they’ve even tried it.

A hero is someone who people believe has special qualities, before they’ve even met them. Heroes are always modest and know exactly when they’re needed. Superman is an anonymous office monkey. But when that child’s drowning, he’ll fly there in a flash in his bright blue costume and red flowing cape. We don’t even mind that he left his red underpants on in the rush to get changed. What really matters is that he’s on his way to use his special powers to help some kid who nobody else was paying attention to. He’d good at it. He wants to help everybody.

Madame Hero Most heroes were created by men, which is why so many of the heroes featured in this book are male. Does that mean women can’t be heroes? At the very least, it suggests that women don’t like dressing up as the hero. They don’t have the natural

drive to stand above the rest. After all, every single life begins with them. Men perhaps feel the need to pop their heads up and say that they count too. In other words. Women are important. Men act important. At least that’s what history tells us. And even today, the world’s biggest religious institutions insist that women are not suitable for the leading roles. If we do ever hear of a female hero, it’s Mother Mary. Who produced a child without the filthy carnal act. Or it’s about Mother Theresa, who single-handedly tackled poverty in India. Male heroes fight. Female heroes suffer.

There’s also more than one way to honour a hero: men put statues of each other in town squares. Women put small figures of each other on mantelpieces.

But still, that’s history and the times are changing. I am only mentioning it, since there is often the reaction that the hero story is a macho story. It comes from my own examples and those out of a history mainly written by men.

The big question is of course whether the road to being hero is only open to men. Or, to put it another way, should companies masculinise themselves in order to become heroes?

No, obviously.

There was once a distinction made between Venus-brands and Mars-brands. The former had an exaggeratedly female character, seen as ‘rounder’, ‘more caring’ and ‘empathetic’. Think of brands like Nivea, Douwe Egberts, Spa or Apple. The latter group were ‘sharper’, ‘hard working’ and ‘results driven’. Brands like Nike, Boss or Dixan.

But I’m convinced that distinction has had its day. Brands, like people, have managed to find a more nuanced approach to their ‘genders’. Hero and heroines united.

If I think about hero and heroine types, I don’t separate by them by gender. There are female authority figures. Her Majesty the Queen, to pick someone at random. There are superwomen. Margaret Thatcher, Marie Curie, Jean of Arc, [ang sung lee – burma], and Severn Suzuki (the 12 year old girl who addressed the United Nations in 1992). There are women to treasure. Mother Theresa, Mother Earth, J.K. Rowling and, last but certainly not least, Marilyn Monroe.

They do what they, did what they did. And they were good at it. Each of their stories is a hero’s story. At the cradle of every brand stands an entrepreneur who can do something well, and enough people to help him or her go forward.

In every advertising brief I’ve ever been handed, there was one central theme: create expectations that make people believe in certain qualities. If the product or the service lives up to those expectations, then you’ve created the company’s most valuable assets: brand loyalty.

Brands are heroes. Big brands are big heroes. Small brands are small heroes. They are heroes as long as they remember to act like heroes. They exist thanks to a belief in, and hope for, exceptional abilities. Marketing exists to channel that belief in the right direction. To create the right hope. And to make a company strong and profitable.

There’s not much more to say about it. You can lend the book to someone else now.

In the next part, we’re going to look at how, on the basis of what we’ve learned so far, you can craft the appearance of your brand (logos, graphic identity, packaging) around your brand’s wider story - and eventually, its advertising.

But that’s for later. After all, it’s only advertising.

PART TWO: WELCOME TO HISTORY

C H AP TE R O N E

Game, name, fame, claim.

Whatever you may think about it, your brand is a hero in the eyes of its users. In the end, they chose you over all the others. Someone thought you were the best. But a hero’s fame can be short-lived. Just ask [joe the plumber].

What we’re all after is something more permanent. Something you can build on calmly, at your own tempo. It’s the art of making sure your customers have the right expectations and you have the right sort of day-to-day challenges, so that you can get a bit better at what you do.

You’d like your brand to stick around awhile in your customers’ souls. So that next time they choose, you’re up there in pole position. People today have so many options, and damn it, we’re proud of that fact. We fought hard enough for it. So your brand, and what it offers, has to be concrete in their minds. One way or the other, you need to appear on their radar – and be more than a meaningless green blob when you do. If they can’t decipher what you’re trying to do right away, it’s finished. You don’t even get to go on celebrity Big Brother.

If ideas spread virally, brands have to be epidemics. To do this, they need Malcolm Gladwell’s stickiness. In other words, for heroes and brands alike, four things have to go right.

There’s your wider story, your higher purpose, your relevance to the community, and there’s your name.

There’s your sensual recognition. Everything from your outward appearance to a unique taste, sound, feel or smell the world experiences because of you.

And there are the right words.

Marketing people and primary school teachers don’t have much in common, except the fact they know the power of a good rhyme. So kids, here’s today’s song: Game, Name, Fame, Claim.

Here’s how it works: [bar mats] Duval Guillaume used this system with our very first client, and we’ve kept at ever since. It’s worked pretty well so far. The nice thing about it is it doesn’t get in the way of the different marketing models that different advertisers believe in. It offers them an extra way to look at their situation. On top of that, it only works if you can see

yourself from someone else’s point of view. And because it’s a simple system, it leads to simple plans. And simple is the fastest way into the collective memory: that lazy, mischievous old consciousness that so rarely remembers what we want it to, and mostly does the exact opposite. The more complicated your system, the more expensive it is to communicate.

The simpler, the better. But your wider story (game) must be at the heart of it. It’s not about being exceptional or different. It’s about doing something that makes the public think you’re exceptional or different. They have to be involved in the story otherwise, you’ll be the only one telling it. And it will stop when you do.

Game, Name, Fame, Claim flows both inwards and outwards. The first thing we do with our clients is an internal exercise, to see how the company sees itself. It quickly exposes how many different ideas people have about the same business. Drawing out these differences of opinion in private, at the start of the process, reduces the risk that they’ll come out in public, when there’s no going back. But it’s not only therapeutic. It helps everyone around the table look hard at whether the platform they’re building is strong enough to do what they want it to. Can we live up to the expectations we’ll create? Is this really what we want? Can we get everyone to come with us – employees and shareholders alike? Are we sure that our path hasn’t been taken by anyone else?

The whole plan needs to be simple enough to fit on a beer mat. And you need to be sure you have the will, the means and the talent around you to reach hero status.

Answer these questions, and you’re ready to start telling a successful brand story.

Born to be great All companies are somewhere along this process – nobody gets it completely wrong.

But to see the model’s power most clearly, I’m going to introduce you to some young companies that you’ve probably never heard of. It’s about as neutral as we can get, and we can see how important the start of the story is. And it proves the point that fame does not depend on the size of your budget; it’s about making a number of good decisions at the beginning so that you don’t have spend as much later on to make yourself recognisable.

At every stage of the process, we use standard questions which the team have to answer as one. CEO included.

JORI A furniture maker from Wervik, JORI is known for good quality, comfortable modern furniture. They launched a whole new range - under a new brand - designed to go

Henry Scott 1/27/09 9:47 AM Comment: Example way to give context

with the minimalist architectural style currently in vogue. The first thing they did was send over some sofas to our Brussels office to see how our (oh-so-stylish) people would react. One thing was immediately clear. Because you can fold the sides up and down, you can lie or sit on the sofa however you like. Over a number of workshops, the following decisions were worked out.

GAME The idea behind the new brand is that it’s modular. You can have as many living rooms as you like, adapting the furniture to whatever your needs are at the time – from love nest to meeting corner.

Better world? Furniture should adapt to people, not the other way around.

Cultural shift? Social zapping. People don’t want to have to stick to one choice. Life can and should change, 1o times a day if necessary.

Other brands? Smart (puzzle-piece exteriors). Senseo (cups of coffee made exactly to your taste). iTunes (organise and collect music by your own logic).

Strength? Won’t bore you with technical details. Plays on freedom and personality.

Where can you change? That the furniture world lacks a little soul.

NAME Company name: JORI. Sub-brands: Jori Originals, Jori Diners + new brand to be decided here.

New brand name (thought up by one of the guys at the agency who made intensive used of the seats): Karmasitra. Implies lots of great positions.

The Jori brand offers Karmasitra quality and comfort. The Karmasitra brand offers Jori a way in to contemporary architecture.

Karmasitra is a new brand and most be launched.

FAME Recognition. We designed a new logo that played on the modular nature of the furniture.

We made modular mailings and let people play with the different combinations.

One game was particularly successful. Four blocks that gave a new pattern each time you turned them. The fact people could play was important.

CLAIM All shapes of life

It was all done with modest means. No national TV ads or epic cinema campaigns. By choosing the right name and the right story, Karmasitra is more than just seats you can move about. It gives furniture shops something more to involve their customers with.

STARMEAL Laurent Mercier’s start-up originally supplied office workers with readymade lunches, which they could order online. When that business failed to take off, Mercier found a partner, Lieven Vanlommel, who supplied fresh salads. Today they now make 30000 salads a day, which are sold in supermarkets all over Belgium.

GAME The idea: Mercier was previously the owner of Frisk mints, a confectionary brand based in an industrial estate in Haasrode. Lunchtime was a case of greasy, depressed sandwiches eaten by greasy, depressed workers. Mercier belonged to a younger generation, and was keen to hang on to the looks he had. He went off in search of a healthier alternative, which he discovered in the form of Vanlommel’s (or rather mama Vanommel’s) salads. Healthy. Tasty. Low in calories. No mayonnaise. No grease.

Better world? Working people deserve healthy food.

Cultural shift? We don’t sit round a table to eat anymore. Eating has to fit in around other activities. But life is just as demanding and people want to keep their bodies on good shape.

Other brands? Spa, AS Adventure, Adidas.

Strength? Positive approach to life. Everything should be possible, if you make the right choices.

What can you change? Make health more accessible and inspiring.

NAME Company name: StarMeal. Also used for the salads. Hero-food. The salads are simply named after their ingredients.

The StarMeal brand distinguishes them from other ranges.

StarMeal is a new brand and must be launched.

The salads sell well, but the brand doesn’t come across strongly enough. Yet. FAME Recognition.

The StarMeal icon is a fairy. She has her magic wand.

StarMeal is the favourite of one of Belgium’s top sportsmen, Stefan Everts The hold music on the company phones is the StarMeal song (always nice to hear).

StarMeal’s fame must come from influential groups of people who live a busy, irregular and mobile lifestyle, but who want to keep themselves in top condition.

Sportsmen, models, celebrities.

StarMeal had some success with a radio promotion. Every lunchtime, a number of salads were delivered to a different volunteer company.

CLAIM StarMeal boosts your X-factor.

(Eat nothing but StarMeal for two weeks and you’ll get healthier; you’ll lose weight and feel great.)

A fresh way of thinking.

BONGO Bongos are experience vouchers (‘cadeau-bons’), packed in a CD-case. Most Belgians will be familiar with the shape, having discovered one under the Christmas tree at some point.

Bongo was originally part of Weekend Desk, a website where you could book the experiences as gifts online. The idea became so popular that this became their company’s main business.

GAME The idea: people are always on the hunt for original presents. A pre-packed special weekend somewhere is an easy for people to give friends, colleagues and family a more unique, richer experience.

Better world? It’s not about the cost of the present, it’s about its value.

Cultural shift? We’ve become spectators in our own lives. Youtube, Blackberry, Facebook. Time to play a more active role again. Time to really experience things.

Other brands? AS Adventure (not just outdoor clothing, but outdoor living).

Starbucks (come outside and drink a coffee with the neighbourhood). Wii (computer games for your whole body). Joker (travel off the beaten track).

Strength? They manage to convey the excitement of each experience, and make it contagious.

What can you change? Bongo goes further than the illusion of living. You do something real, and come back home with a story.

NAME Company name: Weekendesk.

The vouchers were initially called “Weekendesk vouchers”, but the name wouldn’t ever become a figure of everyday speech.

The new name, Bongo, comes from joining BON (voucher) with GO (get out there).

Bongo is also a fun instrument.

FAME Recognition.

The letter N, and the CD-case with booklet inside.

Bongo’s fame is closely linked to gift-giving times – birthdays and holidays.

Success: Bongos are popular as company promotions, particularly with magazines and newspapers. Readers feel rewarded, and Bongo’s awareness spreads.

CLAIM The experience voucher.

LE PAIN QUOTIDIEN Le Pain Quotidien is a fantastic story in its own right. A rare business that managed to grow without losing its authentic touch. Founder Alain Coumont was, without knowing it, a natural born marketer – a chef who created a hero brand unlike any other. His financial backers recognised his talent and gave him the means to spread his story around the world. It’s a great example of just how far one good idea and a lot of good will can take you.

GAME The idea: one big table. Every time a new Pain Quotidien opens somewhere in the world, all people talk about is the table. In some countries the local managers protest that it won’t fit in their culture. That people don’t like eating next to strangers. Alain wouldn’t listen. People in Belgium didn’t think they’d like it either. His brand forced people to remember their table manners.

Better world? People have become strangers to one another. When we do have contact, it’s superficial and digital. (“Mum, can you forward my lunch?”) Why not gather together to eat a hearty sandwich?

Cultural shift: Supports a growing holistic view of the world. Everyone and everything is connected – we’re all part of one system, one planet. No man is an island.

Other brands? The Body Shop (spirit). Aveda (authenticity). Whole Foods (healthy consistency). Facebook (togetherness). Chipotle (simplicity). AS Adventure (experience).

What can you change? A meal at Le Pain Quotidien makes people aware of what’s so special about being people (inside and out).

NAME When Alain told his father that he was going to start his own bakery for his restaurant (nothing in the trade had what he wanted), he replied: “Ce n’est pas mon pain quotidien.” It’s not my thing. Alain decided that that was a good name to start working with. The religious significance (daily bread) didn’t bother him. After all, it was religions that borrowed bread as a symbol. Bread was there first.

When the first shops opened in Flanders, the name was translated. Later, it was decided to keep the French version. French and food go well together.

FAME Recognition Le Pain Quotidien deftly takes brand experience to a whole new level. For a start, the logo breaks just about every rule of commercial design, emphasising its authenticity.

It’s always used in a modest way. Other important branding elements are the table, the cups without handles, the porcelain plates that the sandwiches arrive on, the huge, round loaves of bread themselves.

Fame The company faces an interesting dilemma: can it become world famous and still be authentic? People would like to believe that their Pain Quotidien is the only one on the Earth.

Success Alain’s book “COOK+BOOK” is a bestseller.

CLAIM On the table in the New York branch, a card reads: Conversation with other human beings is not prohibited in this area.

Nothing more needs to be said.

Take the beer mat test.

Your Game, Name, Fame, Claim story has to be as simple as possible. To stand a chance of surviving in our collective memory, it has to be small enough to fit on a beer mat.

Try it with your own brand.

What’s your wider story?

What is your name?

How can you be recognised from a distance?

What words come to mind?

Sounds easy enough. But in reality, it takes huge amounts of patience and thinking to make it simple enough to work.

But first, here’s a little more homework.

C H AP TE R T WO

Your know-why Why is always a good question. It’s the question at the heart of every creative act. It’s the question that a child uses to get to know her world.

Why is the moon so big?

Because it’s so low in the sky, sweetie.

Why is it so low in the sky?

Because the earth is turning.

Why does the earth turn?

So that we have day and night. So you can sleep now.

Why do people have to sleep?

Because they get tired of answering questions all the time.

Why. A jewel of a word.

In 1990, long before the no-holes campaign, Colgate’s marketing directors gave me a briefing in London for a new toothpaste. It was codenamed ‘Project Gold’. Today we know it as Colgate Total. The containers had already shipped, and they desperately needed some copy.

At the end of the briefing, as tradition dictates, they asked if I had any questions.

I asked them why they’d developed this new product.

Because we’ve discovered a new formula.

Why had they discovered a new formula?

Because we pay people to do nothing buy discover new formulas.

Why do you pay these people?

To stay ahead of the competition.

Why do you need to stay ahead of the competition?

Because otherwise we couldn’t compete with them.

We weren’t getting anywhere and I was doing a great job of losing Y&R a $200 million account.

The client was nervous. Suspicious. He thought I was playing games with him. But I was deadly serious. I was looking for something that was relevant to my audience.

Why do you guys do this? Why invest so much in toothpaste? What’s your story? The fact that Colgate is a key brand for Procter & Gamble doesn’t interest anybody. The French call it raison d’être. A reason to exist. The point of your company.

You’re a brand and you want to change something. Something big. If you come up with a new product, or improve an existing one, then that product has to bring that change nearer in one way or the other.

If you need to address a big crowd of people, you need to find for a story that everyone can identify with. Captains of industry can’t stop telling you about their know-how. But what people really need is to know why.

In 1996, two months after Duval Guillaume opened its doors, I was philosophising about this very question. I was in a garden on Cap Ferrat with a pretty view over the lighthouses. The garden belonged to Claude Bonange, a mutual friend of André Duval and I, the B in TBWA – a world-beating creative advertising agency – and the author of a good advertising book, “Don Juan or Pavlov”.

Claude and I had been swimming in the ocean, and were drying out in the afternoon sun. Suddenly, it came to me. The Know Why. Claude jumped up.

‘C’est genial!” he said. “That’s the key. It’s what they’ve been missing.”

When someone like that says you’re onto something, you have a tendency to start believing in it yourself.

“You should write a book,” said Claude. “If you don’t, they’ll steal your idea.”

“Why don’t you write it?” I offered. “You don’t even have to mention me.”

Seemed like a great idea. I’d take the credit, he’d do the work. But it didn’t happen that way. The idea of knowing why became the concept of the Know Why. And it was ours. I think André even tried to trademark it.

We use the Know Why for everything. For writing speeches. For designing annual reports. For creating television campaigns. And building websites. It’s one of those magical terms that forces bosses and marketing departments to stand in someone else’s shoes – whether they be shareholders, employees, customers or prospects.

Why should I invest in this company?

Why should I sit in the traffic tomorrow morning to come and work at this company?

Why should I trust this supplier?

Why am I better off with this brand?

Why should I listen to you? Why should I think about what you’re telling me?

Why should I read this?

Why Obama? Because something fundamental has to change.

After the Know Why, I began observing business leaders. Their language, their attitude, their focus, their mindset. And it soon became clear that there are two kinds of leader: the Know How CEO’s and the Know Why CEO’s.

The first group spoke about their passion for what their company was good at. The second group spoke with passion about what they did.

That lead to a rather unsettling conclusion. The Know-Whyers were happy. The Know-Howers weren’t.

Now, there’s nothing worse than a CEO who isn’t happy. Not only are you unhappy, nobody is allowed to know you’re unhappy. You’re the CEO, after all.

General Patton was a know why person. On the evening of the Battle of the Ardennes, he received word that there wasn’t enough fuel to get the whole way. His troops would have to make the last 50km, through snow and ice, on foot. He called his lieutenants together. They were to brief their troops.

Patton said: “Gentlemen, tell them where we’re going, tell them why we’re going, don’t tell them how we’re going.”

Patton was a happy leader.

Ronald Regan was dismissed as a joke when he was elected. Today, American intellectuals rank him as one of the country’s most important Presidents. He may not have had any great ideas of his own, but he knew where he wanted to go and why.

