Why Is Emotion So Vital For Brands? New Thinking About The Role Of Human Memory Suggests An Answer

A lot of attention in advertising has recently been paid to the importance of emotion as a key driver of brand advertising effectiveness.  The numerous results of studies of the IPA effectiveness database by Les Binet and Peter Field suggest that emotional campaigns are significantly more likely to lead to business effects such as increased profit and long-term changes in market share.  Emotions seem important, but why?  What is it about emotion that makes it likely to impact our behaviour?

For starters it seems reasonable that emotional content is more likely to get our attention and more likely to be remembered, but new thinking about the role of human memory suggests a deeper explanation. Increasingly scientists are arriving at the conclusion that memory exists to help us predict the future rather than to recall the past. Of course memory allows us to reflect, experience nostalgia, to find things we have lost, to recognise familiar people, places and things. But a new theory of memory suggests its real function is to play a vital role in informing our day to day decisions.  In other words, our memory is above all else a human decision-making tool.  

David Robson in an article in New Scientist puts it this way: “Human memory didn’t evolve so that we could remember, but to allow us to imagine what might be. This idea began with the work of Endel Tulving, now at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, who discovered a person with amnesia who could remember facts but not episodic memories relating to past events in his life. Crucially, whenever Tulving asked him about his plans for that evening, the next day or the summer, his mind went blank – leading Tulving to suspect that foresight was the flipside of episodic memory.”

When we are faced with a situation that requires a decision and have certain options available, memories are recalled that prompt emotions. In this way we attach emotional states to potential future outcomes that are highly influential in deciding our course of action. The more powerful the emotion, the more influential the memory and its ability to affect our behaviour. The implications for marketing and communication are crucial.  The emotions that are created and communicated in advertising are not just a tool to remember a brand, these emotions that are stored in memory are primed to actively influence our future decision-making.  So, when I start to think about what type of running shoes I might want to buy I don’t just rationally remember the Nike brand and its products. There is much more happening here than 'mental availability' of the Ehrenberg-Bass kind. 

As part of my decision making I start to actively re-experience the memories I associate with the brand via its communication – memories that include powerful and highly desirable emotions associated with human achievement and success. My brain is using memory to try to imagine a future state (and definitely in this instance overstating my own ability to achieve in said shoes) in order to guide my decision-making.  The fact that this process is emotional and can bypass rational considerations makes it more, not less, powerful.  When was the last time you saw a rational reason to believe in a Nike TV commercial?

Another aspect of how we now understand memory is equally important for marketers and this goes to the nature of forgetting.  We typically think of forgetting and forgetfulness as just a failure of memory.  New research suggests forgetting is something the brain and memory also does on purpose in order to simplify the task of recall from memory.   

In a recent interview in the New York Times, Ronald Davis, a neurobiologist at the Scripps Research Institute in the USA, argues that forgetting is an active mechanism that the brain employs to clear out unnecessary pieces of information so we can retain new ones.  “We’re inundated with so much information every day, and much of that information is turned into memories in the brain,” said Davis, “We simply cannot deal with all of it.” It isn't so much that are brains are full, its that trying to sort out and recall from thousands of very similar memories is hard work for the brain. It is the repetitive and same-same that is trashed.

If you drive to work every day for a year there is no way you are going to remember all those journeys. You simply don’t need to.  There is no value to your future decision-making from recording so many similar types or memories with only very small variations in experience.  Instead, your brain actively deletes memories that are similar to what you have experienced before.  Perhaps only a few recent or somehow noteworthy trips to work might stand out. 

This notion of active forgetting goes some way to explaining the importance of distinctiveness in communication.  Advertising that copies and repeats the usual category norms is effectively short-lasting wallpaper to our memories.  I have seen so many TV commercials featuring enthusiastic car drivers rounding bends on scenic ocean and country roads I hardly need another of these experiences encoded and stored in my long-term memory.  I forget the ad and the brand as soon as I have seen it. I also find it hard to attribute this type of memory to any one particular brand.  They all sort of blend together.

But show me something like the famous ‘cops’ ad for Volkswagen Polo and suddenly this seems different and unexpected.  The idea here is humorous and distinctive, but it also contains a powerful underlying emotional benefit – a well-made car that will protect you and keep you safe. 

Such new thinking on the role of memory as a decision-making tool helps to explain exactly why emotion and distinctiveness are so crucial for brands.  It is both a reminder of the need to fight for these aspects of brand strategy and execution, as well as a way to argue more persuasively for their employment. 

Why We Care But Don’t Act: Understanding The Human Barriers To Climate Action

You don’t have to look very far to find evidence of the size and urgency of the challenge that is global warming. A recent article in the Economist (September 2020) points out:

“Net emissions have grown by 40% over the past 30 years. Meeting the Paris goals will necessitate a 90% fall from the current COVID-struck levels over the next 30 years. Yet during that time world population is expected to rise by 2bn and gross product may triple. It follows that the world economy, which still generates over four-fifths of its energy consumption from fossil fuels, must change dramatically.”

Yet, despite the clear need for action, progress on climate change remains painfully slow.  Politicians dither. Around the world commitment to climate and emissions targets are inconsistent at best. The fossil fuel ‘industrial-complex’ works in whatever way it can to obfuscate on the issue, all the while running its ‘jobs and growth’ narrative – aimed at preserving the status quo.  

A recent Guardian podcast (“What MPs Really Think About The Climate Crisis”) traces a lack of political action on climate change to a lack of interest in the electorate.  Ordinary people, it concludes, are just not sufficiently engaged with or passionate about climate change to encourage politicians to act. 

Perhaps this is understandable in the context of the COVID crisis, which, as a clear and present health danger to millions, is demanding such urgent and universal attention from all levels of society.  But even before the pandemic our collective societal attitude to global warming wasn’t leading to great progress. As an issue, global warming lacks many of the features of the COVID crisis that have driven such immediate (albeit in many cases misguided) action. 

As a social researcher I have explored global warming in qualitative research extensively over the past couple of years, speaking to hundreds of people about the issue on behalf of my clients – sometimes environmental groups, sometimes corporations.  What emerges are a series of barriers people use to justify inaction on climate change.

The barriers can be summed up by the classic television series Yes Prime Minister in a scene in which the infamously obstructive Sir Humphrey Appleby and a government official describe the standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.  

“In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.”

