By Steve Downes, Director
Anyone remember a film from 1990 called Crazy People?
Dustin Hoffman played an adman who has a nervous breakdown which makes him produce ads which tell the truth about his clients’ brands. He comes up with campaigns like “Volvo — they’re boxy but they’re good” and one for a Greek travel agency that goes: “Forget Paris. The French can be annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer!” Clearly insane he’s put into an asylum which is when the movie really gets going.
What’s interesting is that it is so unlikely for an ad campaign to tell the truth about the brand it is a good premise for a comedy! And as an old-time adman myself I laughed along, because the basic premise was right; an agency’s role was to ‘manipulate’ the target audience’s perceptions of a brand – whether or not those perceptions were an accurate reflection of the reality.
It seems that forever the entire marketing industry has been in an unmentioned collusion with the consumer: Brand “we know that most of you know that Persil really doesn’t wash whiter but it might make you pick up a pack if you hear it often enough” Consumer: “I know that Persil doesn’t really wash whiter, but it’s just an ad and anyway it’s quite funny,” etc. In fact many text books referred to marketing as “the art of persuasion”. A definition of persuasion is: “the act of persuading (or attempting to persuade); communication intended to induce belief or action.” No mention of whether that belief would be justifiable.
But the rise of mass feedback channels, in particular social media networks, is changing all of this.
Make any spurious claim now and a mass of consumers will arise like a giant Panto audience and cry (on Facebook, Twitter, forums etc) “OH NO IT ISN’T”. I doubt very much that the campaign “Carlsberg, probably the best lager in the world,” could’ve been born today.
This pressure, in my opinion, is driving a very healthy change in brand’s attitudes to marketing. Take sofa retailers for example. Does anyone really believe that DFS has a sale every day of the year and they are getting real bargains? But look at what CSL is doing. Its is bravely stating that the prices shown are not discounted, not on sale, just fair. I’ll be fascinated to see how this performs commercially.
Which brings us to the thorny subject of what actually is the ‘truth’? I realise there’s a whole philosophical debate there which I don’t want to get into here! One description of what is a ‘brand’ is: “a set of perceptions in the mind of consumers.” I suggest a valid definition might now be: “the consensus of online opinion”. If millions of people are saying on social networks that your brand sucks, no matter what you say, it sucks.
Consumers now value transparency and honesty. In fact a car ad today saying: “pretty basic but very economical,” would make, tactically, very good sense and would certainly not get the creative director assigned to an asylum!
