THINKING INSIDE THE BOX

When it comes to advertising, we are always busy trying hard to think outside the box. Question is: Have we think inside the box?

Advertising needs creativity, this is something that everybody would and should agree with. Problem is, creativity is hard to get and impactful creativity in advertising is even harder to get. Even for a creative director that has won many creative awards in many advertising festivals, it's very hard to produce high standard creative output on daily basis. For this reason, plagiarism (some say adaptation or inspiration) is very common practice in advertising industry. "Creativity is the art of hiding your sources", this means that there is nothing new in this industry. When we talk about shampoo ads for instance, it's very difficult to find a new creativity for the category, simply because almost everything has been used. From silky smooth hair to dirty sticky hair as main message, they've done everything.

"Thinking Outside The Box" is like the creative mantra of advertising, a sacred spell. It is often considered as the only way to produce creative idea. Sometimes advertisers a.k.a. the clients, highly demand this from their advertising agencies. "You're the creative people, you should think more outside the box", ad people hear this a lot from the clients when they present their creative idea.

Even though Outside The Box Thinking is indeed the mantra, the overstretch of it could also damage your brand. Overstretch here is when we tried to produce creative idea that is too far from the brand assets, it is losing its relevance toward the consumers.

Take this Audi A1 ad as an example, the ad that is titled as "pure attraction" tried too hard to illustrate the ultimate bond between the car and the driver. The driver loves Audi A1 so much it feels like he makes love to the car everytime he drives it. The ad showing a man and a woman making out at the usual place when we drive our car.

Yes, probably this advertisement based from insight that Audi driver is very proud of his Audi.

Yes, sex also sells.

But comparing the joy of driving Audi1 with the pleasure of making out is just too far. It's a nice ad to see, it will probably create a buzz, people will talk about it, but at the end, most likely people will not remember the brand of A1, they will remember it as "sexy Audi ad" and that's it. And most importantly, will people buy the car because of the ad? most likely no.

The main reason for that is because the brand has nothing relevant to offer to the consumers. If Audi A1 is targeting adventurous young people like they portrayed in the ad, the premium price of Audi in general will probably not fit to young people profile. In contrary, if Audi A1 is targeting young at heart mature people, the imagery of wild sex animal in the ad would not fit to them. Especially if this people are married with children and are church goers.

Outside the box thinking can be a trap. To avoid that trap we need to think inside the box, before we think outside of it.

The magic is out there, but the power to create the magic is in here.

Inside the box thinking is intended to dig and identify the true potential of the brand. In advertising term, it is the process to find the most relevant brand asset, as the starting point to create an advertising message.

Whatever the message is, it should be based on the real asset of the brand. The failure to deliver brand asset, will potentially create irrelevant message to our consumers. Why relevant message is important? because it is the fundamental of trust, it is the basis of relationship between the brand and its consumers. You can fall in love at the first sight to a woman/man, just because you think she/he is your ideal type. But later on after you found out that she/he is far from your expectation, you will no longer pick up her/his call.

You must have heard a case, where a newly launched brand gained so many consumers, attention because it is advertised so attractively. After sometimes, we no longer heard anything from that brand again, and we didn't even see it in the store. Many RTD brands seems to be in this situation. they launched new brand variants every 3-6 months but most of them will not survive until 2nd year.

This because relevancy creates brand-consumer longevity relationship. We know that launching period is an investment period. We also know that the real money comes from repeat purchase. Thus we should focus more for the long term target, rather than being temporary satisfied of the sales, booked in launching time. And identifying brand asset is the first step to that.

Learning from Coca Cola

Not all brands have tangible asset to offer. For high involvement brands like cars or electronic goods, many tangible asset can be promoted as the competitive advantage in advertising. For low involvement brands like RTD beverage it is trickier, mainly because differentiation between brands is not wide/significant as the result of severe competition. At the end of the day, all RTD brands looks similar on store's display rack.

Brand asset doesn't have to be a physical asset, it could be an imagery asset as well. When it comes to Inside The Box Thinking, there are three steps we need to follow:

1. Identifying the brand asset (physical and imaginary assets)
2. Apply the asset consistently as part of sacred brand identity (mandatory)
3. Build creativity based on that asset.

One of the biggest asset of Coca Cola is its bottle shape. For more than 100 years (1915 - present), they consistently use the same shape. A little modification was done here and there, but they basically keep it the same. This only applied to Coca Cola, for brand like Fanta and sprite, they keep changing the bottle shape.

Not only Coca Cola is the main brand and the main earner for the company, it is also the fundamental that create relationship between the brand and its consumers. Therefore the bottle shape is maintained because Coca Cola wants to be seen as a relevant and trusted brand.

Another sacred asset of Coca Cola is the logo and the color. Same as the bottle, Coca Cola also did minor modification of Coca Cola Logo in their more than 100 years history. With the exception of 1985 logo, the Coca Cola logo is basically the same logo since 1900.

Consistent usage of brand color of red and white since 1950, also make the Coca Cola color the asset of the brand. The asset is so strong that whenever we see red and white branding, we think that it is a Coca Cola branding almost instantly. This is astonishing considering that the product itself is no more that soda water and sugar.

Lesson from Coca Cola: if it is based on actual asset, the brand will have chance to perform better in sustainable manner.

Identifying assets of the brand

As you can see in the above brand asset model, the objective here is to identify the best assets in Q1 and Q2. Those quadrants are the most potential assets to be the message in your advertising.

Physical assets are things that people can see and touch. Things like shapes, colors, strength, durability, material, technology, etc., are falling into this quadrant.

Imagery assets are things that people can feel about your brand. Things like credibility, luxury, friendly, comfortness, trustworthy, safety, etc., are falling into this category.

Unfortunately if you have assets that fall into Q3 and Q4, in which your brand assets has low relevance toward consumers, the only thing you need to do is not to put those assets in advertising, instead you need to modify your brand to have better assets first before you can advertise them.

Otherwise your investment in advertising will be wasted.

just my two cents

sapto handriyanto

advertising enthusiast | sapto.handriyanto@gmail.com