The Iron Curtain must fall and western democracy must open up the world. His words in Berlin – “Tear down this wall” – still echo around the world. They became a symbol of openness, demanding transparency everywhere.

Regan didn’t see himself as a great brain, and certainly not big enough on his own to make his plans happen. So he surrounded himself with extremely strong characters – including a pair of exceptional speechwriters.

Regan was a happy leader, and not just because he had a bad memory.

The Know Why makes a company human and warm. Why does Douwe Egberts buy coffee beans from far off lands, just to burn, mix, mill, vacuum pack and distribute them here? To bring a little pleasantness into people’s homes and offices.

Why does Danone take all that milk from all those cows? Entreprendre pour la santé.

Even a bad translation, like ‘Ideas for health’, is more inspiring than ‘Letting milk go sour and making money off it’.

Why should I carry on sorting bottles of Moët & Chandon on the conveyor belt?

Because Brad Pitt’s got something to celebrate.

Speaking of Champagne…. After diamonds, Champagne has to be the best marketing story of all time. It was years before anyone came up with a more democratically priced alternative. If it didn’t come out the Champagne region, it was “sparkling wine”, which just doesn’t sound right. Then someone had the idea to stick the name “Cava” on it. Now you can’t eat anywhere without someone offering to open up ‘the Cava”. Cava’s gives people a status mere sparkling wine can never match. Same product. Same bottle. Different name. How the original Cava name, which had existed for years, came to become generic is anybody’s guess. As I said before, heroes can’t be created by marketeers. They’re created by people who need a new story to tell. On top of that Cava has set a cultural shift in motion. From Brad having something to celebrate to us having something to celebrate. Simple, everyday things.

Even something as basic as friendship.

The Know Why is the platform on which any brand story, any hero story, is built.

Robin Hood is a hero because England must be freed from bad Prince John.

Ghandi is a hero because the world must see you can free people from colonialism without violence.

Nelson Mandela is a hero because you can win a battle without denigrating your opponents.

Justine Henin is a hero because she promised her dying mother she’d be a champion.

We’ve already seen the recurring features in every hero’s story. Unique abilities. Selfinterest of the first teller. The social relevance of the story.

Social relevance is nothing other than the Know Why. It is the mission you give your company. Its purpose. The relevance of your activities to the world beyond them.

So when you’re creating the outlines of your brand’s story (Game, Name, Fame, Claim) you can’t spend enough time on the Know Why. A great deal of companies get saddled with a mission statement or vision, created for them by consultants. These statements tend to run along the lines of: To be our customers’ premier provider of quality [insert product here] to improve their lives and thus enhance the value for our shareholders.

It sounds good and it gives you the impression that you’re doing the right thing. You care about the wellbeing of your customers and your shareholders alike. But the only useful thing you can do with it is find a nice, oak frame and hang it on the wall somewhere where you don’t have look. For a truly valuable story, something that

actually involves people in your project, you need a little more than this. You need to look deeper into your soul.

You need to answer three questions: 1. Why is the world better off with my product or service?

2. Why are people better off getting that product from me, not from someone else?

3. Why would people help spread my story?

In that order. Product relevance. Brand relevance. Communications relevance.

In an ideal world, everyone would give the same answer to each question.

You must begin with what your product means to people’s lives. Leave your company out of it for now. Get to the basics. What does coffee mean? What do biscuits mean?

Not, what are biscuits. But, what do biscuits mean to people? A sweater is a piece of textile, possibly designed by a famous designer. A sweater means that people can express something about themselves. Everyday, it has to tell a story about the wearer to complete strangers, without using any words. Why is it so important nowadays that people can tell strangers about themselves without using words? These sort of questions.

You can start with a simple truth. A consumer insight. You’ve probably got research documents full of them. You don’t have to be much of an entrepreneur to have a gut feeling about such things. But you do have to have the guts to raise that insight up to a level where it’s relevant to the whole of society. It’s the moment to think big.

This comes from the TV commercial that launched the Apple Macintosh in 1984: On January 24, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.

Steve Jobs, a tiny entrepreneur, had arrived to save the world from Big Brother, IBM. Men drink beer together to relax and laugh ( consumer insight). The world would be a better place if drank a beer together instead of fighting wars (social relevance).

Women drink coffee to have meaningful conversations (consumer insight). The world would be a better place if people took time to talk to each other (social relevance).

For the sake of yourself and your colleagues, you need to create the feeling that you’re collectively on to something good. That your days aren’t wasted. That you haven’t stashed your kids away in the crèche for your career. But because you’re doing something great for the world.

What does a camera mean? (Stores memories, catch moments so you can relive them later). What does a pot of yoghurt mean? (That the world can be a healthier place.)

What does a vacuum cleaner mean? (That we don’t have to slave over the housework so long and have more time for each other.) What does an SUV mean? If you can’t think up a constructive, believable answer, you will be – before you know it – personally responsible, in the eyes of your children, for the death of all the polar bears.

Can something like tobacco have a positive story for the world? Why not? I’m not a smoker, but I’ve met a great deal of them. The vast majority follow the rules of politeness and puff merrily away. Enjoying the fruits of what Mother Nature provides is also an important task.

Yes, but. I hear you say. Like that you can explain away all the world’s evils.

But if you do something that absolutely no good words can be said about, then boy do you have a serious problem.

Some leaders just Know Why. When I was working on the launch of the first commercial TV channel in Flanders, VTM, I talked to Mike Verdrengh and Guido Depraetere. (You can still hear how much better it sounds to say “Mike and Guido”.

They were hero duo with those names.) All the sets and décor were blue, and I asked them why. Mike said: “Because television is a window. If you look at the window and see blue, you know it’s good weather and it puts you in a better mood.” One breath was all it took, and that was the start of “VTM colours your day”.

Other people find it harder. Many leaders like to be modest about what they do: “Our product’s not that important to the world”. I like to tell them about the butterfly effect, where tiny events can have huge consequences down the line. A butterfly flapping his wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. It’s chaos theory. Nothing is unimportant. Everything affects everything else. If that effect, no matter how small – how can a quick cup of coffee help world peace? – is a positive one, then you’re making a positive contribution to the wider world.

Everyone at work feels better about themselves. And the outside world is satisfied that your company knows which way is up. Which also helps push your share price in just that direction.

And then the final question that floors everybody: what the hell are we going to do about the advertising? The relevance of your communications, in other words. Ask yourself this: what would it take for someone to make time for this bit of communication? It can be anything. A speech. An interview. A brochure. An annual

report. A flyer. Writing on a wall. A website. A text on the packaging. Even adverts and commercials in the mainstream media.

Before you put up a billboard in someone’s street, ask yourself: what would people like to hang here? Before you interrupt a program on the radio, or a film on TV, with your commercial message, ask yourself: Wat hebben die mensen eraan om mijn ding te horen??

It’s simple politeness. Uninvited, you’re taking up space in people’s lives. The very least you can do is ask yourself if you think they’ll like it.

Outside the Moortgat brewery, next to A12 motorway, there’s a big sign that reads “Shhh… the Duvel is brewing.” They could have just written that Duvel is a careful brewed premium beer with x,y,z ingredients. Or that it was very refreshing. But the authors clearly started with the idea that they ought to do something to cheer up the stressed, tired commuters that drive between Brussels and Antwerp every day. They gave their sign a nice twist, while still respecting the brand’s proposition – a carefully brewed beer that demands respect.

Why this product, why this brand, why this message?

Three simple questions, borne out of basic customer experience, that can only be answered if you can see yourself from another point of view. Or, to use a simpler word, if you have empathy. A natural thing to do for women. For men, perhaps slightly harder. But within everyone’s reach. And if it’s good, then you already have a simple, open and inspiring formulation for the next chapter.

C H AP TE R TH R EE

Time to save the world.

It might be on the road to Damascus. It might be in a corporate boardroom. It might be in the shower. But at some point, your calling will call. But your modern hero can’t afford to wait forever. So you need to make it clear to the world what game it is you’re playing. To frame what you do in the context of something much bigger. Somewhere in Sherwood forest, Robin Hood realised that “freeing England from bad prince John” was a bit mission statement than “kidnap Maid Marion”.

But never forget that this is, and always will be, a commercial fight. Take your own goals as a starting point. What’s the use in giving your all for a world that’s better for everyone except you? Even Mother Theresa got something back for her troubles.

Even if it was only posthumous.

Of course, you never heard her say, “Come on, lads, round up a few more of the sick and needy, otherwise I’ll never get the damn sainthood.” Real heroes don’t talk that way. But real businessmen have to. You can’t blame them for it. Thanks to the existence of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, they’re forced to tell the public all about their commercial aims. And since the world’s biggest companies are now co-owned by every man and his dog - thanks to a mixture of share portfolio diversification and, increasingly, tax-payer bailouts - CEO’s don’t know whether they should address people as ‘dear client’ or ‘dear shareholder’. Yet profits are either there or they’re not there. Everyone can read the bottom line. Communicate clearly about it, but don’t make a show of it. As Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, once said, profit is “… as natural as breathing. If it’s the only thing you think about, you start hyperventilating.” Announcing profits always sounds better if you put in the context of your wider social purpose. “England is free of the tyrant and the first citizen is on its way,” is a heart-warming speech for the people. A closer look, and you’ll see Robin’s hand on Maid Marian’s growing belly. Ahah. “Marian and I have been at it six times a night. Cheers, mates!” wouldn’t have had the same ring to it.

You’re a hero. Of course people want you to win. It’s normal. But they have to support your cause. You must therefore couple your victory to the good that you do.

The Game, Name, Fame, Claim format demands a great deal of discipline. We therefore use a number of standard questions for each section. It’s the safest way for you and your leaders to look deep into your company’s soul.

The first question is, what is the big idea behind the brand? Somebody must have had a thought that inspired them to start the company in the first place, or to take it to a higher level. Henry Ford had the brilliant idea to use a production line to build cars.

Steve Jobs had the brilliant idea to make computers that people could use at home.

The big idea behind Senseo is that you don’t want to put on a big pot of coffee when you only want a cup. The founders of Google had the insight to use a university computer to catalogue all the pages on the internet. The Wall Street Journal realised they could make world news out of stockmarket news.

If you run your own company, it’s not hard to answer this question. But for older, or bigger, businesses the answer may only show itself after some serious browsing through the archives. But someone, somewhere must have put down their fork during dinner one day, and said: “Darling, I’ve just had an idea”.

Second question. If you’ve done your homework from the last chapter, you should already have your answer. How do you think you contribute to a better world?

Bear in mind that there’s a great deal of disagreement about what a better world actually is. In fact, there isn’t one better world at all. In the Netherlands, environmentalists think the world would be better off without mussel-farming. And the mussel farmers think the world would be a better place if everyone had a tasty pot of fresh Zeeuwse mussels. Their better worlds are diametrically opposed to each other. It happens.

But a polarised public opinion is better than none at all. Around Zaventem airport, there are two visions of a better world. One where you can get a good night’s sleep because it’s quiet. And another where Brussels is a logistical cog, grinding away to the noise of a growing global economy. Choose a world you find positive and give it everything you’ve got.

Not long ago, the Benelux chemicals industry asked me to judge a student competition to think up campaigns to make the sector more attractive to the next generation. One line in particular struck me: “Chemistry. Our second nature.”

Later, I was reading a Time article about plastics and the environmental damage we would cause if they didn’t exist. So maybe the chemicals giants of the world will end up saving the planet after all. Your better world depends less on your company as a business, and more on it as an institution. What institution do you work for? Will people find it good news if you succeed? Imagine you’re Center Parcs, for example.

The more people you convince to come on holiday to you, the less jet fuel will be burned. That’s very in, today.

But watch out for greenwash. Two petrol giants saw Al Gore coming and are busy polishing up their images. Exxon and BP. It’s interesting to look at the differences in the two approaches. Exxon, I believe in. BP, I’m more wary of. It seems to me they want to say, “We are greener than you think, because we also want the planet to survive.” While Exxon says, to me at least, “The world’s energy use is a mess. We’ll

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:38 PM Comment: Or simply “an idea”

never get there with fossil fuels alone. We’ll need nuclear energy, and renewable energy from the sun and wind. We all need to think about it and we all need to work together.”

Exxon has its eyes on a better world: one that can still spin just as fast, because everyone has all the energy they need. You can resist that world, but you can’t deny that Exxon is at least being clear with you. And is thus more dependable.

BP, on the other hand, doesn’t convey much at all – other than they’re fed up with having a bad reputation and they’re throwing their money at the image, rather than the issues that created it.

Third question. What social movement does your brand belong to?

“Panta rhei” said Heraclitus. Everything is in a state of flux. You can never bathe in the same river twice, because the water has flowed on and been replaced.

Your story travels further when it’s connected to certain social currents. You’ll need your research people again here. The biggest waves have already been spotted, and taken by the biggest companies. Toyota’s hybrids surf on our fears of the greenhouse effect. iPod and Senseo are propelled by our needs to be express our individuality.

L’Oréal is still making the most of female emancipation.

Look for new currents. Small phenomena, where it’s not clear why something is

Henri Scott 2/4/09 11:38 PM Comment: Senseo used in lots of examples (outside belgium is it really that big a brand?). Mini?

happening or what’s behind it. The ideal place for a brand is where the soapbox is during a speech at a rally. By lifting certain people higher, you get to become the symbol of that social movement. My Brompton delivers on three fronts: it’s about the environment and consumption; it’s about mobility; and it’s about living more healthily.

But Brompton will have to choose, because each social cause has the bad manners to expect you to focus solely on them. You therefore need to surround yourself with good sociologists and good observers. Spend the money. You’ll more than get it back.

And keep looking yourself. Look for phenomena that you don’t understand at all. If My Big Fat Greek Wedding (average cast, average script, average edit) and Love Actually (syrupy English comedy) can both be a success in the space of less than a year, that alone tells you something’s up. What that something is, is people missing that family feeling. There are more and more smaller families. They spend less and less time doing things together.

Then look at how well Renault did, positioning the Espace as the ideal car for the modern family - divorced with three kids each.

Henri Scott 2/4/09 11:38 PM Comment: Dropped pfaffs. Alternative?

Keep your eyes open and stop when something surprises you. Try to find links. Try to find an insight. Everything has a reason. There is so much movement. The current is strong. Panta rhei.

Fourth question. Are there other brands on the same wave?

It’s good to find yourself among like-minded company. Brands whose brains are wired the same way yours are. After my L’Occitane shower I can take the Brompton for an organic breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien, where they wash up with Ecover.

Or, if I lived more quickly, I could drop the Porsche off in the VIP parking at the airport, take the fast lane through security with my last booking on a flex ticket with Brussels Airlines.

Fifth question. What have they done right?

Look where the stresses lie in their story. What connects with people. What doesn’t.

We have the habit of only noticing what goes wrong on the other side of the hedge. It makes us feel better. But it’s also good to observe what they do right. What their strengths are. How they got to where they are now. How they still manage to spring surprises.

Sixth question. Can you beat them at it?

Once you’ve found your wave, the other brands on it become the competition. Bring it on. If the public reacts well – remember social change – then you’re on to something.

Now you just have to try and understand what it is you’re on to. And how your brand can use it.

If they launch new products or services, look at what effect they have. Try them out – yes, more research – on your own customers. See what drives their success, whether it’s something emotional or rational.

These questions seem easy. Anyone can answer them quickly, in a few words. The trick is get you and ten other people to agree on the same answer. You’ll get debate.

And debate is good, especially when it’s about the essence of your company. You can of course simply flesh out your story entirely on your own and tell your colleagues to live with it. But it’s so much stronger when you give the process time, and let everyone contribute to the story. You’re making them the authors of your story. Over

what your company means. It’s very motivating. It’s also a more interesting thing to discuss than graphs about market share and sales fluctuations.

Now you’re ready to, in one short, deadly line, to say what your brand’s calling is. Do something to make them proud back home.

C H AP TE R FO U R

It’s all in the name.

I was only really sure my name was Guillaume when I got my first passport. That was in 1967. Before that, I’d had a number of names. Joppe. Jomme. Lomme. Even Willem. When my father was angry he’d shout, GEE! YOM! Mostly I was just called Gui. As was at least half the class then. On my school reports, my name was Guy. I think that was my mother’s spelling. As a child, I never guessed the link between all the names. I think my aunt called me Jommeke because she’d seen the name in one of my comic books.

So, there it was on my passport. Guillaume. One day it came out by accident in the class. I was 12 and didn’t have a clue what was going on. There was laughter. Lots of laughter. In those days, you were called Peter, Philippe or Patrick. Marc, Jan or Rudi was also OK. But Guyloom. Nobody was called that. “Gij’s called Giljam”, shouted someone whose ancient granddad had the same name. It was French for William, said a teacher. Like William Tell. Or William the Silent. Who he found didn’t really apply to me.

Nevertheless, after the shock wore off I began to get a feel for the name I’d inherited from my Dad’s grandfather. The original Guillaume van der Stighelen had a renowned sanitation business on the corner of the Boendaelestraat and the Ossenmarkt in turn of the century Antwerp. Alfons de Ridder must have walked these streets, also in search of a new name.

My great grandfather’s company – named after its founder - was a supplier to the City of Antwerp. Numerous historical figures must have relieved themselves over my name, which stood on the porcelain below two decorative roses. Not only was I the only one of the hundred or so great grandchildren to get his name, I was also the only one this side of the language border. The first time I saw someone with the same name in the newspaper was when Eddy Merckx was still taking part in the Tour de France. He had a manager called Guillaume Driessens. Lomme to his friends. Around the age of 15, when you change from being scared of not being able to join in, to wanting to be different at all costs, I quietly started seeing the advantages of such a name.

Van der Stighelen is an extremely long surname that clearly never occurs to the people who design computer systems and government forms. My first name was already enough to stand out, compared to all the Pat’s and Phil’s. I signed my first cartoons in the De Morgen and Flair as giljom, which gave me a nice feeling. Once André Duval and I had decided to start a company together, we agreed right away on

the name: it had to be one person’s surname and the other one’s first name. ‘Van der Stighelen André advertising’ wasn’t really an option.

Nomen est omen The first thing to look at is: What is your brand architecture?

Maybe you’ve got an extremely simple company with just one name. Maybe you’re a hugely complex conglomerate with lots of different brands. That happens a lot when companies grow through acquisitions. There are three sorts of basic structure: The one company, one brand approach. The name of your product is the name of your brand is the name of your company. Like Heineken. Dexia. Or Coca-cola.

Then there’s the structure where your company is also the name of the brand, but the products have their own names. Like Microsoft, Apple and Hyundai.

And then there are companies that have institutional names that aren’t used commercially, under which various brands live their own lives. These are groups like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Henkel.

Each of these structures has its advantages and disadvantages. It all comes down to your business strategy. The good thing about having a name that’s separate from your brands, like InBev, is that you can build up relationships with lots of different target audiences at the same time. If there’s unpleasant news, such as redundancies or scandals, then you can shove the institutional name to the front of the stage. Your brands stay unsoiled. What’s less good is that your company name isn’t known so well, so people don’t feel much for you one way or the other. It’s harder to build up good will around your share price. You’re less attractive on the job market.