In stage two we say something might be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it”

In stage three we say maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”

In stage four we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now”

People typically play back one or more of these themes to justify inaction. Let’s take a look at each of the barriers in more detail as closer examination reveals which is the key to driving the required behaviour change on climate change and how this might be done. 

Stage One

“We Say Nothing Is Going To Happen”

Climate Change Is Not Real

For years we have had climate change denial – the earth isn’t really getting warmer or it is getting warmer as part of natural variations in temperature that are not linked to human fossil fuel consumption.  At home and abroad governments and vested interests still peddle denial of the reality of climate change. There are many, especially those with links to the fossil fuel industry, who have run this argument.  Increasingly however, the science of climate change is being widely accepted and is also backed up by our own experience of bushfires and extreme temperatures around the world.  Denial was the initial reaction to COVID-19 too.  It’s a familiar early reaction to crisis until reality starts to hit you in the face.  However, increasingly it seems as that most of us have now accept that global warming is happening and that it is caused by human behaviour.  Although we can’t ignore this barrier (it is frequently used as a political justification), it is not the biggest stumbling block any more – in Australia at least.

Stage Two

“We Say Something May Be Happening, But We Should Do Nothing About It”

Climate Change Isn’t Pressing Or Urgent 

This barrier refers to the lack of willingness to believe that something should be done to address climate change, that it is an issue worthy of urgent and immediate action.  

This perspective accepts that climate change is happening, however the assumption is that the result will not be felt in any meaningful way for a long time and is too remote to inspire action.  In this view climate change and global warming will be a problem for future generations and while this is regrettable, it is not something I need to worry about right now. Perhaps surprisingly there are still 27% of Australians who do not believe that climate change represents a problem for them personally - according to the ABC Climate Change, Survey 2020.  People are notoriously bad when it comes to making decisions that might require sacrifices today in order to realise future gains tomorrow – even more so when the gains are perceived as being generations away.

This ‘not in my lifetime’ perspective is now being challenged by the Australian and, more recently, the Californian bushfires of 2020.  These events, and the prospect of more to follow have started to change perception of the immediacy and consequences of global warming.  79% of people affected by the bushfires in some way believe climate change is making things worse (Australia Institute Survey 2020). It is sinking in that the effects of global warming are happening now, not at some vague time in the future and they are happening around me, not just to polar bears and low-lying Pacific Islands.  Having our capital cities choked with smoke for days at a time is evidence to anyone that something is wrong and that action is required.   Yes, there have been some who have argued that the bushfires are not related to global warming, but the majority of people seem to accept that what we are seeing with these fires is unprecedented and it is related to man-made global warming.  

However, although the same survey reported that 56% of Australians believe global warming is “a serious and pressing problem”, this represents a decline of 5% from 2019.   Further, climate change ranked only fifth highest of potential threats to Australia’s vital interests in the same poll. Driving greater intention to tackle climate change is a pressure point that could be tackled by communication - bringing home to people in society the likely impacts of global warming on their own life in the here and now (and the irreversibility of what is happening if we don’t act).  Dust clouds, reductions in food availability, the rise of new diseases, a break down in the global supply chain and its impact on economies could all be used to paint a picture of what life would be like as the world heats up.

Stage Three 

“We Say Maybe We Should Do Something, But There’s Nothing We Can Do”

Climate Change Isn’t My Problem

This is really the big issue and problem for action on climate change.  There are many who want to tackle climate change and feel immediacy about the problem, but they don’t actually do anything about it.  

Why?  There are a few explanations for this. First, the issue seems so big and vast that people often feel helpless.  How can I do anything as one person and what would I actually do anyway? Climate change can seem so daunting that people feel powerless to act on their own. Rather than taking any of the myriad individual actions they could take, many people are quick to defer to governments and corporation to drive change (without subsequently applying any political or consumer pressure).  

Part of the issue here may be the way the climate change debate is often framed in the media. The climate change narrative is framed in terms of the need to reduce global emissions and the semiotics are the planet itself, polar ice caps, large industrial smoke stacks, international talks and treaties accompanied by a vocabulary of trading schemes, scientific jargon and the like.  It is all very big, international and in the world of geo-politics.  Rarely is the debate couched directly in terms of our local and personal fossil fuel or energy consumption or the actions we might take in response.  This makes it easier for us to blame governments and corporations and to defer to them for solutions in terms of climate accords, policy, legislation and innovation. But as Sir Humphrey from Yes, Prime Ministermight say, things don’t happen just because people are keen on them.  

Stage Four

“We Say Maybe We Could Have Done Something, But It’s Too Late Now” 

Climate Change Is Just Inevitable 

There is another rationalisation I hear on climate change – that the problem is so big and so far gone that that there is nothing we can do to reverse what is happening.  

We have to just accept our fate and find a way to live through it the best we can.  This view is easier to adopt when people believe the consequences of global warming are not severe or will only become so in the distant future.  Fatalism is also easier to fall into when people believe the problem is out of their hands.  This doesn’t seem like a widely adopted barrier at the moment, but it could easily become more potent over time if we don’t make progress on climate change and global temperatures do in fact reach a tipping point beyond which clawing back the effects of global warming would be difficult.  Interestingly, the reported bounce back in some parts of the natural world during COVID-19 (being able to see the Himalayas again in some parts of India because of reduced pollution levels) has given some people faith that it is not too late to undo the damage that is being done to our climate. 

So what can we do to address these barriers? While action on any of the four barriers to climate action would help, it is the failure of accountability and our ‘perceived powerlessness’ that seems like it could be an area of focus to drive social change.  In society today we have a remarkable ability to display doublethink when it comes to fossil fuels. Where personal accountability is latent or not drawn out in sharp relief, it’s all too easy for right and wrong to be swept under the carpet or given to someone else to deal with. This is where we are with fossil fuels today - we know it’s a problem, but we just don’t feel it enough in our own day to day behaviour.    

What we need is a new narrative for climate action, one that reframes the issue in a way that encourage individuals to be accountable. It should present climate change as an issue of immediate concern caused by industries and corporations, but also driven by a consumer culture that is complicit in global warming. A new narrative would emphasis the severity of the impact in the here and now, and challenge all of us to take on responsibility for the problem instead of deferring to government and industry. It would emphasise the need for us to take action in whatever way we can not just as consumers, but as citizens, employees, owners, inventors, teachers, entrepreneurs, investors and advocates. It is a willingness to take on accountability for climate action ourselves that is missing today. There is still time for us to turn this around.

Why Emotion Is Still Essential To Brands And Communication, Even In The Age Of Big Data.

