Go Luck Yourself: 40 ways to stack the odds in your brand’s favour 9780857198884, 0857198882

Citation preview

GO LUCK YOURSELF 40 WAYS TO STACK THE ODDS IN YOUR BRAND’S FAVOUR ANDY NAIRN

CONTENTS Acknowledgements About The Author Introduction Section 1: Appreciate What You’ve Got Lucky Name Lucky Place Lucky Legacy Lucky Feet Lucky Dude Lucky Mascot Lucky People Lucky Fuel Lucky Pack Lucky Timing

Section 2: Look Out For Opportunities Everywhere Lucky George Lucky Leap Lucky Paint Lucky Dog Lucky Numbers Lucky Shrink Lucky Cakes Lucky Aliens Lucky Carrots Lucky Bags

Section 3: Turn Misfortune Into Good Fortune Lucky Rabbit Lucky Coffin Lucky Escape Lucky Lockdown Lucky Hitch Lucky Limits Lucky Mice Lucky Bore Lucky Bastards Lucky Pencils

Section 4: Practise Being Lucky Lucky Shot Lucky Goal Lucky Dip Lucky Trick Lucky Laces Lucky Lines Lucky Lord Lucky Charm Lucky Eggs Lucky You

Conclusion References Publishing details

Praise for Go Luck Yourself “Andy’s influence on the industry is far-reaching, and his strategic leadership undeniable.” Campaign “An inspiring yet practical book, full of compelling ideas on how to enhance your competitive advantage and see opportunity everywhere. A brilliant read!” Syl Saller CBE – Former Global CMO of Diageo “A fabulous book on the underappreciated role of luck in business, brimming with fresh stories and practical advice.” Richard Shotton – Author of The Choice Factory “Go Luck Yourself is like wandering round a gallery of great strategic thinking… and then getting to take it all home with you to make your own place look better. Fresh, fun, generous, fascinating – this a book stuffed full of stimulating ideas for any restless challenger to steal and use.” Adam Morgan – Author of Eating the Big Fish and A Beautiful Constraint “Andy is as insightful and practical as he is punchy and funny. Maybe you’ll buy this book for the title, but I guarantee you’ll find yourself returning to it whenever you could use a little luck.” Elle McCarthy – VP, Brand at Electronic Arts “I really enjoyed this. It’s a fascinating subject and Andy’s style is very readable. The selection is as much fun as the pick and mix at Woolworth’s, but without the security guard watching your every move.” Zaid Al-Qassab – CMO of Channel 4 “This really is the perfect strategist’s handbook, with great examples, anecdotes, quotes, facts and advice. I found myself time and time again thinking ‘I wish I’d come up with that’ and now having read it, I just might.” Bridget Angear – Founding Partner at Craig + Bridget “This brilliant book will change the way you think. Hugely practical and spilling over with examples and inspiration… all delivered with the wit and charm that we have come to expect from Andy Nairn.” Richard Huntington – Chairman and CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi London “A rare and generous thing; a strategy book that’s not only spectacularly useful but also an absolute joy to read. Buy and devour – and get one for everyone in your team.” Katie Mackay-Sinclair – Partner, Mother “Don’t try to improve your luck by forking out your hard-earned cash on expensive charms, amulets and talismans, buy this book instead. You won’t regret it.” Helen Rhodes – ECD of BBC Creative “Prepare to get well and truly lucked. Your team/agency/client/brand/customers will thank you.” Caroline Pay – CCO of Headspace “The one thing that ALL successful people have in common is a conscious relationship with luck. Luck is now something that you can practise daily. What a gift.” Jonathan Mildenhall – CMO of Dave

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A lot of luck has gone into this book, for which I’m hugely grateful. First of all, thanks to my Mum and Dad. To borrow Warren Buffett’s analogy, I really did win the lottery there. Likewise, thanks to my wife, Louise, and kids Alex, Mia and Lottie. Not only have they put up with me tapping away at the laptop for far too long, they’ve inspired a couple of the stories here too. Next, thanks to my long-time partners, Helen and Danny. I am incredibly fortunate to have such talented and generous friends, let alone ones who are such good fun to work with. And of course, a big shout out to all my other colleagues and clients past and present. In particular, to Jim Bletsas for designing such a great cover and Loz Horner, Ruth Chadwick and Vickie Ridley for reviewing my first draft. On that point, I’ve been reminded how kind our supposedly cut-throat industry can be. So I’m extremely grateful to everybody who has cast an eye over my efforts, offered comments and given interviews. I’m afraid there are too many to mention here but Richard Shotton was particularly helpful when this idea was simply a glimmer in my eye. Finally, thanks to my editors Craig Pearce and Emma Tinker, and everyone at Harriman House. Writing a book has been a voyage into the unknown for me, so it has been a privilege to have such expert and understanding guides.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andy Nairn has led a charmed life. He stumbled into advertising after studying Law at Edinburgh University. Almost 30 years later, he’s one of the world’s most respected brand strategists and a founder of one of the UK’s most successful creative agencies. Lucky Generals has been shortlisted for Campaign magazine’s Agency of the Year for five years in a row and Andy has been named the country’s top strategist for the last three in a row. He has also been listed as one of the top five creative people in world advertising by Business Insider. Now he wants to share his luck with others, so he’s donating his royalties to Commercial Break: an organisation that helps working-class talent break into the creative industries.

INTRODUCTION Luck is a four-letter word in business circles. You won’t hear it at the AGM or read it in the annual report. Neither will you find it in any case study, training manual or résumé. As for books like this – well, a recent survey of business journals found that only 2% of them go anywhere near the subject. This strikes me as odd. Because, after almost 30 years in advertising, I’ve often been struck by the pivotal role that chance plays. And when I talk privately with senior business people, they say the same. In this book, I want to break the taboo. I’ll draw on my own experience – but also everything from architecture to zoology – to explore the role of luck in building a brand. Then I’ll provide practical advice that will help you stack the odds in your brand’s favour. That last bit is crucial, because it strikes at the heart of the silence. Luck remains a dirty secret because it’s seen to undermine the virtues of hard work, talent and intelligence that are at the heart of any successful business culture. Frankly, if commercial success is dictated by some shadowy force called Fate, then we might as well all give up. But I’m not arguing that. Instead, I believe that luck exists – and also that you can improve it. And I’ll explain how, in four sections. In Section 1, I’ll set out the need to appreciate what you’ve got. Like individuals who don’t always recognise their privileges, companies are often blind to their inherited advantages. In this section I’ll encourage you to reappraise existing assets that you might currently be overlooking. In many cases, brand owners already have something really special that just needs revitalising, not completely reinventing. Then in Section 2, I’ll deal with the need to look out for opportunities everywhere. Chance often presents itself unexpectedly and requires an open mind to spot it. Here, I’ll encourage you to be alert to inspiration from other spheres and from other perspectives. As the novelist Sally Koslow says, you need to “learn to recognise good luck when it’s waving to you”. In Section 3, I’ll cover the potential to turn misfortune into good fortune. This part will be all about optimism and durability: I’ll describe how people and brands have overcome crises, criticism, flaws, limitations, hate and taboos. I’ll show you how to see opportunities for your brand, even in the most difficult of circumstances. In fact, I’ll show how you can emerge from the darkness, stronger than you were before. Finally, in Section 4 I’ll explain how you can practise being lucky. This isn’t just a nod to Gary Player’s famous observation that “the harder I practise, the luckier I get”. Instead, I’ll argue that the pursuit of good fortune requires conscious attention in its own right – over and above the honing of your core skills (and sometimes, instead of this). Here, I’ll discuss practical ways to build luck into your organisation’s systems, processes and corporate culture. Before we jump in, I’ll mention a couple of caveats. First, while this is very much my personal account, there are obviously hundreds of people who have helped me on the dozens of projects I describe here and over my career generally. In particular, I have two longstanding (and long-suffering) business partners – Helen Calcraft and Danny Brooke-Taylor – whose names could easily appear on every page of this book, were it not for the risk of repetition. They do pop up occasionally in person (and throughout, as the royal ‘we’) and I couldn’t have done any of this without them. Apologies to anyone else that I’ve missed out along the way, in the interest of streamlining my stories. Second, I’m conscious that I write as someone who has spent his entire working life in the West (especially in the UK and the USA). I recognise that many other cultures have very different attitudes to luck – it often carries less of a stigma in business, or in life generally. However, I believe that my strategies for success are universal and I have tried to include examples from all over the world to make this point. Finally, my desire to draw on an eclectic range of sources has its drawbacks. In some places, I cite unsavoury characters, including ruthless leaders, criminals and bigots. I hope it goes without saying that I’m not endorsing their broader actions or opinions. But just in case: I’m not. Right. Having got all that out of the way, let’s begin by looking for luck close to home and exploring the need to appreciate what you’ve got.

SECTION 1: APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’VE GOT

W

arren Buffett is one of the richest people in history.

Interestingly, he puts a lot of his success down to luck. In particular, he has memorably talked about “winning the ovarian lottery”. In other words, he recognises how fortunate he was, just to be born a privileged, white male, in 20th-century America. The human inequalities caused by inherited luck are outside the scope of this book. But I do think some broad parallels apply to brands. Some companies have built up enormous advantages over their competition – privileges which they can pass on to successive brand custodians. For instance: greater awareness, distribution, pricing muscle and pipelines of innovation. So should you simply accept your place in the corporate pecking order? Certainly not. If you’re responsible for a challenger brand, you should seek out the advantages that you do have, rather than bemoan the ones you don’t. And if you’re looking after a market leader, you should be careful not to be complacent. Either way, the first step towards improving your fortunes is to appreciate what you already have. For as Roald Dahl once wrote: “We are all a great deal luckier than we realise.” In this section, I’ll explore some of the sources of good fortune which companies are most likely to overlook – including the brand’s name, provenance, historical legacy, obscure product features and cultural connections. I’ll also talk about the powerful assets that can make budgets go further – like brand characters, employees, data and owned media. And I’ll finish by highlighting the power of timing – often dismissed as a fluke, but something which takes real skill to get right. Throughout, the message will be to seize the opportunities that are sitting under your nose. For as the celebrated psychologist Dr Tal Ben-Shahar says: “When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.”

LUCKY NAME

A

ccording to Mumsnet, about one in five British parents regret their choice of children’s names. Perhaps this is no wonder, given that baby names registered in the UK in recent years include Marvellous, Isis, Danger and Shy.

I reckon a similar ratio applies to marketers, although perhaps with less justification. Many brand owners worry that their moniker isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s too long, too generic, too regional or just not catchy enough. Perhaps the advance of technology has rendered it archaic, or the foreign origins make it hard to pronounce. Alternatively, it’s not search-friendly or not cut out for social. Whatever the reason, some marketers look at their brand name with something approaching parental regret. I think this angst is a result of the pressure that has been piled on the naming decision over the years. In particular, the pioneers of positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, warned that naming was “the single most important marketing decision a company can make”. They then listed nine features of a great brand name, saying that it should be “short, simple, suggestive of the category, unique, alliterative, speakable, spellable, shocking and personalised”. To be fair, they didn’t require every name to pass all nine tests, but they did urge marketers to tick off as many boxes as they could. Measured against this yardstick, you can see why many brand managers feel inadequate. I’m not denying that this decision is really important. I remember how much time my partners and I spent on our own choice, before landing on Lucky Generals. But all my experience tells me that a good business maketh the name, not the other way round. Put simply, it’s much more important to have a great product, which will then reflect well on the brand, than pin all your hopes on a clever play on words. Unconvinced? Consider the story of AskJeeves versus Google. The former is arguably a much better name for a search engine. It’s certainly more suggestive of the category and brings a sense of human, intuitive service, whereas the latter just sounds like a faceless algorithm. We all know what happened next though. Then there’s MySpace and Facebook. The first is much more personal, inspirational and emotional – but it was left for dust by a clumsy reference to student yearbooks. I could go on, but hopefully you get my point. If a good name is no guarantee of success, then a bad name shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a burden either. As with so many examples in this book, it’s what you do with the hand you’re dealt, that ultimately determines your luck. I was reminded of this a few years ago, when I was working on Loyd Grossman’s range of cooking sauces. Brands that are named after celebrity founders are particularly tricky because their currency is so dependent on the fortunes of their namesakes. It’s why many stars take a subtler approach these days, providing backing behind the scenes rather than on the pack. But back then, we were still in the era of Paul Newman’s dressings, Linda McCartney’s meat-free range and George Foreman’s grills rather than Casamigos (George Clooney), Fenty (Rihanna) and Ivy Park (Beyoncé). In Loyd’s case, putting his face and name on the label had been a very deliberate choice. He’d launched the range in 1995, at a time when he was the presenter of two big shows on British television: Masterchef and Through the Keyhole. Before that, he’d worked for many years as a highly respected food critic. So his endorsement originally brought both fame and credibility. This wasn’t just a celebrity selling his signature for a quick buck; he really cared about the product and played an active role in the development of new recipes. Over the next decade or so, the brand grew stronger and the range expanded from pasta sauces to encompass many more cuisines. By 2009, though, sales were slowing. There were lots of reasons behind this, including increased competition from apparently similar (but actually inferior) rivals. However, one factor was arguably that Loyd’s own profile was not what it had been. In recent years, he’d chosen to prioritise other interests outside of TV and journalism (including guitar duties in a rather nifty punk band called The New Forbidden). As a result, a new generation of home cooks was growing up without a full understanding of Loyd’s backstory. Worse still, the main thing people did remember about Loyd was that he had a rather odd accent. Raised in Boston and then relocated to the UK, his mangled vowels sounded like an affectation, although they were completely genuine. It didn’t seem like a great claim to fame, so his marketing team inevitably began to wonder whether it was time to evolve the brand name to something subtler. ‘LG Sauces’ was mooted. I wasn’t sure. Not least because I didn’t fancy breaking the news to the man himself! Cut to a rather awkward meeting with Loyd and his brand team. We pored over the data. We reviewed the competition in excruciating detail. We looked at the new products that were coming through. In short, we talked about everything apart from the one thing we needed to. The poor man must have thought we were behaving very oddly. Eventually, I’d had enough and bravely took things into my own hands. By which I mean I passed a note to my partner Helen and asked her to do something. And guess what? When she gingerly mentioned the fact that the one thing people associated with Loyd was his voice, he laughed out loud. It turned out that this was not news to him at all because “even my childraaaaan make fuhhhhn of me awwwwl the tihhhhme”.

This was the breakthrough we needed. Instead of shying away from the supposed problem, we embraced it. We stuck with the name but developed a line to breathe new life into it: “Sauces with a distinctive voice.” We then created some funny advertising, featuring people doing impressions of Loyd as they cooked. Even Loyd got in on the act, with a brilliant, self-deprecating cameo of his own. It wasn’t just entertainment for the sake of it. It was a powerful reminder of Loyd’s culinary credentials and the fact that his sauces were a cut above the rest. All served up with a generous helping of wit. A decade or so on, the brand is still going strong. Which just goes to show, there’s really no such thing as a bad name, as long as you have a good imagination.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: A problematic name will wreck your chances of success. Luck says: Your name is what you make of it. So ask yourself: How might your brand name give you a more distinctive voice?

LUCKY PLACE

C

onsett is just a small town in the north-east of England but it used to have the biggest steelworks in the world.

I know this because several of my family worked at the plant and in the surrounding coalmines which fed its furnaces. When we visited Consett as kids, we were always amazed by the red dust which covered everything. It was like visiting Mars, except the aliens were very friendly and called you ‘pet’. Sadly, the steelworks closed in 1980 and 4,500 people were made redundant. The coalmines followed soon afterwards and before long, Consett had the highest level of unemployment in the whole of Western Europe. The iron oxide powder still caked the streets, but it now had sinister associations: it was increasingly linked to a host of serious lung conditions. In short, Consett was the least likely place in the world to launch a premium food brand. But in 1982, that’s exactly what four local men did. The team had spotted a gap for a range of posh snacks, incorporating flavours from all over the world – but without the snootiness that the 1980s was already becoming known for. So they named their brand Phileas Fogg, after the hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. But their masterstroke was to emphasise that the nerve centre of the operation was “Medomsley Road, Consett”. They even created a fictional airport (Consett International), which was supposed to be the gateway to the “cultural centre of Europe”. It was all very tongue in cheek, of course, but focusing on these humble roots was a brilliant way to make the product feel accessible. Medomsley Road became a household name and the local council had to field hundreds of enquiries about the nonexistent transport hub. Within 12 years, the unlikely Geordie gourmets had sold the business to United Biscuits for about £24 million. Phileas Fogg is interesting for our purposes, because it shows that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad place’ to come from. Many marketers only think about provenance when their brand hails from somewhere classically beautiful, cool or wholesome. Hence all those whisky ads set in the Scottish Highlands, all the sportswear brands positioned in America’s inner cities and all the food packaging that cues the Mediterranean. These conventions make sense – but you can arguably make more impact by hero-ing a more unusual home. The story of Medomsley Road is also fascinating because it shows how an apparently narrow provenance story can have broad appeal. This is important because marketers often worry that highlighting their geographic origins might be a turn-off to people from elsewhere. The team behind Phileas Fogg clearly didn’t want to confine sales to one street in Consett: they were using their roots to demonstrate a much broader, down-to-earth stance. Whether we like it or not, places aren’t just postcodes: they carry regional associations, stereotypes and quirks. So if you can define the local spirit as an attitude, rather than a literal location, you can garner much wider appeal than you might think. That’s certainly been the experience of another regional upstart, based about 100 miles down the A1 from Consett. Yorkshire Tea was third in the tea market when we pitched for the business in 2016. The top two players – PG Tips and Tetley – had held sway for decades and were considered pretty invincible, given Britons’ reluctance to change tea brands. The market was in long-term decline too, so attracting completely new users would be impossible. And to cap it all, we had one of those pitches where everything seemed to go wrong. Despite all this, we fluked it. Or as the marketing director, Dom Dwight, told us later, we “lost the pitch but won the business”. The reason he took a gamble on us was that he saw the glimmer of an idea in one of our half-baked routes. It involved making more of the mantra that adorned the factory wall: “We do things proper.” We felt this was a brilliant statement of the company’s commitment to quality, expressed with an authentic Yorkshire accent. What we hadn’t quite cracked was how to make this philosophy famous, fun and nationally relevant. After all, ‘God’s own county’ has a reputation for taking itself quite seriously and the idea of making a proper cup of tea could have felt quite dour, functional and parochial. Well, we kept travelling back and forth to Harrogate, without quite nailing it. But gradually, we noticed something interesting. That Yorkshire philosophy of doing things ‘proper’ didn’t just apply to the tea production process; it seemed to spill into all the other aspects of the company culture. There was just something about the people up there and their determination to do everything well. Even the receptionists’ welcome seemed to be friendlier and more personal than elsewhere. This got us thinking: a story about tea production might be boring, but what if we celebrated all the other things that the company did ‘proper’? I mean, we all have to do small jobs at work sometimes. And as our creatives Nick and Lee observed: “We know that when the small jobs are done well, it’s a sure sign that the big ones are done well too.” This breakthrough led to a new idea: “Yorkshire Tea – where everything’s done proper” (my italics). To bring this to life in advertising, we hired celebrities to do menial jobs around the company HQ. Importantly, they were all from Yorkshire, but national treasures too. For example, Michael Parkinson did the interviews, the Kaiser Chiefs provided the hold music and Sean Bean did the team pep talk. It was an idea with regional roots but countrywide appeal – as shown by the fact that Yorkshire Tea became the biggest-selling tea brand in Britain within three years.