The advantage of a one-name strategy is that your popularity and fame surrounding your brand directly translates into your share price. The downside is that when bad news comes, everything gets tainted.

There’s an in-between solution that many companies use; a combination of options one and three. Your take the name of your best brand and you make that the group name. (That’s what happened with the Danone Group, which was previously known as BSN.) But there are a few strings attached. Danone is a brand that stands for health: everything it does must in some way relate to that positioning. Danone’s beer and biscuits divisions had to be sold off; brands like Evian remain. Heineken and Coca-Cola have a similar structure. The difference there is that over time more brands were acquired. Which can happen.

It’s something you have to decide for your brand, your hero: which specific name is it all about?

Henri Scott 2/4/09 11:40 PM Comment: Bently? Laurent-Perrier?

That’s something I’ve learned from Hollywood. If you want to tell a good story, make it absolutely clear who the hero is. If you need to consider other brands, consider them in separate sessions.

That’s not to say you should forget about all your other names.

What’s most important is that you put all your brands on the table, so you can study the different ways they relate to each other. Ask yourself how these names help each other? Is there an active exchange of value – what marketing people call endorsement by the mother brand? (Apple made the iPhone creative and credible.

The iPhone gave the Apple brand an edge.)

Or is it a more passive exchange of value, like BMW and Mini? Everyone knows they’re part of the same family, but it’s never communicated and that suits both brands just fine.

To get the right results from the exercise, you must be fully aware of the value of each name and what their exact relationship is. Which is anything but simple. On top of that, you need to continuously update your ideas if you’re in a market with a lot of mergers. And this is one puzzle you can’t leave for later - otherwise all your other work is for nothing. You also need to know where your name comes from. Some names were thought up long, long ago. Nobody knows why you’re called what you’re called and who thought of it. Go back to the archives. Often there’s an amazing story behind a name that reveals something of the soul of the company.

You also need to know exactly how well known your name actually is. It’s always scary to see the figures.

Most companies choose a name that already exists. In the case, you need to know that name’s exact connotations. You might also be doubting over which name to use.

Or maybe you’re looking for a completely new name. Then you have an extra problem to add to the list: which one’s the most appropriate?

Sometimes companies can be named after founders who (or whose descendents) are still sitting round the table. Sometimes there are demands made during a takeover. If you haven’t decided where you want to go and why, then these decisions are forced upon you, and you begin to let circumstances decide. I once had a client who had, worldwide, nearly eight hundred different brands. 800. All small family businesses, which had been bought up over the years to make one big worldwide group. It took a huge effort to convince the board of directors how urgent it was to bring everything under one global flag. But it was a Belgian company. And Belgian companies are – on top of everything else - reclusive types. There’s no point appealing to their vanity or lust for glory. You can only do it terms of strategy. Let them know that their name

isn’t anywhere to be seen. That they have a common mission, and this mission has to be carried out under one name. That means having the right name.

Cassius Clay became Mohammed Ali. Ratzinger became Benedictus. Alfons de Ridder became Willem Elsschot. Changing your name isn’t weird. But in the corporate world, it’s often used in a weird way: to suggest a strategic change without really changing anything. The public sees through these things. You should only change your name if you’ve got a good reason: Reorganising your portfolio (bringing different products into one brand after a merger).

Fundamental change in business strategy (Volksgazet became De Morgen) Old name no longer appropriate to the age or circumstances (example) Or simple because you’ve been stuck with the wrong name for years (example) Thinking up a new name.

Imagine that you didn’t have a name yet. Or that your old name made your strategy unworkable. Just as the Gemeentekrediet/Crédit Communal name held back the bank that would eventually become Dexia from expanding into European. Or Weekendesk. Weekendesk is an interesting example; we were on the verge of completing a whole strategic exercise with them when we realised the name didn’t match the ambitions. Work started on a new name. It was about gift vouchers (cadeau bonnen) for experiences and days out. Bon-go was one of the first names up on the flip chart. After that we went through a few thousand other options. Until one of the founders said, “Actually, Bon-go wasn’t bad. But the hyphen doesn’t work.”

Bongo has, in the meantime, become a firm fixture on both people’s and company’s gift lists.

Anyway. You were looking for a new name.

You need to first to get a few things straight. Do you want the name to mean something, or not?

There are companies whose software can put together different sounds, syllables and letter combinations and immediately see if that name is free. That’s how Dexia came by its name. The choice to have a name with absolutely no connotations was deliberate. The name would have to cover too many different activities, in too many different countries. Over time, the way the bank performed would give it meaning.

By contrast, Fortis chose a name that conjured up “power”. A group of smaller players, brought together to become a greater financial force in Europe. If you give your brand a name with a meaning, you have to bear in mind that the meaning will last as long as your name does. It can be the case that your brand can become so

Henri Scott 2/4/09 11:40 PM Comment: international example

strong that your name’s original meaning is undermined by it. Nobody knows where Bongo comes from. Or Google. Or Bluetooth. (One anecdote: Larry Page and Sergey Brin first called their baby “BackRub”, because their system analysed the back links of the worldwide web. But they weren’t completely convinced, and brainstormed further. They came to the name Googolplex by shoving together two words that mean huge numbers. Larry thought that Googol was enough, and asked a student to register the domain. The student registered google.com by accident, which was of course, free.

Bluetooth is named after King Blattan (Bluetooth). He managed, in the 10th century, to get the Danes and Norsemen to communicate. He really did have a pair of blue gnashers, since Vikings didn’t take care of their teeth, which went blue when the nerve died.

If you want to work with a meaning, then you can make it as explicit as you like. For example, you might want to point to the name of the founders – Porsche – or the place the product comes from, as in Finlandia. But you can also choose something more suggestive, such as Virgin or Google. Or Samsonsite: Samson was strong, and the –ite suffix is used for stones and minerals like granite.

Q-music Coming up with a name for the country’s first commercial radio station was a serious job. The name had to mean something. Bert Geenen and Erwin Deckers had made that clear in a number of sessions. Two words kept coming up that would eventually help us design the logo. “Ball control”. No idea where it came from, and maybe we’d all had too much coffee, but ‘ball control’ somehow expressed where Bert wanted to go. From there came the word ‘cue’ – for a DJ, it’s important to get the right cue. It was just one step to replacing the word with the letter. Q music.

There are plenty of ways to brainstorm something. We came up with our own system.

It has a matrix. Long live the matrix!

On the left hand side, we list all the different qualities of the brand, from founders to ingredients to benefits. Everything that says something about it. On the bottom, we then list some general themes – fauna, flora, mythology. All you have to do is tick a box in the middle and hunt for a name for that specific combination. It’s particularly good if you have to brainstorm with a lot of people. Big groups have a tendency to all chase after the same ball together. Plus, filling in boxes in a matrix is a much less onerous responsibility than finding a new name for an entire company or new product. People loosen up and the ideas flow more easily.

If you want a decent name, keep in mind the sound, rhythm and image of your word.

After a while, names take on a life of their own. Nobody thinks of a young Spanish girl when their hear the name Mercedes. Word are just noises with a meaning. How does your word sound? How does it feel to say, or hear? Everyone knows that o’s and a’s make a word warmer. They’re the first sounds we can make. They reach something primary inside us. Short e’s and I’s feel sharper. Combine them with hard consonants and you can cut glass with your name. The more you say it, the meaner you’ll feel.

Words are also rhythms. Bri-tish Air-ways. Brus-sels Air-lines. Luft-han-sa.

And, lastly and perhaps most unexpectedly, words are images. Shapes on a page or screen. Think of the two o’s that stare out at you from Google. An interesting exercise is to look through alphabets you can’t read, Russian or Arabic for example, until you find a word you like the look of. Appearance counts for a lot.

[WOORD-JAZZ

OP

RUSSIES

GEGEVEN]

Brands are often created by shortening names.

International Business Machines is Eye-Bee-Em. Bayerische Motoren Werke, better known as BMW. Sometimes the short version of the name creates something beautiful, like SABENA. The brand’s tortured existence may have bordered on the comic, and there are virtually endless jokes about what the abbreviation actually stands for. But let’s put those to one side. Sabena is a beautiful name. It sounds good. It has a nice rhythm.

The way you say it in English turns it into a girl’s name. But for most Belgians, even a name that pretty can’t break itself free from the connotations of mismanagement and bankruptcy. Perhaps we can be more objective about a less well-known name. Take the Alcopa group. Also a beautiful name, which sounds serious and looks good. It comes from Albert Constance Participation. Albert Moorkens, and his wife Constance. Wonderful. But bear in mind that shortening a name doesn’t automatically make it better. Just ask Chuck or Kat or Liz. Rob Hood wouldn’t have got far.

It’s also a good idea to listen to what the public calls you. Coke and Bud Lite were born that way. ‘Bitte ein Bit!’ comes from the Bitburger brewery.

When a hero has the right name, you know exactly what he’s there to do. If your hero has no name, then it’s high time you found one. One that reveals what he means.

Holland’s chief civil engineer, the man responsible for the infrastructure that holds back the North Sea, is called Ronald Waterman.

Henri Scott 2/4/09 11:40 PM Comment: James joyce? Eliot?

And whatever name you choose for your hero, make it crystal clear to everybody how it should be pronounced.

C H AP TE R F I V E

Recognising is believing.

The moment I hear Fred Brouwers’ voice, I know I’m listening to Klara. When I see an orange shell hanging by the side of the road, I know I can get petrol. When Marcel Proust dunks his Madeleine cake in his tea, his childhood comes straight back to him.

It’s been 15 years, but when I think of the Grand Bazar mall on the Groenplaats in Antwerp, I can still smell the freshly roasted coffee. I can still hear the squeaks of the escalators. I can still see the copper gears turning the coffee grinders. I can still feel my mum’s hand. I can still remember the time I took someone else’s hand. I recoiled in shock. It felt different. Cold.

How do people recognise your brand? Recognition is sensory. It happens when the signals that reach our brains trigger reactions in our memory banks. We love to recognise. It warns us of dangers. It prepares us for what’s about to happen. It gives us context. It’s how we evaluate our environment.

We find rats disgusting. But make a rat smaller and turn its squeal into a squeak, and it’s a mouse. Only old ladies are scared of mice. Give it a fluffy tail and you’ve got a something cute that small kids want to feed out of their hands. All these different interpretations are a result of small changes in the information our senses provide us.

We’re continuously receiving and decoding their signals. We translate them into decisions. As children we stick everything into our mouths, because our memories are empty. As adults, we’ve learned a great deal. We can quickly make choices about what to do, without first having to try out every single option.

Visual, auditory, olfactory and other signals allow us compare what is happening now with what has happened before. Based on that comparison, we choose what to do about it. I like that. I can’t do that. Red light means stop. Green means go. It’s intuitive. When we cut open a peach we can tell if it’s ripe, and therefore edible. We know we can eat bananas when they’re yellow. We can smell when a melon is ripe.

We can hear when popcorn is ready. Good chefs can feel whether a steak is rare, medium or well done. There’s a simple trick. Make a fist out of your hand, and press your ring finger into the centre. You get an idea of how the steak should feel.

Recognition is vital to how we experience things. If, when we’re little, oysters remind us of slimy animals, we won’t want to eat them. If, when we’re older, they remind us of genitals, we may or may not (depending on how we feel about our sexuality) want to eat them. If oysters simply remind us of the sea and the waves, it’s a different experience again.

Churchill smelled of cigars. He was a heavy man. He shouted victory. He slammed his fist on the table. Everything about him signalled “weight”. This is an important person with a great deal of power. If you’re on the same side as him you feel confident. If you’re not, you feel intimidated.

What are your brand’s sensory properties? A hero’s external characteristics must do two things: inspire trust and signal experience. They create trust when they remind you of the quality you’re looking for: the antiseptic smell of a pharmacy, the soft springs of a mattress, the dazzling lights of a dance floor, the quiet of a luxury car.

Brands generate them all the time: the orange interior of a McDonald’s. The ‘bong’ when you turn on an Apple computer. The feel of the gauze of an Always panty liner.

They are all signals that serve to put our minds at rest. Good choice. Proceed. A decision based on a previous positive experience, registered in the memory and triggered by the sensory signal. The clearer the signal, the easier the decision. These signals are part of our experience of the world. They’re wormholes that transport us instantly to a certain action.

The signals in the second group transmit confirmation of the hero’s ability to help us.

They determine how we should interpret a specific experience; our brains need help there too. Champagne from a plastic mug is a very different drink from Champagne out of cut glass. Our brains interpret the taste very differently, even if it’s the same liquid. We can’t recognise the usual festive feel - just as children and adults see different things in oysters.

The minty taste of Colgate doesn’t make it work any better. Yes, menthol has antibacterial properties – but there’s not nearly enough of it in the toothpaste to protect your gums. So why not just replace it with something else? Because it sends such a powerful signal to our brains. We think of mint as something fresh and hygienic. Its taste tells us we are doing something right. It makes sure we want to go through the ritual of brushing our teeth every day. And that signal also keeps us attached to the brand that transmits it. The foam on a Senseo makes us feel that this is a fresh, decent cup of coffee. The chlorine smell of bleach makes you feel that there won’t be bacteria wandering about on the floor where your kids are playing. The silence of a Miele washing machine makes you feel that everything is under control inside.

The classic way to show how experience influences your perception is one you probably tried at school. You need a table with some kind of barrier on it, say a pile of books or a laptop. Lay both your hands flat, in such a way that one of them is behind the partition where you can’t see it. Next to the hand that you can see, put an empty glove where your ‘missing’ hand should be. Now ask someone to come and sit

opposite you. This person should stroke the hand you can see, and the glove. Keep going until you begin to feel that the glove is alive. And then the person smashes down on the glove with their fist. You won’t believe what you feel.

Visual signals can make you physically feel things.

Inspire trust, signal experience. The two basic functions of recognition are vital.

You’ll need them later.

Real heroes project these signals intuitively. If you’re in a burning building and you see a fireman approaching with a heavy protective suit, you already start feeling safer.

Your hear the sirens. You see the red fire engine. It all makes a very different impression from the ice cream van coming round the corner with its happy jingle.

The right signals create the right expectations. Story tellers and film directors understand their power. Danger is coming and the clouds are gathered. A spotlight appears with the shape of a bat in it. Help is on its way. You believe Batman is coming and you hope that he’ll make the danger go away. Then Batman appears - and really does have the features of a bat. It’s dark and you’re being helped by someone who knows the night. The cape, the eyes, the mask. Even his car has bat elements. It all inspires confidence. And creates the expectation that you’ll soon be rid of The Penguin and his mean, chattering voice.

Fame is nothing more than making sure that everyone recognises your sensory attributes and interprets them as unique abilities. Your signals are a kind of display of genetic quality, as a biologist would say. Nelson Mandela’s smile suggests his exceptional negotiation skills. Elvis Presley’s hips suggest his exceptional musical talent. Richard Branson’s long hair and beard suggest his exceptional ability to challenge the establishment. Dali’s moustache. Tommy Cooper’s fez. Prince’s guitar.

The same is true for brands.

The noise of a Harley-Davidson is famously described as The Voice of God. In the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle you can see the shape of a slim woman.

A purple cow makes chocolate lovingly from alpine milk.

Make it easy for people.

There’s only one way to be easy to recognise: you have to look different. But different itself is a balancing act, between your brand and the recognition people are looking for. A car can look different from all other cars, but it still has to look like a car.

People still to have to recognise it, know what context to judge it by. Red Bull’s packaging breaks all the rules of soft drink packaging. But you can still recognise it as a soft drink.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:44 PM Comment: International?

Smell is the most underestimated sense when it comes to recognition. With thirty million smell sensors, people are able to detect ten thousand distinct odours. And smell is also the only sense that feeds unfiltered into the emotional brain (amygdala).

You can’t fool your noise as you can your eyes or ears (see a good example on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2JMTbBsB7Y) Back to your story.

So, you’ve got an idea of what makes you recognisable to casual bystanders and diehard fans alike.

The graphic side of things naturally gets the most attention. Ask yourself how to get your brand’s other sensory properties into your visual identity. Whereas you often see suggestions of aroma or taste on packaging, the pierrot on Spa bottles is something you feel. One of the most beautiful logos of all time, His Master’s Voice, features a dog listening to a gramophone. The visual can incorporate many different kinds of sense. Touch and taste can be visualised. Use every opportunity you have.

Logo. Text. Packaging. Design. Brochures. Everything.

John Lennon looked like Jesus when he thought he could save the world (and maybe he did). In a Hollywood that overflowed with glamour and excess, Charlie Chaplin wore the same black clothes in every film. Ghandi wore sackcloth. Gorbechov had a birthmark on his forehead. It doesn’t always have to be a conscious choice. It doesn’t always have to be aesthetically perfect. What it does have to do is stand out. It has to be different. And it has to be right for your mission.

When was the last time you saw your brand? Do you see it on the shelves when you trundle round the supermarket? Take a look at the sign by the door or on your roof.

Does it say, “I can help you”? Does it say, “Come in, there’s something exceptional going on here”?

Think of Batman. Everything about how he looks creates the perception that he’ll take your plight seriously. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Your visual appearance is that chance.

Design Here are two American examples. One good. One less than good. Let’s start with less than good. Jacuzzi.

Now, very few people even know that Jacuzzi is a brand. A brand that became a generic name for something, as brands often tend to do. A biro. A hoover. To google.

(Xerox is often mistakenly put on this list – Xeroxing is the procedure after which

Rank named his copy machine.) Any bath with bubbles in it is called a Jacuzzi, whatever brand it is. This might be frustrating to the people of Jacuzzi, but they deserve it. There’s nothing special about their bubble-baths. They’re completely replaceable. Inside perhaps, sits, the best technology. But outside you can see nothing but… a bubble-bath.

Jacuzzi’s designers have probably put a lot of work into their designs. But they’ve started from the idea that it had to be aesthetically pleasing. Not from the idea that it had be exceptional.

The people at Weber barbecues did understand this. Perhaps not consciously, but as we said before, that doesn’t matter. Mr Weber and Mr Stephens had a foundry in Chicago. They made cast-iron buoys for Lake Michigan. The buoys were made by welding two half spheres together. Stephens had an unused buoy that he grilled meat on. He put the coals in one half, and when the heat was too strong, he put the other half on to cut off the air. Of course, that could end up putting the fire out completely.

So he drilled four holes in the bottom of the buoy so that it could the draw air up.

And, in the process, invented the perfect oven for cooking outside.

Stephens decided to go it alone and specialise in barbecues. He clearly had a feel for the power of a good name - and he asked his ex-partner if he could use his; Weber of course agreed. It’s a great story that I happened to hear directly from the youngest of the Stephens clan – who still run their independent barbecue company in Chicago, albeit without Dad being around anymore. It’s a shame they don’t want to make the story more famous, because it’s just the sort of thing they need: a great tale to tell over a barbecue.

More important to our current situation is the visual strength of their product. Weber have kept the buoy shape, and that means that while there are lots of different barbecues out there, there’s only one Weber. They can’t be replaced by anything except another Weber.

Logo A good, unique product needs a good, unique logo.

When you’re developing a logo, it’s important to ask yourself first impression it makes. Before you’ve even read the name. Just being pretty just isn’t enough. Your logo will join the ranks of other pretty logos. You have to see your logo as a coat of arms for your heroic quest.

Duval Guillaume was, at the very beginning, involved in the story of Telenet. The company was going to lay down fibre optic cable network so it could deliver far more digital information that was possible with a classic phone line. Ultimately, it would be

Telenet who would deliver the total multimedia experience thanks to the greater bandwidth in its network.

In 1996, at the company’s birth, the fibre optic network still had to be laid down. It was far too early to promise the fast internet, digital television or pay TV that would one day arrive.

So what should they do in the meantime?

We decided to introduce Telenet as a phone company. The advantage of doing that meant there was a big bad guy to attack: Belgacom. Having a villain meant that Telenet could be the hero that would free the land from tyranny. They could be the underdog.

We first looked at all Belgacom’s strengths and weaknesses. We looked at where Telenet could do better. Belgacom’s strengths were its monopoly, its professionalism and its inertia: they had a lot of clients, and they all stayed put. Belgacom’s weaknesses were their unwieldy structure and their absolute lack of customer service.

It was 1997. There was still an image of “there are twenty people before you”.

Belgacom’s logo was turquoise, with digital letters and a robot. It came over as cold and mechanical. Together with Lambie-Nairn in London, we set about creating a logo for a friendly crusader, looking out for the little guy. “Telephony with a smile”, as André put it. That was how the logo literally turned out. The # sign from your phone with a smiley in it. All in warm yellows and reds.

Later, as the focus shifted away from telephony towards the internet and digital TV, the # disappeared. Ready for the real battle.

Moan, moan, moan Never underestimate how little people like change. When Studio Brussel, a radio station, took a new strategic direction, we designed a new logo. Everybody hated it.

Feeling was so strong that Niki Desiron, the designer, even got threatening letters in the post. Enough to cause real panic. But the reaction from the head of the station, Marc Coenen, was brilliant. He let us put plastic mats in the urinals, with the logo and a line saying, “Now you too can piss on our logo.” The logo is still going strong.

Q-Music We’d found a name for Belgium’s first commercial radio station. Bert, Erwin and Sven were happy with Q. But unlike the launch of VTM or Telenet, we didn’t have an enemy to fight against. The public broadcaster (the VRT) was rock solid when it came to radio, and its brands all had loyal listeners. As I said before, the phrase “perfect

ball control” had stuck in the minds of Bert and his team. For the logo, we wanted to suggest a record with the needle on it – creating the shape of a Q. Designer Marc Borgions drew it in one pen stroke, and Touch de Clerq made the now famous twist so that it looked like the perfect dribble.

Packaging.

Anyone who’s my age will remember Kelton watches. They cost 250 Belgian francs.

They went kling-klong instead of tick-tock. And they came in a grey plastic box. That box was something else. This was 25 years before Swatch. Watches didn’t come in boxes. And boxes weren’t made out of plastic. Boxes were made from cardboard. The box even opened diagonally – unlike any box I’d ever seen. All these things made my Kelton a very special present indeed. It’s the only watch I’ve ever had. I lost it after two weeks. But I kept a dried butterfly in the box for years.

There’s a great deal of fuss about packaging. You have to get professional packaging agencies in. There are so many different technical and practical things to worry about you can go mad. Measurements, legal requirements, ingredients, stapling options. It never stops.

But what you have to do for your packaging is write a communications brief. What do you want it to say?

What is the story of the brand in which this product plays the leading role?

I’m not a whiskey drinker, but I can’t resist looking at the bottles when I’m at the airport duty free. Next time you’re there, take a look at how The Macallan is presented. It’s packed in a cardboard that feels like watercolour paper. Indeed, it looks like someone has painted a watercolour of the landscape around the glen. On the other side, the Macallan story is told. Of course, this is all for a luxury product that you’re not - hopefully - going to buy every day. Yet it involves you in the product’s story like few other things can.

Look like a hero.

My Brompton is incredibly easy to recognise. The only weakness is that the logo doesn’t quite work where they’ve put it.

Up to now, we’ve talked about sensory recognition – visual recognition in particular.

Things that make people stop for a moment and think, “That looks familiar.”

But what about the things people are going to recognise in it? Can they influence how you appear?

Is your brand often in the press? For what reason?

Does it have it to be? Is it good for the brand? What are the triggers? By which I mean the things that have to happen in order for your brand to be of interest. Are there any particular announcements? Inventions? Designs? Are there media-friendly people in your company? Are there events? Ad campaigns? What was your most successful public appearance? It’s best to ask people outside the company, since they can be more objective about you than you can.

By understanding when and why you’re of interest to the public, you can learn a lot about the forces that shape your public image. The more you understand these forces, the more you can control you external perception.

And bring it all down to the one and only important thing that people know you for.

The red Marlboro roof. The Nike swoosh. The Spa clown. And choose a colour if you can. Colour is one of the most powerful brand experiences around. If you’ve ever been somewhere where the Dutch football team have been playing, you’ll know what I mean.

Can heroes change their appearance?

A hero can evolve. As long as he stays true to his project.

-

Your activities can adapt, but the project remains

-

Consumers behave like infants when faced with change

-

A hero brand takes people with it, and therefore requires new tools

Imagine you’re a media company and you describe your project as “bringing people world events as quickly as possible”. A thousand years ago, you would have been standing shouting in a town square. A hundred years ago you would have printed newspapers. Fifty years ago you would have had a radio station. Then TV. And now a website. Your activities moved with the times, but you were always fighting for the same cause.

Kodak’s wheels fell off because it defined itself as a producer of photographic film. It would have been to stick with its original marketing position. If they were still “keeping memories alive”, both with their story and their products, they’d have a nice niche between Flickr and Facebook. Instead they’re forced to experiment expensively online without having a community they can turn to for support.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:44 PM Comment: joker?

New code Heroes can change how they look. So can brands. But the change has to mean something. David Bowie changed his image the moment the rest of the world caught up with the last one. It was a visual statement: new Bowie, new era.

You can change dramatically to announce a break with the past. BP changed its logo to a sun, in order to give the brand a ‘greener’ feel. Whether or not it’ll work over the long term, I can’t say. But most brands adapt their appearance so gradually you hardly notice. There have been at least twenty versions of Shell’s shell. Over the years the Douwe Egberts’ lady has grown younger and more contemporary. What’s most important is that you don’t change your brand’s quest. Douwe Egberts still wants to help people ‘share warm moments’, and has been doing so for as long as anybody can remember. That’s their strength, something that allows them to compete in a highly competitive market.

Change There’s a huge paradox to all this. Consumers are always looking for something new.

Yet they are as terrified and incensed by change as any toddler. You’ve probably seen it yourself with your mobile phone. Just as you begin to get used to it, something new comes out and it’s back to the instruction manual. Drives me mad.

Hero brands have big stories: they’ve never tied themselves to one gadget or thing.

They tell people they will take them somewhere, and keep on coming up with new ways of doing that.

You’ve never heard Apple say that such and such computer is a lovely bit of furniture to have in your home. You’ve only heard Apple say that creativity is something that needs to be stimulated. And you expect that at regular intervals, Apple will come up with something does just that.

Weaker brands change quickly, victims of circumstance. Market forces, new owners, different politics, the economic climate. They are forced to follow, because they are never followed.

Weak brands are nervous, and act accordingly. Consumers, on the other hand, have all the time and choice in the world. If a brand begins to come over strangely in the media, they look the other way. Until the brand picks up the torch again and gets back to its original quest.

C H AP TE R S IX

The right words Long, long ago I lived in a small town to the north of Antwerp. There were a huge number of chip shops and a Chinese. You could always eat out heartily and cheaply.

The competition was fierce. In the local cafes, discussion raged over where you could get the best meat nowadays. I still remember Charel, one of the older local chefs, standing up and shouting: “If I cook a cutlet for you, then it’s from a pig I knew personally!” Newcomers were warned.

I still can’t get that line out of my head, even after all these years. He put it so beautifully. He could have simply stated: “We only serve meat of the highest quality.”

Or like it says on the grease-proof paper at the butchers: our quality is our advertising.

In Leuven, in a shoe shop called Mertens, there’s a sign that reads: “We don’t know how long our shoes last for. And we’ve been going for 280 years.” These small family business could teach big advertising agencies a thing or two about how to talk to your customers.

Now it’s time we hunted down the right words.

You’ve got almost everything you need to turn your brand into a hero by telling the right story. A story that will give people enough pleasure so that they will pass it on themselves. You’re driven now by the positive contribution that your brand can make to world events. The world is ready to know what makes you different from the competition.

You have an opinion about what your product means to people. It’s time to put it into the most convincing words possible. There are two things you need to focus on: what you have to offer, and how you feel about it.

Let’s start with the first one. Your proposition.

There are two ways to approach it. Either you concentrate on the overall relevance of your product – just as you did for your product category in chapter [x]– and make it your own. Or you need to find a new reason to want to it. Imagine for example that you start a coffee company. You know that coffee generally means a pleasant moment. And you have two choices: you can claim that your coffee makes the moment more pleasant than, say, Douwe Egberts. Or you can say, screw pleasant: let’s talk about the stimulating side of coffee. Coffee is speed you can drink.

If you go for option one you’ll need a lot of money and a lot of time before your story is generally accepted. A pretty tough giant has got that patch marked out.

On the other hand, if nobody’s yet managed to capture what the category really means to people in any lasting way, then this can be the most logical route to take.

Axe (Lynx in the UK), a Unilever brand, managed to capture the essence of men’s deodorant with the idea that it helps boys get girls. Of course, that’s scarcely the most ground-breaking insight, and every other brand was saying that same thing at that moment. But their ads were so wishy-washy and forced, the field was wide open.

Why deodorant? Because it helps the continuation of the human race.

Why Axe? Because you want to get more girls.

What have you got to offer?

The best way to come with a good definition of what makes you different – in other words, your brand proposition – is to sit everybody together (sales, production, marketing, board) and make a list of sales arguments. Everybody. There’s already loads of reasons listed in your brochures and on your packaging. But you’ll find even more if you bring in people from sales and logistics into the discussion. Every sales argument should be considered separately, as if it were about to become your only sales argument. At first you’ll get a great deal of rational pointz. And then, more and more emotional arguments will come out.

- Eat your sandwich - No! - There’s calcium in it.

- Yuck!

- And magnesium - Yuck yuck!

- And vitamins.

- You eat vitamins. I’m healthier than you are.

- You’ll grow up big - Then my clothes won’t fit.

- And strong.

-?

- Everyone looks at big, strong boys.

- Hm. - Especially girls. [munch] Arguing is something we all do quite a lot of. And in our everyday lives, like in the scene above, we quite naturally use emotional arguments to make our case.

- Oh, you smell so good. As good as new. Come here!

Then comes the hug, and my mother sells the idea of “bath” to someone who’d much rather be out digging holes in the garden.

The reality in most companies and particularly in their meeting rooms is somewhat different. We learn to hang up our emotions on the hat stand on our way in. So expect it to be a while before your group loosens up. And maybe they even need some professional guidance. But in the end, it happens.

At the same time, run a parallel exercise with a research agency, from your customers’ point of view. Ask them to make a complete list with all the reasons people choose your product or service. From the painfully rational to the bizarrely emotional, and everything in between.

If you then put the two lists together, there should be a few places where they overlap. Arguments which are as relevant for the company as they are for the consumer.

And one of those arguments most become the argument. The reason why people are better off with your brand. It can be rational or emotional: the context will decide where your argument needs to score.

Once you’ve isolated that argument – your brand proposition – it’s time to test it against these three criteria: -

is it true?

-

Does it mean something to people?

-

Is it ownable by your brand?

Is it true?

Your story’s more credible if real life backs it up. That might sound obvious. But a company under pressure from its competitors can easily find itself tempted to claim something that isn’t quite accurate. Advertisers are no worse than politicians in this respect. Once a client came to me with a sales argument that I’d heard quite a few times before. I asked him was different about it. He quoted Henry Kissinger: “The difference is, this time it’s true.”

You could laugh about that sort of comment then. People were open to new things, and there was no internet. Today, no lie goes unpunished. Death by blog, it’s called.

The silent majority has been replaced by an extremely tap-happy minority that scares the hell out of brands. And quite rightly. Unless what you claim is true, is true.

There is another side to ‘true’. Something can be true now, and false tomorrow. “Is it true?” means does it apply equally to every part of your business. Is everyone, from

head of production to shareholders, onboard? Is everyone, in every part of the business, ready, willing and able to do what it takes to make that claim true? And can you give your clientele the assurance that you’re not going to go back on it at the next management reshuffle?

Does it mean something to people?

You can’t check this carefully enough. You can be completely inspired by a sales argument that differentiates you from the competition. But if people outside the business don’t get it, then you’ve got nothing.

Make sure you get the research done professionally. If you sent a couple of guys out onto the streets 10 years ago to find out people thought about “Axe deodorant helps you pull girls” you would have been told it was bullshit.

There are some great research companies around nowadays, that can go amazingly deep into your users’ world. Don’t skimp on it.

Can your brand own it?

If you’re the only one in your market, you don’t need to think too long about this one.

You are the market. But as soon as some competition turns up, sparks will fly and then you’ll be glad you were prepared. Pleasantness is best left to Douwe Egberts; health is best left to Danone. Jupiler and manliness aren’t going to go their separate ways anytime soon. Nor are Spa and purity.

Take your brand proposition, the words you’ve formulated, the message that your business is going to make true and that your customers are dying for; take that proposition and hang it on the wall. Ask yourself if it’s realistic to think it will one day become inseparable from your brand.

Thomas Cook does this to sell holidays. They don’t start with the idea they need to convince people to travel. They don’t say, our holidays cost 20% less than other travel agents. They don’t say, go on holiday, the weather’s rubbish here. Thomas Cook starts from the idea that people have already decided to go on holiday. All they need now is a good reason to book. And that’s their adverts give them. They tell their customers that they’ll have such a great time they won’t want to go home.

Brand proposition: an unforgettable time.

A proposition is what you have to offer people.

People will do something if they think they’ll get something back by doing it.

That something doesn’t have to be material.

You want to enrich yourself– materially, morally and socially.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:44 PM Comment: Only in Belgium Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:44 PM Comment: In England they did (“it’s time to leave the country”

You go to work every morning to earn a living (material) Because you told your company you would (moral) Because your colleagues need you (social).

You drink a beer after work because you’re thirsty (material).

Because you’ve worked hard, you deserve a beer (moral).

Because you want to be with your mates (social).

You choose a certain car because it’s more fuel efficient (matieral).

Because it pollutes less (moral).

Because it’s a slightly better model than your neighbour’s (social)

A proposition is only attractive if it responds to a material, moral or social need.

Depending on your brand and your market, you make a choice, which you then accentuate as much as possible in your proposition.

Colruyt/Lowest prices:

Material.

Delhaize/Life how you want: Moral.

Albert Heijn/ ‘s

Holland’s no 1 for taking care of the little things:

social.

When it comes to finding the right words for your brand, there are two things to consider: what you want to say, and how you want to say it. Content and delivery.

The content we covered in The Game. What do you think makes you different and how do you make this matter to people? Charel stood out at the end of the 1960’s, by making the case for having personal contact with the farmer at a time when the meat production was being industrialised.

Content: meat you can trust in a world of factory farming. That’s Charel’s brand proposition. In itself, it’s already quite convincing. But it doesn’t quite stick.

Stickiness factor: 0.

Charel the copywriter, please stand up.

Our words grow stronger the more people use them. As they can work their way free from the print and into the conversation, their power grows. L’etat, c’est moi. To be or not to be. Ordnung muss sein. Mangiare, Cantare, Amare. Hasta la vista, baby.

Hakuna matata.

People talk about winged words, because they’ve broken free of their original context and are used in everyday speech.

The following is a text from a real advert: A 294 kW five-litre V8 power plant, with rear-wheel drive and 500 Nm of torque, propels the car from 0-60 in 4.7 seconds. Maximum speed is electronically regulated at 250kmph. Controlling this power, using the silky-smooth six speed manual transmission, makes driving the BMW Z8 an unforgettable experience.

Content-wise, it’s not bad. Fast car. Great performance. Nice engineering. And for anyone who isn’t convinced, driving it is also ‘an unforgettable experience’. But you get the feeling that the author himself didn’t find his own text that convincing. The engineering speak had to be translated into a consumer experience. But not much of the text will stay with you, unless you’ve already put down 100k for the car and need to justify it to your mates.

Contrast it with this: The new Porsche 911. Top speed: nobody really knows.

Content-wise, there’s not much to separate the two bits of writing. They’re both about fast, expensive toys. But the words from Porsche stick in your mind. You can imagine telling someone else about it. The author decided it wasn’t enough to simply tell the story. He wanted other people to tell it too. Porsche’s words convey ‘an unforgettable experience’ without even mentioning it. The question for BMW was “Have I said everything that can be said?” The question for Porsche was “Has the reader understood what I wanted him to understand?” That’s a big difference. The copywriter gave you the feeling that you’ll be faster in the Porsche. You’re beyond comparison. If you’re together at the lights, the BMW driver will have to rev his motor so that everyone can see how fast he is. The Porsche driver, of course, doesn’t need to.

A different Porsche ad claims that the new 911 is the fastest way to get around without having eat airline food. One short line says so many things: first, when it comes to speed the only thing that can compete with Porsche is an aeroplane. Two, for those of us who live in the fast lane, bad airline food is just part of life. The huddled masses who have to save up the whole year to get on a plane will find out for themselves soon enough. It’s complainer’s bluff. As in, “You’ve no idea how much maintenance a big garden takes.” Or, “With fuel prices nowadays, heating the pool is no laughing matter.” Yes. Rich people have problems too.

Of course, when you dissect everything like this, some of the magic is lost. But it had to happen here, if you want to see what really gives certain words power.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:44 PM Comment: Should we say that it’s a translation?

Some famous texts dissected.

Speaking of convincing texts, nothing can beat the Marseillaise.

Allons enfants de la Patrie Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Contre nous de la tyrannie L’étendard sanglant est levé (x2) Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes Mugir ces féroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras. Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!

Aux armes citoyens Formez vos bataillons Marchons, marchons Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons If you ever want to get the French out of their slippers and make them trek off to go fight an unknown enemy hundreds of miles away, now you know what to say.

The song was original called the “Marching song of the Rhine army”. It got its new name during the French revolution. The troops from Marseilles starting singing it on their march up to Paris. Napoleon later banned it as subversive (and because he didn’t think of it). Funny how often a new boss bins his predecessor’s campaign. But if a campaign is strong enough – and this one surely is – than it’ll outlive its boss. De Marseillaise came back. And it’s worth looking at a little more closely.

Arise, children of the Fatherland, Begin with a strong us-feeling. Countrymen, fellow sufferers. Address your audience as a group with a strong connection to each other.

The day of glory has arrived.

Start with the good news. Victory’s on its way. My daughter Joline once worked for an organisation that handed out food on the streets and went in search of missing children. She told me if you confront people with bad news, they run off. “Always start with something positive,” she said.

Against us the tyranny's bloodied banner is raised, Outline the problem you’re going to attack. The importance to the rest of the world.