Advertising has never been an industry to concern itself much with economics, but in the interests of self-preservation, now might be a good time to start. Classical economics holds that in a marketplace with perfect information, advertising doesn’t exist. Consumers make choices based on a fully informed understanding of their options. Advertising creates no economic value. It is irrelevant. All of which might sound rather quaint or academic, if it wasn’t for the fact that over the past decade, especially since the arrival of the ubiquitous smart phone over a decade ago, the global economy has accelerated at pace towards this very idea of more perfect information. Are we there yet? No (the era of ‘fake news’ has seen to that for starters). Are we getting closer? Absolutely and COVID-19 is only likely to accelerate this trend towards our adoption of a more information-rich digital world.

As I sit in quarantine scanning options on Netflix for my evening viewing I can simultaneously check rating scores on Rotten Tomatoes and movie reviews in the Guardian or New York Times. While standing in my local Dan Murphy’s wine store I am free to ignore the ‘staff pick’ suggestions or the scores of the in-house wine panel and check online to see independent reviews for a bottle of Penfolds Bin 28 and decide whether the 2012 or 2013 vintage might be a better drop.  At the same time I can make sure the price is competitive and see whether anyone is offering free delivery to my suburb. Amazon helps me decide which books to buy, eBay where to shop and Mr.Porter which fashion brands I will like. Consumers today are able to access information, prices, reviews, commentary, ratings or opinions and do so almost instantaneously. And of course we can do this in just about any category you’d care to think of – hotels, restaurants, fashion, electronics, banking, cosmetics or travel. You name it, Google, Seri or Alexa can direct us to the right information or even provide immediate answers. 

The rise of these new persuaders, from Trivago to Trip Advisor to Top Gear, is bad news for advertising. The information characteristics of their content is the key to its advantage – the content is often more detailed, accurate, objective, entertaining and reliable than much of the material we are exposed to by advertisers. The new consumer “pull” touchpoints, as McKinsey calls them, have another even more compelling advantage over advertising. We go to them. We seek them out, often online, and we do this when we want them. They don’t have to interrupt us to try to get our attention. Advertising now has to fight for relevance in a way it didn’t have to before and that’s a big change. 

How is the world of advertising responding to the challenge?  The industry’s data and analytics gurus, and the agencies and advertisers they work for are leading the charge to tactical campaigns powered by digital technology. Driven by short term metrics and sales pressure, many are doubling down on a precisely targeted, data-driven approach typically designed to persuade consumers with highly rational selling or ‘activation’ messages.  Massive amounts of data lets brands believe they know all about us and what we want. They spam us using analytics based tools that are deemed a success if we respond to more than one out of every two hundred approaches.  They use cookies to create banner ads that chase us around the Internet and programmatic advertising to be always on and always in our face. I look at a pair of designer trainers at an online fashion boutique and these same shoes seem to follow me around for days online. Last year I received hundreds of emails from Qantas alone and many thousands more from other brands.  Advertisers are shouting their messages louder, longer and more repetitively than ever online, simply it seems, because they can. Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, was recently quoted in the New York Times as saying: “We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise.”  Is it any wonder that consumers are not following the big data script? 

What we see playing out in the marketing landscape is a battle for influence that brands are at risk of losing. The problem isn’t the technology, it’s what it is being asked to do. You don’t influence people by being boring, dull and relentlessly annoying. Rational, fact-based, tactical advertising informed by good insights clearly has a significant role to play in the marketing mix, but the risk is that an over-reliance on this way of driving consumer behaviour well be less effective as consumers find new and better ways of informing their decisions.

What many advertisers seem to have forgotten is that influence has to be earned. This is something that brands like Nike, Apple, John Lewis and Coke have always known and which is arguably more important, not less so, in our information age. They understand the real USP of advertising is its ability to move us emotionally. The power of emotional communication has been established consistently in the ground-breaking work of Les Binet and Peter Field through their analysis of the IPA Databank (over 1,200 case studies submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Awards) and is outlined in their book Effectiveness In Context: A Manual For Brand-Building, 2018. At its best, emotional advertising does more than merely communicate information about a brand, it has the ability to alter the brand itself by attaching powerful associations to the brand’s image. 

Advertising is never going to win an information war against the Internet. Instead its data gurus should place a greater emphasis on how they can connect with audiences emotionally. But emotion isn’t something that fits easily into their scientific and data driven view of the world, until it does, their sums won’t add up no matter how impressive their technology.

How To Ensure Distinctive Assets Don't Become A Liability

The term ‘distinctive brand assets’ seems to have become very fashionable in marketing departments and advertising agencies over the past decade. Even just saying the words makes you feel kind of smart.  Sometimes in meetings when it comes to briefing or reviewing creative ideas it can seem like there is a rush to be the first one to bring up the topic.  

Perhaps the appeal lies in the fact that it's one of the rare times when we as marketers get to apply a phrase that sounds like a financial or accounting term.  If you really want to impress you might even drop in a quote or two from Ehrenberg-Bass or talk about ‘nudging memory structures’ and ‘mental availability’.  It all sounds technical, scientific and accountable, all of which can be rare indeed in the intuitive, gut-feel world of branding. 

This is not to say the buzz around distinctive brand assets isn’t entirely merited.  It’s a significant contribution to thinking about what makes brand communication effective and every successful brand has at least some distinctive assets that it deploys in its marketing and customer experience.  Countless brands have ridden on the back of powerful distinctive assets to create rivers of revenue gold.  From Mortein’s ‘Louie The Fly’, to M&M’s use of their colourful characters, to Nike’s use of Michael Jordan and to the ongoing Peroni Girl campaign, you don’t have to look far in the brand landscape to find great success stories involving such assets. 

Inherent within the approach of distinctive assets is the recognition that brands need to find their way into long term memory if they are to maximise their influence on consumer behaviour.  This perspective is to be applauded and certainly isn’t something that can be taken for granted when you consider how brands are often promoted in today’s increasingly short-term, digitally driven marketing environment. 

But I can’t help wondering if another reason behind the popularity of distinctive brand assets is that it reduces uncertainty, risk and anxiety.  If people can just fill their brand communication with a set of approved and agreed distinctive assets that have been used before they don’t really have to take responsibility if something underperforms in market. Distinctive assets can be a convenient and easy ‘opt-out’ from change and the hard strategic decisions that often go with it.