And do you know which region showed the biggest growth at launch? Lancashire. As any Northerner will tell you, a campaign that can persuade Lancastrians to buy a product called ‘Yorkshire Tea’ must have been proper great.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Only brands from glamorous places should do provenance. Luck says: There’s no such thing as a ‘bad place’. So ask yourself: How could you channel your local spirit?

LUCKY LEGACY

A

ntiques Roadshow is one of the longest-running series in British television. Since its debut in 1979, generations of viewers have marvelled at the treasures which lucky punters have found in their attics. Often they have inherited these artefacts from their forebears and dismissed them as worthless, only to be corrected by the experts. There was the glass vase being used as a peanut dispenser (it later went for £42k). The leather jacket that turned out to be JFK’s (valued at £200k). The decrepit old camera (£320k) and the not-so-humble plant pot (£560k). We laugh at people using priceless meteorites as doorstops and rare tapestries as curtains. But sometimes, businesses are guilty of far greater negligence. Often, organisations are sitting on the brand equivalent of these treasures – except the assets may be worth tens of millions rather than hundreds of thousands. The artefacts might be old slogans, ad campaigns, promotional mechanics or graphic devices. Or they might simply be an archive of amazing stories, photographs and packaging. Once you blow off the dust, these can reveal themselves to be as powerful as they ever were, but all too often they remain forgotten and unloved. Sometimes, this neglect is due to genuine ignorance. With CMOs and agencies changing on average every three years, corporate memories can be dangerously short. But in other cases, the decision is more deliberate and represents the desire of new brooms to sweep the past behind them. In an industry where history is seen as the preserve of dinosaurs, the very idea of looking back is viewed as anathema. All these themes were evident when we found ourselves working on Hovis, back in 2008. The long-time brand leader in bread had recently been toppled by regional challenger Warburtons. Market share was in steep decline and disgruntled retailers were threatening to cut distribution. Morale among the 6,500 bakery workers was low. As a result, the brand’s owner Premier Foods was in peril. A Sunday Times article depicted the CEO in a toaster, with the headline: “Is Premier toast?” Pundits were united as to the cause of all this: the Hovis brand was old-fashioned and in urgent need of modernisation. It’s easy to see why so many observers reached this conclusion. Hovis is one of the UK’s most venerable brands. Founded in 1886, its name is a contraction of the Latin phrase hominis vis (‘the strength of man’). As if this wasn’t archaic enough, there are ghost murals of the brand all over the country: faded advertisements that reinforce the idea of Hovis belonging to a bygone era. Most of all, Hovis was associated with a very old-fashioned advertising campaign. Ridley Scott’s 1974 story of a ‘Boy on the bike’ is one of the most famous TV spots of all time and its sepia tones are used as a cultural shorthand for nostalgia. Researchers complained that they only had to mention the brand’s name in a focus group and people would start humming the brass band music and talking about cobbled streets. Successive ad agencies had tried to break free from this heritage, with bright animated styles and modern families, but to no avail. Hovis appeared to be irrevocably stuck in the past. Against this gloomy backdrop, we were surprised to get a call from a new CMO called Jon Goldstone, asking us over to Hovis HQ in Windsor. I remember the meeting well. The newspapers that day were full of terrible economic news (it was the early stages of the Global Financial Crisis), which put a further dampener on the usual small talk. Instead, Jon jumped straight into the business challenge, which he described as a “burning bridge”. Unless we took dramatic action, the brand (and possibly the company) would cease to exist. In the long term, he would need to overhaul the entire marketing mix, but in the meantime, he asked us to keep the flames at bay with “the ad campaign of the year”. No pressure. What was great about this briefing was that Jon didn’t dictate the solution. Frankly he didn’t care what we did as long as we got him out of this hole. In particular, he didn’t flinch when we asked whether we could explore the company archives. Although this seemed an unlikely source of inspiration for a brand that urgently needed to bring itself up to date, we wondered whether there was anything that we could repurpose for the modern era. As it happened, there was. What everybody had forgotten, in the rush to erase ‘Boy on the bike’ from history, was that there was a really strong line hiding at the end: “As good for you today, as it’s always been.” OK, it was a bit too focused on healthiness, because it had been conceived for an era when Hovis only made wholemeal bread. But my creative partner Danny pointed out that if we shortened it to “As good today as it’s always been”, we could communicate an array of messages about the modern range (from taste to innovation, brown bread to white). Best of all, the slogan wasn’t as backwards-looking as we remembered it. When we read it again, we could see that it did hark back to another era (“as it’s always been”), but really the emphasis was on the brand’s enduring relevance today. This sparked another thought. What if we borrowed some of the narrative spirit of ‘Boy on the bike’, not just the line. Again, this felt counter-intuitive. But we reasoned that the ad was so iconic that it would be easier to build on it than obliterate it. Step forward another lad, in a sepia-tinged setting. He started in a Victorian bakery, where he bought a loaf of bread (just like the boy in Ridley Scott’s classic). This was everything we’d been told to run a mile from, but instead our lad ran through 122 years (and 122 seconds) of history: through crowds of suffragettes, WWI recruits, the Blitz, Coronation street parties, World Cup celebrations, striking miners and finally the Millennium fireworks.

Eventually, he ran through a modern front door, put the loaf on the kitchen table and told his mum he was home. Phew. This epic reworking of “As good today as it’s always been” was a smash hit. It built on the past, but literally brought the brand up to date. Its story of enduring goodness captured the hopes of the nation, which had now plunged into full-blown recession. Jon Goldstone not only got his wish for the ad of the year, the British public voted it their favourite campaign of the decade. And more importantly, sales rocketed. In fact, Hovis was the fastest-growing grocery brand of the year and the campaign was estimated to have boosted profits by about £90m. Imagine finding that in your attic.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Looking backwards is a bad thing. Luck says: Your brand’s history can be a treasure trove of good ideas. So ask yourself: What’s in your brand’s attic?

LUCKY FEET

Y

ou know what they say about men with big feet, don’t you? Yes, well I’m afraid it’s not true. In 1993, Canadian doctors measured the foot size and penile length of 63 men and found only a weak correlation between the two. A Korean study from 1999 was not much more encouraging. And neither was a British study from 2002. In fact, it appears that there are very few advantages to having big feet. A further study from 2011 (yes, it does seem odd that there is so much research in this area…) found that women prefer men with average-sized feet anyway. Worse still, a Swedish report from 2016 suggested that life expectancy decreases as shoe size increases. There doesn’t even seem to be any benefit to runners: the consensus among sports scientists seems to be that any marginal gains in stride are more than cancelled out by extra weight. In traditional marketing terms then, this makes big feet pretty useless. They don’t provide the meaningful differentiation we are taught to pursue. This concept has been at the heart of the advertising discipline since at least the 1930s. Sometimes the terminology changes – for instance the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) lost favour to the idea of an Emotional Selling Proposition (ESP) in the 1990s. But the basic argument has remained the same: brands need to find a point of difference that is valued by other people. A compelling benefit, not something pointless like my facetious footbased example. This sacred belief has made life difficult for companies all over the world. Successive marketers have embarked on quests to find something different to say – only to find that this is almost impossible in many categories. The entire market research industry has been set up to help, but anyone who has ever run a focus group will tell you that respondents often don’t care about the propositions which are offered up. Ad agencies have got in on the act too: one British agency famously offered to “interrogate your product until it confesses to its strengths”. It all sounds like a lot of hard work, doesn’t it? Which is the exact opposite of what consumers want when they are shopping. In the last few years, this model has been turned on its head by the work of Professor Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide. Sharp has revolutionised marketing by using empirical research to find out how consumers really buy and How Brands Grow (the title of his breakthrough book). One of Sharp’s most iconoclastic findings is that meaningful differentiation isn’t always necessary for commercial success. Instead, companies should build distinctive qualities which help their brands stand out and make them easier to find. Crucially, these attributes don’t need to have any intrinsic purpose or profound meaning: they can be something as simple as a colour, a logo, a tagline or a shape. This new way of looking at the world should be good news for many marketers. Instead of slogging away, trying to find a non-existent USP, they should first consider what distinctive assets they have. Many organisations will have these assets but may have rejected them as pointless. Perhaps they have a striking colour but have struggled to articulate what deeper meaning that hue symbolises. Or maybe they have an unusual shape that doesn’t really serve a purpose. In the old model, these could be considered unfortunate – but with this fresh perspective, they might emerge as very lucky indeed. Peter Mayhew from Barnes in Surrey would probably have agreed with this point of view. Born in 1944, he developed an overactive pituitary gland and grew to 7 feet 3 inches tall, with size 17.5 shoes. Apart from this, there was nothing remarkable about him. He had no exceptional talents. He was neither athletically inclined nor academically gifted. He was just a kind, unassuming man who went on to work as a porter in a London hospital – until his distinguishing feature got him his lucky break. This came in 1976, when a local reporter visited Peter’s place of work and became transfixed by the size of the gentle giant’s feet. The journalist encouraged Mayhew to write to the Guinness Book of Records and although this came to nothing, he later wrote an article about him and his clodhoppers. By further chance, this attracted the attention of a movie producer called Charles Schneer, who was casting for his latest blockbuster, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Schneer asked Mayhew to play the Minotaur and shortly afterwards another producer named Gary Kurtz came calling about a new space adventure film. This movie had been rejected by a host of studios but later became one of the biggest franchises of all time: Star Wars. Mayhew played the beloved character of Chewbacca from 1977 to 2015. You could say that he landed on his feet. My point is that sometimes, it’s OK to be pointless. Mayhew’s distinctive feature apparently served no purpose in life. But it did help him stand out and made him easy to find. In a world where consumers don’t want to spend ages thinking through their choices, that’s a pretty good steer for most brands too.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Brands need to find a meaningful difference. Luck says: It’s better to be stupidly distinctive than deeply different. So ask yourself: What’s your most unusual feature, even if it seems pointless?

LUCKY DUDE

D

ale Carnegie wrote the original book on improving your luck – and enjoyed very good fortune with it. How to Win Friends and Influence People only had an initial print run of 5,000 in 1936 but went on to be one of the best-selling books of all time.

One of Carnegie’s top tips was to talk about the subjects that your audience is interested in, not drone on about yourself. He cited Franklin D. Roosevelt as the master of this art. Apparently whenever the President expected a visitor, he would stay up late the night before, reading about the individual’s passions. “For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.” This is good advice for brands too. But it does need to be done with caution. Consumers are rightly cynical when their bank tries to chat to them about hip hop or their washing powder expresses an opinion on alternative comedy. Brands can talk more credibly about culture when there’s an obvious fit with the demographics (e.g. Baileys’ backing for women’s fiction), a strong link to the product (e.g. Heineken’s sponsorship of European football) or a long-standing association (e.g. Pepsi’s support of music). Even better if all three conditions are met. But what if your brand doesn’t have any formal tie-ups? Does that mean it can’t leverage an aspect of popular culture? Not necessarily. If the connection is authentic enough then that will still be more powerful than any expensively bought sponsorship. Kahlúa – which we helped relaunch in 2013 – is a good example of this. Kahlúa is a strange rum and coffee liqueur from Mexico. It’s one of those drinks that many of us remember from our misspent youths, but when we got a call from its marketing manager, Caroline Wood, it had been on the slide for a decade. Performance in the US was particularly problematic, as that market accounted for the bulk of sales. Looking at the data from the States, it was clear that the decline was due to a lack of recruitment: the brand was no longer being drunk by the under-40s. In fact, it was barely being drunk at all. Instead, it had almost become a food ingredient, used to make desserts by an ever-dwindling band of middle-aged moms. Even the brand’s owners (Pernod Ricard) were downbeat about the brand’s chances. But Caroline was adamant that we could make the brand aspirational again and win over a new generation of drinkers. So that was our brief. Our first step was pretty basic: to reposition Kahlúa as a drink, not a food! The most recent advertising for the brand had banged on about the product’s delizioso taste. But if you’ve ever drank Kahlúa straight, you’ll know that coughmedecino would be a more accurate description. Besides, what our under-40s audience was really interested in was cocktails. They were making a comeback and the brand had historically played well in that space, so we determined to refocus the conversation there: Carnegie would have been proud. More importantly though, what about the brand? When we conducted research, people were really confused by it. They had no idea where it was from (the name is actually derived from an Arabic word for coffee, that the Spaniards brought to Mexico, but guesses ranged from Hawaii to Japan). They didn’t care how it was made. They said the bottle looked old-fashioned and messy. In fact, the only time the conversation ever perked up, was when they talked about a cult movie called The Big Lebowski. In that film, Jeff Bridges plays a guy called ‘The Dude’ and drinks copious amounts of the most popular Kahlúa cocktail: White Russian. At first, this seemed like something of a distraction. The movie was already 15 years old and felt niche. But it kept cropping up, so we went with the conversational flow, just as Dale would have suggested. We discovered that the film enjoyed cult status online – even among younger people who wouldn’t have been drinking when it was first released. There was actually a physical event called the Lebowski Fest, where thousands of fans gathered to watch the film and down White Russians every time The Dude did. This got me thinking. What if we realigned the whole brand with the world of cult film? This area of culture fitted with our desired demographic (it was very clear from the research that our audience loved the genre). There was a strong link to the product (it was sold in the indie theatres that our target frequented). The association was long and deep (weirdly, we found lots of other cult movies, where Kahlúa featured as the oddballs’ drink of choice). So I opened my brief with the provocation: what would Quentin Tarantino do, if he was managing this brand? The answer was: Kahlúa Productions and the first sales rise in a decade. We embraced the crazy mash-up of elements – rum meets coffee, Mexican meets Arab, messy retro design – just as a cult film director would. We created hand-illustrated posters for our cocktails, as if they were the coolest Bmovies in the world: after all, who wouldn’t want to watch ‘Dirty Mother’, ‘Frozen Mudslide’, ‘Colorado Bulldog’, ‘B-52’ or ‘Mind Eraser’? We created a four-minute film called The White Russian, which launched in Hollywood and ran in indie cinemas. And of course, we got The Dude to star in it (well, Jeff Bridges anyway). This story supports Carnegie’s point: talk about what your audience is interested in. In this case: cocktails and cult movies, not cheesecake and crumble. When you think of your brand’s assets, don’t forget the bonds that tie it to culture because they may be your best chance to win friends and influence people.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Only talk about your brand, your product or your benefits. Luck says: Connect with the things your audience cares about. So ask yourself: What cultural connections does your brand have?

LUCKY MASCOT

I

n Japan, most local municipalities and organisations have a mascot. They’re called yuru chara or laid-back characters. The expression also carries some connotations of light-heartedness and frivolity, reflecting the fact that the best of them are a little bit naïve and not intended to be taken seriously.