People must free themselves from totalitarian regimes if they want to be happy.

Let people feel the seriousness of the problem. The enemy has raised a bloodsplattered banner.

Do you hear in the countryside If you weren’t convinced the first time, let’s bring the problem a bit closer to home.

The roar of those ferocious soldiers?

Scare the listener. It’s getting dangerous.

They come right here into your midst The danger is getting closer, more threatening, becomes real.

To slaughter your sons and wives!

And then the knock-out blow: we’re not asking you to fight for yourself. It’s about your helpless wife and child. You’ve been changed from a frightened weasel to a proud hero.

To arms, citizens!

This is what’s known in marketing terms as the call to action. Just do it!

Form your battalions.

The resistance will only happen by building the community.

Let’s march! Let’s march!

There must always be progress.

May a tainted blood drench our furrows!

If you start positively, end positively. You won’t be satisfied if your enemy is only beaten. His blood must fertilise the crops. It’s a clever way to bring women into the men’s madness of war. It all makes sense, because you’ll end up with some good fertiliser.

The point is, the French went to go and fight on the Rhine.

Imagine John Lennon is, after Lao Tse and the four apostles , the greatest copywriter of all time. He could win over anybody in just a few words. What makes his music so unique is that he took big social themes and made them accessible to the lads in the pub. Woman is the nigger of the world drew attention to the feminist movement.

Give peace a chance brought the anti-war brigade into the mainstream. And Imagine shock free some of the cynicism that had taken over the world. It’s the ultimate ode to an idea that looked impossible at the time, but now seems like common sense.

Let’s go through Imagine as if it were copy in an ad.

Imagine Good headline. Immediately lets your audience know that you’re appealing to their imagination.

Imagine there’s no heaven.

Strong opening. Your first sentence should intrigue your reader. 90% of the planet believes in the afterlife. ‘Put your faith to one side’ is a strong approach.

It’s easy if you try.

Shows empathy. Let people know that you know it’s not easy. And yet, at the same time, there’s a challenge laid down. If you just try it, it’ll take care of itself.

No hell below us.

It doesn’t only have to be bad news.

Above us only sky.

The liberating word. Nothing can limit us. No threats having over us.

Imagine all the people Again, the power of talking to the crowd: everyone will take part, including you.

Living for today The power of the paradox. Use your imagination, but live now.

You may say I am a dreamer.

More empathy. You know that your listeners think you’re half mad right now. But you’ve got their attention. So now get the big guns out. The ultimate argument to win over the crowd.

But I’m not the only one.

Lennon isn’t ashamed to defend himself with one of the oldest arguments in the book: there are more like me.

I hope someday you will join us Now comes the sales pitch. But it’s softly said, given the weight of the idea. You don’t have to, but you can come along. There’s no pressure. Take your time.

And the world will live as one.

Ah, the proposition: a world that lives in harmony. You asked a lot from your audience. But just look what you’re offering in return. Peace and unity. No more war.

No more misery.

Imagine there’s no countries The dam breaks further. If you feel that your audience is with you, don’t hesitate to take them further.

It isn’t hard to do But make sure it’s a user-friendly suggestion.

Nothing to kill or die for An argument against nationalistic feelings: borders cause wars And no religion too Wars aren’t only fought over borders, but also over beliefs. Lennon doesn’t have to even say why: we get his story, we’ve accepted where evil comes from.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace Here he’s pointing towards his own heroic quest that he announced after the Beatles: bring peace to the world. Stop the war.

Chorus Repetition doesn’t do any harm. The more you repeat something, the more you create the impression it’s worth repeating.

Imagine no possessions We’ve covered collective evil in the world. Now it’s time to look at everyone’s personal responsibility.

I wonder if you can.

Now the tone is becoming very challenging. I don’t think you’re up to it.

No need for greed or hunger If you’re not lusting after things, nobody else has to either. Just when you thought you were OK, and it was only religion and politics that were at fault.

A brotherhood of man Out with religions, in with the brothers of love.

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world Brotherly sharing, in other words and…

The world will live as one.

The construction behind Imagine is very straightforward.

There’s a seductive offer: a world that lives in peace and harmony.

To get that, you have to think the way I do for a moment You’ll have to let a few things go that you thought you couldn’t live without.

First on a social level, then on a personal level.

And then there’s the peace of mind that you’re not alone.

The right words for your brand. The one sentence that has to sum it all up. A great deal of worrying goes into it. And very few good lines come out. The strongest outlive management culls. The weakest die a lonely death that nobody notices. In the terms of the trade, it’s called the baseline. The line on which everything is based. The words that sit next to the logo.

There are several different kinds.

-

Most companies like to have a definition of themselves as a signature. We can divide these up into three categories Who you are (the ultimate driving machine /probably the best

beer in the world).

What you do for your customers (Audi. Vorsprung durch Technik./ Heineken refreshes the parts other beers can’t reach/ Spa, the purifying water/ VTM colours your day.)

What you mean to your customers (Volvo. For life./Miele. There’s nothing better./Reading Humo can have serious consequences.)

Then there’s the credo. A line that expresses something you believe in (The future’s bright/Impossible is nothing/Every little helps.)

•

There is the call to arms (Just do it/ Go create / Think different).

•

There’s the community builder, bringing the audience together: (Mannen weten waarom / Waar Vlamingen thuis zijn / Limburger wereldburger/

the

world’s favourite airline/together we’re stronger).

•

There’s the atmosphere setter (Het

Schat, staat •

ruikt

hier

naar

Douwe Egberts /

de Bokma koud?)

And there are a whole range of ads where the customer comes first. The

1980’s were particularly badly affected. (BBL denkt aan u / we care / 2.000.000 klanten elke dag, dat moet

je

verdienen/ passionate about you).

These lines express the management’s need for their own people to be friendlier to their customers.

15 bits of advertising you can learn from Diamonds are forever If you can give a lump of rock emotional value, then you can do almost anything.

Diamonds have many special properties, as any geologist will tell you. But diamonds have one quality in particular that we humans lack, particularly when it comes to our relationships: permanence. What’s the difference between true love and diamonds.

Diamonds last forever. We’re fragile beings, mere flesh and blood. We promise something is for life, but we can’t always keep that promise. If a man gives his beloved a diamond, then he’s showing his eternal love. The women who receives it thinks, “His love may disappear at some point, but at least I’ve always got the rock.”

Just do it It’s disarming how Nike, in three simple words, announced a huge social shift. The hippies, with their rambling, had to make way for do-ers. It was the starter pistol of the yuppie culture.

Heerlijk helder Heineken (clearly delicious) The line is one big serving of platitudes: alliteration, rhythm and rhyme. But that uncomplicated character fits the pint perfectly. It’s like an old friend you get together with for some deep chat. At the same time, Heineken casually gets its two trademark qualities into the line: taste and clarity.

Bier van hoge goesting (high enthusiasm volumes) The Zulte beer baseline didn’t have a very enthusiastic beginning. Copywriter Chris Dieltjans simply read the “bier van hoge gisting” legal description on the bottle. With one small change he created something unforgettable. I’m amazed it hasn’t be used more often.

Te Laet (too late) Flemish estate agents De Laet add their own twist to the ‘te koop’ (for sale) sign when they sell a house. It’s wonderful that a small entrepreneur found a way to stand out from his many competitors by giving a standard announcement a personal twist.

Because you’re worth it It’s not pretty but it is strong. You can translate this line into any language and it still means something – suggesting something of universal value that you don’t need wordplay to sell. There are several layers to it. Above all, it says: “I, woman, don’t need to feel guilty for spending money on my appearance”. It’s the result of a deeply rooted cultural issue: women feel incorrectly labelled. Men value the wrong things about them. In the corporate world, they earn less for doing the same job. At home their efforts are unappreciated. The genetically programmed glances that men cast at any exposed female flesh are seen as valuing someone else. It is time the world correctly valued women.

‘Eendracht maakt macht’ and ‘Eigen volk eerst’ In a few words, they try to recruit you to their causes. Both slogans’ lies sits in how their connect a proposal with an advantage. ‘Eendracht maakt macht’ proposes unity.

The advantage is ‘power’. In other words, togetherness makes you stronger. Such a promise resonates with the little guys fighting powerful vested interests.‘Eigen volk eerst’ also offers a kind of unity: let us, who speak the same language, have the same skin colour and have the same history, let us become a group. The advantage? This

group should have priority over all others. We’ll take care of each other, and we are, on top of that, better than everyone else.

Here the client always comes first Not a remarkable line in itself, until you know who it was used for: an American brothel. It’s a suitable comment on an advertising epidemic that hit the corporate world in the 1980’s. Studies had shown that many big corporations had ignored their customers. Immediately, Ford responded with “We build the car you want”. In Belgium, we got BBL’s “The BBL thinks about you”. There was a rash of slogans designed to make customers feel they were important.

Schat, staat de Bokma koud? (Honey, is the Bokma cold?)

One of many gems bequeathed to us by Jim Prins, a legendery Dutch copywriter.

I grew up with his work. “ik ga bij Japie wonen, want bij Japie hebben ze King Korn brood” and I was lucky enough to work with him at Y&R. He was creative director at their Amsterdam office. And I beat him, to his great displeasure, in Tien voor Taal, in a match between Flemish and Dutch copywriters. I like mentioning that when I can.

Anyway. The line. Short and powerful. A rhetorical question that tells us a great deal about the speaker. Bokma beer has to be cool because it’s delicious that way. But the inclusion of the ‘schat’ adds an extra element that makes Bokma different. Most men drink beer together in bars and deny it afterwards. But not Bokma drinkers. Your sweetheart pours the drink and you enjoy it at home. There’s also the feeling that you’re entitled to a beer. You worked hard today. You can have a cold Bokma. Just enjoying something in Holland is not really permitted. You have to deserve it. The line became part of the language. For example if you want a beer on your boat. Or, if you want a beer in a bar yell, schat! The line tells you so much about the product without saying a word. Just as a real hero should do.

‘Trop commercial, désolé’ This phrase became enormously popular with the Flemish youth, who began shouting it out after Studio Baptist shock up the radio world. A discovery of Studio Brussel, by Geoffrey Hantson and Dirk DOmen.

Vorsprung durch Technik This German line for Audi was thought up in England. There they dared to put their slogan in German – because German and decent cars go well together. Just like the English “I’m lovin’ it” from McDonalds (coincidentally written by a German) stands

for American unrestrained enjoyment. Which suits a burger well. Using German in the car world makes you appear well-engineered. The proposition here is high technology, which gives you an advantage over everyone else. Voorsprung. Just what male drivers want.

Zot van A City marketing is, for most towns, a drama. It’s marketing by committee and involves many soulless ideas and complex procedures. One of the few successful projects in recent times was what Antwerpen did with its “A”.

Game: free the port city from cynicism and self-loathing.

Name: Antwerpen Fame: the shining A, with the Keith Haring stripes. White on red.

Claim: Zot van A. (Crazy about A. Or, if said in an Antwerp accent, Mad about you.)

About the claim. The official baseline for Antwerp is ‘The city for everybody”. A line with a huge so-what factor, a bit lecturing and poltically loaded. That’s not the case with “Zot van A”. There are stickers and t-shirts everywhere, and the line sticks.

It was thought up by Harry De Mey and it brings friends and enemies together.

Die ochtend in de krantenwinkel (one morning in the newsagents) A great line from Guy Mortier. Make an everyday situation in a small shop sound like the start of a thrilling story. Can’t get any better.

Belgacom ADSL. En je bent het wachten niet meer gewoon Peter Ampe shares authorship with his art director Katrien Bottez. He claims art directors come up with better lines, because they don’t look for them that often.

Schatjes van patatjes During my first meeting with the management of Lutosa, a Belgian potato processing company that exports all over the world, I had the feeling something was wrong. I felt I was on completely the wrong track. Every time I spoke, the owner of the company went bright red. After a while I asked him what I was doing wrong. The release was palpable: “Wij spreken hier niet over patatten, meneer, wij spreken over aardappelen.” We don’t talk about spuds here, Sir, we talk about potatoes. I never used the word spud again. Until one of our copywriters, Raoul Maris, came up with something brilliant: ‘Schatjes van patatjes’ was born and even Mr Lutosa thought it was great. He was right. It still cheers me up when I’m stuck behind a Lutosa truck on the E17.

Finding the right words is hugely important.

My son Mattias doesn’t say, “Dad, your golf swing is awful.” He says: “Dad, your swing looked like a squid falling out of a tree.” Harsh, yet poetic. It’s true that copywriters are paid a lot compared to, say, journalists. Let alone novelists or poets.

If you work out what they get paid per published word, you won’t like it. But try and work out the value of Just Do it or Mannen Weten Warom. And what a difference the right words on a piece of packaging can make if someone is doubting between two brands. Your words literally carve out territory for your brand. Or at least, that’s the idea.

Finding the right words doesn’t take long. Three seconds, to be precise. The only problem is you never know when those three seconds will come. That can makes things a little tricky. It’s not just about slogans.

Every text you, as a company, send to the outside world must be worded right. From a purchase order to an annual report to brochures to posters in the street. And don’t forget, whatever you do, your website.

That’s where your whole story starts.

C H AP TE R S E VE N

Your relation to humanity Madonna comes on stage. She knows what her public fantasises about and she gives it to them. She gives love, and she gets love back. Tia stands in the stadium and she prepares herself for the jump. She knows what her public is here to see and she lets herself by lifted by their rhythmic clapping. She gives energy. And she gets energy back.

The pope appears on Saint Peter’s square. He feels the crowds are looking for new hope and he gives their hope meaning. He shows the people respect and he gets respect back. Before you go public you must know what how you relate to the public.

Do people love you blindly? Are they dazzled by your performance? Or are they simply in awe? In this chapter we’re going to look at how to set the right tone for your brand.

No easy task. Just look at that legendary stage antics of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (type ‘Ballmer crazy’ into Google). That’s what happens when you think that you have to act like a rock star to be noticed. To be accepted. What makes the best performers so good is their ability to know their relationship with their audience. Your brand performs too, every time it appears in the public eye. And it will perform better if you first look at what the public wants from you.

We live in times dominated by entertainment. As a result, everyone wants to be a star. Everyone wants to be loved. Which is where the idea comes from that your brand relationship should be seen as a love affair. And there are indeed some brands you just want to stroke. Apple, or Mini. These are the Madonnas of the commercial world. Hip. Carried on the crowds like rock stars. But what about the others? The IBM’s, the Microsofts? The BMW’s, the Stell Artois? Should they just give up and go home? Or should they, like Ballmer, do something crazy to get themselves noticed and be chosen?

Many companies are looking for the right tone for their advertising. The conflict between the younger and older generations in a company doesn’t make it any easier.

The younger generation sees senior management’s tone as old fashioned, boring, conservative, passé. The older generation sees their younger colleagues as unnecessarily provocative. With the result that something in between is chosen.

Neither fish nor meat. A nice, clean-shaven message with – here and there – a few more hip or brave notes.

You don’t arrive at the right tone by look at what’s hip right now. Nor do you find the right tone by researching how your current and potential customers see you.

“Yes, but...” You say. “That’s just where I want to change. I want to change the brand image with an image campaign.”

Doesn’t work. Anyone who’s been reading from the beginning will remember that companies’ images, like those of heroes, aren’t made by advertising or marketing.

Images are made by the public. A pope with a red nose is still the leader of the church. Madonna in a nun’s outfit is still a sex goddess.

Back in the dawns of time, De Standaard newspaper gave me the following brief: we have a boring, grey image – make us young and sexy. I thought about it. If people

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:46 PM Comment: “a”

find you grey and boring, that’s already a lot. At least they know you and have an opinion about you. You’re not going to tell them that opinion’s worthless, are you?

Who likes to be told they’ve got the wrong idea about something? Especially if it’s by an advert.

What you can do, as we saw before, how you can make ‘boring’ and ‘grey’ valuable.

Boring becomes ‘intelligent’, grey ‘sober’. Start by accepting what people think of you.

And make something big out of that. A lot of people find Audi ‘boring’ and ‘technical’. And look what Audi does in a tv commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrX0yiHcA Our image of Bill Gates is one of an uber-dull, badly dressed man with a dodgy side parting. There’s not much he can do about it. Bill is bill. And let’s be honest, he hasn’t done that badly. If you search online for ‘Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld’, you’ll come to a commercial that shows him exactly how you always pictured him. And yet you carry on watching. The advertising agency didn’t try and change Bill’s image. They accepted it. They asked themselves, how can we make expand his unique qualities and awake the hero inside of him?

There are an enormous number of exercises designed to help you find the right tone.

The best one I ever found myself in was with our New York agency at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. The workshop was lead by a Canadian branding agency that used archetypes created by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson. There were photos shown of Harry Potter and Indiana Jones and Florence Nightingale and a whole range of other famous personalities, from Spielberg to Skywalker. With each photo, you had to choose how much the personality type was like your brand. There were 12 in total: The magician (brands like Disney, Viagra and Mr Clean) The Rebel (brands like Virgin and Humo) The Creator (brands like Apple and Renault)

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:46 PM Comment: Doesn’t work

The Wise (brands like Garnier or A.Vogel) The Ruler (brands like BMW, Microsoft, Côte d’Or) The Everyman (brands like Jupiler, Dove) The Lover (brands like Mini, Magnum) The Joker (brands like Gamma, Red Bull, Axe) The Carer (brands like Nivea, Danone) The Innocent (brands like Lenor, Milka) The Big Hero (brands like Nike, Fedex) The Adventurer (brands like Jeep and A.S.Adventure).

It’s a great way to find your brand’s voice. A hugely practical exercise that you should really do with people from outside the office. To see if the image you have of yourself matches the one the outside world has of you. Which helps.

These archetypes are great to work with – after all, they’re heroes one and all.

If someone offers to do this exercise with you, do it. Everyone should see their brand at least once as a person, not as a company. But there are limitations. The first is that you automatically have to compare yourself to other brands. And that’s against most marketeers’ instincts: after all, you want to develop your own personality, just like those brands did. The second problem is that the list isn’t that long. In reality, there are as many personality types as there are brands. Perhaps that’s the idea. The third problem is that everybody has a little bit of every archetype in them. I think I’m a magician if I can put a ball from 10 meters. I’m a rebel if I cycle against the traffic in New York. I’m a creator when I draw. I’m wise if I give my neighbour advice. A ruler when I’m steering my boat. An everyman when I go to José’s for a beer. A lover with my wife and a joker with my children. (You begin to see how your self-image comes from your practical experience.) A carer for my garden in Holland. An innocent, even if sometimes come home late. A hero if I dive into the water after my sister’s mobile.

And an adventurer if I stop and ask for directions in Brussels.

But the biggest risk is that you’ll end up with someone else’s voice, rather than something you can make your own. We’re not here to see which mask works best. We want to discover what our relation to the outside world is.

I also used a couple of archetypes at the beginning of this chapter. Madonna, Tia Hellebaut, the pope. They stand for a certain type of relationship.

You follow Madonna out of love.

You follow Tia out of amazement.

You follow the pope out of respect.

King Arthur, Superman or Jesus: what sort of hero are you?