The theory even has an economic angle to appeal to CFOs. The repetition of familiar icons, imagery, characters and music allows for the formation of consistent and stable memories in the minds of consumers. These stable memory structures don’t need to be re-created over and over with expensive sixty second television commercials. Over time they can be cost-effectively topped up with much shorter bursts of activity in television, online or even outdoor.   Distinctive brand assets suddenly feel even more attractive when talked about in this fiscally responsible way.  

Perhaps not surprisingly brands have gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve distinctive assets. VB created voiceovers for its familiar ‘Hard Earned Thirst’ television ads using computer generated audio of the voice of John Meillon long after he died.  Avis has been running with its famous “We Try Harder” end line for over half a century. And there was a time when Qantas had to reassemble the Australian Children’s Choir every time it wanted to plug the brand on television.  But should distinctive assets be pursued at all costs? 

Distinctive assets are a powerful tool, but their application needs to be thought through carefully, especially the extent to which they are used for brand communication. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing. Logos, end lines and musical ‘stings’ are the most basic and harmless examples of distinctive assets.  The challenge comes when the distinctive assets start to find their way into the fabric of the communication itself and take centre stage at the heart of the execution.

Distinctive assets can quickly become a creative and strategic straight-jacket.  Close to home and more painfully, I once worked on a wine brand that had an eagle as the brand's logo and core distinctive asset in the advertising. The television ads featuring an eagle in flight to a classical score (and not much else) actually worked extremely well at driving awareness and connected seamlessly with the wine label on shelf in store. For a long time the soaring eagle, simple as it was, worked well and the brand was very successful. Loyal customers loved it. But over time the brand started to lose relevance and wasn't attracting a new audience. Try as we might, we couldn't find a way of using an eagle in flight to communicate a bigger idea in a way that worked. Every way we turned our giant eagle was crowding out the idea. Eventually we were fired, and shortly after, so was the eagle but too late to save the account. So when looking to introduce distinctive assets front and centre into the DNA of a campaign it’s good to think through whether or not it will provide enough potential for variation and engagement over time.  

Distinctive assets can also have a cultural and social shelf life.  Solo’s remarkably successful campaign dating back to the 1980s featured Solo Man himself as the primary distinctive asset (complete with moustache, canoe and macho charisma) often pitted in a lone battle against the wild. It was certainly a powerful and motivating symbol of masculinity in its time.  But today society, and our views of what constitutes an acceptable version of masculinity, have moved on.  So the brand decided to kill off its most famous distinctive asset and present a new version of masculinity.  It did however, keep the music from the previous campaigns which maintains a link to those older existing memory structures, while still letting the brand move on with a more contemporary depiction of manhood.  Cultural relevance can often be a good guide as to which distinctive assets should be retained and which might need to be gently shunted off stage.

It’s also true that brands can be successful without any core distinctive assets at the centre of their advertising and communication at all. Volkswagen in the UK had extraordinary success over decades with its Volkswagen Golf advertising, helping the model become the third highest selling car in the UK (as outlined in the IPA Effectiveness Gold Award winning paper: VW Golf 30 Years In the Making, 2006).  The advertising featured no distinctive assets of any type, but instead retained a consistent tone of voice and the flexibility to produce ideas that reflected real human truths told in a compelling way. More recently John Lewis, in one the most effective campaigns of the past decade, has achieved extraordinary success with a series of television ads focused around different expressions of the true spirit of Christmas rather than locking into a familiar and repeated set of distinctive brand assets. 

Nike has used celebrity distinctive assets in the form of Michael Jordan, Lebron James and most recently Colin Kaepernick in its advertising for decades.    What is interesting about Nike’s approach is that the distinctive asset of celebrity, has never seemed bigger than the Nike brand itself, no matter how famous the athlete - and in the case of Michael Jordan and Lebron James, they don’t get much more famous.  The core brand idea of heroic achievement always seems to come through strongly.  It’s always about Just Do It, a key asset in its own right, rather than an ad about celebrity. 

Another example where there is the right balance between flexibility and consistency is the famous Reassuringly Expensive campaign by Stella Artois. By establishing a consistent brand world reminiscent of European cinema and influenced by Jean De Florette - french feel, rural setting, realistic but idiosyncratic characters - the brand established a visual look that was highly recognisable and distinctive. But it also had the flexibility to tell any manner of different stories of sacrifice for a glass of Stella Artois. It was a great example of distinctive assets applied with tact and in a way that provided great storytelling flexibility.

Distinctive assets can be a brilliant tool for building long term brand equity and they have a place in any discussion around brand and campaign strategy. But, distinctive assets, no matter how good they are at nudging memory structures or creating mental availability, should always serve the brand idea, not the other way around.  After all, Nike, John Lewis and Volkswagen are good reminders that the most powerful distinctive asset is always the brand idea itself.

How To Align Business & Brand Strategy: A Behaviour Change Perspective

Ultimately every business growth challenge is also a challenge of human behaviour. Most brands have a stated ambition for the level of growth they are trying to achieve.  Usually it is expressed in terms of revenue and profit forecasts and it’s easily identifiable as a line item in the annual report, budgets and plans. However, every financial target regarding business growth has embedded within it certain implied assumptions about human behaviour change. Growth targets are inevitably based on people undertaking certain forms of consumption behaviour - buying more of a product, buying something different or paying more for something, etc. The idea of explicitly linking financial growth targets for a business or brand to specific assumptions about human behaviour change is what we call defining the Brand Growth Theory.  We see tremendous value in translating business growth into a human behaviour change task.

Surprisingly, the human behaviour change assumptions that underpin growth theory are often not stated explicitly and may not always be properly considered.  The top down nature of much corporate strategy and business planning often produces a set of growth targets that seem like they have been materialised out of thin air. Or maybe it's a case of last year plus 10%. Either way, if you have ever felt like the targets you've been lumped with are out of touch with reality, you wouldn't be the first. We suggest it is an important discipline to think through how financial targets for the organisation translate into a theory of growth based on human behaviour change before they are carved into stone.  

First, consideration of the behaviour change required can reveal how reasonable or otherwise a brand’s growth theory is in practice and this can allow an organisation to evaluate different strategic options for driving growth. Further, understanding the human behaviour that will create value for the brand is also vital for setting the direction for marketing and customer experience initiatives such as brand strategy and communication. One of the principle failings of brand strategy is a lack of clarity about how the strategy will create economic value for the organisation.  If you are clear on the behaviour you want and how this delivers growth it ensures that those creating brand strategy and communication have a much clearer idea of exactly what they need to deliver.