The phenomenon really took off in 2007, when Hikone Castle commissioned a mascot to celebrate its 400th anniversary. Hikonyan was a super-cute white cat in a Samurai helmet, a reference to a local legend. It became a cultural phenomenon, selling huge amounts of merchandise and boosting the local economy by hundreds of millions of dollars. Other municipalities quickly got in on the act, inventing their own characters based on their own claims to fame. By 2010, there were so many mascots that a national competition was set up to award the best one. Then, around 2014, the bubble burst. That year, thousands of characters entered the annual event and tens of millions of Japanese citizens cast their votes. Some yuru chara launched video games and music albums. But the government worried that this mania was causing local councils to waste time and money on self-referential nonsense. So the Finance Ministry ordered a cull. Hundreds of characters were binned overnight, creating a new phenomenon of unemployed mascots. These included a chin dog called Adachin, who now identifies as a stray and wanders the malls of Adachi selling merchandise with slogans like “The mayor hated me” and “I got fired”. This probably sounds like one of those peculiar stories that could only happen in Japan. But actually, it mirrors the journey of mascots in Western advertising. Not so long ago, brand characters were commonplace in our marketing. Now, they are very much out of fashion. So much so that I could easily imagine Adachin the dog bumping into sundry cats, tigers, roosters, cows, soldiers, farmers and sailors down the mall. They’d probably be wearing Tshirts saying “My brand manager hated me”. There are lots of reasons why modern marketers have deserted brand characters. Some of them are perfectly valid (certain companies have recently woken up to the fact that their old symbols are racist or sexist, making them completely inappropriate today). But typically, the logic is pretty flimsy. Especially when research suggests that campaigns featuring branded devices are 22% more likely to boost profits. For instance, there’s often a worry that mascots are old-fashioned – a throwback to a bygone era. But this needs to be weighed against the instant recognition they bring – precisely because they’ve been around a long time. If you have a character that now looks a bit tatty, it’s usually better to give them a makeover than sack them altogether. Check out KFC’s reinvention of Colonel Sanders to see how even the most distinguished figure can be made to feel fresh and contemporary. Then there are accusations that these devices are too silly, at a time when many brands are trying to tackle serious issues in society. Leaving aside the question of whether marketers should be doing that – I’ll deal with it elsewhere – this seems more like a failure of imagination, rather than an intrinsic defect. A quick look at the Michelin Man’s promotion of tyre safety over the years should show that strong characters can flex to talk about serious issues as well as fun stuff. Perhaps the biggest concern is that brand characters are inward-looking. They don’t live in the real world, so make it harder to demonstrate real consumer insight. Instead of representing the company, surely we should be reflecting the whole of society? Well, OK – but wouldn’t it be better to do both? The best advertising doesn’t just hold up a mirror to the consumer, it offers a unique point of view. Just ask the Pillsbury Doughboy or the PG Tips Monkey. A few years ago, we were working with that most contemporary of brands: Twitter. They hadn’t needed to advertise before but now their momentum was slowing. The problem was that they had a core of loyal users, who absolutely loved the platform, but were struggling to attract new users. It seemed that many people were intimidated by the perceived need to be clever or funny. As a result, our brief was all about repositioning the brand from being a place to showcase your own sparkling wit, to one where you could simply enjoy a huge range of content, created by other people. Now, at this point, I’ll skip over lots of clever product stuff that the marketing people did to make the service more accessible. And I’ll skim over our strategy, which was about capturing life’s rich diversity, as it changed in real time. Suffice to say that our line was “This is happening”, answering the question which greets you every time you use Twitter (“What’s happening?”). More importantly for our purposes here, we used Twitter’s famous blue bird mascot to get our message across. On the face of it, this made no sense. Echoing the concerns raised above, it was potentially a bit clunky, superficial and introspective. In particular, it was arguably off-brief: the bird was a symbol of tweeting that might alienate non-users who just wanted to consume rather than create. But we felt it would be crazy not to use one of the bestknown icons in contemporary culture. So we reworked it as a framing device – instead of being a noisy symbol of communication, it became a neverending portal for consumption. Whether we were in film or outdoor, we would dive in through multiple bird logos and explore a myriad of content, from serious political campaigns to silly pop-culture stuff. We even had a cute kitten, to rival Hikonyan.

It only worked because the client team were able to see past the superficial arguments to the much more powerful benefits, of awareness, brand attribution, consistency and speed of communication. The little bird wasn’t an albatross round their necks – it was a lucky mascot. And so might yours be.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Brand characters and devices are old hat. Luck says: Mascots sell. So ask yourself: What brand character or symbol could you use or create?

LUCKY PEOPLE

M

ost companies have employees who go beyond the call of duty. But they’re sometimes overlooked by their bosses. So I often find myself urging organisations to recognise them as potential assets, another lucky resource that they should be more appreciative of. And when I do, I invariably reference a Tesco employee called Chris King. In 2011, Chris received a letter from a little girl called Lily Robinson (“aged three and a half”). Lily had a strong opinion on a pressing issue (I’ll talk more about the potential of kids’ perspectives in the next section). With admirable brevity, she simply wrote: “Why is tiger bread called tiger bread? It should be called giraffe bread.” Now, if you’re familiar with this particular product, you’d have to admit that she had a point. Which is exactly what Chris did. He wrote back saying: “I think renaming tiger bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it? It’s called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripy like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.” He enclosed a £3 gift card and signed off his letter “Chris King, aged 27 and 1/3”. This charming response went viral and spawned a Facebook campaign which received 150,000 likes. As a result, the supermarket really did change the name of the product – generating even more positive coverage. This is a lovely example of a small human gesture saying more for a company than a flashy ad campaign ever could. That’s why I mention it so often, as one of my favourite customer service stories. Except when I checked the facts so that I could write this book, I discovered that Chris King didn’t work for Tesco after all, but for their arch-rival, Sainsbury’s. So I’ve been telling this story wrong for years. And although I still think it’s a great example of the power of people, I now see it as a warning on their pitfalls too. Let’s go back to my opening line: “Most companies have employees who go beyond the call of duty.” There’s the problem right there. While it’s absolutely right to celebrate the amazing feats your people perform, it can be hard for ordinary folk to tell such stories apart. After all, one bank’s smiling tellers look pretty much like any other’s and one fast-food server’s story can sound like the next. On one level, you might not care about this because your internal audience is incredibly important in its own right. As long as they feel recognised then you might feel your job’s done. But this book is about making the most of your luck. If you’re fortunate enough to have great people working for you, wouldn’t it be better that their stories add up to something bigger, longer-lasting and more consumer-focused? Richard Branson would say yes. He’s a great believer in luck, saying it’s “one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated factors in life”. He’s also a huge advocate of people power, arguing that if you “take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your business”. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many parts of the Virgin empire over the years and will share some thoughts on these later. But for now I’m reminded of my time on Virgin Holidays and how we created a big idea based on customer service. It was 2010 and times were tough in the travel market. Technically the world might have emerged from recession in 2009, but austerity was in full swing. Then in April, an Icelandic volcano erupted and wiped out virtually all travel across Europe. An incredible 95,000 flights were cancelled and there were mass complaints about the various responses from travel companies. It was a good time for Virgin to reassert its service credentials, but we didn’t want to do this in a tactical, opportunistic way. Instead, we wanted to tell a positive story that would also apply to happier times. As Virgin Holidays’ Marketing Director Andrew Shelton told Campaign magazine: “People want to be looked after when things go wrong but should also be treated well when they go right.” The trick, as ever, was how to make this customer-service story credible and memorable. The truth was that Virgin Holidays did tend to recruit more fun, energetic, self-starting reps in line with the ethos of the parent brand. But this was quite hard to get across. At a time when all our competitors were falling over themselves to stress their service record (usually with less justification, but more money), we were worried that our message might get lost. So we started looking for a form of language that only Virgin could use. Something famous. Eventually we found one, by going right back to the company’s roots. Richard Branson had rock ’n’ roll in his DNA. His first business was a student magazine, for which he interviewed stars like Mick Jagger. His next ones were a mail-order record company and then a music shop. His big break – and the first use of his name – was a label called Virgin Records. And his most notorious moment was signing the Sex Pistols, when nobody else would touch them. Even the way Branson looked and spoke had more of Glastonbury about it than the City. We figured that this was the reason Virgin Holidays’ reps were so good: they were used to dealing with Richard and his mates. The idea of Rockstar Service was born. This was a big idea that the whole organisation could get behind – but that consumers could easily understand too. We brought it to life in a fun advertising campaign, featuring a terrible band called The Danke Shöns, who thought they were getting pampered because of their celebrity status (oblivious to the fact that Virgin Holidays treat everyone that way).

But the idea went much further than that. Jimi Hendrix’s former tour manager was hired to teach employees how to deal with rockstars. Inflatable TVs were left in hotel rooms, to be thrown out of the window. Chauffeurs were laid on and backstage passes handed out. The idea was even exported to other parts of the Virgin Group, including cruises. Of course, it was still incredibly important to highlight real stories, featuring real employees. But these now had greater resonance, because they were part of a more memorable story. Returning to the lovely Chris King, I’ll still use him as an example of best practice. But from now on, I’ll be doubly sure to preach the need for a bigger idea. Because what I’ve learned is this: you need Rockstars as well as Tiger Kings to become famous for customer service.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Your people can be your secret weapon. Luck says: True, but they’re even more powerful if you don’t keep them under wraps. So ask yourself: How can you make your customer service famous?

LUCKY FUEL

I

n recent years, marketers have become fond of saying that “data is the new oil”. I’ve never been a fan of this expression (I’m old enough to remember similar pronouncements about integration, personalisation, experience, influence and many more). But the phrase did finally resonate with me on the 20 April 2020.

That was the day that oil prices turned negative for the first time in history. This incredible situation was yet another surprise consequence of the Covid-19 crisis. Global demand had dried up overnight but supply remained stable, so the industry ran out of storage. As panic mounted, traders started paying dealers to take oil off their hands. To me, this development made the marketing metaphor much more powerful. Originally, the comparison was supposed to position data as a precious resource which can lubricate the cogs and wheels of an organisation (all true). But now, the analogy reminded us that a valuable commodity can also become a costly burden, if it’s allowed to build up in enormous quantities without being used. In fact, in many businesses, that interpretation is probably closer to the truth. Modern companies gather data on an unimaginable scale, collecting numbers that we can barely get our heads around: gigabytes, terabytes, even petabytes. But they don’t always use it to similarly massive effect. The result is that brand owners are often sitting on a goldmine of information (to mix commodity metaphors) without realising it. They might consider themselves unlucky, oblivious to the riches that are under their noses. Or at best, they might content themselves with hacking out the odd nugget from time to time: a little chunk of insight that will help them tighten up their targeting or focus their NPD. Given the expense of collecting it, I think this is a waste. I think we all need to be much more demanding of the data we amass. It doesn’t just have to be piles of boring information that we gather in the background, it can be the fun, fizzy, facts that we put centre stage. Spotify do this brilliantly. In December 2016, they launched a campaign that simply took amazing statistics, from their enormous database of listening habits, and used them to make fun observations about the year just past. For instance, one poster said: “Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ the day of the Brexit vote. Hang in there.” Another one said: “Dear person in LA who listened to the ‘Forever alone’ playlist for 48 hours on Valentine’s Day, you OK?” The following December, they gave the campaign a different twist, using data to suggest ‘Life Goals’ for 2018. For example: “Be as loving as the person who put 48 Ed Sheeran songs on their ‘I love Gingers’ playlist.” Or: “Eat vegan brisket with the person who made a playlist called ‘Leftist elitist snowflake BBQ’”. Then in 2020, they used data to express gratitude to all those who had used music to keep us going, including “the creator of the playlist ‘women are keeping this rap sh*t afloat rn’”. Meanwhile, individual users get their own personalised summary of their listening habits. ‘Spotify wrapped’ tots up your total minutes and then breaks it down by your favourite songs, artists and genres. You can then share these vital statistics on your social feed and compare notes with others. Even the artists get in on the act – they’re given their own data, outlining how many fans they have, in how many countries, etc. – and post this on their channels. It’s an approach which has helped Spotify become the biggest platform for streaming music, with 144m paid subscribers and 320m monthly active users as of Q3 2020. But it’s a route that’s available to older brands too – and doesn’t even require the brand to own the data. For instance, one of Spain’s most popular campaigns of recent times was for a liqueur called Ruavieja. The brand is traditionally drunk after lunch but has been hit by the pressures of modern life. So the marketing team wanted to remind people of the importance of spending quality time with their loved ones. But they wisely chose not to communicate this with a conventional marketing campaign: after all, the idea of ‘enjoying precious moments’ is a very well-trodden territory. Instead, they used publicly available data to predict how much time individuals had left to spend with various loved ones. OK, they constructed a bespoke algorithm to do the maths, but the basic opportunity could have been seized by anyone. Over half a million people spent an average of five minutes on a microsite, calculating their scores, often with poignant results. What I love about both these stories is that they show the true power of data. In Spotify’s case, dry user information has been transformed into witty social commentary. And in Ruavieja’s case, demographic statistics have been used to prompt profound conversations about life. If you have your own customer data (or have access to information from elsewhere), then you should consider yourself very lucky. Just don’t squander your opportunity. Data is like oil. But you should treat it like creative rocket fuel, not just as an expensive commodity produced by massive bores.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Gather as much data as you can. Luck says: Use data as brilliantly as you can. So ask yourself: What wealth of information are you sitting on?

LUCKY PACK

R

esearchers at the University of San Diego recently conducted an experiment to explore how we evaluate ideas. They told a group of volunteers about a new shoe that used nanotechnology to reduce the risk of blisters. The twist was that they told half of the respondents that the technology had been developed nearby and half that it had been created far away. Perhaps surprisingly, consumers rated the idea as being significantly more creative when they were under the impression that it had been generated far away. The researchers made sense of the results by explaining that, when we evaluate ideas that are ‘far away’, we’re in a more abstract state of mind, and thus more open to their possibilities, as opposed to their risks. To this, I’d add that distance brings some creative mystique and exotic interest. In the next section, I’ll talk about how important it is to cultivate this natural curiosity and be open to ideas from other spheres. In my experience, fostering this eclectic interest is one of the most effective ways to improve your brand’s luck. But for now, I want to briefly warn against the opposite problem: being so in thrall to ideas from elsewhere, that you don’t spot the opportunities sitting under your nose. In particular, I want to talk about the media opportunities that are all too easily overlooked. Since the turn of the millennium, many marketers have used a model called POEM to guide their channel planning. It’s unclear who first coined the acronym but, as you probably know, the initials stand for Paid, Owned and Earned Media. When POEM was first introduced, it was a helpful reminder that the media landscape consists of a lot more than just traditional broadcast channels. Over the years, we’ve all seen the graphs that chart the shift from Paid to Earned. But what about Owned Media, squeezed in the middle? Owned Media covers all the channels you control yourself, from your brand’s website and social feed to your shop window and pack. As such, it’s an incredibly valuable platform that should be the first port of call when it comes to any media plan. But it lacks the glamour of that big Paid campaign, probably produced by an ad agency on the other side of town. And it doesn’t have the buzz of Earned, the thrilling possibility of your customers making you ‘go viral’ all over the country. In short, Owned Media is the equivalent of the researchers’ boring old shoe: familiar and dependable but easily overlooked because it’s produced in your backyard. Smart marketers know that this is a mistake. And they don’t come much smarter than the folks at Oatly. This Swedish company was the first to commercialise oat milk, way back in 1994. But it took many years to take off. Of course, in recent years, it’s benefited from wider appreciation of oats as an ingredient, and concerns about the health and environmental impact of dairy. But even with these tailwinds, Oatly was a fairly anonymous FMCG player right up until 2012. That’s when it hired a new CEO (Toni Petersson) and CMO (John Schoolcraft) and the brand’s stratospheric rise began. This duo had worked together before and were determined to develop a much more radical strategy than had previously been pursued. Instead of just passively riding societal trends, they would actively champion the benefits of plant-based living. They wouldn’t be afraid to tackle the dairy industry head on. In fact, they would positively relish it. They developed a very punchy manifesto – the kind that would normally be unveiled with a big Paid campaign, or a controversial Earned initiative. But instead, they focused on Owned. Schoolcraft explained why, in an interview with the eatbigfish consultancy: “We started with the packaging. It’s owned media and because we don’t have these US or UK size advertising budgets it’s really our main media. Usually in the food industry, any change whatsoever made to the packaging would make the company very nervous that sales would dip. Brands will make slight tweaks so customers don’t get confused and the result is no one notices. We approached it differently, we just threw the old packaging out completely and were prepared to take the hit.” Overnight, Oatly’s packs turned into posters. They carried striking headlines like “Powered by plants” and “It’s like milk but made for humans”. They included lots of copy, but the kind of witty commentary you want to read rather than the perfunctory information usually stuck on packs. They used hand-drawn cartoons and typography that looked like it had come from a punk band’s album cover, rather than a corporate playbook. They even put critical comments on, as a form of reverse-psychology: “Tastes like shit! Blah!” Since then, Oatly has used conventional channels too, but really these have simply been bigger versions of the packs. And the Owned-Media-First approach has worked. Sales have grown by about 100% and the company was recently valued at around $2bn. Of course, your brand might not have a physical pack, but before you jump to traditional methods, make sure to audit your own real estate. You might want to advertise like Nike, but if you can do shop windows like Macy’s, social media like GoPro, email like Uber, flyers like Trader Joe’s or a website like Twitch – you might not need to.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Paid and Earned media are the most exciting ways to promote your brand. Luck says: Owned media should be your first port of call.

So ask yourself: How could you tell your story, using only Owned media?