Love, amazement and respect are the three different motives to follow someone.

Love: even you don’t know why, but you’re crazy about them.

Amazement: You’re impressed by a performance.

Respect: You hold the position in high regard.

To make sure your brand performs right every time it appears in public, you need to know which of the three it is that makes people follow you. Where the core of your brand lies. If you know why people follow you, then you know more about what’s expected of you.

Mercedes is esteemed, BMW is admired, Mini is loved.

And with the feelings come the expectations. You expect a Mercedes to be faultless.

You expect a BMW to perform. You expect a Mini to seduce you.

Or, to use a parallel from the hero world: you follow King Arthur out of respect. You follow Superman out of amazement. You follow Jesus Christ out of love.

Now, imagine there’s a flood. Arthur, Superman and Jesus arrive on the scene. What does everyone expect them to do?

We expect King Arthur to put his boots on and come and inspect the damage first hand, feeling sympathetic.

We expect Superman to build a huge dam in a flash and pump away the water.

And we expect Jesus to walk on the water and make everyone believe that they could too.

The right attitude is therefore a question of how people see you: King Arthur: high regard for your position.

Superman: admiration of your performance.

Jesus: unconditional love.

With different types of relationship come different expectations. It’s vital you understand what kind of relationship you’re in. You can’t make Microsoft or Mercedes loved. Nobody wants to cuddle Bill Gates. You admire him. Like Superman, you’re amazed at what he’s done for the world.

Apple, on the other hand, is a brand you can love. You want their stuff to work, because you’re fond of their brand. But Apple can’t start telling the world about how well they perform. Gigabytes and megapixels aren’t good for romance. They’d undermine your unconditional faith.

You choose a Mercedes because it’s superior. You’ll never see it fail. But if Mercedes cries, “Love me tender”, the room will go uncomfortably quiet.

In this chapter, we’re looking at what sort of business our customers think we are, and how we can best communicate in order to make our brand a success.

Respect Three questions that will tell you whether you’re a respected brand: 1. Do I have a product that’s seen as superior?

2. Does the market see me as a leader?

3. Is the world agreed about my superiority and the fact that I’m the best choice?

Your relationship with the customer is founded on empathy.

For a company, knowing whether you’re a King Arthur, a Superman or a Jesus Christ isn’t easy. So you therefore need to do investigate your relationship with your customers. There are plenty of tools to help you do this, like market research, but it’s vital that you hold them up against your own experience.

I once got an extremely detailed and carefully thought out report about Douwe Egberts that – to me – had nothing tangible about their relationship with their customers. Did customers respect their brand? Was it a loving friend for them?

Where they amazed by it?

Admittedly, research can - and does - give you some insight into how people experience a brand. But still. Research can actually make it harder to know whether your brand is loved, respected or admired.

So I trot off to the supermarket. I take up my place in the coffee aisle. First thing I see is that coffee brands and own labels look almost interchangeable. Similar packaging.

Similar presentation. Similar text.

“My wife’s just given birth, and I’ve got to pick up some coffee for the visitors,” I tell a lady who comes by. “I’ve never done it before. Can you help me?”

I ask nine other ladies. And in no time at all I had my answer. All ten of them tell me to get Douwe Egberts. “You can’t go wrong with it,” they told me.

It all became clear. At important moments, you don’t want to take a risk. You go for the security of Douwe Egberts. Which makes Douwe Egberts a respected brand.

That’s unusual. At first glance, you’d think that Douwe is a brand you’d love. But no.

It’s respected, and people are prepared to pay for it. Same as IBM in its heyday: Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM. If you’re a respected brand, then tune your communications accordingly. Douwe Egberts shouldn’t communicate about the quality of its coffee or the superiority of its beans. People know that. They’re already convinced that the coffee’s good.

What Douwe Egberts does need to do is give people who choose their brand a good feeling. They need to make the act of drinking a cup of coffee feel better. To raise it up a level. To make an intense moment out of it. If my sister comes round for a good gossip, I don’t get any old coffee out, I get Douwe Egberts. That is the empathy that lives at the heart of respected brands. You don’t bore people with how great you are.

You’re great because you help people be better. You ensure they have an unforgettable coffee moment.

Check your status.

There’s a lot of talk in marketing about ‘the emotional franchise’. Brands with an emotional franchise stand out the most in our world. Hip, young Virgin Atlantic is much nicer than dull old Lufthansa. But don’t get the idea that you have to be popular, cool and matey in order to be successful. It can take you to a strange place.

Brands with all sorts of different values have, under the influence of marketing and advertising types, started believing that they have a problem with their emotional franchise.

Seeing your status correctly does wonders. Witness this great spot from German agency Springer & Jacobi. A man comes out of his chic villa and opens his chic garage. Inside stands a glimmering Mercedes. He goes into the garage and we await the purr of the engine. But it never comes. Instead, we hear a squeaking noise… The noise of a bike. And indeed, the Mercedes owner comes out of his garage on this bike.

The commercial captures the essence of Mercedes’ superiority. A Mercedes driver has the luxury of being able to drive it whenever he likes. It’s like Herman de Conick’s poem ‘Two kinds of nothing”.

Luxury is the difference between on driving a car without a radio and driving a car without the radio.

Silence is the difference between Saying nothing and having nothing more to say.

Between everyday silence and the silence After the last line of a poem about silence.

Empathy There’s one great risk to being a respected company. When you, as a consumer, are stuck with a particular brand because there isn’t anything better, it can get a bit dull.

You almost want to write letters to Japanese companies to get them to come up with

something. Then you’d at least have something you and the respected company could negotiate.

As a company, you need to feel when your customers are feeling restless – before it’s too late. You need to make sure that the respect your company receives doesn’t translate into arrogance. You need to give people something back. This goes for the makers of luxury watches as much as for sports car manufacturers. For private banks as much as for Stella Artois. If you’re big enough and important enough to people that you can change the world, your communication needs to have empathy.

That’s what HSBC bank does. It plays on our fears of globalisation. We’re afraid of being small fish in a very large pool. That we’ll lose our identity. HSBC puts our minds at rest. When you arrive in a foreign airport, HSBC explains the habits of the local culture. They tell you how familiar things mean something different here. Or how unfamiliar things mean the same as things you have at home. It’s a campaign borne from the bank’s global experience, but it’s showing you their empathy. There’s plenty of room for everybody’s identity in a globalised world.

John Hancock Financial Services, an American bank, is another example of a brand built on empathy. Its highly believable campaign is based on an understanding of people’s situations. The bank can see things from its customers’ point of view. For example, the bank imagines how hard it is to be a single mother with two children. Or that paying off a mortgage on your own is no joke when your husband’s left you for someone else. Or that starting a family has certain financial consequences, from making sure you have a pension to being able to care for your parents.

John Hancock offers tailor-made solutions for the financial impact of moments like these. Together with the client, they come up with a financial plan based on their situation.

The campaign makes it clear how - in contrast to brands that are loved, where everyone must care about you – a respected brand must care about its customers. If our town is flooded, we expect that the king cares enough about us to come and visit.

Humour is an important tool for respected brands’ communication. If you don’t signal enough empathy, there’s a good chance that people will start finding you pretentious. Humour can help keep that beast at bay.

A Stella Artois customer wants to believe that they’re holding the best beer money can buy in their hands. If you look at the brand’s campaigns around the world, you see how they are made according to the recipe of a respected brand. The slogan is ‘Reassuringly expensive’. In other words, this beer is clearly terribly exclusive but you’re comfortable with that. Ultimately, it’s saying less about the beer than it is about you.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:46 PM Comment: Really?

If I look at Stella’s current campaign in New York, I see “Perfection has its price”.

Now these things are obviously very subjective, but that line doesn’t give me the same warm feeling inside. It doesn’t feel good. It’s pretentious. There’s nothing wrong with being arrogant – I know plenty of pleasant, credible people who overflow with arrogance – but without humour, it’s pretentiousness, pure and simple. It’s Richard Branson versus Donald Trump. Trump talks mainly about himself. The only funny thing about him is his hair. Branson also talks about himself a great deal. But he does it in a cheekier way. Someone asked him once, “What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire?” He replied, “You first become a billionaire and then buy an airline.”

Branson accepts he’s reached a status that most people can only dream of having.

He’s not shy about it. But having reached that status he manages to say something valuable about people. And the way he gives us good advice is self-depreciating. It’s disarming and a great way to communicate. He also understands the need for the modesty that typical of true heroes. You need to show you’re small, even though the fact is you’re an absolute leader. It’s the modesty you see for example in Gandhi’s dress – which was anything but what you’d expect from a respected leader. Or in the disarming smile of Nelson Mandela.

You don’t need to make yourself smaller. You just need to keep yourself in perspective. You accept who you are, because that’s what people made you. And that in itself is something that should keep things in perspective.

New Even respected brands need to keep on surprising people, to keep on bringing out new things. When you do that, there’s one mistake you can’t afford to make. If you do something people don’t expect – for example, as Douwe Egberts did when they launched Senseo – then you need to change the way you communicate. There’s no point telling people they have to like something because it’s yours. On the contrary.

You need to have the basic politeness to explain that you have something new for people and what it involves. You need to introduce your product to people.

Sony didn’t launch Playstation on the strength of their corporate image. It was they first time they were in the video game world, and they weren’t going to get far by saying, “Buy a Playstation, because it’s a Sony.” Instead they said, “Buy a Playstation and you’ll rule the world, conquer armies, be a football champion.”

Introducing a new product still means using empathy. Only the company has to give a little bit of its leadership back to the people.

Admiration

To find out whether you have a Superman brand, ask yourself the following three questions: 1. Can I claim superior performance? Do I do something that others can’t, and can I do it better than the competition can?

2. Will I manage to make it relevant to the world? Can I threaten to knock the market leader off the top spot?

3. Do I have the will to change the rules of the game? Can I set something in motion that changes the rules of the market?

Your relationship with your customers is based on admiration.

Nike is a Superman brand. Nike took sports clothing away of its traditional environment – gyms, running tracks, football pitches – and out on the streets. If you, as an ordinary person, wear Nike, you look athletic.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong is a Superman hero. He beat cancer, and came back as a top sportsman who won the Tour de France seven times in a row. What a performance!

And as a performance, it’s also relevant to the wider world. It shows what you can achieve with the right will. Without a doubt, Armstrong decided to rewrite the rules: not only did he defeat the cancer, he decided to climb back up to the top of the cycling world afterwards. And he changed things inside the cycling world too. He brought in a Formula 1-style approach to sponsors and suppliers. Everyone had to make their contribution if they wanted to be part of the team. The company that designed the bike frame and the company that delivered the tyres could no longer afford to work separately. That strategy is now so ingrained in the sport it’s easy to forget that not so long ago, it barely existed at all.

The existence of rugby is another classic Superman story. Rugby was invented at ‘Rugby College’, an English school. In the 1800’s, the forerunner of football was introduced to the seven most important public schools, including Rugby. While the sport evolved at the other schools into what we now know as football, Rugby played a different version. How it came about exactly, nobody knows. But myths abound about William Webb Ellis, a young student who played a crucial role in its birth in 1823: in complete defiance of the rules, he picked the football up and ran with it to the goal.

The rest is history.

Admired brands turn things upside down. Microsoft. Nike. Audi. Actimel. Admired brands are brands whose reputations depend on doing one thing better than anybody else. The art of their communication is changing the paradigm. Take, say, jam. Now, the main criteria for choosing a jam is how much fruit it has in it. Materne even shows you the enormous handfuls of the stuff that go into a pot.

So if your new jam business wants to get in on the action, it’s logical to communicate something similar. Come out fighting, telling everyone that there’s more fruit in your jam. Or that your fruit is better quality.

But an admired brand doesn’t follow the rules. It changes them.

For example, if you’re Effi you tell everyone that they should choose the jam with the least sugar.

And what do you know? Suddenly low-sugar jam is huge. Everyone goes looking for it.

Your communication needs to be based on not following the market. You’ve got to make sure that the market follows you.

If every car company is talking about speed and responsiveness, Volvo can talk about safety. If Volvo keeps at it, safety can become a big social issue. If Volvo wobbles and has second thoughts, everyone’s attention goes back to other abilities.

Leading call Changing the rules of the game isn’t easy. As you get to know the market, you discover that it’s only the biggest players who get to say what they are. They make a big impression and their truths are seen as self-evident. Amongst frogs, they have what’s called the ‘leading call’. There is always one frog who croaks the loudest. All the other frogs croak after him. After a while, they start to synchronise. The loudest frog has, naturally, the most success with the opposite sex so he sets the tone. If you’re a small frog, you think “well, if the big guys are doing that, I better do it too”.

But nature has created smarter frogs than that – as you can hear on any summer’s evening. The moment all the croaks merge into one big croak, you suddenly hear a small croak, in the gaps. Thanks to his off-sync strategy, that little frog has made sure he gets all the lady frogs’ attention. And possibly the heron’s, which isn’t so lucky.

There’s a leading call in every market. Thanks to Apple’s iPhone, everything now has to be “smart” and have an expensive touch screen. Everyone is croaking to the same all-in-one call. Until someone decides to change the rules again.

Perhaps it’s time for a disposable phone. For all the people who – like me – excel at dropping their phones into various bodies of water.

There’s a lot of pressure on brands that do similar things to say similar things. They listen to their consumers and the consumers say what they think they want to hear.

They also listen to each other and to whoever happens to be the most successful at whatever it is they all do.

The leading call is the result. All the brands say the same thing, packaged slightly differently. The only one who gains is the number one.

The success of Jupiler – Men know why – lead other brewers in Belgium to believe that ‘male camaraderie’ was a goldmine. So they decide to communicate that too: Men, mates, Maes. And the public says, you’re right. Jupiler is a good choice.

The art of the admired brand is to use its own qualities to change the leading call. It’s a game of seduction. Think of it like walking into a bar: the good news is there is a hot blond sitting there. The bad news is so are Jean-Claude Vandamme, Brad Pitt, Chris Martin and Jim Carrey. And they’ve seen her too. If Jim Carrey has the leading call, he’ll make sure everyone feels compelled to tell jokes. He’s the best at it. He wants to fight the battle on his territory. Brad Pritt will approach it from his looks.

He’d choose a place to sit with lots of light and plenty of mirrors so he can be seen from every angle. That’s how he can win.

Jean-Claude Vandamme would probably start a fight. That way he can use his martial art skills to protect the girl. Chris Martin will play a song on the bar piano. And encourage everyone to sing along.

The art is to make sure your quality, the thing you’re best at, is the weapon that everyone fights with.

When you come in, you immediately feel what’s going on. That’s your market research. And your conclusion can be: girls will choose the man with the best voice.

So the question automatically becomes, what shall we sing?

An admired brand approaches it differently. It asks itself, what am I good at that the others aren’t so good at? The men in this café are all stars, with plenty of girls running after them. Maybe they’re not so good at being faithful. As a complete unknown, I need to shift the debate. Get everyone talking about being loyal to your partner. That’s my ground.

It can always be better.

It’s always tempting to offer something that the public wants. But that’s not what you do if you’re an admired brand. You change what the public want. A brand like Thalys came onto the market with something it was the absolute best at: taking people quickly to Paris. For years, Thalys ran poster campaigns made with the visual code ‘fun, fast, Paris’. They didn’t talk about comfort and service. Other companies were good at that. Thalys shifted the focus: we’re the fastest if you want to go to Paris. And Thalys became a brand. Young executives use it in their conversation “You’ll never guess who I saw on the Thalys yesterday…”.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:46 PM Comment: geography

Thalys and Eurostar aren’t trains anymore. They’re brands. Ask the public what they want? Not if you’re an admired brand. You only end up thinking that your brand has to make that wish come true. Which means you’ll only give them more of what they’ve already got.

Keep it up Admired brands need to keep springing shocks on the world. But you need to surprise people with something they’re expecting from you. You must acknowledge that you’re taking on the market leader. You’re attacking a choice people have been making for years. The public will wish you success, but you’ll need to perform. Here it’s important to keep in mind your particular ability. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you’ve come up with a new process for designing really sharp drills. For your engineers, that’s an incredible thing to be able to do. But your customers are interested in something completely different. Don’t say, “I make sharper drills.” Say, “My drills make better holes in the wall.”

What’s the first step towards becoming an admired brand? Always start with the performance. Shift everyone’s attention to the thing you’re stronger at. Don’t ever forget this rule: you have something and everyone agrees that you’re the best at it.

You must make this one quality so important that your other, lesser qualities are tolerated. It’s like a man who can cook brilliantly. He doesn’t have to be the most handsome man in the world to be a success. But he does have to be seen getting the women at the table.

New rules, old tricks.

Succeed in getting the market’s leading call to change, and you can be sure that the big players are going to rethink their ideas. That they try and jump onto your wagon is no bad thing. In the 1980’s Stassano –a big brand at the time – tried to deal with Danone, which still small. Their market research showed that Danone was ‘more modern’ than they were. So that’s where Stassano pitched its tent. An advertising campaign appeared, featuring ‘modern people’ consuming their products. It was party time at Danone. Stassano was saying the yoghurt should be modern, and Danone was more modern. Everyone chose Danone.

A classic example of how you can change the leading call is the VTM-VRT story.

Before the BRT (as it was then known), television had had a principally educational role. VTM appeared on the market in 1989 with an ad saying “new life on your TV”.

Television could simply be a bit of fun. VTM changed the paradigm. Half of Flanders was suddenly driving round with a VTM sticker on their car. The idea that TV could

be entertaining caught on. It helped that the programs were well made. That there was the social pride that Flanders could do something on its own.

And they had the right words. Guido would often say: “We’re going to make good productions entertaining and make sure entertainment is well-produced.”

Jan Schodts, who headed up the newsroom, said, “The Wetstraat isn’t the only street in Flanders”.

The BRT reacted by changing its name to the VRT, making more entertaining programs and touching up its existing productions. That didn’t do them much good, and mainly ended up making VTM’s leadership more entrenched. That’s how it is when you’ve shifted the leading call to a territory that you dominate. The new rules all work for you.

A few years later, the exact opposite happened. The VRT went back to its original roll as a respected brand and campaigned about the importance of quality TV (whatever that was). This time, VRT too the high ground and VTM decided to climb up after them, making more serious programs – and giving the leading call back to the VRT. So it can be good news when the market leader reacts to your story. But it can also be bad. When the leader takes your story and tells it better than you do, it can be very frustrating.

It happened to Panasonic. The company was one of the first to invest in flatscreens.

They created a top quality product that revolutionised the TV market. Sony reacted by getting in on the market too, but with the tactic of taking Panasonic’s claim and outdoing it. Sony’s first campaign for the Bravia put the experience of the flatscreen front and centre: it was all about realism and colour. In a flash, everyone wanted a Sony. Panasonic found itself having to discount its TVs. If you went into the shop and asked for a Sony Bravia, the salesman would ask you, “Have you thought about a Panasonic? It’s cheaper but just as good.” Panasonic should really have been the best.

But that’s the danger if you don’t notice that the market leader can claim the same thing you do. If you change the leading call, make sure that it’s to something that you are going to be the best at for a while. And that nobody can run off with your story.

Changing society.