Ultimately the task here is as simple as defining the business goal in human terms. It's the vital strategic thinking about the business problem even before you start thinking about insight and proposition for brand strategy. In most instances we work on these key questions with our clients and do the analysis required together. The work is normally based around addressing five key questions.

Growth Ambition - What Is The Rate, Nature & Source Of Growth?

The first question it is important to address is the rate, nature and origin of business growth. All of these factors can have vital implications for how to approach brand strategy. They will also help you confirm whether the underlying growth theory is realistic and achievable. 

(a)  The rate of business growth relative to category.

The level of ambition in a growth strategy is relevant to the type of brand strategy that you might want to pursue. For example, if the expectation for the business is that it will grow significantly above category this has clear implications for brand and marketing strategy. Brands aiming for above category growth will need to consider whether their share of voice (advertising spend as a proportion of category) is able to be dialled up accordingly (which can require significant media investment) and whether they may need a more disruptive brand and communication strategy to create the kind of impact and attention their growth ambition will require.  Green And Black’s is an example of a brand that grew strongly off the back of a quite limited advertising budget with a disruptive communication campaign during its early days in the UK market that challenged expectations of what good chocolate should taste like.  

The Green and Black's brand and campaign was so successful it was later purchased by Cadbury.

It’s also worth considering the stage of the category life cycle in which the brand is competing – more mature markets may require more disruptive brand strategies if growth is ambitious. New markets that are early on in their life cycle can often generate momentum that will let a brand ride along in the category slipstream. Streaming services such as Netflix are benefiting from this effect at the moment where the business model itself is disruptive enough to drive growth on its own.

(b)  The nature of growth (e.g. premium pricing, market share, penetration, etc.)

This is about understanding whether growth is to be achieved based on stealing market share, driving penetration, increasing purchase frequency or achieving a price premium for the product or service in question. In 2005 Sainsbury’s in the UK effectively changed its Brand Growth Theory in a massive way by deciding that it was too difficult to try to win customers over from other supermarkets and that instead it could meet its growth targets by getting existing customers to simply purchase one more item each time they visited a store.  Clearly for Sainsbury's the decision to drive additional purchases from existing customers was instrumental to the development of their new brand idea Try Something New Today. Sainsbury's delivered £2.5 billion extra revenue by asking customers to try new products, encouraging each shopper to spend an extra £1.14 every time they shopped. The success of this campaign generated £550 million in sales over two years.

(c) The source of growth (the geographies, markets, regions which will drive growth).

The degree of geographic diversity of markets across country, ethnicity and culture (or even across the globe) has important implications for subsequent brand strategy too. Typically the more diverse the audience the more it makes sense to consider more universal human insights when it comes to brand strategy - insights that have the ability to appeal to deeper truths beyond what might be relevant to a specific culture, market or geography. Persil's 'Dirt Is Good' or Johnnie Walker's "Keep Walking" campaigns come to mind as examples of brands that have growth ambitions right around the world and therefore developed campaigns that tapped into more universal ideas.

The Audience To Win – Is The Audience Viable And What Is Their Mindset?

This seems like an obvious thing to consider of course, and yes it is – but audiences are too often identified without proper business analysis, defined too broadly or described just in purely demographic terms.  

Ideally this decision on what audience to target is based on a systematic analysis of two key questions – First, the attractiveness of the audience (based on size, growth, value, profit potential, etc.). Second, the ability of the brand to actually win share with the audience in question (existing brand strength, presence of strong competitors, access to the right channels, etc). Do we have a realistic shot at winning these customers over?  A lot of work with our clients involves answering these key questions in order to finalise target audience definition. Further, while demographic information can be useful when getting to grips with a target audience it’s helpful when you can define the audience in terms of an overall mindset or attitude as well. 

When Unilever first launched its hugely successful Knorr Stock Gel in the UK in 2008 there were a number of possibilities when looking at how to define the audience to win – but Unilever specifically focused on “Time Poor Foodies’. Focusing on people with a foodie mindset was critical as the audience had the income to afford the 250% price premium the new product required. Further, the product’s key strength, its similarity to real stock, was vital to overcoming the barrier this foodie audience had historically showed towards the artificiality of normal stock cubes that are often seen as high in salt. "Time Poor Foodies" were both an attractive segment financially and the product's authenticity had a good chance of winning them over. Their mindset of looking for authenticity and real food values was also critical in developing the strategy for the new brand - that Knorr Stock Gel is 'Just Like Real Stock'.

Desired Behaviour – What Exactly Do We Expect People To Do?

The desired behaviour is, yes of course, to ultimately achieve a sale, but it’s always about much more than this when you look beneath the surface. What is the actual shift in behaviour and what is the psychology involved. Rather than thinking about driving a one off transaction it’s useful to think in terms of behaviour change. This might be to purchase the product more often, to pay more for the product or to use the product at a new occasion.   I have always loved the Got Milk campaign by Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco for milk for the way it approached selecting the behaviour change task.

Rather than asking people who don’t drink milk to start drinking it or telling people milk is healthy, the campaign instead reminds people how bad it is to run out of milk. It’s asking people to stock up on milk, which it assumes they already drink, so they don’t experience the feeling of not having milk and running out when they really need it. This is a much more realistic behaviour change than, for example, asking non-milk drinkers to start drinking it or asking people to increase the frequency of their milk occasions. The campaign is an example of nuanced thinking about what we want people to do rather than simplistically assuming the answer is to buy more milk or increase frequency of purchase. The campaign shows it is worthwhile thinking through and identifying the most easily achievable behaviour change that can also deliver the required level of business growth.

The Behaviour Barrier or Trigger - What Is Holding Your Audience Back?

The next consideration is to identify an attitude, belief, perception or capability gap that is holding the audience back from the behaviour desired by the brand.  Or alternatively whether there is a trigger that might be applied to similar effect.  Sometimes barriers and triggers may be evident when you start working on a brand strategy or communication and other times they may not. I have always liked the strategic understanding of barrier and trigger in the awarded campaign created by DLKW and the planner, Charlie Snow, for literacy in the UK. The key barrier was that parents are often too tired to read to their children after a long day at work and children can be reluctant to read as well. The potential trigger was the idea of using signs, notices and even outdoor advertising in the world around us as opportunities to get kids reading. Brilliant.

The Challenge In Human Terms - What Change Will Unlock Brand Growth?