LUCKY TIMING

I

t’s a cliché to say that ‘timing is everything’. Most famously, comedians swear by this maxim. So do politicians, investors, sports stars, musicians, chefs, soldiers, historians, actors and lovers. In the business world, it’s also held up as one of the great truths – frequently given as an explanation for the success of companies as diverse as Ford and Microsoft. But despite all this, it’s often overlooked as a potential source of advantage. Daniel H. Pink explores this paradox in his excellent book on the science of timing: When. He explains that although seizing the moment is seen as important, it’s usually left to “a steamy bog of intuition and guesswork”. Instead, Pink suggests using evidence-based phenomena like the Fresh Start Effect. This is the finding that we’re more likely to achieve goals set at the start of a new time period. It’s part of a broader dynamic, whereby we’re highly influenced by beginnings. Pink discusses all this in relationship to human behaviour – for instance, how we act at New Year or the start of the week – but I think it has great application to brands too. Most obviously, this effect is relevant to start-ups. When brands launch, they have an opportunity to present themselves as a new dawn. One of the best expressions of this kind is: “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.” But of course, most brands aren’t youngsters. Instead, they’re experiencing growing pains, a mid-life slump or even a geriatric decline. These companies can’t change their chronological age, but they can reset their clock by presenting themselves as part of a new era. To do this though, they need to appreciate the possibility in the first place (otherwise it will slip by in the night) and have a right to claim the moment (otherwise, it will just feel like jumping on a trend). For most organisations, this requires a change of mindset. Instead of thinking of time as something that simply happens to our brands, we should see it as another under-exploited asset: why does this moment belong to us? Funnily enough, Pink’s book was published at the start of 2018, which turned out to be great timing for me, as I was working on a tricky brief for the Co-op. The Co-op is an extraordinary organisation. It was founded in the northern mill town of Rochdale in 1844, as a way of helping communities to help themselves. It was the first co-operative society in the world and remains owned by its members to this day, generating millions of pounds for local causes. Over the years, it’s grown to span everything from food retail (it has Britain’s biggest network of shops) to funeralcare (again, it’s the UK’s market leader). It even sponsors its own schools, has an online pharmacy, sells insurance and so on. It had recently overcome a financial crisis, and the new management team were looking for a fresh start. The top two marketers, Matt Atkinson and Ali Jones, explained that the organisation had previously focused on the individual business units. As a result, people didn’t really know what the Co-op stood for anymore, beyond it being an ‘ethical retailer’. Terms like mutuality and reciprocity didn’t help. Our brief was to articulate a singular Co-op vision that could stretch right across the Group: they were at pains to say that this was a massive organisational task, rather than an ad brief (although that might come later). I shuffled in my seat as I wondered how the hell to reconcile food and funerals, let alone all the other stuff. In the end, the breakthrough came from some comments Matt and Ali made about capturing the zeitgeist. Instead of getting lost in the detail of the business, they were evangelical (as many people at the Co-op are) about the bigger challenges in today’s society: issues like sustainability, community well-being, food poverty and the skills gap. They rightly argued that none of these problems could be tackled without different parties working together and talked about creating a sense that we were entering a new era, where co-operation would be key. This resonated with me. I joked that we would all be blown away if some Swedish start-up called ‘The Køøp’ launched a membership-based movement, spanning schools to funerals, designed to plough money back into local communities. They laughed, but then we all got excited by the idea of presenting the familiar old Co-op in this new light. Binning all the Victorian language of mutuality and reciprocity, we articulated the Co-op difference with the internal-facing line: “We care about the world we share.” This was true of all the business units and the underlying commercial model. Although it carried echoes of the Coop’s beginnings, this articulation also felt incredibly relevant today – a fresh start. Best of all, we could evidence it with action. We weren’t just jumping on the latest trend or running a token CSR campaign; this was how the organisation behaved, day in, day out. As our outwards-facing line said: “It’s what we do.” Since then, the entire organisation has got behind this rallying call. We’ve proclaimed the start of a new decade of co-operation, after a decade of division. More importantly, we’ve backed this rhetoric with well-timed action. For instance, we’ve helped to communicate an online platform to connect volunteers with people in need. We’ve also teamed up with England footballer Marcus Rashford to tackle food poverty. And we’ve handed out laptops, to address home-schooling inequalities.

With the help of thousands of colleagues, sales have smashed through the £10bn barrier for the first time and market share is at its highest in almost two decades. Not just because our timing was a fluke – but because we saw an opportunity to reset our clock. If we could make a 174-year-old organisation feel like a fresh start, how could you seize the day for your brand?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Timing is out of your hands. Luck says: You can seize the moment. So ask yourself: Why is this the best time for your brand to be alive?

SECTION 2: LOOK OUT FOR OPPORTUNITIES EVERYWHERE

W

hereas the previous section was about appreciating what you’ve got, this one is about looking out for unexpected opportunities elsewhere.

This isn’t a new idea: the Greek poet (and occasional angler, by the sound of it) Ovid advised that “chance is powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be fish.” But now, this age-old advice has been confirmed by empirical research into the psychology of luck. Professor Richard J. Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire is a global leader in this field. In one of his many experiments, he asked a group of people to read a newspaper and count the number of photographs. Previously, the respondents had been asked whether they identified as lucky or unlucky. Amazingly, the ‘lucky’ individuals completed the task in seconds, whereas the ‘unlucky’ ones took a couple of minutes on average. The reason was that there was an advert on page two of the newspaper, saying: “Stop counting – there are 42 photographs in this newspaper.” Only the ‘lucky’ respondents had seen it. Wiseman used this finding to argue that luck is partly due to being alert to opportunities outside of the core task you’re working on. Lucky people tend to have better peripheral vision, whereas unlucky people tend to focus on the job at hand. To ram home the point, Wiseman also included an ad saying: “Stop counting – tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” Again, the unlucky respondents missed it, as they were so busy looking for photographs. This phenomenon of making an unintentional discovery while performing another task, is known as serendipity. It’s very well known in science, where it’s been responsible for many celebrated breakthroughs. Most famously, it was the dynamic whereby Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, when some mould grew on an unattended petri dish. Then there was Percy Spencer, who invented the microwave after his chocolate bar melted during a radar experiment. And of course, many drugs have been discovered in this way – most notably Viagra, which was originally tested as a heart medication, until researchers noticed an unusual side effect… Scientists don’t regard such discoveries as flukes because they appreciate that there’s a real skill in spotting the opportunities in the first place. However, in the commercial world, this method of working is frowned upon. In fact, as the great Jeremy Bullmore has noted, it’s effectively seen as a form of “cheating”. Ideas are supposed to be developed only by rigorous step-by-step analysis, not by post-rationalisation. We’re taught that work requires focus and that our minds should not drift off elsewhere. This is a shame because, in my experience, some of the best creative breakthroughs stem from such happy accidents. In this section, I’ll show you how to make them yourself. I’ll describe how nature, sport, art, storytelling, maths and psychology can all inspire great marketing strategies, if you’re open-minded. I’ll talk about the power of borrowing ideas from completely unrelated sectors. And I’ll show how listening to outsiders – like those from other cultures, other age groups and other levels of expertise – can bring a fresh perspective. OK, the kind of discoveries I’ll be talking about are unlikely to win you a Nobel Prize. But they do support the likes of Louis Pasteur, who said that “chance only favours the prepared mind”. In business, as in science, opportunity sometimes knocks when you’re least expecting it – how can you recognise it and let it in?

LUCKY GEORGE

O

ne day in 1941, George de Mestral was hunting in the Jura mountains of Switzerland. As usual, he had his dog with him and when they got back home, he saw that the animal’s fur was covered with hundreds of tiny burrs.

Now, as any dog owner will tell you, it’s important to remove these as they can irritate your pet – and even pose a threat, if the burrs harbour ticks. The problem is, they’re very hard to dislodge. The task usually requires a combination of gloved hands, comb, brush – and even pliers. Most owners have to really concentrate on the job, to make sure they catch all the prickly seeds. But George de Mestral wasn’t most owners. He was an engineer. So instead of simply focusing on removing the burrs, he got thinking about why they were so sticky in the first place. When he examined the seeds under a microscope, de Mestral saw that each one was covered in hooks. These grabbed onto anything with a natural loop – whether that was a dog’s fur, a bird’s feathers or human clothes. They had evolved that way, as it helped the plants disperse their seeds. But de Mestral now saw that they might also inspire a new form of fastening. For the next few years, he experimented with different combinations. Then, in 1955, he finally patented an ingenious solution, whereby one strip of material would be covered in thousands of hooks, pointing in random directions, and the other would be covered in an equally dense and random layer of loops. He called this Velcro – a combination of ‘velvet’ and ‘crochet’. De Mestral’s invention is a classic case of serendipity. Most of us would have been so focused on the task at hand, that we would have missed this opportunity. More specifically, it’s an example of biomimicry, whereby humans borrow ideas from the natural world. This is now a hugely popular form of innovation, because it allows us to build on dynamics that have already been perfected over millions of years. Biomimicry also leads to more sustainable solutions. For instance, architects in Zimbabwe have designed officecooling systems inspired by termite mounds. Engineers in Japan have created more efficient trains, modelled on the aerodynamics of a kingfisher. Environmentalists in Israel are improving coastal defences by learning from tide pools and oyster beds. It might sound very far-removed from our own humble day jobs – but actually, nature can be a fantastic source of inspiration for marketers too. Take one of the biggest ideas to emerge from our discipline over the last couple of decades: the brand ecosystem. This is the notion that, instead of competing as individual entities, companies should form networks with their partners, suppliers and even competitors, to provide consumers with a holistic range of services. It’s no coincidence that the top four brands in the world – Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft – all use this model. Nor that every other marketer is being urged to develop their own ecosystem strategy, either as architects or more junior participants. The model is popular because it’s seen to bring greater scale, efficiency, loyalty and protection. But it’s an approach that’s been directly taken from nature, where it’s as old as life itself. Then there’s the concept that we are all herd animals. This was first popularised by former ad strategist Mark Earls, in 2007. Back then, it was viewed as a heretical notion. Until that point, most marketing textbooks (and those from other disciplines) had treated human beings as rational individuals. Earls challenged this idea with a host of empirical evidence, including parallels drawn with other species. Nowadays, his basic premise – that we are social creatures and that most decisions have a strong group dynamic – is relatively uncontroversial. Or what about today’s big issue: sustainability? One of my favourite marketing essays of recent times was by a strategist from Wunderman Thompson, called Omar El-Gammal. It revolved around a really interesting metaphor, drawn from nature. El-Gammal argued that too many businesses currently function as weeds: they prioritise rapid and constant growth, at the expense of everything around them. He suggested that trees were a better model: they still grow, but more steadily, while putting down deep roots in their communities and providing shelter and nourishment for those around them. That’s three great questions from nature, right there. ‘What’s your ecosystem? How can you appeal to our herd instincts? How can you be more tree than weed?’ Too often, our heads are buried in the details of our day jobs and we forget to ask more interesting questions like these. We end up picking burrs off dogs, not making Velcro. Talking of which, another strategist called Russell Davies does a talk on “How to be interesting”. And guess what metaphor he uses – albeit in a very different way? “We need to have lots of random hooks and loops,” he says. “If we read the same old books, we get to know more about the thing we know lots about already. We need to subscribe to magazines that we wouldn’t normally subscribe to; we need to go to places that we wouldn’t normally go to, eat at places that may not be our kind of place. We stay interesting when we don’t just stay in our groove. We keep pushing; we leave what we know behind for a bit. Velcro goes in many different directions in order to make a connection. If we are interested in new ideas, so should we.” I’ve never seen Russell’s talk – I stumbled on an account of it while researching my own piece. Even weirder, I found two more articles, making entirely different (but equally interesting) points about business, using Velcro as a

metaphor. The beautiful serendipity of all this simply reinforces my belief that nature is a bountiful giver of great ideas. The next time you get into a sticky situation, think like George.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Concentrate on the task at hand. Luck says: Go for a walk in the great outdoors. So ask yourself: What can your brand learn from Mother Nature?

LUCKY LEAP

A

lfonso Barani is a mysterious character. Not much is known about him, apart from the fact he was an Italian acrobat who lived in the late 1800s. Even his name seems to be in doubt (he is sometimes referred to as ‘Baroni’ in the few surviving records). But he lives on in gymnastic terminology, by virtue of an astonishingly difficult move that he invented. The Barani Flip consists of a front flip and 180-degree turn, so that the tumbler is left facing in the opposite direction to the one in which they started. It has now found its way into sports like snowboarding and trampolining, but when Alfonso invented it, he did it using his core strength alone. Just think how hard that must be: to flip your body, from a standing start, so that you not only land on your feet but have completed a half-turn in mid-air. The YouTube videos that demonstrate this technique are always heavily trailed by disclaimers. They’re clearly only meant for supreme athletes who are in complete control of their bodies. This makes it all the more amusing that they once came to my assistance, as a middle-aged strategist with creaking limbs, on a brief for that least sporty of foods, Pot Noodle. Pot Noodle is the brand leader in the UK’s hot savoury snacks sector. It’s owned by Unilever, although it’s something of an outlier in their global portfolio, as it’s only sold in Britain. Here it’s a cult favourite among students, because it’s so easy to make: just add hot water to a pot of dehydrated ingredients and you have a tasty (if not exactly nutritious) meal. It has a long history of famous – and very funny – advertising. But when we were asked to pitch for it, in 2014, it was in decline. Superficially, the reason for this decline was simply that there was a lot more competition in this sector than there had been. When Pot Noodle launched in the 1970s, it effectively had the field to itself, but now there were all sorts of new rivals. Like many market pioneers, Pot Noodle was starting to look a bit old-fashioned and boring. So the Unilever team asked us to rejuvenate the brand. To achieve this, they suggested we draw on a modern cultural insight: a sense that the world had become too complicated and was thus calling out for simplicity. As evidence for this, they cited the bewildering number of ways you can order coffee, watch TV or exercise these days. Positioning Pot Noodle as an antidote to this seemed like an interesting contemporary take on the challenge, so we used this premise to develop a raft of creative work and sent our top strategist off to research it. Loz Horner is the planner behind many of the campaigns in this book (Amazon, Yorkshire Tea and Taylors Coffee for starters), so I looked forward to hearing about another hit. Bad news: Loz came back to say that the work had all bombed. First of all, he said that none of the young people he’d spoken to thought that the world was too complicated. In fact, they said “that’s the sort of thing my dad would say”. Ouch. Worse than that, they hated the implication that they were looking for easy options in life. This was a surprise, in that ‘Slacker culture’ had been at the heart of the brand’s historical success. One of Pot Noodle’s most famous campaigns had gloried in the tagline “The slag of all snacks” and the latest one was “Why try harder?” Generations of students had laughed along at jokes featuring couch potatoes and sofa slobs. But today’s more ambitious teens were turned off by this unashamed laziness. With less than two weeks to go before our pitch, we had no brief, no insight, no work and (we feared) no chance. Now at this point, I’m ashamed to say, I got a bit distracted. As I recall, I was Googling ‘turnarounds’ and had gone down a rabbit hole of great sporting comebacks. I read how Liverpool had come from 3–0 down to win the 2005 Champions League; how the Boston Red Sox had won the 2004 World Series, despite an 86-year-old curse; and how Lasse Virén had taken an Olympic Gold in 1972, despite falling halfway through the 10,000m. All fascinating but utterly useless. But eventually, as the links spiralled from surprise wins into physical twists and turns, I found Barani. Which, in turn, flipped a switch somewhere in my brain, when I returned to the task. The reason that this particular gymnastic move helped us make a strategic leap was that it revolved (literally) around using one’s own core strength. This had been the bit that had been bugging us about Pot Noodle. Our research had suggested that the brand’s core strength (simplicity) might be off-putting to today’s 18–24-yearolds. The obvious answer was to jettison it and do something radically different. But what if we took the same attribute and turned it on its head? Maybe we could flip Pot Noodle’s simplicity so that it appealed to today’s gogetters, rather than yesterday’s couch potatoes? Loz and I wrote a new brief focused on the thought that “Pot Noodle saves you time cooking, so you can win at life. Think Zuckerberg pulling an all-nighter or Adele in the studio, rather than some loser on a sofa.” We won the pitch with this strategy and a very poor demonstration of the Barani Flip, from yours truly. My creative partner Danny then contributed a killer line, “You can make it”, which was literally true of the product (you can make it in just four minutes) but also true to our strategy (you can make it in life). A host of others chipped in with very funny ads, PR stunts, social posts and promotions. And a brilliant CMO called Patricia Corsi orchestrated it all – so well, in fact, that sales broke through the £100m barrier for the first time. It had taken enormous team effort to ‘make it’. But I’ll never forget that our Most Valuable Player was an Italian acrobat, who was over 100 years old.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Games are frivolous and a distraction from business. Luck says: Competitive sport is a great metaphor for commerce. So ask yourself: What could you learn from your favourite players?

LUCKY PAINT

O

n 31 January 1917, Germany declared that its U-boats would be engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare. Previously, officers were supposed to operate by a surprisingly chivalrous code of prize rules when it came to attacking merchant ships: they were meant to surface, conduct a search of the enemy craft, place the crew in a position of safety and then sink the vessel. In practice, these rules hadn’t been followed since the first few months of the war. Most infamously, U-boats ignored the regulations in sinking the British liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives. This caused outrage around the world and influenced the United States’ decision to enter the war on Britain’s side. But they didn’t do this until April 1917. So Germany’s announcement in January 1917 was effectively a calculated bet: they reckoned that, if they went hell for leather with their U-boats, they could starve Britain into submission before America got fully mobilised. At first, this plan seemed to work. The newly emboldened submarines sank 1,860,000 tonnes of shipping in the first three months of the campaign. This onslaught left Britain with only six weeks’ worth of wheat. There was panic in Whitehall, as the UK’s high command struggled to construct a response. Not only was the U-boat a relatively new enemy, this form of warfare was unprecedented. Admiralty bigwigs, politicians and civil servants couldn’t find an answer – but a marine artist called Norman Wilkinson came up with an unlikely solution that was as effective as it was ingenious. Wilkinson was born in Cambridge in 1878 and had spent his pre-war years building up a reputation for painting seascapes on England’s south coast. When the conflict broke out, he was assigned to the Royal Naval Reserve and placed on submarine patrols. Like everyone else, Wilkinson was racking his brain, trying to find a method to combat the U-boats. But while others approached this challenge from a more conventional military perspective, Wilkinson came at it with an artist’s eye as well as a sailor’s. This led him to question whether there might be a role for camouflage design. Now, the British Admiralty had experimented with camouflage before and had found it unhelpful. Their experts pointed out that there were too many variables at play out on the open sea: colours were greatly affected by time of day, weather conditions and changing light. In addition, the sheer size of the merchant vessels and the quantity of smoke billowing from their funnels made concealment impossible. Put bluntly, it was a lot harder to hide a 700-foot ship at sea, than a single soldier or tank on land. Wilkinson agreed but made a lateral leap – the kind you can only make when you have a curious brain. Combining his artistic background with his military knowledge, he agreed that you can’t hide a ship, but went on to argue that “you need to make it hard to hit, not hard to see”. At first, this must have sounded like a contradiction in terms: isn’t the whole point of camouflage that it makes an object difficult to spot? And how can you make a ship hard to hit, without hiding it somehow? The merchantmen were already getting sunk at an alarming rate, so surely the only way to save them – at least the only way using paint – was to make them less visible? Well, actually, it turns out that not all camouflage is designed to conceal. Being an artist, Wilkinson knew that certain patterns could simply confuse (Picasso would later claim that his cubist methods were the inspiration here). After a couple of years in the Navy, Wilkinson also realised the U-boats’ limitations. Frankly, for all their lethal ability, the submarines still needed time and effort to hit their targets. Spotting the ships wasn’t the difficult bit for a submarine crew: the skill came in calculating their victims’ distance and direction of travel, based on a quick glance through a periscope. Wilkinson reasoned that if the British ships could confuse the U-boats, they could significantly improve their chances of escape. Although it took a while for the Admiralty to catch on, they eventually backed Wilkinson’s audacious plans. Over 4,000 ships were painted in strongly contrasting colours, arranged in bold geometric patterns. Counter-intuitively, this actually made them easier to see – but also made it extremely difficult to guess how big they were, how far away, or even what direction they were pointing. Every design was different, with Wilkinson marshalling ideas from other painters, sculptors and theatrical set designers. The end result was a garish fleet of highly visible, but also uniquely protected ships. Appropriately enough, for such a brilliant idea, the technique became known as dazzle painting. I love this story because it represents a remarkable reframing of the challenge using inspiration from a totally different field. In particular, it’s a reminder that art provides a wonderfully eclectic palette from which to borrow. In Wilkinson’s case, he did so literally. But brand owners can simply use the underlying concepts within art to get the creative juices flowing. For instance, pointillism could get you thinking about mass-participation (all those little dots adding up to a bigger picture). Or perhaps the fabulous Benin Bronzes might provoke a premiumisation strategy. Dadaism might make you think about shock tactics, Pop Art might encourage you to be more nakedly commercial and Frida Kahlo could inspire something magical. As for Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’ – well, I defy anybody to look at it and not find at least one potential connection to their business! All too often we are like the Admiralty bigwigs, applying conventional solutions to unprecedented problems. By opening our eyes and drawing on other reference points, we can get to much more interesting questions and

answers. Great marketing is an art. If you find yourself painted into a corner, sometimes your best bet is to paint your way out.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Marketing is a science, not an art. Luck says: Wandering round a gallery can inspire you more than sitting at a desk. So ask yourself: How could you use art to provoke fresh commercial ideas?