Admired brands have to be relevant to society, and that all depends on whether you can change the leading call. In the 70’s, every bottled water brand talked about the mountain it came out of. The Alps, the Vosges, you name it. Then Spa came out with something new: there were lots of minerals in those waters, and therefore lots of salt.

Not good for your heart. Spa changed the leading call and became the benchmark for every household.

I grew up in the sixties. Having come through the war, my parents knew what poverty was like. They weren’t bothered with health. Their biggest concern was, is there enough food? And can we put something aside in case another war comes along? It was only in the seventies that health came on the agenda. Scientists began to make the link between heart problems and eating habits. They concluded that we all ate too much salt. And that if we wanted to avoid a heart attack, salt-free eating was the only way to go. Spa was one of the first big brands to see the potential in that.

Changing the rules To change the paradigm, Toyota needed a big social theme. At first, they started with Lexus. A Mercedes clone, but a lot cheaper. It wasn’t a huge success. Until they realised that prestige, which market leader Mercedes was still associated with, wasn’t big enough. A car had to be ecological. So they launched the hydrid Lexus and Prius.

Immediately, society went off looking for the most ecological cars. Toyota became the market leader, precisely because they’d decided to stop following Mercedes. In Beverly Hills in late 2008, a Prius is the only car to be seen in. Admired indeed.

Magnum and Bertolli are two other brands who were very successful at rewriting the agenda. Magnum changed the idea that ice creams were for children. The brand raise eating ice cream to a sensual pleasure for adults.

Unilever’s Bertolli brand changed the rules of the margarine game. Until Bertolli, healthy margarines told you about how they were lower in fat and had less cholesterol.

Bertolli turned the message on its head. Bertolli was healthy because they added something to their butter and margarine, namely olive oil. And olive oil is the ingredient that gives Mediterranean people their vitality. With that, Bertolli hooked itself up to a big social idea: everyone will die young, but they’ll do it much later than they do now. Bertolli never said you’d become old thanks to their products. The brand’s power lies in the message that you’ll keep your vitality, even in your autumn years. You see pensioners playing football with teenagers’ enthusiasm. They do it to impress the ladies. It makes the idea more tangible that at a ripe old age you still have the powers and desires of youth. Bertolli managed to make their message socially relevant, but they also had to have the will to push it through. From a business point of view, the brand wasn’t a great success. It took a while before the market began to follow.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:46 PM Comment: hagendaaz?

Patience Patience isn’t something you associate with many big organisations. They mostly make a plan one day and want to see the results the next. You therefore need to be sure your shareholders see the intelligence and the disruptive potential of your approach and are willing to be patient. Otherwise, you’re better off taking a different strategy – such as that of InBev, the brewer. Or Sara Lee, in confectionary. These companies buy brands. For them, that’s a better expansion plan than launching their own brands and waiting till they succeed. Which approach is the right one? Only honest introspection can tell you that.

Many brands don’t have the willpower to change the rules. It can seem easier to go with the others and take your place in the queue. Nothing wrong with that.

Twenty years ago, I worked for Palmolive. We’d come up with a worldwide campaign for the brand. We showed the European marketing director an example of ad we’d worked out. He said, “This isn’t what I want to do. What do I really want? You have Nivea. Their products are blue and white. In the shelf below them is another brand, with the same products. That’s us. I would like people to say this about us: ‘it’s the same product, but it’s green instead of blue and it costs 10% less. So I’ll choose that.’”

He wanted a Nivea campaign in green. A campaign that people felt was exactly the same, but cheaper. It’s a perfect strategy if you don’t have the will to create something new and change the market. You’re a hero impersonator. An Elvis tribute act. Björn Again. These people are also happy, in their way.

Good retailers like Colruyt and Vanden Borre are also admired brands. They create admiration by the ability to keep their prices so low. At the same time, they change the market’s rules. Everyone else has to lower their prices to compete with them. You don’t get into that fight on a whim. It’s a rational judgement and they make just the right moves to get where they want to go.

Love If you want to find out whether your brand can be loved, ask yourself the following three questions: 1. Do I have natural charm and can I get each of my employees to have it too?

2. Do I have a group of people who’ll follow me through think and thin?

3. Can these followers become important to society, and become my missionaries and ambassadors?

Your relationship with your customers is based on love and sympathy.

Everything you need to know about loved brands has already been written in Kevin Roberts’ book, “Lovemarks, the future beyond brands”. Research always shows that a brand’s greatest strength is its emotional franchise. When people think of emotions, they immediately think of love – as if respect or admiration are things you can’t feel.

Most brand-builders dream of having people love their brand.

And that’s worth talking about. The essence of a loving relationship is forgiveness.

Loved brands get away with quite a lot. You don’t have any status to defend, as a respected brand must. You don’t have to constantly bring out new products to make yourself admired. You can surf on the wave of positive feeling that people have for you. All you have to do is launch a new product or two every now and then.

Still, it’s an illusion to think that people are ever going to fall in love with Microsoft or IBM. Nevertheless, IBM has tried it. They commissioned some research, and it transpired that IBM was a very distant company. It needed to come closer to the people. So IBM bought the rights to The Tramp from the Chaplin family in order to communicate sympathy and make itself more loved. Paid charm. Makes me think of the aunt who stands over the pram saying coochycoochycoo in the belief that that’s the baby’s language, and that trying to talk it will bring them closer together.

Charm can harm The problem for IBM is that you can’t buy your charm in. The charm of a loved brand comes from everything they do. It’s in your appearance. In what you say. In what you do. Charm is, ultimately, tough. You’ve either got it, or you haven’t.

Look at the classic cars that are being relaunched. The new Mini has charm. Perhaps even more than old one. The new Beetle has no charm. The new Fiat 500 is so different from the old one, it’s hard to say.

Charm: you wouldn’t sell a single iPod or iPhone if they didn’t look as exceptional as they do. They have to be magical. So much misery begins when companies go on a charm offensive in order to be loved, but forget to make themselves attractive. They get the codes wrong. They come over as fun and sympathetic. And yet, at the same time, they give you enormous explanations and want to give you 10% off or a free towel. If you want to play the love game, you need to know if you have the natural charm, will and daring to pull it off. And not just once, but everywhere, all the time, in everything you do. Charm is – or isn’t - in your brand’s genes. Virgin was born with charm.

Disarming.

Loved brands are disarming.

Typically, one of the best examples of disarming advertising comes from Apple. The ‘Think different’ campaign.

In a black and white film, you see icons like Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali, Maria Callas, John and Yoko, ending with a shot of a child.

The narrator says the following: ‘Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.’

The film turns creative types into the most honourable citizens on earth. It even became a social movement, described by Richard Florida in his book, “The rise of the creative class”. If you compare this film with the campaign for the new Beetle, you see how desperately hard the Beatle is trying to win you over. The song, “I wanna be loved by you” lays it on far too thick.

And therein lies the danger of being loved. You’re playing with people’s feelings, but they’ll always ask themselves if you really mean it. They want integrity. Are you just being nice now to soften me up for some hard sellin’ later on? The need for integrity is enormously underestimated. A company’s integrity and charm comes, in the first instance, from the boss. Is the boss charming? If it’s Steve Jobs up on stage, you’re transfixed. If it’s Bill Gates, you’re straight off to the bar. Charm. You have it or you don’t. And there aren’t many CEO who are charming and can transfix the public: those aren’t the qualities they look for first when they’re drawing up a list of candidates for the top job. So the charm card is really only open to companies that are still in the hands of their founders. With an imported CEO, it gets a lot less realistic. In any case, the CEO needs to look hard in the mirror and ask himself three questions: Am I able to radiate charm and magic?

Am I staying here?

And can I make sure there’s continuity?

The advantage of a loved brand is that you don’t have to be perfect. You only have to be slightly better than the competition.

Ambassadors.

So you’ve got charm by the bucket load. But you also have to make sure your employees do too. There’s no point trying to get people to love your bank if there’s a monster lurking behind every counter. The power of Apple or The Body Shop lies in the fact that their employees are all converts to the cause. They carry the fire and let the world know it.

Jesus Christ first had to find 12 apostles. They had to be driven to learn, and all of them had to be charming. The master had to give his pupils the self-belief that they too could walk on water. Because if he died, it would be they who would have to carry his message on.

Once you’ve got your converts, you then need to create a bigger group of believers.

Your customers, in other words. But whatever you do, don’t call them customers.

Call them friends. Partners in crime. Fellow travellers. Whatever you like. Anything but ‘customer’. A big enogh group of believers can carry a company. At the beginning of the 1990’s Apple went through a dip. Their talisman, Steve Jobs, was gone. It was a grey period for the company. Literally. Even the machines were grey. Apple continued to be supported by its customers- sorry, fans.

The supporters stayed faithful to the brand and even bought the bad products. When Steve Jobs came back, their loyalty was rewarded and the company got an unstoppable élan.

The internet makes loved brands very relevant.

A loved brand is created by the consumer. Much more so than with respected or admired brands. The internet has made sure that consumers can make these loved brands even faster. YouTube, Google, Amazon, Skype. These brands came into existence suddenly. There they were, in all their glory. Without you ever having seen an ad from them. And they’re all good products, no doubt about it. You can’t be charming about something that it isn’t good. If you want to make chicken soup, you need, first and foremost, a good chicken.

Image making Loved brands create their own images. Branson and Jobs play themselves. They even have a distinctive look. The people who work for them are a fun group. They shoot pool together. Classic companies try to borrow some of that fun atmosphere, which only makes loved brands appear even worthier. Seen from a social point of view,

loved brands are examples to the rest. Even though they’re responsible for only a tiny amount of GNP. They have an attitude and a way of acting that everyone is jealous of.

Rock n’ roll companies, compared to traditional businesses. But while some brands do their utmost to become loved, others have missed their chance. Nokia is a company that didn’t see the levels of affection that people had for its brand. It never occurred to them to think about it.

Arise, King Superchrist.

You’ve worked hard your whole life to be all three: admired, loved and respected. But in a relationship, you have to make choices. If your girlfriend asks you to come round and fix the boiler, arrive with a screwdriver, not a rose. And if you go out for a romantic dinner, don’t take a bouquet of drill bits. When you know why people will follow you – out of love, out of admiration or out of respect – then you can reduce the risk of becoming a hero with the wrong mask. Think it over thoroughly, make your choice and make sure you bring everybody with you.

PART THREE: A COMMERCIAL BREAK

C H AP TE R O N E

The market When I was 16 I had a holiday job on a market stall.

One day we were selling cheap china: cups, plates, that sort of thing. Or more accurately, we didn’t sell anything. We stood there and everyone walked right past us.

They didn’t even look. My boss had had enough. He took a handful of tea strainers and smashed them on the ground.

People stopped. And looked. And stood.

My boss screamed out that he’d rather smash his china to bits than have to sell it to stupid people who’d rather buy it from the supermarket at twice the price.

The crowd grew and grew. People at the back had to push and shove to see what was going on.

Some ladies came up to me. Can we please buy some plates or that dish?

My boss heard that. He grabbed the plates and the dish and threw them against the side of our truck. Then he said to me, “Start selling.”

And sell I did. Twelve plates in one go. And as long we carried on selling, customers carried on coming.

We were sold out by midday.

It was my first lesson in marketing: make enough noise for people to notice you.

Another time, we sold clothes. The evening before the market, we changed the labels.

A large became a medium. A medium became a small. A woman at the market asked me for a large. “If you ask me, Madame,” I said, “I think you’re more of a medium.”

She laughed. But they fitted. She bought three pairs. Lesson number two. If you make people feel more comfortable, they become better customers.

And finally, we were on the Vogelmarkt in Antwerpen. The Dutch flocked there in droves to get bargains. Opposite us, a man was selling polo shirts. He had an unusual promotion: 6 euro each, 20 euro for 3. You couldn’t miss it. It was written in great big red letters on a huge sign. I went over to ask him whether people actually fell for it.

“Of course,” he said. “But only the Dutch. They’ve come so far, and are so obsessed with getting a bargain that they don’t even bother counting. On top of that I give them another two euro off as an extra discount. They love it. They go home and tell their friends how easy it is to get a good deal out of a Belgian. And so their friends come along too…”

Lesson number three. Give people the feeling that they’ve done better out of the deal than you have.

Later, when I got into advertising by accident, I was swamped with strategy documents full of tricky words. I waded through fat files about consumer psychology.

It was ages before I had any idea what they were on about. The irony was that these dossiers were actually written for me. I was to take my information and inspiration from them in order to write a decent advert. It was meant to help me. And on top of that, at the agency I worked for then, you needed to be fluent in marketese if you wanted to be taken seriously. Luckily I’m a simple kind of person, which forced me to boil it all down to the essentials.

Am I making enough of a racket to be noticed? Do I exist?

Am I making people feel good about themselves?

Are they getting the impression that they’re onto a good deal here?

Do I exist? This happened to you when you were small. All the grown ups sit round the table talking to each other, and you want to say something. But nobody hears you.

You’re too small. Too unimportant. Your voice doesn’t carry very far.

Good feeling. You also knew then who to get Mum and Dad to do what you wanted.

Add a compliment. Mama, you look so beautiful. Can we open the biscuit tin? Dad, you’re so strong. Can you get my kite out of the tree?

Good deal. You’d made sure that they came out of any negotiation as the winners. If Jan comes over to stay, then I’ll have to tidy my room.

Communication is a fundamentally natural process that we all grow up with. Get attention, win people over, negotiate.

In this third part, we’re going to look at how hero status helps you do it even better.

C H AP TE R T WO

Creativity as a biological phenomenon.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The noise.

There are jams all along the information highway. An average person has over 2000 advertising messages fired at him every month. Even the most disciplined brains can only retain around sixty at a time. That means there’s a good 1900 that just burn off into the ether. A layer of calluses has built up on Joe Public’s brain. And that layer is coated in teflon. So it’s getting harder and harder to get through. To be seen, heard or read.

A quick biology lesson can help us.

Geoffrey Miller is an American biologist and author of a breakthrough book called The Mating Mind. It’s the best marketing book ever written.

Miller looks at why, over the course of evolution, man has developed such a big brain.

The answer, he goes on to show, comes from Darwin’s less famous theory: sexual selection.

Everyone knows Darwin’s other theory about natural selection, because academics have spent years studying its effects. Interest in his other theory only began to take off at the end of the twentieth century.

Here’s a very short summary. It’s very hard to explain the existence of a male peacock’s tail via survival of the fittest. It makes him easy to spot by predators. And it makes him even easier for to catch. So Darwin explained it with a second theory: sexual selection. In order to successfully pass on your genes, you need to be attractive to the opposite sex. Attractive in this sense means: standing out and signalling the potential likelihood of exceptional abilities. Anyone who’s ever gone running with Gilles van Binche will know that strong muscles have much the same effect as long, heavy feathers. Peahens don’t have a sophisticated system to screen males for genetic qualities. So they rely instead on the size and colour of their men’s tales. Miller calls this a display of genetic quality. In other words, the show is an illustration of exceptional qualities. The croaking of a frog shows how strongly he can breathe. A cricket’s song depends on muscle power. The healthier a glow worm, the brighter it shines.

Miller started reflecting on what humans’ display of genetic quality might be. He came to our brains. For years, anthropologists have wrestled with the mystery of how men got the best of all the primates when it came to brains. They based themselves on the laws of natural selection, and came up with some shaky ideas about how a genetic mutation must have given people bigger craniums, and then we developed

brain cells to fill up the space, which made us smarter, and that’s why we’ve survived as a species. Miller is the first biologist to compare our grey matter to a peacock’s tail.

He comes to the conclusion that creativity made our brains grow. Creativity as a display of genetic quality – what a beautiful idea. We sing, we dance, we paint, we sculpt, we constantly think up new ideas to be chosen by the opposite sex. And that has made sure that our brains outgrew their fixtures. So: creativity seduces.

Creativity creates the impression that anyone who exhibits it possesses superior genetic material. It explains why well brought up ladies throw their knickers at the head of a drink- and drug-addled singer on stage. It explains why healthy young men still lust after a grandma who screams “you’re simply the best”.

I fell in love with my wife because she had a beautiful laugh and could make other people laugh too. (After we got married, of course, the laughing seemed to disappear.)

The most important thing to take away from all this is how the brain makes selections. We like to believe that we make objective, intelligent choices and don’t let our feelings influence what we do: it’s the one time we overestimate our brains.

If we truly were rational, choosing a pot of yoghurt would take a full investigation by five big research companies, with one of the five then evaluating the results and presenting its conclusions – and that’s just to chose which shop is the best to buy it, objectively speaking. Whichever way you turn it, even if you have a twenty year subscription to Which? magazine, your ultimate choices are never rational. Creativity lures you in. Creative stimulates your brains. Creativity says, “Something special’s going on here.”

It also cleared up something that I had been wrestling with for years.

I had never understood why sensible, well-organised and disciplined companies wanted to a clown like me to take their message to the outside world. Nor did they, for that matter. They were looking for creativity. Why, they weren’t so sure. To sneak into their audience’s attention zones, they told themselves. Until you came back with a really original idea, and they had a collective heart attack and went back to having a pretty picture of the product and a nice line saying how happy you’d be with it. All that wrestling with creativity always drove me mad. I often thought, “To hell with all this. Just write what you want to say and stick it up on the wall.” For 80% of the advertising that see, no creative talent is necessary. Yet advertising still appears.

Because business leaders have an intuitive feel that creativity seduces more effectively. They just don’t have the necessary scientific studies that prove the suspicion.

Now they do: call Geoffrey Miller.

Henry Scott 2/4/09 11:49 PM Comment: Werft

But anyway. Back to the point of view of the opposite sex. In this case, the consumer.

The potential customer.

Of the two thousand messages, a couple stick.

There are three reasons that happens.

The first is that huge, huge, huge, huge amounts of money are spent on buying attention. That makes an impression on the street.

The second is that it’s often repeated. That costs even more money, but it’s spread out over a longer period.

The third reason is creativity.

I’d like to stress here that creativity isn’t the One True Answer. You can quite happily live without it as long as you’ve got the two things above: just buy huge amounts of media space, and keep repeating the same thing as long as you can. We shouldn’t be shy about saying this: it works, and there are brands and companies who’ve grown huge this way.

But we can safely assume that not every company has the media budget of a multinational. And who has the time nowadays?

If you want your message to turn the world upside down, and if you want someone to stop and read it, creativity is your last option.

Real creativity. Because creativity is a word that seems describe everything these days. I once heard someone say, “this car was photographed from a very creative angle.” A CEO once told me, when I asked him what creativity meant to him, that it was “the number of benefits that you can fit into one sentence.”

I’m not making that up.

So that’s what we don’t mean by creativity. We want the original stuff that gets our brain’s attention. Poetry, cleverness, charm, wit, drama, parable, story telling. Not just creativity in image and text, but creativity in how and where your message appears.

Creativity is what an Inuit does with fish.

Any normal person would moan till the reindeer come home about how little useful stuff there is in the North Pole. The Inuit, however, does the best he can with the one thing there is a lot of: fish. He eats the fish – lots of Omega 3, remember – and then makes a comb from the bones, and perhaps a few toothpicks. Creativity is a way of making reality more beautiful using only your imagination.