Lastly, it is good to try to sum up the challenge faced by the brand in overcoming any barriers or capitalising on and driving the required behaviour change. Some years ago I developed the strategy for the Wolf Blass brand and helped the creative agency JWT develop the 'Here's To The Chase' campaign that has no been running for over five years. The original task was to reinforce the diminishing prestige of the brand by addressing the perception that the brand was outdated - a relic from its heyday in the 1980s but not so in touch with the values of today. The challenge in human terms was to make the brand stand for a more contemporary expression of triumph - which was achieved by focusing on the pursuit of triumph (the 'chase') rather than the destination.

In summing up, it's always useful to consider the implied assumptions about human behaviour that underpin business, brand and organisation growth. Not only does it give you an insight into whether the Brand Growth Theory is realistic, it helps set critical direction for the marketing and brand strategy work to follow.

Beyond Communication: The New Mandate For Brand Strategy

A sobering remark about brand planning and strategy by Jon Steel that has always stuck with me is that neither clients nor agencies need it.  And he's right. Much of the best advertising of all time was done without strategists in the room or anywhere near the brief for that matter (e.g. Volkswagen, Avis, Apple).  The onus on strategy and planners is always to be relevant by contributing thinking to the problem that makes the solution better. But there has never been a more difficult time to meet this most fundamental goal.  In agencies today planning, like most departments, is spread thin and under-resourced.  Agencies are notorious for not selling planning properly or for giving it away, with the result that the strategic process is often compromised or crammed into unrealistic timeframes.  Another, even bigger issue is that direct engagement with consumers via research, the foundation of good planning, is often not possible due to budget and time pressure or is out-sourced to market researchers.  As planners we are often left to just make stuff up based on judgement, experience and what we can find online. It’s a bit like the end of week rummage around in the kitchen, throwing a meal together from left-over ingredients and what you can find in the bottom of the fridge. Sure, it is possible to come up with a strategy this way, even a good one once in a while, but you can’t do outstanding strategy consistently without understanding the people you are talking to.  Really understanding them. It’s no guarantee of success mind you, but it does give you a much better chance of developing, and just as importantly defending, breakthrough strategic thinking. If these challenges sound familiar the pressure on planning and planners is, of course, symptomatic of the broader pressures facing agencies and the advertising industry.  

Yet despite these challenges, and perhaps paradoxically, I believe the future of planning is bright.  But here’s the rub.  To realise its potential the discipline of planning needs to not just address the systemic issues above, it needs to look beyond communication. Planning can have a bigger canvas, much bigger.  The future of planning is linked to the future of brand strategy. More enlightened clients are starting to realise and act upon the idea that the brand is the business.  They understand that in the digital age what you do is more important than what you say. If brand strategy is to work (and to be credible) it must come to life in more than just advertising, it should inform every part of the customer experience and even beyond that to how a business does things customers can’t see. Done right, brand strategy can and should be an organising principle for a business.  This is the real potential of brand strategy today and it’s an exciting mission for planning to be involved with.   Having a brand idea to build from is much more directional than vague notions of becoming customer-centric and then measuring the Net Promoter Scores for progress. In fact a key weakness of much corporate strategy is that it stops with the business itself rather than going further to consider the mind of the consumer - after all this is ultimately where strategies need to work and where the battle for market share is won or lost.

Most businesses today are light years away from this type of thinking, which is why you often seen organisations with a business plan, corporate purpose and brand strategy all pulling in different directions. Organising the business (including its purpose) around a unifying brand idea is the answer, but this notion would be laughed out of most C-suites and board rooms.  Brands and their power are poorly understood outside of marketing departments, which in truth haven’t done a great job of communicating how brands work or the economic and financial impact strong brands can have. The idea of the brand as a strategic weapon for the business is a corporate blind spot. Agencies haven’t helped much either - it’s only in the past few years that advertising itself has been able to articulate how brands and communication create economic value (thankyou Les Binet, Peter Field and the IPA). Planning, alongside marketing, can have a role in building powerful brand strategies, explaining how brands work and bringing them to life across the organisation.   This is a big and ambitious mandate for planning but it’s the right one too.  It means continuing to work on making great communication, but also lifting our sights to the bigger picture of transforming how organisations engage with consumers in much broader ways.  How might a brand strategy affect the way employees interact with customers, how a store layout is designed or how a business executes its sustainability and environmental agenda? How might innovation priorities be reframed to drive a brand idea of say "Freedom" rather than some generic notion of customer centricity?  Brand strategy can inform or at least influence all these things and more.

Taking the brand to the entire business will require new types of skills for planners as brand strategy approaches need a few tweaks when they are applied at the organisation level rather than just to advertising outcomes. Naturally there are bits and pieces of this broader application of brand strategy happening now in more progressive client and agency partnerships around the world, and in this endeavour most of us are learning as we go – often by trial and error. Whether this type of work is done in the future by the big agency groups or independent brand agencies and consultancies is an open question, but either way it represents and exciting future for brand strategy and for planning – one that is not linked so closely to the uncertain fortunes of advertising. 

Why The Big Four Bank Brands Will Weather The Royal Commission Storm

“We’re all innocent and we’re all guilty." 

So said an infamous Italian mafia boss after being jailed along with scores of associates, numerous politicians and members of the judiciary in Northern Italy in the late 1990s. He wanted to make the point that the culture of corruption in the city had become so institutionalised, so routine and so widespread that it didn’t even seem wrong to anyone any more. 

In light of the interim findings by the Hayne Royal Commission, such normalisation of bad behaviour based on greed is an accusation you could equally lay at the door of some of the leading players in Australia’s banking and financial services sector over the past decade. As the Royal Commission has pointed out, the problems within the big four banks and other major institutions are widespread, cultural and not the result of “just a few bad apples”. The findings to date and the fallout have been damning.

But how damaging will the revelations eventually prove for the big four bank brands? Perhaps, surprisingly, there is reason to believe they may not be as negative as one might initially think and may even present an opportunity if any bank is brave enough to seize it.

Recent data from Roy Morgan shows that although customer satisfaction with the big banks has declined over the past year, the falls have been quite small. Compared to the previous year, in the six months to June 2018 customer satisfaction at CBA is 78.3% (down 2.7%), NAB is 77.1% (down 2.7%), Westpac is 76.4% (down 1.5%) and ANZ is 76.1% (down 2.7%). The percentage point declines seem modest and the overall satisfaction levels are still well above the long term average for all banks of 73.8% (calculated since 2001). Further, the Roy Morgan analysis attributes a large part of what declines there are to increases in interest rates amongst home loan customers over the period rather than the revelations of the Royal Commission on its own.