LUCKY DOG

I

n recent years, it’s become fashionable for marketers to describe themselves as storytellers. To be honest, I’m not keen on this. I mean, if your name is Hans Christian Andersen, then feel free to put this job description on your LinkedIn profile. But the rest of us should probably investigate what constitutes a good yarn, before we tell the world that we spin them for a living. In particular, we could all learn from the wise words of John le Carré, when he observed that: “‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story. But ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is the beginnings of a story.” Conflict is at the heart of all great narratives. Successful authors encourage new writers to establish it early on. Maybe even in the opening line. Then they advise that the plot should heap on more conflict, one problem after another, until the hero’s situation appears impossible. Without this jeopardy, they caution, readers or viewers won’t care about the resolution. Most advertising, on the other hand, actively avoids conflict. Characters and settings are usually nice, lest they reflect badly on the brand. Wonderful things happen to the protagonists, as if by magic. Difficult themes are swerved, and negativity is frowned upon. Then we wonder why nobody’s interested. Now obviously I’m not suggesting we start putting Freddy Krueger and Jigsaw into cornflakes ads (although ‘Cereal Killers’ would be amazing to watch). But we should always be asking ourselves why anybody would care about our stories. Most importantly, I think it’s helpful to consider the different types of conflict that experts say make for the best narratives. First, there’s character vs self. Some of the greatest novels and films revolve around inner conflict. This kind of turmoil is usually avoided in advertising because it’s seen to lack confidence. But sometimes acknowledging selfdoubt can be used to heighten empathy and strength. For instance, in 2018, we created a campaign for Under Armour, starring heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua. At the time, ‘AJ’ held the WBA, IBF and IBO titles – and was on course to win the WBO belt too. It would have been easy to celebrate his undisputed prowess, but that wouldn’t have been much of a story. Instead, we showed him shadow-boxing his inner demons. That was much more surprising. In the words of his voiceover: “In your head is the greatest fight. Because there is always shadow, where there is light.” Then there’s character vs character. This is much more common in marketing. Think Coke vs Pepsi, Mac vs PC, McDonald’s vs Burger King. But it’s not easy to pull off. It can come across as petty and inadvertently draw attention to your rival. Again, the trick is to make the conflict entertaining to a wider audience – not just your own stakeholders. For instance, a couple of years ago, we got a brief from the Chinese handset manufacturer OnePlus, asking us to make direct comparisons with its Samsung equivalent. This could have been deadly boring, but we got selfconfessed ‘morons’ to test the smart phones, while being attacked by zombies, dogs and flying cacti. Next up, character vs nature. This is a well-established device in art and becoming more important in business, given the potential conflict between consumerism and the environment. My creative partner Danny developed a lovely idea on this theme: ‘Green Santa’. His aim was to educate young children about global warming. The challenge was how to make kids care. Well, if the ice caps melted, Santa’s sleigh wouldn’t be able to take off. So Danny created a multimedia story playing off that – first online, then as a Bafta-nominated TV series. Why did this idea fly like Rudolph through the night sky? Because it had jeopardy at its heart. Character vs society is also common in marketing these days. Many brands are tackling big societal issues to demonstrate their sense of ‘purpose’. I’ll cover the pros and cons of this in Section 4, but for now it’s worth sounding a quick note of caution. Make sure your brand has a very strong story to tell and that your narrative goes beyond platitude. Otherwise there’s no real conflict – you’re just mouthing empty words about a topic that everyone agrees on anyway. Finally, we have character vs technology. The relationship between people and machines is obviously one of the great themes of our time. But how do you tell interesting stories about technology in a way that feels human? My team was pondering this in the run-up to Super Bowl LII in 2018. We were working on a brief to promote Amazon’s voice technology, Alexa. It was up against some fierce rivals, from both Google and Apple. But Alexa had the advantage of a human name. She already felt more like one of the family. We wanted to bring that to life in an entertaining way. After all, people watch the Super Bowl almost as much for the ads, as for the sport. We didn’t want to brag about Alexa or compare Amazon’s technology with its rivals – but we did want to position her as an indispensable part of contemporary life. So it was a surprise when Danny produced a picture from an old film: The Little Mermaid. Yes, the one immortalised by our friend Hans Christian and then updated by Disney in 1989. The one who lost her voice – and then found it again. It turned out that Danny had been chatting to our COO Nik Upton and he’d said: “Imagine what would happen if Alexa ever lost her voice!” It was a wild idea, but Danny didn’t think it was a silly one – and neither did the team at Amazon. In fact, the company’s VP Global Creative, Simon Morris, was positively intrigued by the notion. Over the next few months, Danny and Simon worked with a huge team to turn this simple idea into an exciting story.

First, they collaborated with Amazon’s engineers, to ensure that Alexa would cough if you asked her who would win the Super Bowl. This ‘easter egg’ was switched on a week before the game and over 1m people interacted with it. Something was up, they said on social media. Next, a teaser film was released online, starring none other than Jeff Bezos. “Alexa’s lost her voice? How is this even possible?” the Amazon founder asked his team. Don’t worry, they reassured him: they had a plan and they were sure it was going to work. But the look on their faces said otherwise. More dramatic tension. The Super Bowl was only days away now. And suddenly celebrities started telling their fans on social media that they’d received strange headsets from Amazon. Cardi B, Anthony Hopkins, Gordon Ramsay and Rebel Wilson were among those to unbox their devices. But it still wasn’t clear what was going on. Finally, on match day, all the pieces came together. A 90-second film recapped Alexa’s cough and Jeff’s concern. Then we saw the celebrities, trying to fill in. A catalogue of entertaining disasters ensued. It was clear that, despite their best intentions, the celebrities were nowhere near as good as Alexa. Fortunately, she recovered just in time to save the day and the music struck up: “Nobody does it better” I think this story would pass le Carré’s test – the American public certainly seemed to think so. They voted the ad their favourite of the Super Bowl (the only time a British agency has ever received this accolade). In addition, over 50m people watched the ad online, making it the most-viewed commercial in the world that year, according to YouTube. So by all means, call yourself a storyteller. But first, put this book down and pick up a great novel. Watch a favourite film or go see a play. Then go back to your brand’s story. After all, it’s got to compete with all this other content, to be heard. Now, be tough with yourself, like an editor would be. Does your narrative consist of a cat on a mat? If so, find yourself a dog.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Marketing is all about great, positive storytelling. Luck says: There needs to be jeopardy to keep it exciting. So ask yourself: What conflict could make your story interesting to others?

LUCKY NUMBERS

J

oan R. Ginther is the luckiest woman in the world.

She has won big prizes in Texas State lotteries on four occasions. Her winning streak started in 1993, with a $5.4m prize in the Lotto. Then she scooped $2m in 2006, in the Holiday Millionaire Scratch-off. Two years later, she won $3m from a Millions and Millions ticket. Finally, in 2010, she picked up another $10m, bringing her total to $20.4m. The odds of her achieving this are one-in-18 septillions. That’s 18 with 24 zeros – a higher number than there are grains of sand on this planet. So how on earth did she do it? Well, it probably helped that she has a PhD in statistics from Stanford. A bit like the maths students from MIT, who exploited loopholes in the Massachusetts State Lottery to win $8m in 2012. Or like Mohan Srivastava (statistician and alumnus of both Stanford and MIT), who cracked a Canadian lottery in 2011. Unlike the others though, Ginther has never explained the secrets of her success, so we have to guess at her methodology. Needless to say, the possible mechanics are extremely complicated. But two of the factors that other experts have cited most often are essentially price and distribution. The first is important because Ginther seems to have favoured relatively inexpensive scratch-card games and then increased her chances of winning big by buying enormous numbers of tickets when the jackpot was unusually high. By some estimates, she spent more than $3m over the years but focused it on times when she calculated the priceto-probability ratio was most favourable. The second factor came into play because Ginther appears to have worked out how winning tickets were dispersed across the State. This led her to concentrate her buying in an obscure backwater. As yet another mathematician (David Hand, emeritus professor at Imperial College, London) said: “It’s as if she had cracked the routing algorithm the company used to deliver the tickets.” I’m sure there was much more to it than this. But for our purposes, I think two points are interesting. First, the fact that mathematicians sometimes spot golden opportunities that the rest of us miss. Second, that they often do so by focusing on inputs that we might find less interesting. For instance, since the 1960s, all marketers have been brought up to believe in the importance of the four Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. But in recent years, the middle two (which Ginther embraced so successfully) have been increasingly ignored. According to a survey in 2017, most marketers don’t even have primary responsibility for pricing within their organisation – and almost half of these are quite happy with that situation. No doubt this is because it’s seen as dry and complicated compared to the glamour of making ads or new products. But think of all the options that are available now to marketers with sufficient imagination. From surge pricing to subscriptions, group buying to auctions, freemium models to peer-to-peer platforms – the creativity that is now possible within pricing is unparalleled. It’s a similar story with distribution. Our friend Professor Byron Sharp has drawn on a huge body of evidence to show that increasing physical availability is critical to brand growth. In a way, this is only a restatement of the old Coca-Cola mission to be “within an arm’s reach of desire”. But now, as with pricing, there are more creative options to achieve this – from pop-ups to direct-to-consumer, aggregators to marketplaces, social commerce to voice technology. Again, these can be leveraged to catapult a brand forwards, faster than any ad campaign. Pinduoduo is a company that’s currently enjoying phenomenal growth, largely thanks to disruptive strategies on both Price and Place. It only launched in 2015 but had gathered 643m users by Q3 2020. That year, it became China’s second most valuable online retailer, selling a huge range of products from groceries to home appliances. The first factor in its success story was a group buying function, known as team purchasing. The way it works is that users are given two pricing options when looking at a product. The first one is a standard price but the other is a discount that can be unlocked when a team of two or more buyers join forces. The bigger the team, the steeper the discount. As you can imagine, this has encouraged millions of people to share their purchases with friends and encourage others to join in. It’s been so popular that most of the other Chinese e-tailers have now followed suit. But Pinduoduo has an in-built advantage: as well as being first mover, its name translates as ‘together, more savings, more fun’. The second factor behind Pinduoduo’s runaway growth is its integration with WeChat. That’s China’s most popular messaging app, with over a billion users. It’s backed by Tencent – who also invested in Pinduoduo. This gives the brand a big advantage over its main rival, Alibaba. Customers can make payments directly on WeChat, whereas the market leader requires an extra step to set up Alipay. This friction-free interface has allowed Pinduoduo to make deep inroads into rural China and win over less sophisticated users. I should point out that, despite its incredible revenue growth and market capitalisation, Pinduoduo has only just edged into profit. But by rethinking the maths of Price and Place, it’s proving a highly disruptive influence in the biggest retail market on earth. Put another way, those 643m users mean that the company has a lot of tickets in the lottery. And just like Ginther (who rather ominously has now moved to Las Vegas), few would bet against it.

GO LUCK YOURSELF

Convention says: Marketing is all about Product and Promotion. Luck says: The other two Ps may prove a better bet. So ask yourself: How might a mathematician rework the numbers in your category, using Price and Place?

LUCKY SHRINK

M

y wife is a clinical psychologist. When I tell people this, they usually joke that I must keep her busy. There’s probably more truth to that than I care to admit but, joking aside, it helps that we have quite different jobs. I do occasionally borrow her magazines and journals though, as they often contain fascinating insights into the human psyche that can also be applied to my world. This came in handy many years ago, when I was working on a brief for the Inland Revenue (now HM Revenue and Customs). I can’t pretend that I whooped for joy when this project came in. I mean, tax is about the driest subject in the world and the brief was quite complicated. Primarily, it focused on the need to get more taxpayers to send in their selfassessment returns by 31 January every year. In addition, there was a push to get such returns filed online. As you’d expect, there was a lot of detail to communicate too – dates, penalties, helplines and web addresses. The fact that the Revenue was probably the least popular organisation in the country didn’t help either. Benjamin Franklin famously remarked that, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes”, but what he didn’t say was that we’re sometimes more accepting of the former than the latter. Historically, the Revenue had tackled this brief with all the officious zeal that you’d expect. In fact, their most famous campaign featured a little cartoon bureaucrat, called ‘Hector the Inspector’. Wearing a pinstriped suit and bowler hat, he looked like something out of the 1950s and literally hectored people into getting their returns in. More recently, Hector had been replaced by a character from the popular TV series Father Ted, but the approach was essentially the same: Mrs Doyle (the priests’ housekeeper in the show) badgered people to “go on, go on, go on” or (to tackle the secondary objective) “go on, go on, go online”. Conventional wisdom was that this was the only way to get people to do something they didn’t want to do, for an organisation they didn’t like. Except that compliance was declining – and in a market where every percentage point was worth around £300m, that was a problem. I was mulling this conundrum when I came across a piece in one of my wife’s psychology journals. It was about procrastination and I remember joking to her that I was surprised the author had finished it. She replied that I was in no position to talk, since I was flicking through magazines when I was supposed to be writing a brief. Harsh. But when I read the article, I saw that the academic perspective could actually have great practical application to my task. In particular, my eyes lit up at the opening paragraph, where the author argued that telling a chronic procrastinator to “just get on with it”, was like telling a depressed person to “cheer up”. It turned out that there was an emerging (if unlikely) body of work on this subject. And the more I read, the more interested I became in the Revenue’s brief. Suddenly, I wasn’t dealing with a boring form-filling exercise. Instead, I was grappling with some deep-rooted quirks of human nature. How do we respond to authority? How do we perform under pressure? Are we more motivated by the carrot or the stick? If I found this fascinating, maybe consumers would too. Based on this fresh insight, we developed a completely new comms model for self-assessment. It was summed up by the line: “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing.” Instead of hectoring people to get on with their return, we would offer them some help. Crucially, we wouldn’t pretend that it would be fun, just that they could make it easier on themselves by following some simple steps. To bring this to life in advertising, we used a popular TV academic to explain the psychology of doing chores. In particular, he encouraged people to get their tax return out of the way, so they could get on with the things they really enjoyed. It was less like a tax campaign and more like a parent coaxing their kids to do their homework so that they could go out and play. “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing” ran for about ten years, saving the British government around £185m in the first three years alone. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, this campaign was also an early example of a much bigger movement: the application of academic psychology to marketing. The same year it launched (2002), a psychologist called Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics – despite never having taken a single course on the subject. In 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein captured strategists’ imagination with their bestselling book, Nudge. Nowadays, it is almost de rigueur for brand planners to use behavioural economics in their work. All I would say is that strategists shouldn’t see these new theories as easy answers. Many of the principles contradict each other, while others are based on experiments that don’t translate naturally to our world. Such ideas are more helpful as sources of inspiration, rather than foolproof rules for success. But as any good therapist knows, it’s all about asking the right questions and seeing where the conversation takes you. The deeper you dig, the more likely you are to find something really interesting.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Psychologists sort out problems for people. Luck says: They can also highlight opportunities for brands.

So ask yourself: What would a psychologist say if your brand was on the couch?

LUCKY CAKES

C

andace Nelson lay awake in the middle of the night, clutching her pregnant belly. She had sugar cravings but there was nowhere open to give her a fix. Luckily, she was the founder of the Sprinkles bakery chain, so instead of turning over and trying to get back to sleep, she tried to come up with a solution.

Eventually an idea came to her: the world’s first cupcake ATM. Fortune magazine acknowledged that this “didn’t necessarily scream ‘genius business idea’.” I mean, what could a bakery learn from a bank? But the ATMs have proved a great success. The first launched in 2012 and there are now dozens all over the US. Each machine holds up to 800 cakes which are sold for $4 apiece. Altogether, they generate millions of dollars every year – almost all incremental business, which Sprinkles wouldn’t normally attract. The Cupcake ATM is a great example of borrowing thinking from a completely different sector. This is common practice in manufacturing, where it’s been shown to yield more radical solutions. For instance, a recent paper published in the Harvard Business Review described an experiment whereby hundreds of roofers, carpenters and inline skaters were asked to develop ideas for safetygear. Each group was significantly better at thinking of novel ideas for fields other than their own. However, cross-fertilisation is arguably less popular in marketing circles. This might be due to the fetishisation of ‘originality’ in our industry. Or it might come down to deeply held views that each sector has its own ‘category rules’ which shouldn’t be broken. Our processes don’t help either. For instance, tracking studies take a very narrow view of the market; competitive reviews only include direct rivals; and recruitment is often done by sector. Either way, we seem reluctant to borrow ideas from other categories, unless they’re right next door. It’s a shame because changing our mindset should be much easier than re-tooling a factory. Or a brewery, for that matter. Wellpark, in the East End of Glasgow, has been the home of Tennent’s Lager since 1885, but beer has been made there since 1556. Tennent’s is many times bigger than its nearest direct competitor. In fact, its share of the Scottish drinks market is so vast that it outsells any brand of milk or water. Its red letter ‘T’ lights up virtually every street in the country and every football ground. In short, it dominates Scottish culture like no other brand. The problem with being so far ahead though, is that your lead can only ever be cut. That’s what was happening to Tennent’s in 2016. A myriad of smaller competitors – from foreign imports to local craft beers – were nibbling (or perhaps slurping) away at its sales. The brand’s owners, the C&C Group, realised that they’d been a little complacent and that they needed advertising for the first time in years. So they hired a new CMO with a reputation for making a quick impact – and he called us. Now, we’d worked with Gav Thompson many times and loved his bias to action. He’s a larger-than-life character, who champions great work and knows how to get things done. The fact that we were now working with him on Tennent’s (which, as a Scot, I’d grown up with and felt huge warmth towards) felt like a dream combination. So why did it initially prove so difficult? Looking back, I think we started by focusing too narrowly on the sector. We held tasting sessions, to compare Tennent’s against its rivals: this was a little depressing, as the upstarts inevitably seemed more interesting than the beer we were so familiar with. We also went on trade visits (a wonderful euphemism for a pub crawl round Glasgow, as far as I could see). Again, this was unsettling: Tennent’s was absolutely everywhere, but newer brands sometimes had more bar presence. And of course, we held focus groups among lager drinkers and asked them about their preferences. They still seemed to have huge affection for Tennent’s but were keen to tell us about their more sophisticated tastes too. All of these initiatives made perfect sense but were somewhat artificial. In real life, people don’t do side-by-side taste tests, compare founts at the bar or spend hours talking about beer: they just drink it! As a result, we lost a few weeks with work that tried to address the threat head-on, but actually ended up magnifying it. And any ideas we had that made fun of the foreign imports or the hipster pretensions of the craft beers felt small and defensive. It was only when we stepped out of the category and tried to capture the extraordinary role this brand plays in Scottish life that we got back on track. The shift in strategy came to me while we were walking around the brewery. This was another well-intentioned initiative which could have made us look inwards. But as I gazed up at the enormous vats, where the water, malt, hops and yeast are fermented, I saw something bigger. Those huge cylinders and all the surrounding pipes looked more like a power station than a brewery. I remembered those facts about Tennent’s outselling milk and water. I recalled how the brand effectively ran Scottish football and lit up all the streets. And I thought: “Tennent’s isn’t just a beer, it’s more like a utility, powering the nation. We need to position it like it’s a government department or national service.” This brief led to a big idea: “Here to serve.” We liked the pomposity of this – and so did Gav. It was the kind of slogan a national airline might use, or the armed forces – not a lager. From this point on, the brand behaved more like a publicly-owned institution. It set up a currency exchange at the Scotland vs England football match, allowing English fans to change their notes into Scottish ones (one pint of

Tennent’s cost £3.50 Scottish notes or £7 English ones). It put on spooky buses at Halloween, to take punters from pub to pub. It even placed posters outside betting shops, helpfully advertising the fact that you could steal ‘free pens here’. If bakers can become bankers, and brewers become brewrocrats, what sector could inspire you?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Your category is unique and your thinking must be original. Luck says: Borrowing ideas from elsewhere can lead to more radical solutions. So ask yourself: What can you learn from a completely unrelated sector?

LUCKY ALIENS

I

magine a planet far, far away. Somewhere very different from Earth but teeming with life. Think of the kind of animal that might exist there. Now draw it.

According to researchers from Texas A&M University, you’ve probably sketched a creature that’s not so very different from the ones we have on our planet. In a series of experiments, they found that the vast majority of respondents included at least one standard sense organ (99%), one standard limb (97%) and the property of bilateral symmetry (91%). Not only that, the interviewees seemed to have modelled their creatures on the Earth animals that most easily came to mind. When questioned, they named cats and dogs as their top sources of inspiration. The pattern was repeated when other respondents were asked to design tools for a new planet. Even when it was emphasised that the aliens there had no arms or legs, people responded with variations on the hammer, screwdriver, wrench and saw. It was the same story when another group was asked to draw extraterrestrial fruit. Even when they were encouraged to be as creative as possible and explicitly asked not to limit themselves to Earth fruit, they came back with things that looked suspiciously like oranges, apples, bananas and strawberries. To use the researchers’ jargon, these experiments show that our imaginations are highly structured when it comes to conceptual expansion and that retrievability plays an important role. In other words, when we’re trying to come up with new ideas, we can’t help building on previous concepts – especially the ones which come most readily to mind. Further studies have shown how this phenomenon affects science-fiction writers and design engineers – so we can be pretty sure it applies to marketers too. It explains why most new product ideas are incremental and why creative teams in ad agencies tend to develop work that has echoes of other, famous ideas. But most importantly, this dynamic also underlines the need for diversity within organisations. Diversity, equality and inclusion are rightly (if belatedly) seen as huge priorities for companies today. There’s the moral argument, of course. Then beyond that, there’s the eminently sensible point that we live in an increasingly diverse society and businesses can’t hope to connect with their customers if they’re not representative of them. But the A&M research points to another imperative: diversity is required to push the boundaries of creativity, because it widens the pool of influences and knowledge that we can draw from. Basically, it stops us coming up with Martian hammers. This helps to explain why immigrants have received one-quarter of the Nobel prizes awarded to Americans and one-third of the patents – all while representing only about one-eighth of the US population. Or why the BioNTech vaccine was developed by German citizens born to Turkish parents. It’s not just that immigrants work harder (although research shows that they do), it’s that they have more novel ideas, inspired by the richer experiences that they have had in life. This phenomenon is also the reason why people from multicultural backgrounds perform better in creative-solving tasks. Or why so many artists (from Handel to Hemingway, Picasso to Stravinsky) have done their best work in other countries. Again, those responsible have more influences to draw from. They don’t just return to the same old cats and dogs – their eyes have been opened to the possibility of much more fabulous creatures. People who are ‘neurodiverse’ (for instance, with autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia) have similar advantages. Research shows that, because their brains are wired differently, they are often better at coming up with lateral ideas. Likewise, people with physical disabilities are often highly imaginative, because they have had to hone their problem-solving skills to overcome all the obstacles that ableist society puts in their way. And while most research suggests that LGBTQ+ people are not inherently more creative than others, again they bring a different perspective to the party. The common theme is that people with more diverse life experiences have wider reference points. To borrow the title of Jeanette Winterson’s classic lesbian coming-of-age story, they know that “Oranges are not the only fruit”. Anyway, let’s get back to aliens. In 1974, a creative team at an ad agency called BMP were developing some extraterrestrial beings for a new campaign. As the A&M research would predict, they drew on their own, earthly experiences. The characters looked a little like frogs or ants, albeit with metal exoskeletons. They also had many human traits – most obviously, huge smiles and infectious laughs. They had pincer-like tools instead of hands and were strangely obsessed with potatoes. As such, they were a classic example of our tendency to think in terms of existing memory structures. But these aliens were also a great advert for the power of a fresh perspective. You see, these particular super-intelligent beings were Martians and they had been devised to promote Smash (Cadbury’s new instant-mashed-potato product). BMP’s legendary Creative Director John Webster had started it all with an epiphany down the pub. “It’s crazy,” he said to the team over a pint, “If anyone came down from another planet and saw that we bothered to peel potatoes, boil them and mash them up when you can get it out of a packet, they’d think we were barmy!” This observation inspired one of Britain’s most popular campaigns of all time.

The Smash Martians delighted the nation by poking fun at the way earthlings made mashed potatoes. “They are clearly a most primitive people!” they cackled as they rolled around laughing on their spaceship floor. Sales rocketed – if you’ll excuse the pun. And while the trend for ‘real food’ eventually brought the brand back down to earth, the aliens are still a beloved part of British popular culture. All of which underlines the importance of broadening our horizons and seeking out fresh perspectives. The really good news is that we don’t have to go to a different planet or ask an alien for that. We just need to get out of our bubbles – or better still, get others in to burst them.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Insider information is the most precious form of insight. Luck says: You can improve your odds by getting out of your bubble. So ask yourself: What do people from other cultures or backgrounds think about your problem?

LUCKY CARROTS

Y

ou know what my least effective campaign of all time was? The one aimed at getting my kids to eat their vegetables. It was a long-running battle with very poor results, beyond the occasional floret of broccoli. But at least I was only trying to win over three children. Imagine trying to convince an entire country’s offspring! That was the challenge faced by one of our sister agencies (TBWA Belgium) in 2018. The brief was for Delhaize: Belgium’s leading supermarket. The brand had a strong reputation for quality but, like all retailers these days, was under pressure from discounters and online grocers. The agency had won the account with a simple insight that “people want to eat better but it’s a daily struggle”. The thinking was that Delhaize could help families in this quest, while its rivals just flogged them cheap, but empty, calories. In this context, fresh produce became a key battle to win. The fruit and veg section was symbolic of a store’s wider quality credentials. It’s also the classic example of a category where we have good intentions – we just struggle to live up to them. If Delhaize could help people eat better here, it would surely perform better elsewhere too. The problem was those pesky kids. Research showed that children’s reluctance to eat their greens wasn’t just bad for them (on average, Belgian kids were only getting 30% of their recommended daily amount). It was also harming vegetable consumption across the rest of the family, because parents couldn’t bear the hassle. As a result, the brief focused on kids, as a way of helping the whole household eat better. This meant that the team had to think differently about messaging. Traditionally, communications in this sector had emphasised the nutritional benefits of vegetables or their versatility as an ingredient. But these were very sensible, grown-up themes. To connect with this new (and notoriously hostile) audience, a fresh approach would be needed. So the agency enlisted some experts. Kids. Specifically, they asked children to come up with more appetising names for vegetables. Things that sounded fun and exciting to have on your plate. As the agency’s chief strategy officer, Bert Denis, told me: “It’s one of those simple ideas that sounds so obvious afterwards. But it hadn’t been done before. The names were incredibly imaginative – and made the vegetables much easier to sell. Who wouldn’t want an orange space rocket instead of a carrot, for instance?!” What I love about this campaign is that Delhaize didn’t just make this into an ad campaign (although there was one of those). The retailer actually re-branded the top 12 ideas and carried the new names through into packaging, point-of-sale and even till receipts. Tomatoes really did get rebranded as clown noses, oyster mushrooms became gnome trumpets and cucumbers were troll bats. Throw in a few dragon teeth (chicory) and treasure boxes (peppers) and you can see why the Magic Veggies range saw sales increase by 151%. This story shows that you will always get an interesting perspective if you listen to kids. Yes, they’re wired to be conservative around food – but the opposite applies when they’re coming up with ideas. Indeed, research consistently shows that they are more creative than adults. For starters, children aren’t bound by conventional wisdom or social norms. Likewise, they’re more likely to make lucky mistakes, by mixing up concepts that grown-ups would treat as separate. Finally, they don’t worry about feasibility – to them, anything is possible. Including the idea that a leek might be a witch’s broom. This open-mindedness has seen youngsters develop countless inventions. A few appear in this book (the trampoline and the Braille alphabet), but there are many more – like flippers, earmuffs, walkie talkies and the snowmobile. So the next time you are looking for a big idea, you could do a lot worse than asking a little ’un. Or, if this sounds too much like child labour, you could think like a kid yourself. Einstein was a great fan of this technique. He said that: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play.” Researchers at the North Dakota State University agree. They conducted an experiment where they asked 76 undergraduates what they would do if college were cancelled for the day. The interesting bit was that half of them were encouraged to think as if they were seven years old. These students were found to give much more creative responses than the control group. Alternatively, you could go to the other extreme and enlist some older accomplices. Ad agencies and marketing departments are notoriously ageist, with one of the prejudices being that ‘older people’ (read: anybody over 50) lack the drive of their younger counterparts. But there’s a lot of evidence that challenges this. For instance, a study by the University of Toronto found that older people were indeed less focused than 20somethings. However, the tendency of their minds to diverge, wander and draw on wider sources was precisely what made them better at creative problem-solving. It’s yet another reminder that you can improve your luck by looking beyond the usual demographics. If you want some fresh thinking, ask someone sage who knows their onions. Or a kid who calls them pixie heads.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Working-age adults come up with the most sensible ideas.

Luck says: Maybe, but you don’t get very far just by being sensible. So ask yourself: What would someone much younger or older say about your brand’s challenge?

LUCKY BAGS

C

razy People was a pretty mediocre film. Released in 1990, it starred Dudley Moore as Emory Leeson: a stressed-out adman who is tired of peddling lies to the public. As his mental health unravels, he starts to write brutally honest headlines. For instance: “Jaguar. For men who’d like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know.” Or “Buy Volvos. They’re boxy but they’re good.” Needless to say, this doesn’t endear him to his boss and Leeson ends up being committed to a psychiatric hospital. While he’s there, something strange happens (yes, even stranger than two car companies being happy to share an agency). Leeson’s ads run by mistake and turn out to be a great success. This eventually prompts the evil boss to re-hire him – and the other patients – to create more. These go down equally well (“Metamucil. It helps you go to the toilet.”) and eventually Leeson escapes to set up his own agency, with all his new friends. As I say, it’s not a great movie. The depiction of mental health is hackneyed and there are other unhelpful stereotypes too. But the underlying premise – that amateurs can sometimes do better than the experts – is interesting. I don’t mean professional marketers should just give up and ‘crowdsource’ their brand’s communication strategy from the public (a silly notion that pops up from time to time). This ignores the fact that, in real life, creative people can’t just spitball ideas. There’s a real skill in getting to the right brief, let alone the right work. As with all forms of serendipity, an expert and ‘prepared’ mind is required to recognise a half-formed thought and work out whether it is any good or not. No, I mean that it can be helpful, at the early stages of a project, to get a completely naïve perspective. The view of someone who doesn’t know (or care) about all the technical details. Someone who might not even use the category. Someone who might say something a bit silly – that you can then pick out and turn into something clever. Talking of clever things, a while ago we were working on a brilliant new product from Taylors of Harrogate. They’re the makers of Yorkshire Tea (mentioned earlier) but this brief was for Taylors Coffee. Specifically, it was to launch their new coffee bags. To be honest, coffee bags have been around for decades. But they’re a lot harder to get right than tea bags, because they contain finely ground beans rather than leaves. That means it’s difficult to make a bag that’s porous enough to let the flavour out but fine enough to keep the grains in. As a result, hardly anybody knows about them and those who do often complain about the taste. Taylors hadn’t offered them in the past, preferring to focus on formats that could deliver a great flavour: beans, ground and pods. However, they could see the last of these wasn’t very environmentally friendly, and their productdevelopment wizards had recently made a breakthrough on bags that would finally deliver a cafetière-quality taste. So they took a strategic decision to exit the Nespresso world and lead the way in this new (well, new to them) format. As you can imagine, this was quite a big deal. When we got back to the agency, we took care to emphasise how important this launch was. We stressed the technical brilliance of the bags and how they were better than anything that had gone before. We highlighted the end benefit – that they offered “real coffee without the faff”. We talked about their potential to revolutionise the way we drink coffee. So it was a bit of a blow when our creative team appeared to be completely nonplussed. “Aren’t they just tea bags but with coffee?” George and Lizzie asked. “What’s so clever about that?” Needless to say, we explained once more why it was such a technically difficult feat. A couple of weeks later, it looked like the significance had finally sunk in. The team came back with a range of really strong ideas. One compared the innovation to magic. Another promised to make instant coffee a thing of the past. Others proclaimed the newfound ability to have coffee wherever you liked. We were glad they’d taken on our feedback. Until they slipped in one last idea. “We don’t want to keep banging on about this,” said George. “But we’re still struggling to see what took them so long.” Lizzie agreed: “We reckon there’s an idea in that,” she said. “I mean it’s pretty funny that humans managed to put dogs in space before they could put coffee in bags. Shouldn’t we just admit how ridiculous that is?” Again, we explained why this really wasn’t a fair comparison and that the bags were the result of years of hard work. “That’s kind of our point,” they replied. “Taylors is over 100 years old and they’ve only just worked out how to do this. Meanwhile, we’ve split the atom, sequenced the human genome and discovered the Higgs boson particle. It feels like we could do with a bit of perspective!” Well, that was us told. And to be honest, we began to think they might be right. As did the Taylors team who had spent so long developing the breakthrough. While we all knew it had been a great achievement, ‘normal people’ might not. A little bit chastened – but also emboldened – we developed a new idea: “Why didn’t we think of them before?” This was probably the least launch-y launch slogan in marketing history. But it was refreshingly honest. And led to some funny advertising capers through history. It was the sort of disarmingly frank idea that Emory Leeson’s agency would have created. And just like in the film, the coffee bags sold like crazy (so much so that we had to pull the campaign).

This brief was a reminder of the dangers of getting too close to a project. Expertise is clearly crucial, in any walk of life – but only up to a point. When you’ve poured your life into an initiative – or just devoted all your weekends – it can feel like the most important thing in the world. But usually, it’s not. Sometimes, it pays to take a step back and have a coffee with someone who knows less than you do.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: The experts always know best. Luck says: Yeah, but usually you’re not marketing to experts. So ask yourself: What would an uninformed amateur say about your problem?

SECTION 3: TURN MISFORTUNE INTO GOOD FORTUNE

T

he first two sections covered ways to find opportunities for your brand that are either sitting right in front of you or hiding in the world around you. This section is about the flipside: what to do when the odds seem stacked against you.