Noise, in today’s media, is the creativity that you bring to people’s days to get your story across. Make sure you stand out. That you’re talked about. To start with, choose a medium and a moment that you can dominate. Media planners excel at making

spreadsheets that make it look you’ve covered the whole world. Makes you feel good.

But if you work with a good media strategist, you’ll seen the difference between a spreadsheet and the intelligence of someone who can orchestrate all your tools into one movement.

Your message works even better if it’s creative.

Companies find their own advertising fascinating. But for the public, you’re one of the many who interrupt their telly. You’d better be sure you’ve got a good story, and that you tell it well. It’s not easy. So many companies are, without even knowing it, creataphobic. Original creative ideas often disrupt your sweet daydreams. And that internal balance is sometimes very deeply engrained: hence the suspicion of new ideas.

The moment you see it for yourself, the easier it is to get around. You simply have to change your frame of reference. A meeting room is deadly. Go outside to talk about ideas, and to evaluate ideas. Find somewhere inspiring.

Our agency was started to help companies do that. We wanted to build-up a culture around working methods that help advertisers make creative choices. But that’s something for another book.

Feel good Whatever you tell them, you must ensure that the people who queue up to buy your product or service feel good about themselves. A cigarette is just a bunch of dried leaves, rolled up in a thin piece of paper into a tube that you set fire to and suck on the end of. The smoke that you inhale into your lungs may give you cancer. There’s no a huge amount to feel good about. But add an image of a cowboy or an adventurer to it, and things are already looking up.

Women like driving 4x4s because they feel less intimidated by the big trucks on the ring road. But “Shop safely” won’t shift many Range Rovers in Kensington. Give them adventure. The Grand Canyon. The wilderness. They’ll feel so much better about themselves.

Once you bought Playboy for the articles. Makes you feel better. Is that deception? Of course it is. And there’s nothing wrong with it. As someone else put it so beautifully: man cannot live on bread alone. Fantasy brings a good feeling of its own.

We have a need for spirituality. The earthly choices that we make need a more noble context. We don’t pig out, we go on gastronomic weekends. We don’t drink ourselves stupid, we taste wine. We’re not gay, we’re just in touch with our feelings. We’re not lounging about on the sofa with a magazine, we’re engaging in current affairs. It’s only human to want to feel good about the things we like doing.

We don’t consume too much, we’re seduced by advertising. The people of Apple are the masters of giving their users a good feeling. Apple’s famous ‘think different’ campaign started with a legendary film featuring a range of heroes from the 20th century - all of them creative. Apple calls it a tribute to thinking different, because people who think different change the world. You may be sitting tapping clumsily on your Macbook, but you have this feeling that you belong to a very select category of people who have the vision to make the world a better place. Apple puts you in the same group as Gandhi, Hitchcock and Picasso. And no single creative person, no matter how critical they may be of the figures themselves, will have a problem with this kind of compliment. Makes them feel better.

L’Oréal uses the same logic with ‘Because you’re worth it”. You give your customer the feeling that spending money on her appearance is a good investment. As a good advertiser, you’ve given her an answer to those nagging doubts about whether she can really justify spending her cash.

Bear in mind that you can’t seduce your audience with a direct compliment. They must turn it into a compliment on their own. It may be that your audience feels good when you talk to them the ‘wrong’ way. Women can take it as a huge compliment if you play on their sense of humour. Children can feel very good if you talk to them as adults. Old people take it as a compliment when you portray them, as Bertolli does, as immature jokers who are scared of nothing and flirt with everything. But whatever you do, however style you use, make sure you leave people with a good feeling inside.

In Belgium, Humo’s communication makes us feel we’re a bit of a rebel for reading the TV listings. With De Standaard under our arms, we feel we’re more interesting than the average newspaper reader. With De Morgen we feel we’re more openminded. Danone gives us the feeling we’re living more healthily. Spa makes us feel purer. My Brompton makes me feel like I’m helping to save the planet. As long as I don’t drop it in the sea again.

Good deal A sale or an acquisition is a transaction. You offer good or services in return for money. There’s always a dynamic to the trade. The buyer wants more product for his money. The seller wants more money for his product. Somebody has to come out on top. A good salesman makes sure that the buyer comes away feeling they’ve won.

He’ll throw in something extra, or offer a privilege. Something.

What you don’t want to do is pollute the deal with a discount voucher. The only impression you leave behind is that you were asking too much in the first place. That makes you unreliable. Even if you have a reputation for being a discounter, always

talk about the extras you offer. Colyruyt’s main message is that they guarantee low prices. As does Vanden Borre. But their communication is about how satisfied their customers are about their quality and their service. Make no mistake, low prices are never an advantage. Not that there’s anything wrong with including a good price.

Every H&M poster does that. But the company never makes the price a reason to buy.

Instead, they get celebrities like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss to run around in their clothes.

To sum up: when you’re putting together a communications plan for your brand make sure you have the following: 1. Enough time, money and creativity to stand out 2. A way of giving your clientele a good feeling about themselves 3. A way of making your customers feel they’re getting the best side of the deal.

And then you need to capture it in a story that the public want to hear, see and read.

Whatever the medium, the story is what counts. It all comes down to your ability ot tell that story. And if you don’t have that – it happens – then you need to bring in good storytellers. But you need to make sure you don’t put your storytellers in straightjackets, so that everything comes out unbelievable. Surf a few company websites, watch an evening’s TV, listen to the radio and you’ll quickly see there are more than enough companies telling a story about their product that makes you think nothing more than “Time for a toilet break.” Yet so much thought went into those commercial messages. Perhaps too much.

C H AP TE R TH R EE

It all starts here dot com The best place to start telling your story nowadays is the internet. The big advantage is that the most of the big brands have all made a complete mess of it. Very few CEOs grew up with the online world, and traditional marketeers see it as more advertising space. More media. They count the number of visitors. They count the number of clicks on a banner. Even though people may only have clicked on it because they wanted to get rid of it.

This approach doesn’t work on the web. The measuring tools are designed to measure the impact of advertising space. But the internet is not media. It’s a virtual copy of the real world.

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It’s the place where you can tell your whole story

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It’s the place where you can prepare for the buying act, and even perform the act itself

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It’s the place where you can open dialogues with your customers, shareholders, distributers and employees

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It’s a place where you can watch what’s being said about your brand.

Brands are used to buying attention. You could do that in the old world, by interrupting people’s TV and putting posters on their streets. But in the new world, there’s a new challenge: you have to earn attention. And that is brilliant news for anybody with a good story to tell. Like the guys from Innocent smoothies. They have a good story. The internet comes naturally to them. It’s a central part of the way their company organises itself.

You earn attention online by putting your whole story on it, and making that story count. Get people’s attention and make them interested in whatever it is you have to offer. Make sure that you’re in a position to serve anyone who’s interested in you.

Complete process The great advantage of the digital story is that it’s brought us closer than ever to what advertising really is. Marketing has become so cumbersome for big companies. The media is so huge. Nobody has an overview of the process as a whole.

On the internet, you get that overview back. You’re sales director, marketing manager and communications director all at the same time. You get the chance to shape your customers. They come by as uninterested bystanders, and you can entice them into

your shop and make sure they find something that they absolutely have to have.

Shaping clients is the art of advertising.

Especially online. It’s a sales process. In a good sales process, scepticism evaporates.

The sceptic buys the argument before the product. It all comes down to the same, age-old dynamic: customers want to get as much product or service for their money as they can; companies want to get as much money as they can for their products.

Seller and buyer negotiate. Advertising is nothing more than orchestrating those negotiations. The mood of the negotiations determines who’ll go home victorious.

Salesmen and customers court each other according to well-defined rules. This flirting goes both ways. When you have a seller and a target audience, it can work to the customer’s advantage because the audience is always limited. The target says, “OK you want me to buy this product, so why don’t you do something about the price? Or better still, I’ll buy two products if you make the price even better.”

The other model is of provider and buyer. The buyer absolutely must have the product or service the provider is offering. The less the provider looks like a salesman, the more the buyer wants it. That’s the dark art of selling. Those are the brands we’re all jealous of. The hero brands.

So how do you turn sceptical people with no interest in your stuff into buyers who absolutely have to have your product? You start by making them forget you’re making a sales pitch. If you treat people pleasantly enough they’ll start asking questions about you on their own. Suddenly you’re in the wonderful position of being a provider.

The way most companies approach you on the internet today is so repulsive that there’s room for a well-told story or two. A convincing story is what separates dull and sharp advertising. The only thing you can’t do is make it look like advertising.

See it from your customer’s point of view. The last thing she wants is someone telling her what she thinks is good or bad. Nor does she want to get the impression she’s odd for thinking that. And yet that is exactly what so much advertising does: what you think is wrong. Hardly the basis for a wonderful relationship.

Instead, you build up good relationships with your customers by using the tricks of the market stall. You give the world the impression you’re a success. And above all, you make them feel good about themselves. “What you think is wrong” is not going to get you there.

On the contrary, they’ll come away with the feeling they’re really onto something.

Call it manipulation if you want. But you can only manipulate someone into seeing something they want to see. A woman can’t spend 100 euro at the hairdresser every

two weeks on her own. Her hairdresser has to help her. He knows what she wants, and he knows she feels a little guilty about how much she spends on herself. He’s got a good story that makes her feel good about her decision. I’ve got a new dye that’s just the colour of your eyes, look…

The traditional media is full of marketing and advertising, yet very little of it registers. There’s too much advertising that’s only about image or only about sales.

People are somehow expected to put together the whole story out of these random elements. But the online world now offers you the chance to give people – in a flash – the whole picture. As a marketing director you can, with one website, catch the eye of the whole world, make them feel good about themselves, turn them into buyers and even satisfy their urge to buy.

You can’t expect people to buy something over the phone when they’re on the internet, or to wait and buy it later. Anything that demands too much of their time is simply abandoned. The buyer must immediately want your product and immediately be able to buy it. You can create that sense of urgency by understanding who the media of the internet really are. The bloggers who compete with each other to see who’ll be the first to find the next big thing.

A year ago I was given a Zune by Microsoft. Bill Gates’ iPod. I came proudly home with it and give it to my son, Mattias. Mattias plugged it into his PC and it didn’t work. So I sent a mail to Microsoft’s technical support. A week later, I forwarded their reply on to him. He answered sarcastically, “Dad, it’s been sorted for ages.” He’d found the answer himself on a Zune blog.

Webbed feet.

A good example of what’s possible is Aldenshoes.com,which sells shoes via the internet. I called them in 1996 and asked them how they did it. The first pleasant surprise was that the phone number was incredibly easy to find on the website. The second pleasant surprise was that someone immediately picked up. And they were able to help. And they took their time over it too. In the beginning we sold 80% of our shoes in the shop and 20% online. Now it’s the other way around. 80% online. How did it happen? Trial and error. There was no fixed recipe we could follow. We asked our customers in the shop why they didn’t buy online. They told us, ‘You have to try shoes on. You have to feel that they fit OK.’ But how do you try shoes on online? It seemed impossible until someone had a great idea: ask our customers what their favourite shoes were. We said to them: ‘Give us your size, your model, the brand.’ We then went to the different stores, bought the shoes and used them to model our own shoes. Customers who’d bought a couple of pairs via the online store found them as

comfortable as their favourite ones. After that, they knew they couldn’t go wrong.

They carried on buying them online because it was just easier. The data for their ideal show was in the system. So everyone knew that every pair they bought would always feel great.”

Alden didn’t just manage to use the internet to generate interest in their shoes and direct people to their store. They managed to make their customers loyal. Every sale created the perfect conditions for the next sale. You bought your ideal shoe in your exact size from us. Now we can make you as many as you like.

In contrast to all the companies trying to flog things online at any price, Aldens created extra expectations. Expectations they – and everyone else who wants to compete with them - had to live up to.

Online, our expectations are higher than they are in on the high street. As a customer in a store, you can accept things being a little inconsistent now and then. You forgive them. You think something like ‘It wasn’t my usual sales guy, he didn’t know what I wanted’. On the internet, the exact opposite happens. As a customer, you start with the idea that you’re on a network. You approach shopping with the idea that it’s centrally organised and there can be no gaps in the system. And there can be no exceptions to the golden rule: you must give your customer the impression that he’s the most important one you’ve had today. In other words, you react immediately. An example. I’m a ‘platinum member’ of a frequent flyer program. If I send the airline a mail with a question, I get an automatic reply saying that they’ve received my mail and will get back to me as soon as possible. Three weeks later I get an answer. I’d forgotten what the question was by then.That kind of thing just doesn’t work on the internet, and yet it happens all the time.

If, in early 2009, you look at www.brompton.co.uk, you be greeted by what looks like plenty of information. Take a look at ‘about us’ and then ‘history’, which is obviously what intrigues us most right now. You get the story of Andrew, the inventor the folding system. You don’t get his photo. But you do get a quick account of how it all happened, with some nice details, like how the name Brompton comes from the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington, which his student bedsit overlooked.

But as a story, it’s not that involving.

I think that after a day’s cycling with Andrew, you could tease out something more interesting than “I wanted to functionally improve an existing design”. It’s a bit like Steven Spielberg telling you he made Jurassic Park because he wanted to do a better version of Dino from the Flintstones.

Andrew must be a fairly driven kind of guy. Look at all that he’s achieved. And yet he just doesn’t come across that way. And as a result, neither does the philosophy of the

company. Again, Andrew explains it to us. But he doesn’t get much further than ‘easily foldable bikes that are pleasant to ride on – which I do a lot of myself’. Oh, and they’re nice to look at too. But that wasn’t the main aim.

Naturally, Andrew didn’t write this himself. Somebody interviewed him and he timidly answered the questions, probably while he was covered in grease trying to design a better set of gears.

Real heroes tend to say, “I’m just doing what I think is right”, and they feel good about it. But if you were to ask Steve Jobs what the philosophy of Apple is, he probably wouldn’t say “music players that are easy to take with you and look reasonably good as long as you don’t mind walking about with two white strings sticking out of your head”.

What Brompton hasn’t done yet, and maybe one day will do, is turn their story into our story. When their website talks about environmental impact, which is a pretty hot topic right now, they talk about their factories – accurately – and not about the positive impact all those Bromptonites are making. The exhaust they’re not producing. The cities that they’re mobilising. Yet that’s why need, if we’re going to tell Brompton’s story for them, if we’re going to be ambassadors for this wonderful brand.

Brand new medium If you’ve done a good job of creating a hero brand, you can be fairly sure the internet will be interested in it. There’s absolutely no point in telling great stories in the mainstream media, if you don’t continue them online. And where online? Not like in the old world, on someone else’s property. At least, that’s not where you start. This morning I went on a news site and clicked on an article about a child rapist. The article was suddenly covered by a banner featuring dancing kids. Completely misplaced. Repulsive even. So then I go to have a look at the advertiser website – and I find nothing. This is the first place you’d expect to find their story. There’s still a lot of work to be done in the store.

Brands are making campaigns – 30 second tv spots, posters, adverts – around a central idea and then paying other websites loads of money to put the same images up online.

Whereas, if their campaign is strong enough, it can be a medium in itself.

Imagine you’re Brompton and you’ve come up with a big media campaign on theme ‘fold up your mobility problems’. The first thing you want to do is start foldupyourmobilityproblems.com with a clear link to your homepage. This site is a medium in itself, all about urban life and transport. Whatever you do, don’t put fold-

up banners on someone else’s website because you’re just holding up the traffic.

You’re a hero. You’ve got a story. Behave as if you were the media. It’s what the internet wants you to do.

TONSILS

Bullshit detector So there we are. You’re ready to give your brand hero status. You’ve got a great sounding name. You look great. And you’ve found your voice. On top of that, there’s a clear link between the three: your brand’s overall quest. Now you’re ready to go outside. Your story won’t interrupt people’s lives. They’ll be grateful for it.

There’s just one condition: you yourself have to be convinced that people are better off with it.

You need to run everything through the bullshit detector.

Consumers nowadays have a very sensitive one. They’ve been let down before.

They’ve heard one lie too many. And they all already have the information they need.

Even if they don’t have a bullshit detector, they’ll know someone who does. And when that detector goes off, you go with it.

There’s one defence against it: integrity.

Real heroes are straight with you.

Back we come to the mother and father of every hero story: belief and hope. Hope that there can be a better world. And faith that there’s someone out there who can bring it about. But hope and belief are anything but robust.

Hope is the fragile sister of ‘foresight’. Belief is the brittle brother of ‘knowing’.

Foreseeing a good year is very different from hoping for one. Believing your partner is faithful means only one thing: you don’t know.

If people trust you, they’ll pay for something they believe in even if they don’t know whether you deserve that trust. At the end of 2008, the financial world found itself in a trust crisis. People had hoped for a carefree old age, and believed that their bank manager would give it to them. Following the implosion of the American mortgage market, a bullshit detector went off, triggering others in its wake. With the result that nobody had any trust anymore. The banking world was confronted by something it had never faced before: the speed at which people could give each other news and warn each other. Death by blog.

Expectation and redemption There is only one way to pass the test. Be straight with people. A media-saturated world gives the impression that it’s enough to have a good story, told via the right channels. Dead wrong. You must have something to offer. The whole art is to create the right expectations. And that’s what heroes are great at.

You don’t expect Mohammed Ali to explain the universe and you don’t expect Einstein to pitch up on a stallion and save your life. They sharply defined what they

had to offer, and never made you hope or believe that they couldn’t deliver it. Driven as you are by commercial competition, it’s tempting to try on different shoes. But the opposite is also true. If you’re consumed with nervous modesty, you’ll miss the biggest opportunities. The art is to align the expectations with the delivery.

If they’re higher than what you can deliver, your brand won’t survive long. If what you deliver is much better than what people expect, you’re throwing your money away. If the two are balanced, you’re rich. Or happy. Or both.

It’s a case of making sure that you read your customers’ hopes right, and making sure their belief in you is justified. For that, you need: 1. Exceptional qualities. You can only show what you already have inside.

2. A strong story about these qualities.

3. A first teller with an interest in telling your story. Someone must be proud to talk about you.

4. Social relevance of your story. A big group of people must be helped by knowing it.

5. A good name. A name that works with your story, or a story that works with your name.

6. Strong appearance. Easy to recognize.

7. The right words. Inspiring, convincing, telling.

Think about it. People have chosen you. They want to be proud of their choice. They want to share their choice with other people. Don’t deny them that pleasure by hiding behind a veil of false modesty. The modesty that infects so many small companies is nothing more than an inability to live with success. Feel your brand becoming a hero in the eyes of those who queue up to engage with it. And know that you must carry your hero status with pride and honesty. If you can do that, then your brand will get all the attention it could possibly deserve.

As I’m reading through this manuscript, a robin flies against the window. It falls down to the terrace and I pick it up in my hands. It’s unconscious, but still breathing. It was a hard knock. I pick out the last bags from a packet of tea and fill it with Kleenex. I lay the robin inside. He has a beautiful red crest. I put the lid back on the box so that it won’t start flying round the house when it wakes up. If it wakes up. Half an hour later, I hear scratching coming from the box. I take it outside and open the lid. The robin flaps up to a tree and perches there for a while.

Am I a hero now?