Aiming straight in Sydney

I ran a strategy workshop in Sydney for the Domestos brand. What might be its future role in Australian bathrooms?

Included was a mix of Unilever managers from various functions and an equal number of Aussie 'consumers', all women.

I can’t quite remember how it started, but the women got into a group rant about the inadequacies, the incompetence, the total hopelessness of men. This went on for what seemed an age until they paused, quiet, perhaps to draw breath.

Then a tall blonde announced with an air of game, set and match : “They can’t even bloody AIM STRAIGHT.”

World’s Most Boring Airline

Just back from a trip to the Netherlands, I thought about the time we did the advertising for the airline.

We were working on a new strategy for KLM in Australia. Pleased with the result, I took it to the creative team and walked them through it, picking out all the most positive features one by one.

“Ah,” said the copywriter, “I think I’ve got it. World’s most boring airline.”

I doubtless looked somewhat crestfallen.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “Whoever wants to fly with the world’s most exciting airline?”

Freedom and strategy

“Give me the freedom of a tightly defined strategy,” wrote legendary British creative adman, Norman Berry.

How few seem to grasp this powerful paradox. In fact many creatives seem to resent it.

Truth is, many of them then flounder.

Norman Berry (1931-2010) was a copywriter at Lintas initially (where his father had worked as an art director before him), then at Young & Rubicam, becoming creative director. In 1964 he founded Davidson Pearce Berry and Spottiswoode, an agency that created the famous and long-running “Chimps” campaign for PG Tips. The agency was acquired by Ogilvy & Mather, where he became creative director in New York.

His aim always was to create a climate where creativity would flourish.

He died two years ago and his daughter, the poet Lucy Berry, has written about how “wonderfully bloody-minded, funny, and difficult my father was – and how loving he could be.”

M&A – respect and contempt

Why are some mergers and acquisitions brilliantly successful, while most under-perform miserably?

In my experience, it has nothing to do with the numbers – critical mass, cost-savings etc.

It’s something to do with mutual fit. But it’s much more to do with mutual respect.

When Saatchi & Saatchi merged with Garland-Compton - the hottest creative ad agency in the world (but with a somewhat iffy reputation for strategic thinking) went to bed with an excellent strategic agency, who served Procter & Gamble and Rowntree, two of the most demanding and professional clients. So certainly there was a good fit, but, more than that, the people inside the merged business respected and valued each other for their complementary skills and talents from day one.

The result was an inexorable rise to number one, first in the UK, then worldwide.

More recently, when the Interpublic holding company merged two of its global networks, Lowe and Lintas, there were apparently the same ingredients. A leading creative agency with a strong strategic one. But there the comparison ends. Contempt, “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (as King Lear puts it), was the order of the day. Particularly on the side of the dominant partner, Lowe.

The result? Two plus two equals one. Mass exodus of clients and staff, and a slump in all key markets around the world. (The agency I had chaired in Sydney went from Top 5 to bottom of the Top 50 inside two years.)

It’s never struck me that M&A marriage brokers know this, focused as they are on the numbers (and in particular their own bonuses).

Strategy first?

We had a Creativity Research Network meeting yesterday at beautiful Kent University in Canterbury – Creative Campus was the theme of the day – and it was followed by the opening of the newly transformed foyer of their Marlowe Building, just one of the Creative Campus initiatives.

Making the necessary unveiling speech the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor David Nightingale, observed that many of the most interesting innovations are born out of individual and team passion, not resulting from any particularly well-formed strategy. In fact, he went on, so often the strategy is only formed once a new idea has been both born and successfully implemented.

It made me think of my time at Saatchi & Saatchi. I had been brought up before Saatchi in highly disciplined, “professional” advertising agencies, where the strategy would be sweated over for months, sometimes (as with P&G) years. When, and only when, that phase was totally complete would the creative people be approached to start work.

What I discovered at Saatchi’s was that, invariably, the best, the most exciting and salient work would be created in exactly the opposite direction. Long before a strategy had been formulated (or even thought about in any depth), the creatives would be presented with the product or service and challenged to come up with something brilliant. When they had achieved that, the strategy behind their work would be formulated and researched.

The work was then presented to client in the usual sequence: strategy then creative. After all, that’s what clients imagined to be the only “professional” way. How shocked they might have been if they had discovered the truth.

It changed my own thinking dramatically. In fact, there may be something profoundly dulling in the traditional sequence. How inspiring that Professor Nightingale should know all that.

Do you have examples of brilliant new ideas preceding strategy?

Too-tight innovation strategies

A fascinating article by Stefan Stern in the Financial Times reminds us how easy it is for organisations to fall into an elephant trap formed out of their own corporate missions and strategies and operational norms.

At the heart of the article are thirty five innovations that were rejected internally by Xerox management over the years, innovations that went on to create significant wealth for other companies. In fact, it’s been estimated that the cumulative market value of ten of these rejects became worth twice that of Xerox itself.

The principle is this: if your mission/strategies/processes/norms are too tight, too specific, you’ll end up with the panflute situation.

You don’t suppose the panflute flowchart was one of Xerox’s core processes, do you?