Often this comes down to a change in mindset. The best marketers don’t get downhearted by ‘bad luck’ any more than they get complacent about their ‘good luck’. After all, as a Chinese folk tale reminds us, the two are often hard to tell apart. The story goes that an old man owned a beautiful white stallion, which one day escaped from its field. His neighbours commiserated with him on his ill fortune. “What bad luck!” they said. However, he simply replied: “Who knows? Maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s good.” As it happens, the stallion returned the next day – followed by 12 mares. This time the villagers came round to congratulate the old man on his good luck. He simply replied: “Who knows? Maybe it’s good luck, maybe it’s bad.” Sure enough, the next day, the old man’s son fell off one of the horses while he was trying to train it. The boy broke his leg and the locals sympathised with the father. But again, he replied: “Who knows? Maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s good.” Finally, the Emperor’s soldiers passed through the village and rounded up all the young men to go off to war – they spared the peasant’s son though, because of his broken leg. Once more, everyone congratulated the old man on his good fortune. He replied as usual: “Who knows? Maybe it’s good luck, maybe it’s bad.” In this section, I’ll explain how you can take a similarly Zen-like approach to your brand’s challenges. First, I’ll show you how to overcome setbacks, break taboos and escape assumptions. Then I’ll talk about how you can turn flaws and limitations into advantages and opportunities, as well as how to get through crises and tackle minor irritations. Finally, I’ll discuss how you can beat some common enemies, like boredom, hate and complacency. I don’t seek to minimise any of these challenges or present a naïve view of the world, where bad luck can simply be waved away with a magic wand. Clearly, when your brand finds itself in troubled waters, it can be enormously stressful for both you and your organisation. Moreover, turning a situation like this around typically involves a lot of hard work and corporate commitment. But hopefully my examples will just show that it can be done, even in the most trying of circumstances. To emphasise the point, I’ll start with a story about a devastating blow to one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs – and how this apparent setback turned out to be his salvation.

LUCKY RABBIT

W

alt Disney was not having a good day. It was 13 March 1928 and he was on a train from New York back to Los Angeles. While in the Big Apple, he’d had a series of disastrous business meetings, where he had lost control over his most precious asset.

His biographer, Neal Gabler, later explained that, as he sat in the carriage, “the eternally optimistic Walt Disney, who had ridden out crisis after crisis, had one terrifying thought: he would have to start all over again.” The irony was that the asset in question, the source of all this worry, was a cartoon character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney had created him the year before, with his long-time collaborator Ub Iwerks. The couple were working for Universal after their own studio had gone bankrupt. Their producer, a tough cookie called Charles Mintz, asked them to create a character that would stand out from the various cats that were all the rage at the time. Disney and Iwerks not only met the brief with their rabbit but exceeded it by investing Oswald with a unique personality. This was considered revolutionary at the time – previous cartoon characters were two-dimensional servants to the plot, whereas Walt wanted Oswald to have a more rounded identity: “peppy, alert, saucy and venturesome.” Disney also pushed the boundaries of what an animated movie could do, introducing sophisticated humour, camera angles and editing that had previously been the preserve of live-action films. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was Disney’s first success. Audiences loved his debut (Trolley Troubles) and Walt looked forward to making many more. Universal had commissioned 26 films and were paying him $500 per movie, plus $100 per week – enough to enable him to invest in an oil well. Behind the scenes though, Mintz was working on ways to cut Disney and Iwerks out of the picture. Getting wind of this, Walt travelled to New York to try and negotiate but found himself outwitted by the wily producer. Sitting on the train, Disney felt despondent. But rather than wallow in his misfortune, he spent the journey trying to dream up a replacement. By the time he got off in Los Angeles, he had the basis of Mickey Mouse: the most successful cartoon character of all time. Walt would later reflect that: “You may not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” It certainly proved so in this case – as the entire Disney empire was built on this apparent piece of bad luck. There’s even a lovely twist in this bunny’s cottontail: 80 years later, the Walt Disney Company bought back the rights to Oswald. Since then, the rabbit has had a new lease of life, with films, merchandise and video games of his own. In short, this movie had a happy ending. But how many of us would have had the resilience to come back from such a bitter disappointment? Marketing is fraught with such setbacks and ideas are constantly at risk from research feedback, budget cuts, company politics and the like. Very often, we can feel like we have a Lucky Rabbit on our hands and can’t bear to think of them being taken away from us. But instead of pining for our Oswald, we have to pour all our energy into making a Mickey. In fact, I’d say that the really great marketers these days are brilliant at anticipating this kind of churn and possibly even precipitating it. When I first started out, cannibalisation was seen as one of the most basic errors in the marketing manual. This seemed self-evident: why would you ever wish to introduce a product that hurt your own sales? But nowadays, the pace of change is so intense that you need to kill off your best ideas before the market does. Steve Jobs was the master of this. He believed that, “If you don’t cannibalise yourself, someone else will.” With that in mind, he unleashed wave after wave of products, each of which threatened or even killed its predecessor: iPod, iPhone, iPad and so on. Of course, this isn’t an easy trick to pull off. Most companies have products that have totemic status within the organisation because they account for such a disproportionate amount of sales. When you’ve got a winning product like this, it’s obviously tempting to milk it. And if you’ve spent years developing it, it’s painful to contemplate its demise. But you need to be thinking about what comes next, because your competitors will be. This means creating a culture where ideas are plentiful and there are better ones arriving all the time. A culture where there is no room for complacency and no reluctance to start again. A culture where you know what to do if you find yourself sitting on a depressing train journey from New York to LA. Like John Steinbeck said: “Ideas are like rabbits: you get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” Just make sure you can always pull a new one out of the hat, when an old one hops off elsewhere.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Losing a great idea is painful. Luck says: You can come up with something even better. So ask yourself: What would you do if you had to start again?

LUCKY COFFIN

T

he word ‘taboo’ sailed into the English language with Captain James Cook in 1777. He had encountered it in Tonga, although similar words are found in Fijian, Hawaiian and Maori – suggesting it has earlier, protoPolynesian roots.

Cook described how the locals had strong beliefs about the appropriateness of certain foodstuffs (oblivious to the fact that the same could presumably be said for him). “Not one of them would sit down or eat a bit of any thing… On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said; which word has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden.” Since then, taboo has come to describe any subject or act that is considered so socially unacceptable that it must not even be spoken of. As such, it presents some very difficult challenges for marketers in certain categories. For instance, how do you promote sanitary protection in a culture where menstruation is considered dirty? What about toilet paper or fresheners, in a world which pretends that defecation doesn’t exist? Or erectile dysfunction drugs in a society that worships male virility? The good news is that there is a general shift towards loosening these inhibitions. And marketers have often been at the vanguard, educating people about these perfectly ordinary aspects of life and making it more acceptable to talk about them. But what about the greatest taboo of all: death? Our German sister agency (Heimat Berlin) recently faced this very challenge. It was working on a campaign for the Central Association of German Crafts. This body represents lots of different trade organisations, from electricians to metalworkers. Germany has a proud history of incredible craftsmanship, but this brief was to show that such skills are still relevant in today’s world. The agency’s response was to create a series of short films featuring interesting tradespeople. Stories with a modern twist. For instance, a female carpenter could go around the world, learning techniques from other cultures. Or a cosmetic professional could talk about her desire to change women’s relationship with beauty. This seemed like a pretty flexible device – until the agency was asked to make it work for the Association of German Funeral Directors. Can you imagine a less promising brief?! Heimat’s chief creative officer, Matthias Storath, told me: “Funeral directors play an incredibly important role, but this was quite challenging, to say the least. Nobody likes to talk about death, let alone work with it every day. I wasn’t sure our idea would stretch. But we had already sold it to the board, so we had to make the best of it! And in the end, this bad luck led to good luck. In fact, a chain of very lucky accidents.” First of all, this curveball meant that the team were forced to consider a difficult issue. The kind that advertisers – including funeral providers – tend to shy away from. The agency had already sold the construct of tradespeople talking honestly about their crafts, so they couldn’t suddenly switch tack. In this context, they realised that the taboo wasn’t a problem – it was what could make the story fresh and interesting. Next, the team found a great leading man. A funeral director who didn’t fit the mould. Eric Wrede from Berlin was on a mission to change our relationship with death and make it more positive. He even had his own podcast, where he talked about the issue with surprising frankness. The discovery of Wrede meant that the funeral commercial arguably became the most powerful of the whole campaign. But the luckiest break of all came courtesy of one small detail. The film’s director had arranged for a coffin to be painted in bright colours, as a way to dramatise Wrede’s positive approach to life and death. It was a nice prop, but Matthias and his team were struck by its symbolism. They wondered if it could be something bigger. An idea or a mini-campaign in its own right. As it turned out, it became a social phenomenon. The Heimat team arranged for five artists to each paint a personalised coffin for five influencers. They used garish colours. Noisy typography. Cartoons and slogans. And as they made these extraordinary objects, the painters chatted to their subjects. About death. They shared stories from their childhoods and recalled their first realisations of mortality. They talked about their parents. They confronted their own fears and even managed to enthuse about the send-off they might get. I love the fact that they then released the conversations and coffins on that least likely of platforms: Instagram. As artist Ju Schnee observed, the message had even more power “in the otherwise glittering world of fashion, makeup and avocado toast”. Followers were encouraged to share their own thoughts about death and #mycoffin took its place alongside #mysneakers, #mytravel and #mybreakfast on people’s feeds. Finally, the celebrity sarcophagi were auctioned on eBay for a good cause. This unexpected campaign ended up generating 100m impressions on social media. And, in the most unlikely headline of the year, Bild announced: “These coffins are jaw-dropping.” Personally, I’d have said “to die for”. But the point was that a dark and scary subject had been turned into a bright and joyful conversation. If funeral directors can make death cool, what taboo could you tackle?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Taboos are a curse and should be avoided like the you-know-what.

Luck says: It’s often better to mention the unmentionable. So ask yourself: How can you turn a taboo into a talking point?

LUCKY ESCAPE

J

ohn maynard keynes revolutionised economics but played down his own creativity. He said: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

Many marketers would agree. It often feels like our job is more Houdini than da Vinci: wrestling our way out of intellectual straitjackets rather than sketching ideas on a blank sheet of paper. Sometimes the ropes have been tied by our predecessors while other times they’re self-inflicted. Either way, there comes a point where too much accumulated wisdom becomes a hinderance rather than a help. It felt like this when we worked on the anti-smoking account for the Department of Health in 2009. This was just the latest in a series of government initiatives, which stretched back 50 years. In fact, you could say that we were following on from the warnings of King James I in the 1600s. Not a man to hold back, he called smoking “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless”. Since then, study after study has confirmed the horrendous health risks of the habit – complete with mountains of data. So much so that health education experts used to joke that: “smoking is now responsible for 90% of all known statistics.” The result of all this killer evidence was a killer strategy. Literally. Although there has been the occasional deviation over the years, there was a strong presumption among health professionals that the role of anti-smoking advertising was to remind people about the deadly effects. The strategic task was then deciding which illness to focus on (lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, COPD, pneumonia, etc.) and then the creatives had to find increasingly shocking ways to bring these to life. You can see the logic. Messages don’t get much more motivating than ‘the avoidance of death’, so it made sense to keep ramming this home, with new evidence and fresh work. Except that when I started researching ideas like this, they… um… went up in smoke. It wasn’t that the creative work was bad. From memory, I had a really powerful route featuring rats scurrying down sewers (symbolising the carcinogens spreading through the body); a very disturbing idea about a ‘hidden killer’ lurking in your house; and some heart-wrenching pleas from smokers on their death beds. They were all on brief and all accompanied by terrifying statistics. But when I shared them in my focus groups, they bombed – several of the respondents even asked if they could nip out for a ciggie! In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by this response. Research showed that virtually all smokers knew that it could kill them. And they were familiar with most of the medical conditions too. Apart from anything else, picture warnings on the pack meant that smokers received a macabre reminder over 4,000 times a year (based on an average habit of 12 cigarettes a day). But they were still hooked, so (unlike previous generations who had been scared into quitting), these remaining smokers were clearly not going to be moved by such messages. In fact, this approach seemed to entrench smokers’ views. Many respondents complained that this was a question of personal liberty: they could harm their own bodies, or even kill themselves, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else. Others argued that the damage wouldn’t hit them for years, giving them plenty of time to quit if they wanted. And as for statistics, well, all those numbers were negated by knowing an elderly relative who’d smoked up to their 90th birthday or a super-healthy friend who’d dropped dead while jogging. To return to Houdini, we were trapped in a creative straitjacket and time was running out. Then an escape route presented itself when one of the respondents mentioned that her ten-year-old would tell her off if they heard her talking like this. This prompted a lot of discussion (which I pounced on, because I had no more work to share). For the first time, the conversation was animated. Not about illness but about sadness. Almost all the respondents had kids and most of them acknowledged that their little ones were worried sick about their habit. They talked of notes left in their fag packets (“Dad, please stop smoking”) and of tears before bedtime. Unlike a physical condition that might not show up for decades, this emotional pain was happening right now – it could not be denied. And while the respondents felt entitled to hurt themselves, they hated the idea of upsetting their loved ones. When focus group after focus group generated the same response, we saw an opportunity to wriggle out of the constraints we’d set for ourselves. Re-energised, we developed a new brief, focusing on ‘the emotional harm to your kids, rather than the physical harm to you’. There were no statistics. We didn’t need a fancy creative metaphor either. We simply recorded dozens of real children making heartfelt pleas to their parents to quit smoking. Then we placed these ads in the parents’ favourite media environments. “Hi Dad, I know you watch Coronation Street, so I just want to ask you to stop smoking.” “Hello Mum, I know you read Heat, so I’m begging you to give up your fags.” Looking back, I think it was enormously helpful that our main client – the newly arrived marketing director, Sheila Mitchell – wasn’t a health professional. Yes, she was ably supported by some brilliant experts from that field. But Sheila had spent her whole life working in the private sector, so felt less bound by old assumptions. She just wanted results. And that’s what she got.

The campaign performed better than any previous anti-smoking initiative. Specifically, it generated an extra 3m attempts to quit in the first two years alone, saving the NHS over £120m and improving the ROI by 54%. As Keynes (or any smoker) would tell you, the hard bit was kicking the old habit. We had been hooked on a conventional wisdom, but now we were free.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Coming up with new ideas is hard. Luck says: Breaking free from old ideas is harder. So ask yourself: What assumptions can you escape from?

LUCKY LOCKDOWN

I

’m writing this book in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, at a time when the UK is in lockdown. One of the many peculiarities of this moment in time is that every organisation on the planet is undergoing the same crash course in crisis management. What’s interesting is that some companies are coping with misfortune much better than others – and not just because of the sector they’re in. What can we learn from them (and from previous catastrophes too)? Well, perhaps the first observation to make is that it’s difficult to generalise. A recession is different from a health crisis. An Act of God is different from a self-inflicted scandal. An environmental disaster is different from a product recall and so on. Please read the following advice with this caveat in mind. Another watch-out is that good crisis management really begins long before anything bad happens. The organisations who do disproportionately well tend to be those who already have strong leadership, a clear mission, good lines of communication and an agile way of working. But perhaps the most important point is that the surest way to fail during a crisis is by seeking to profit from it. All too often, organisations seem driven by Churchill’s apocryphal advice that you should “never let a good crisis go to waste”. I’ve never liked this phrase – it’s too gleeful, too exploitative of human misery. I believe a more appropriate (and effective) maxim would be ‘never stand still during a crisis’. Specifically, I believe there are six steps that organisations can take to help during a crisis (and indirectly benefit themselves in the long run). These actions are Clarify, Review, Involve, Serve, Invest and Strengthen. Or CRISIS for short. First, strong brands clarify. Any difficult situation is made worse by confusion or simply an absence of information. Either of these create a vacuum where rumours can spread, and fear or anger can set in. Leaders need to be all over the data to quickly establish both the facts and the organisation’s position. In particular, if there has been corporate wrongdoing, they should acknowledge it clearly and appropriately. KFC did this brilliantly in 2018, in the aftermath of a supply chain fiasco. Yes, there were a couple of days when the UK raged about a shortage of fried chicken in its restaurants. But the fast-food company quickly defused the row by acknowledging the farce, apologising to customers and franchisees and clarifying the steps it was taking. The fact that the brand did all of this in its own voice (with a headline reading “FCK”) meant that it was soon able to control the narrative. Second, organisations need to review all their existing operations and activities. Obviously safety procedures and the like come first. But communications need to be checked too. Sometimes, long-planned campaigns no longer make sense – or might be incendiary. Nobody wants to end up like Spirit Airlines, whose automated email told America that there was “never a better time to fly”, days after the US announced a ban on air travel. Third, successful companies involve their people. A 2015 report by Deloitte noted that most studies of crisis management focus on the ability of employees to help. In contrast, Deloitte’s research found that willingness to assist was a more important factor. In particular, frontline workers need to be listened to, reassured and rallied so that they are motivated to help the organisation recover. It might sound obvious, but brands like Wetherspoons, Topshop and Sports Direct have all been roundly criticised for their treatment of employees during lockdown. Why would workers there want to go the extra mile for their bosses? Fourth, organisations need to ask themselves how they might serve the greater good. In the current crisis, we’ve seen many companies retool their factories to make hand sanitisers, masks and testing kits. We’ve also seen organisations relax payment schedules, bring down paywalls and waive fees as gestures of goodwill. But help can be as simple as keeping spirits up. For instance, we raised smiles by introducing a ridiculously long-spouted ‘social-distancing teapot’ for Yorkshire Tea. And for property website Zoopla, we encouraged families to build homemade forts and create estate-agentstyle ‘listings’ for them, at a time when the housing market was suspended. Obviously humour needs to be handled carefully in a crisis but, used in the right way, at the right time, it can be hugely appreciated. In fact, our research – conducted at the peak of Britain’s first lockdown in April 2020 – showed that 90% of the UK’s population felt “keeping a sense of humour is important in times like these”. Fifth, organisations should continue to invest. A Harvard Business Review study from 2010 found that fewer than 10% of companies typically emerge stronger after a recession. These are the ones who cut non-essential costs but continue to invest in marketing support and innovation. Similarly, McKinsey have recorded how certain West African companies emerged stronger from the 2014 Ebola outbreak, because they took the opportunity to invest in their workforces. Finally, organisations should aim to strengthen themselves. It is always tempting to go ‘back to normal’ after a sudden disruption. But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb declared back in 2012, companies should not simply try to be “resilient”. Instead, they should aim to improve under pressure (a phenomenon Taleb calls “anti-fragility”). This means locking in positive changes that have come about through disruption and accelerating improvements that have been thrown up in the chaos.