This is not to say the Royal Commission into banking isn’t bad for the reputation and profitability of the big four Australian banks. Quite to the contrary, the regular, widespread and sensational revelations of poor and potentially criminal behaviour represents a watershed moment in the history of the Australian financial services sector. There will be far reaching implications in terms of regulation, customer compensation, compliance and bank culture that will rightly have lasting implications for the banks for years to come. The big banks have already written off hundreds of millions of dollars and their share prices have been hit hard.

However, there are reasons to believe that on the demand side bank brands may be able to see out the current crisis of reputation in a way that limits the damage to negative sentiment rather than to customer defection.

We Still Trust The Big Banks In A Vital Way

We typically are told to think of trust as a singular concept. You trust someone or something or you don't and possibly there are levels of trust in between on a continuum. But in truth, trust is a much more elusive and complex concept. The nature of the trust relationship in banking and finance is unique. On a certain level you could argue persuasively that we never really trusted the banks to begin with, even before the Royal Commission and certainly in terms of acting fairly, with transparency and accountability, our trust in them has gone down from an already low base. However, there is one significant way in which we do trust banks. We trust them not to fail. Perhaps the most important factor of all that underpins the ongoing strength of the big four bank brands is that we trust them to be there, to survive and to keep our money safe. If there is one thing that matters more than anything else to consumers in banking it is the financial security of their savings.  Yes, they may be driven by profit, yes they may charge fees that are too high, yes they may be out of touch with community standards, but at the end of the day your money is safe. 

Our long held trust in the stability of the Big Four banks was only reinforced in the recent global financial crisis of 2008. At a time when banks and other financial institutions all around the world were were failing, our banking sector (with help from the government of the day) held firm. Even the widely used phrase ‘the four pillars policy’ underscores the idea that it is the big banks that hold the structure of our financial world intact. 

Banks Now Do Everyday Banking Very Well

This isn’t something we like to talk about in our anti-bank culture, but without making much of a fuss banks have quietly gone about totally revolutionising the banking experience over the past decade with technology. If you are not so inclined, there is little if any reason to go into a bank branch these days. Internet banking is fast, seamless and ubiquitous. Cash machines are everywhere, if you even need cash. Banking via mobile phone apps is mostly easy and instantaneous. Payments have become as simple as tap and go. No card? Just use your phone. In the process they have removed queues, paperwork, red tape and the inconvenience of branch banking. Yes, problems remain, but by and large banks have gotten out of the way in everyday life and most people are grudgingly quite grateful for this.

There Are No Easy Alternative Choices

The fact that all four banks have been so embroiled in the Royal Commission’s negative findings is also, strangely enough, protective of each of them individually. There isn’t a like for like swap that consumers can easily make. And even if people want to go beyond the big four, as many no doubt will, changing banks is time consuming and difficult. As technology has found its way into our financial lives the big banks have us more “entangled” than ever with multiple product holdings, direct debit arrangements and familiar online systems that are not easy to set up or re-learn at other institutions. Changing banks today means a pretty substantial re-organisation of one’s financial life. This is likely to reduce the likelihood of switching behaviour even for disaffected consumers unhappy with what the Royal Commission has revealed about big bank behaviour. 

The Opportunity Within The Storm

It would be a brave person to predict that the worst of the financial scandal surrounding bank behaviour has come out. The Royal Commission and the ongoing enquiry by parliament may still uncover more skeletons from the closets of the big four banks. However, unless something emerges that challenges our collective sense of the security and ease that the big banks provide their brands will have the time and opportunity to bounce back. The recent experiences of Volkswagen on emissions and Toyota on product quality show that big brands with long histories have the ability to recover strongly over time from reputational damage if corrective action is taken from the top down.

So far there are lots of contrite and positive noises coming from bank leadership, but we will have to wait to see the extent to which it finds its way into meaningful change. The prospects of this happening would be significantly enhanced if consumers had more genuine choice. And the question of competition policy in banking is an issue that regulators and government will now have the opportunity to address. 

Beyond the obvious defensive actions, the maelstrom of the Royal Commission presents a rare opportunity for at least one of the Big Four banks to seize the initiative over its rivals. Olympic marathon runners will tell you the best time to make a move during the grueling race is over the closing stages when running up hill and everyone is feeling the heat. Can one of the banks break from the pack and tilt the balance more in favour of customers at the short term expense of shareholders to ultimately achieve greater long term gains for both? When everything else is stripped away this is the tradeoff that would need to be made. This is change that goes way beyond eliminating bad behaviour and actually creates a culture that more proactively encourages outcomes that are in the best financial interests of customers. It would be a bold play indeed if any of the banks was brave enough to pursue it. Recent history might suggest this is unlikely, but then again, tomorrow is another day.

Innovation Lessons From The Theory Of Evolution

"...From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” - Charles Darwin, The Origins Of Species

The ongoing story of the adaption of life on earth to the natural environments of our planet is nothing short of astonishing. Evolution is the most remarkable of innovators. It strikes me there is surely some level of inspiration we might take from the theory of evolution by natural selection that we can apply to our own much more prosaic and humble attempts to be innovative. Let me start out with the disclaimer that I am no biologist or expert on Charles Darwin's theory. So I apologise in advance if I use the term 'genus' when I should use 'species' or don't properly communicate the finer points of gene mutation theory accurately.

Be Open To Random

A core component of the process of evolution is the idea of random mutation. Inherited traits are passed from one generation to the next, but each new generation has new elements in its genetic makeup based on random mutation. Luck and chance play a key role in evolution, not unlike the role they have played throughout the history of science in the development of new ideas from penicillin to gravity. In contrast some approaches to innovation within organisations are so prescribed and process-led with their stage-gates, concept templates, formulaic approaches to insight and batteries of testing that they leave little opportunity for luck, chance or random events to play a role.

But there is clearly a place for the random, unplanned stroke of inspiration and it is something we should be open to. The unlikely world of stock cubes has been a recent source of a master-stroke of quite random inspiration. Oxo was one of the early pioneers of the stock cube in 1910 and then nothing much changes about them for over a hundred years. That is, until a food technician at Knorr (part of Unilever) was munching through a 'Mozart Ball' and somehow wondered whether it would be possible to create a stock ball with a shell on the outside and a soft gel-like centre that would dissolve more completely in hot water than cubes, which always seem to leave a crusty and salty residue behind.

