Micro-Branding

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog linked recently to a fascinating essay by Mohammed Iqbal of Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. At the start of the essay, Iqbal writes about a “celebrated speech at Cannes last year” delivered by Lord Maurice Saatchi. Saatchi told the audience that “To succeed in a world of message fragmentation, media fragmentation, continuous partial attention (CPA), and non-existent day-after-recalls (DAR), one has to hone the brand positioning relentlessly, until only one word – yes, one measly word remained. Two words were one word too many, as Lord Saatchi reminded those pleading for lenience.”

And then Iqbal goes ahead and tears Saatchi a new one. (Maybe Saatchi should stick to sponsoring shocking post-Duchampian art exhibits.) The article goes on to refute the premise and proposes that more is better – people want richer content, information and memes that suit them personally, and even branding games that they can participate in. In the distributed word Pajama People are demanding more, not less.

Iqbal writes: “Russell Davies, planner provocateur and ex-world wide planning head of Nike, wrote on his blog (though not directly in response to Lord Saatchi’s speech) : “What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distilled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.

“Judging by the reaction to this post and by the Mexican wave of blog posts and comments criticizing One Word Equity, it was obvious this idea of brand polyphony (as Russell calls it) was infectious and appealing. It’s appealing because we ourselves as consumers seek it. We find fault in movie-characters for being too uni-dimensional. We say people are uninteresting (or boring) if their range of interests or conversations are too narrow.”

The piece is worth quoting from extensively.


“The fragmentation and abundance of media has now helped lower the barriers to connecting the supply and demand of more brand messages – theoretically of all possible brand messages.
“For eg, Volvo’s primary brand proposition could continue to be safety. But if there’re people out there who relate to it as a stylish car, you can create communication tailor-made for them. Simultaneously, another bunch of people might actually like a Volvo for its European-ness. No longer will they have to ignore that connection and only seek ‘safety’ in Volvos.”

“In a long tail world, the real opportunity is not in pre-filtering what’s available but in making everything available to everybody. And providing the aggregated audience the tools to sort out what’s good from what’s not (like Flickr does for photos with its folksonomy, for eg.)”

“In a long tail brand communication, all possible brand messages are simultaneously available in the market.”

“When you have infinite choice, context is more important than content. For too long advertisers and communicators have focused only on what they are saying and not enough on who they are speaking to and where the conversation is happening. And even when they do so, they have almost always painted the picture with broad and all-encompassing brushstrokes.”

Read the entire essay (WARNING: pdf file)

http://blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf