Developing culture and brand

Common Sense Idea 3. Culture leads everything.

This is the most important idea and directly affects the power of your marketing. Your culture is often articulated and felt in all your communications material. If an organisation’s marketing material feels weak and confused, it will be because the culture is weak and confused. Our culture at 42 Below was based around a common fight in which we would take on the large corporate liquor giants where they were weak. And we’d win. They were slower in their activities and bland and safe in their communications. So we decided our culture had to be fast and with a real edge to it. We’d be like an indie rock band, something like the Sex Pistols. With their unconventional management and loud and in-ya-face antics, they become part of rock and roll history – all without money or a big studio.

The Kiwi who split the atom, Ernest Rutherford, said, ‘We didn’t have any money so we had to think.’ Our fight at 42 Below was shaped by this. We realised we were small and without the funding the big liquor brands had. Therefore, we needed to be loud and do the things they didn’t or couldn’t. Darryl Parsons started to articulate this early on with our ads: they spoke like a young maverick upstart, working on us inside 42 Below as much as they did on our customers. Our customers felt our culture, our fight. It was classic ‘David versus Goliath’, only this time, David was quite lippy with it.

Our marketing manager Angela Barnett used a great analogy that she called her cocktail party theory. ‘At a cocktail party, who do you want to speak to? The very educated but boring guy, the very funny but flaky guy, or the guy who is smart and also very funny? Of course it’s this guy.’ We wanted 42 Below to be smart and insightful but also very entertaining.

If we were very clear internally on what type of company we were and the culture that drove us, all our communication would be clear. If we bought into our fight, believing we could take on the world and win on a shoestring budget, our potential customers would feel it too. This was helped in a huge way by our two earliest ads. The first stated we got first equal in a worldwide taste test. We lined up all the bottles with the highest ranked standing tallest and the lowest rankings shortest. The judges concluded ‘There were no kind words to say about Absolut.’ We said something much less damaging; ‘The judges were unable to find a good word to say.’ And we didn’t name the brand.

Absolut complained. I had to fly to Wellington to defend the ad at the Advertising Standards Complaints Tribunal. We lost, because we had not quoted the judges correctly.

Anyway, we thought we should say sorry – very publicly. So we did. We didn’t even need to pay to run this apology: the press ran it for us. The two ads travelled the world, the second getting a hundred times the exposure of the first. It also went to the top offices of all the major liquor companies. David came out fighting from the outset. And despite the blow from the establishment, David won a resounding victory with the audience that counts – the customers.

From this point, we knew our fight and we believed we could win. So did our customers.

Common Sense Idea 4. Brands have stretch.

When ‘marketing experts’ were asked to comment on 42 Below’s strategy, they would often say it was ‘schizophrenic, lacking in consistency and not keeping to the one core proposition’ and ‘unable to consistently deliver its core competency of a defined consumer promise’.

It was schizophrenic, often manic. Also vibrant, surprising, entertaining and alive. Not obviously from the same manual.

I grew up (in advertising) being told that all messages had to be exactly the same. The same proposition. The same tag line. The same look. The same tone and manner. Same same. What a bunch of rubbish. How many people do you know like that? None, I hope. If you did know someone like that, you would find them totally boring and drop them before you got to the end of your first discussion.

A fun person to hang out with – that’s a person who will surprise you and entertain you in different ways every day. Doesn’t that apply to a brand?

At 42 Below, we fought this constant battle in our communications and it’s still being fought. ‘Should we stand for purity and location, or should we stand for irreverent personality?’ The answer as it transpired was yes. Both. And other things as well.

So many organisations spend days on their ‘brand wheel’ or ‘brand opinion’ in an attempt to find their one defining phrase. We had a defining phrase – a different one every day. Yes, it was all based around being the small guy taking on the world, but we did whatever it took that day to win. We just went on with selling as much as we could by any means we could, and did whatever we could to get noticed.

We could have had a beautiful brand manual with a strict set of parameters that we needed to adhere to every day. If we did, we would have been boring and measuring ourselves every day against our manual, instead of our sales targets.

The best people are vibrant and diverse. So are brands. Don’t put a brand in a straightjacket. It will become very boring.

• This information is provided by Geoff Ross:
  
  www.ecoya.co.nz