My former planning director and CMO, Karen Evans, had the best metaphor for media neutral idea strategies as just being “Matching Luggage.” When I started studying brand strategy in the mid to late 90’s, a marketer was revered as a grand brand strategist if they were able to have a big idea and stamp that idea onto every single contact point that a consumer interacted with and observed. When I worked on brand consulting for GAP Inc. I saw this strategy come to life on a global scale.
Now as I study the strategies of creative advertising campaigns like Geico and Burger King, I see the strategy of matching luggage fading away. Both of these campaigns have multiple characters and storylines to sell their services and products. These campaigns have proved that consumers are savvy enough to handle and recognize various narratives and storylines that ladder up to an overall brand idea or “take away” without looking or acting like matching luggage.
Anne Benvenuto, EVP of strategic services at R/GA talked about “Embracing Complexity” at an APG Conference, which is the opposite of simple matching luggage. She has given us a hint to what makes her interactive agency so good. Brand strategists have worked to simplify communication plans and messaging strategies for years now and we can all find hundreds of books explaining how to do this. This has started to backfire on marketers because trend forward consumers are getting bored with this strategy. They are ignoring you and want more interesting expressions of your brand.
As marketers start to use Propagation Planning techniques that spread through new media channels we’ll need to remind them that the Innovator and Early Adopter will ‘most likely’ need a different expressions of the brand. It must be different and interesting enough for them to notice and share with others. This is a target audience that will allow creative teams to take traditional brands and twist them into interactive and interesting storylines that may be contrary to the brand image and tone that the mass majority views.
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