The answer initially was no - well, at least not a stock ball with a hard outer shell (which proved resistant to dissolving in water). But the team persisted. The idea for an outer shell was discarded and the team focused instead on, quite literally, the core of the idea - the soft gel-like centre which as it turned out didn't require a shell at all. Soon afterwards Knorr Stock Gel was born. A pure stock gel stored in a small single serve tub with a brilliant flavour that was much more like real stock. This simple quite random idea has since produced hundreds of million of dollars in revenue and inspired a generation of new products that are selling all around the world. All from a a humble mozart ball that cost less than one Euro.

Don't Fear Cannibalisation

Evolution is not afraid of cannibalisation. New life forms and new species that are better adapted to an environment can and do overtake the old. This is the essence of natural selection. Ruthlessly and unsympathetically the old and the weak are pruned away.

An argument you often hear to justify holding back innovation or not investing in new ideas is that it will cannibalise the existing business and dilute margins. I have heard this line of thinking a lot from people in organisations. I suppose it's fine until someone else beats you to market with the idea and the cannibalisation is done by someone else rather than you. That's just called being eaten. The cautionary tale of Kodak makes this point quite well. According to an article in the Australian Financial Review earlier this year, Steve Sasson, a 26 year old engineer at Kodak presented a prototype digital camera to company management in 1975. It drew a tepid response at best. Perhaps not in small part because of concerns it would affect Kodak's virtual monopoly of the highly profitable traditional film business. The idea was never made a priority, at least not at Kodak.

There may be times when it makes sense to hold back an idea in the interests of the broader business, but you'd be a brave CIO or CMO to bank on this for long.

Be Wary Of Unconscious Bias

Evolution doesn't apply a set of pre-conceived values or notions about what will be successful. It is value-neutral, free from confirmation bias and absent dogma. It doesn't have a dominant paradigm through which it views what it takes to succeed that creates blind spots to new forms.

It seems striking that so many of the brilliant and successful innovation ideas in the world today come from outside the dominant players in an industry and especially from startups. How can it be that IBM didn't identify the opportunity in software? That Microsoft failed to capitalise early enough on the possibilities of search? That Google overlooked social media? And that Facebook didn't see the potential of a pure photo and video-sharing play online (and had to buy Instagram instead).

Even more striking is the blindspot capitalised on by Fever Tree in the tonic and mixer market. Without wanting to downplay what is obviously a stunningly successful commercial achievement, the Fever Tree business is based on nothing more complicated than spotting a gap in the market for a more premium brand of tonic with no artificial preservatives, sweeteners or flavouring. The founders, Charles Rolls and Chief Executive Tim Warrillow, recently offloaded a 2.6% holding for over $US 100 million. And what of the stunning success of Afterpay, now only four years old and with a valuation in the billions of dollars. It wasn't MasterCard, Visa, Amex or a banking giant that identified the potential for this idea despite the millions these organisations must spend each year on new product development. Innovation blindspots produced by unconscious bias are everywhere.

This is all great news if you're a startup or entrepreneur looking to innovate, but rather less good if you're in a large organisation. I wonder if the best one can do is to be aware of the possibility of bias limiting options and possibilities and to try and work from there.

Avoid Incrementalism (Unless You Have A Lot Of Time)

Evolution has been successful by effecting millions and millions of small changes over time. It also has the luxury of being able to weave its magic combination of inherited characteristics, mutation and natural selection over a very long time stretching back millions of years. Unless you have a very long timeframe indeed incremental thinking about innovation can easily be frustrating.

A lot of new business pipelines I have seen within organisations seem fully loaded with ideas and initiatives, but when you scratch beneath the surface of the powerpoint charts it soon becomes obvious that a lot of the changes are minor line extensions, new varieties with slightly improved flavours or small improvements on an existing idea. Sure it is often safer to build on what works. But such approaches rarely produce the kind of disruptive innovation that lead to dramatic growth. In the case of fast-moving consumer goods the incremental innovation is often just a way of protecting shelf space or keeping the retail customer happy.

The wine industry produces hundreds of incrementally different wines from existing brands year after year, but a star performer in recent times has been a radically different new brand called 19 Crimes from Treasury Wine Estates. Although the wine itself is not that different (initially Australian shiraz, cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay), it's marketing and branding is breaking new ground in the wine category with a rebellious identity, use of virtual reality on the wine label and clever storytelling targeted to the millennial consumer.

By being willing to look beyond incremental innovation Treasury Wine Estates has hit upon an innovation idea that is now driving tremendous growth in a US market that has recently not been favourable for Australian wine.

Test Ideas In The Real World 

Evolution doesn't have a testing laboratory. It tends to get its 'prototypes' into the real world pretty quickly where they either survive and thrive or fail. Natural selection is rather brutal in this regard.

Clearly a certain amount of rigour and robust work needs to be done to shape and refine an idea so it has the best chance of success, but there is nothing like learning from the real world performance of the product - not just whether it lives or dies, but also how to enhance and improve it over time. Silicon Valley, and Google in particular, are famous for championing this approach of launching beta versions of new software and learning from them in a safe and controlled way.

Too often million-dollar launch budgets are put behind products that ultimately fail, when some judicious in-market testing (rather than flawed market research) would have revealed fatal flaws a lot sooner. New Coke and Coors Sparkling water come rather scarily to mind. So if you have an interesting new idea, try it, get it into market, see what consumers think, start a pop up store. There are lots of ways to get invaluable real world feedback early on.

Encourage A Diversity Of Solutions

Evolution keeps its options open by encouraging a diversity of forms. There is extraordinary diversity both within and between species. This diversity of natural forms is especially important for ensuring adaptation during rapid environmental change.

Rapid environmental change is what we are experiencing now right across the business landscape. Our age of technology disruption is causing all manor of shifts in culture, markets and behaviour. So when developing innovation ideas, especially early in the process, it makes sense to at least keep your options open and not narrow down too quickly.

According to Nicklas Hed of Rovio, when the company was looking for a idea to launch their foray into independent game development they reviewed several hundred ideas over many months from the development team until Jaako Iisalo, a game designer "pitched a cartoon showing a flock of birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of coloured bricks. They looked cross....but it was magical". Angry Birds was born. The business was at this point on the verge of bankruptcy but they kept their options open and resisted narrowing down on a second rate idea early in the process.

Evolution certainly has a remarkable track record when it comes to innovation, and even if we can't match it's lofty standards, we can at least learn a thing or two from its example.