The theory and practice of overturning marketing conventions.

By Paul Pfleiderer

 

We all follow conventions. Coffee in the morning, ties on men, noun before verb (usually), ladies order first, pass on the left, no white after Labor Day. For better or worse, conventions form an invisible web around our actions and the way we think, even if we have no idea how those conventions began or what their original purpose or meaning was. We are so used to most of the conventions that guide our lives that we don’t actively think about them at all.

And that’s fine, because our brains don’t really need to be faced with the same exact low-value choices over and over again every day. A mind that doesn’t need to decide which beverage to drink with breakfast or who should order first now has added bandwidth for other, more useful work.

The trouble, of course, is that conventions sometimes outlive their usefulness – and the force of habit they create can be difficult to break. We get so used to coffee for breakfast or sweets after dinner, for example, that the habit overwhelms the voice of the doctor who just told us to cut down on either or both.

Companies and industries and market sectors act in the same fashion, on a grander scale. As companies and industries and market sectors mature, the people that lead them tend to stick with conventions that have developed over the years, conventions whose initial purpose or utility may or may not even exist any more, to the point where those conventions become so familiar that no one questions them or even thinks of them as conventions at all. This is especially the case in messaging. Over time nearly all companies and industries and market sectors develop marketing and communication conventions – they follow unspoken, even unconscious, rules, everyone doing and saying more or less the same things in the same ways. And it shows. An anthropologist from Mars with no knowledge of human culture or language or technology could probably pick out all the car ads, all the prescription drug ads, or all the beer ads just based on all the visual and stylistic cues common to each.

In individuals, conventions can be useful shortcuts, as long as their underlying purpose remains valid. But in companies, industries, and market sectors, conventions too often descend into a sea of similarity, where everything looks and sounds the same.

So what to do? Marketing departments can’t all cut out the coffee. But they can still disrupt.

Disruption is what great brands and brand managers do. They figure out the conventions of their market sector – the status quo. Then they create and execute on a vision that turns those conventions on their collective ear.

Here at my agency, TBWA\WorldHealth, disruption is our software. The chairman of TBWA\, Jean-Marie Dru, has been thinking and writing about disruption – or, as we put it, “DISRUPTION®” – for the better part of the last quarter-century, and has placed it at the center of the network’s corporate culture. So all of us here are pushed to think and create disruptively. And it has worked, over and over again.

“That’s easy for you to say, Paul,” I can hear you thinking. “But every marketing agency has its little buzzword philosophy. What makes this one so exciting?”

Fair question. And there are a few good answers. First, disruption matches up to the opportunity offered to us by human behavior – by conventions. Second, disruption is simple. It doesn’t have 1,500 steps; you don’t have to torture your ideas into a pyramid and run them through the shakeup lens of this and through the blender of that to the ladder of this. Disruption, at least as practiced by TBWA, has exactly three steps. And third, disruption arises from the context of culture.

Let’s dig into those a bit more.

I’ve already talked about conventions. And even a cursory review of the history of disruptive brands shows that the biggest, most successful examples are those that blow up conventions – whether conventions of an industry, a market sector, or a customer audience. One great example is Airbnb.  Airbnb has changed the way people think about travel; going on vacation doesn’t mean staying on the ninth floor of some cookie-cutter hotel any more.  It’s flipped a convention of travel on its ear.

Second is simplicity. As practiced by TBWA, disruption involves three steps. First, capture and define those conventions – the conventions of the market space in which you’ll be working. We call this part convention hunting. What are the dynamics of the marketplace? What are the habits and assumptions of other companies and brands in the space? What are the habits and assumptions of consumers in the space? Second, define where you want your brand to go, and how it’ll look different from those conventions – your vision. What do you want your brand and its relationship with customers to look like in a year, or five, or ten? And finally, how will you get there? How can your brand flip those habits and assumptions to its benefit? What has the market missed? Can you turn a pain point that everyone else has accepted or ignored into a gain? What are the most important aspects of your brand, and how can you communicate them better? And is everything you are communicating about the brand now really all that important?

The last bit is critical. Brands don’t become disruptive by telling everyone about their twelve key features. They do it by distilling their essence down to a white-hot point of flame, instantly recognizable, memorable, unique. And simple. In a marketplace full of complexity and convention and surrounded by extraneous noise, that white-hot point is disruption.

Finally, the part about the context of culture. Great disruptions do not appear out of the clear blue sky; they operate, as Airbnb has, in the context of cultural trends and shifts that are going on out in the world at large. Too many brand managers, in all markets, have a tendency towards tunnel vision; they forget that there’s a world outside cars or beer or, yes, prescription drugs, that their audiences are living in that world, and that the real competition for share of voice isn’t all the other car or beer or pharmaceutical drug ads, it’s the rest of the culture out there. Which means that, in order to disrupt, a brand must study culture first. At TBWA\ we have a team of “culture spotters” who do this. Taking the brands we have on the roster as a starting point, they hunt around for interesting trends, news stories, cultural events, and then bring them back to the creative teams to see if any brands might be able to lean into them, so to speak.

What might this look like in real life? Right now there’s a trend brewing that might be called “Wound is my weapon.” It’s manifested in all sorts of creative and interesting ways, but the fundamental principle is that of patients taking pride in and celebrating, rather than being embarrassed by, the visible components of their medical conditions. A few years ago, a woman named Sierra Sandison competed in and won the Miss Idaho competition while wearing her insulin pump. A photograph of her in a bikini with pump attached quickly went viral, launching a whole social media “Show Me Your Pump” movement. Now all sorts of variations on this theme have popped up – the “Scarred for Life” project, breast cancer survivors walking the runway at New York Fashion Week, and plenty more. And all of them represent potential opportunities for related brands, if those brands are paying attention. Brands can just float in the eddies of culture, tossed about by pure chance, or they can make their own currents; if you want to be disruptive, you have to find where the currents are forming and learn to push them along yourself.

And that’s all. Of course, anyone can keep building brands that look like all the other brands. In fact, that’s just what I hope you do – it’ll make my own job easier! But if you really want to do what your clients are paying you to do, if you really want to cut through the banality and show patients and physicians why your brand matters, then cut down on the coffee, pass on the right, and disrupt.

 

Paul Pfleiderer is chief strategy officer at TBWA\WorldHealth.