What you will hopefully notice about this model, is that it’s not driven by opportunistic exploitation. Instead, it’s centred around making the situation better for everyone – and improving yourself in the process. Crises are, by definition, incredibly difficult situations where the natural tendency is to be lost in the short term. But amid the melee, brand owners need to see the bigger picture. Put another way: history doesn’t look kindly on brands who chase ambulances – it favours those who purchase them, support them and kit them out.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Crises represent opportunities to exploit. Luck says: Crises are occasions to stand up and be counted. So ask yourself: How can you help others and show your brand at its best?

LUCKY HITCH

A

lfred hitchcock believed that “luck is everything”. Interestingly, he felt that his good fortune stemmed from a flaw. And a very surprising one at that: “My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense

film.”

That’s right. The man behind Psycho, Notorious and Vertigo was also frightened of policemen, priests, teachers, sex, small talk and falling (among many other things). He even had a severe phobia of eggs. Many of these anxieties stemmed from his upbringing as an overweight child with a strict father. But he channelled them all into his work: “The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.” Hitchcock’s strategy of embracing his flaws is, of course, the polar opposite of conventional marketing advice to accentuate your positives. However, as the behavioural economist Richard Shotton has noted, it’s actually been at the heart of some of the greatest ad campaigns in history. In particular, it was a favourite trick of Bill Bernbach, the post-war creative who’s generally considered the father of modern advertising. In 1959, he launched one of the most famous campaigns of all time, by turning the supposed flaws of the VW Beetle into strengths (OK, it wasn’t as big as American cars, but that meant smaller repair bills, smaller insurance costs and smaller parking spots). He then did the same for Avis, using the fact that it was second in the market to argue that, “We try harder.” Shotton explains that there is a welter of scientific evidence to show why this counter-intuitive approach works. He rightly cites the pratfall effect: a well-established phenomenon whereby we prefer people or brands with small imperfections. A huge body of research has shown that a dash of humility not only makes you more likeable, it makes your message more credible too. This makes it all the more puzzling that – beyond some celebrated outliers – this technique isn’t more widely adopted. In fact, if anything, self-deprecation seems less popular now than it was in Bernbach’s day. As the legendary creative Dave Trott has said: “Now I doubt you could find anyone who even understands the concept.” Well, at the risk of being the guy who boasts that he is brilliant at self-deprecation, I thought I’d share some thoughts on a recent campaign of ours, which had this at its heart. Hostelworld is essentially the Booking.com of youth hostels – an online platform, offering young travellers a choice of 33,000 properties around the world. Its biggest challenge is that the sector is dogged by negative stereotypes. People worry that hostels are noisy, crowded, dirty, unsafe and lacking in amenities. It doesn’t help that the top search result for ‘hostel’ is the horrorfilm franchise of that name. This is a series of movies that Hitchcock would have been proud of: dark, seedy and dripping with blood. The travesty is that hostels have actually undergone a complete transformation in recent years. Many now have quiet dorms, secure lockers, amazing common areas, bars and restaurants on site, free Wi-Fi, and even private rooms. They’re basically much nicer that you think. So the sector really has a perceptual problem, rather than an actual one. In 2015, Hostelworld asked us to start addressing these misconceptions. We began conventionally enough, by articulating the positive benefit of the hostel experience: the fact that it’s inherently social. Unlike hotels, where people avoid eye contact at breakfast and hang ‘Do not disturb’ signs on the door, hostels are great places for meeting like-minded travellers. They’re also much closer to the local communities and culture. We summed this up with the mission: “Meet the world.” We spent the next few years promoting this philosophy and showcasing the fantastic accommodation that enabled it. We revamped the brand’s identity, making it much more symbolic of socialisation, and partnered with Google to provide a voice-based translation feature on Hostelworld’s app. We also developed a famous campaign, where unexpected celebrities like Chris Eubank, 50 Cent and Mariah Carey visited hostels and saw what amazing, vibrant, social hubs they were. Together, these activities were very successful in presenting the positive side of hostelling. Perceptions improved and bookings rose – but the negatives proved hard to shake off. So when we took a call from Charlie Sheen’s agent in 2017, it didn’t seem like a helpful development. After all, he was a notorious wild man who was infamous on social media for his crazy antics. He’d had well-publicised drink and drug problems. Sex scandals and violent episodes. Outlandish views. He was probably the last person we’d want to associate hostels with, right? His agent argued otherwise. It turned out that Charlie had been cleaning up his act and was now sober. He was also doing a lot of work for charity (especially after he’d revealed he was HIV-positive in 2015). In short, he was a reformed character. What’s more, he loved our campaign and was coming to London next week. He wanted to know if he could be our next unexpected guest. Well, most marketers would have politely declined at this point. We hadn’t planned this activity. We didn’t have much time to get it right. Charlie’s reputation – whatever his agent said – was still notorious and could prove toxic

for a brand with perceptual problems of its own. But Hostelworld’s CMO, Otto Rosenberger, was one of those dream clients who was brave and decisive in equal measure. So we decided to not only go for it – but double down on it. Instead of shying away from Charlie’s notoriety and the poor reputation of hostels, we would embrace both. Properly leverage them, using the kind of clickbait-y headlines that Charlie had been so infamous for and which still dogged hostels from time to time. Then we’d show that both were ‘nicer than you think’. Specifically, we created six 15–20 second films for social media. They deliberately aped the style of salacious clickbait, before revealing the truth. For instance, one headline screamed: “Charlie Sheen beats teen in hostel with bat” – the payoff then revealed him playing a game of ping pong with a backpacker. Another roared: “Charlie Sheen cooks up in hostel.” It turned out he was just making a nice dinner for his fellow hostellers. “Charlie Sheen bashes Bishop in hostel” showed him playing chess. “Charlie Sheen sleeps with seven people in hostel” was about him napping in a peaceful dorm. And so on. The lurid format worked brilliantly in an environment where viewers often skip ads within the opening seconds. This way, we had them gripped from the start. Then we could address their prejudices explicitly, rather than just implicitly. Although (or perhaps because) this had been a high-risk strategy, it paid off handsomely. Sixty-six percent of those who saw the ads said they’d be more likely to book a hostel as a result. Bookings rose by 21% year-on-year. And YouTube named the campaign its most effective of 2018. It just goes to show that sometimes, acknowledging your biggest weakness can be your strongest strategy.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Brands should always conceal their flaws. Luck says: Acknowledging a problem can boost your credibility and likeability. So ask yourself: How can you turn your biggest weakness into your greatest strength?

LUCKY LIMITS

O

ne of my favourite business books of recent times is A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden. In it, they acknowledge that we all have to operate within certain constraints.

For instance, we may have limited financial resources, limited time, limited information or limited technical ability. Alternatively, we may be constrained by outside pressures, such as government regulation, the economy, our demographic or the laws of physics. Either way, limitations are invariably seen as a bad thing. But Morgan and Barden argue that they can actually be “catalytic forces that stimulate exciting new approaches and possibilities”. In the book, the authors suggest a number of ways to unlock these opportunities. One is Can-If. This technique was inspired by a conversation with Colin Kelly, the director of research and development at Warburton’s (Britain’s biggest baker). He explained that many interesting ideas get killed because of our tendency to see constraints as impossible barriers. This manifests itself in protests that “we can’t do this because…” To counteract this, Kelly has banned this particular sentence construction. Instead, he advocates using “we can do this if”. So, for example, if someone objects that “we can’t use that new packaging because it will slow the line down”, they’re encouraged to reframe their point as “we can use it, if we use someone else’s line”. Morgan and Barden point out that this is a really helpful way to propel innovative thinking forward. But they also recognise that constraints are rarely one-dimensional and often come in overlapping groups. As such, they recommend tackling the inevitable litany of Can’t-Becauses with a cascading sequence of Can-Ifs. This reminds me of a charity campaign I worked on in 2013. In fact, the Male Cancer Awareness Campaign (MCAC) was the very first brand we worked on at Lucky Generals. We met its founder, Patrick Cox, on the day we opened for business – he’s a big, gregarious Irishman and we hit it off immediately. Patrick explained how he’d set up the charity after surviving a testicular cancer scare a few years before. From that point on, he’d known his life’s mission was to educate other men about the main male cancers (prostate, testicular and bowel). In particular, he wanted to emphasise the need for early detection: although 19,000 British men die from these conditions every year, the vast majority would have survived if they’d caught it early. We were bowled over (balled over? bowelled over?) by his passion for the cause – but also by his infectious good humour. We really wanted to help him spread the word, but we could also see that there were plenty of constraints. Morgan and Barden’s book hadn’t been published yet, but what followed was effectively a Can-If conversation. We both began by putting our cards on the table. Patrick emphasised that MCAC was a tiny charity and that he had no budget. In fact, he said that even if he did have money, he “wouldn’t be giving it to a bloody ad agency”. Fair enough. We pointed out that we were also as poor as church mice, having just poured our life savings into our new business. But we did have loads of enthusiasm, talent and contacts. So “we can do it if we think creatively, pull favours and use our network”. First problem: solved. Next, Patrick talked about how difficult it was to get men to bother about stuff “down there”. While generations of women had been taught the importance of checking their breasts, blokes were less aware and, frankly, lazier. This chimed with us. We’d worked on other projects where guys had complained that they were now bombarded with requests to change their behaviour (oblivious to the fact that women have had it much worse). But rather than give up, we said: “We can get them to act, if we keep our request really simple.” Finally, Patrick reminded us that this was a taboo topic. As I discussed in an earlier chapter, it can be difficult to get people to think about a subject that society has deemed off limits. In this case, there was a real reluctance among guys to talk about their ‘balls, bums and bowels’. That sense of embarrassment was killing people, but could we overcome it? We argued: “we can if we talk our audience’s language and have some fun.” We were conscious that this was a serious subject and that Patrick might not agree on that last point. But he turned out to have the cojones, alright. “That won’t be a problem”, he said, as he pulled out a picture from his last campaign. It featured a man called Mr Testicles, dressed up as an enormous (and terrifyingly detailed) scrotal sack. Liberated by this Can-If conversation, the constraints didn’t seem so bad. In fact, we turned them to our advantage with a solution that we’d never have got to if we’d had unlimited funds, audience enthusiasm and social approval. Our idea was to get guys to ‘go commando’ for a day. Not wearing underpants was hardly a big ask. In fact, as my creative partner Danny said, it was “possibly the first ever request to do one less thing for charity”. Crucially, it did make men more conscious of their ‘bits’ though – and more likely to check them out. Then, to make sure that this wasn’t just a private initiative, behind closed doors, we created a new medium. We made arm-stickers in the form of a sergeant’s stripes, to tell the world that the wearer was ‘Going Commando’. These were designed to spark interest and conversation – whether on the Underground or at work. On the reverse side, we printed basic information about the importance of early detection and included a link to MCAC’s site. But really, the point was to break the taboo in an unexpected – and dirt cheap – way. Using our network, we got the stickers distributed in 260 Paddy Power betting shops, plus the headquarters of companies like Google, Red Bull, Virgin and The Sun. Finally, to give the idea some aircover, we blagged enough favours to create a social film and print campaign. Basically, every time we (or our production agency friends) shot a male celebrity for another client – we’d ask if we

could tag on a quick clip of them throwing their underpants away, slapping on a sticker and saying that they’d be ‘Going Commando’. As you can imagine, the media loved the footage of various popstars, TV celebs and politicians ditching their undies. Altogether, we received over £1m of free space, 290m editorial views and 36m Twitter impressions. Best of all, over 65k men wore a sticker on the big day. We’d created something out of nothing – precisely because we had nothing. You might think that your constraints are oppressive and that you can’t overcome them. But maybe you can, if you embrace Can-If?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Constraints hold you back. Lucky says: Limits can liberate you. So ask yourself: How would you approach your task with half the money, half the time or half the expertise?

LUCKY MICE

I

n 1814, ivan Krylov wrote a fable called The Inquisitive Man. In it, the eponymous hero visits a museum where he notices all sorts of tiny details – but misses the much more obvious presence of an elephant.

The story was popularised decades later, by writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mark Twain. In subsequent retellings, the proverbial pachyderm became a metaphor for a big issue that was deliberately avoided for fear of embarrassment. And so, after a suitably lengthy gestation period, ‘the elephant in the room’ was born. I’ve covered some brand challenges like this in previous chapters. For instance, taboos around death and negative associations around youth hostels. These were positively elephantine problems, in that the issues loomed large and couldn’t really be avoided. But what about all the other, less pressing niggles that companies face? The ongoing glitches, mishaps or unfortunate accidents that all organisations experience from time to time. The truth is that most businesses don’t have elephants thudding about the boardroom. They have MICE. As in: Minor Irritations, Cock-ups and Embarrassments. Conventional wisdom teaches that business leaders should ignore such problems and focus on the bigger issues. But as any homeowner knows, it’s unwise to turn your back on MICE. Sometimes they can even be a source of entertainment. Take Busch Beer, for instance. For those of you outside of the States, that’s a very popular lager. Made by AB InBev, Busch is a favourite of Middle America, and prides itself on its down-to-earth personality. It’s a longstanding sponsor of that most blue-collar of sports, Nascar. In particular, it’s backed the legendary driver Kevin Harvick for quite a while. So far, so good. Now bring on the MICE. Harvick has two arch-rivals. Brothers, in fact. Here’s what Harvick once said about the younger sibling: “He’s the biggest whining little piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my whole life. He better sit his ass in his motor home or I’m going to come find him and he’s going to have to hold my watch because I’m going to whip his ass.” Harvick isn’t any keener on the elder brother either: he’s a “rubberhead”, a “dumbo” and a “clown”, according to the two-time Xfinity Series champion. So why is this a problem for Busch? Because that’s the brothers’ name. They’re called Kurt and Kyle Busch. To recap: Busch Beer sponsors Kevin Harvick. And Kevin Harvick’s arch-rivals are also called Busch. So whenever he takes to the track, he’s plastered in the name of his fiercest opponents. Obviously, this is not ideal. But, on the other hand, it’s not a huge problem either. Everybody knows that Busch (the beer) is different from Busch (the drivers). Everybody gets that it’s just ‘one of those things’. In fact, it’s been ‘one of those things’ for ages. Of all the challenges that AB InBev grapples with each year, the Busch brothers are probably quite low on the list. They’re MICE, rather than elephants. Still, it would be good to do something about those little pests, right? We thought so. So, for one Nascar race in 2019, we took off all the Busch branding from Kevin Harvick’s firesuit, kit and car. Then we replaced it with ‘Harvick’ in exactly the same font and colours. The same went for all the social-media channels, the track signage and the on-screen graphics. We even rebranded all the beer cans that were being sold at the event. As Harvick himself said: “Now this is a paint scheme! I got my name on the car. I got my name on the beer can. I can support this one. It’s about time.” Now, I’m not going to pretend that this one-off stunt transformed the fortunes of Busch (the beer) that year. But the switcharoo did generate a lot of noise for the brand in a highly competitive market – helped by the fact that Harvick won the race. Busch Beer picked up 47m social-media impressions. It received that year’s Nascar Marketing Achievement Award. And the cans are now collectors’ items. In short, it was the kind of ‘small win’ that Karl E. Weick says businesses should aim for more often. Weick’s a celebrated organisational theorist from the University of Michigan, who published a landmark paper on the subject in 1984. Sadly he didn’t touch on Nascar, but he did investigate the NFL, among many other competitive endeavours. And what he found was that long-term success is more likely to come from a series of small victories, than from a single, huge result. Weick then listed a series of advantages that apply to small wins. First, they are concrete events. This means that they’re easier for internal and external audiences to get their heads around. For a brand like Busch – rooted in the everyday and with a disdain for highfalutin’ marketing missions – this is important. Second, small wins represent stable building blocks. To explain this point, Weick used a parable. He asked his readers to imagine themselves counting 1,000 sheets of paper, while being constantly interrupted. He pointed out that, if they tried to do that in one go, they risked losing track and having to start all over again. Whereas if the sheets were put in stacks of 100, the danger of unravelling was much lower. Applied to our campaign, it meant that once Harvick had passed the finishing line, our victory couldn’t be undone. Handy in a fast-changing market like beer.

Third, small wins create momentum. They do this partly by exciting internal and external audiences – and partly by disturbing the environment. Admittedly, they’re not always easy to plan in a linear fashion, but they do have an additive effect, which helps organisations move forward in the right general direction. Once more, this applied to Busch. Our stunt was one of a series, all designed to build the brand’s Middle-American credentials. For instance, we also took aim at another little nuisance (in this case, hipster culture) by hiding a popup shop in the middle of a forest. Thousands of thirsty punters picked up clues and made their way to a wood in Missouri. Some travelled thousands of miles and hiked the last five hours in 100-degree heat. All were lured by the promise of free beer for life. Again, not world-changing in its own right, but it did generate another 114m social impressions and nudge the brand forwards. Don’t get me wrong. I think that true transformation usually comes from tackling bigger issues than this. In fact, I’ll talk more about the idea of Big Hairy Audacious Goals in the next section. But pursuing a mammoth isn’t always the right answer. Pest control is also important. So if there isn’t an obvious elephant in your room, look under the skirting board and see if there are any mice.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Little problems are distractions and should be ignored. Luck says: Minor Irritations, Cock-Ups and Embarrassments all add up. So ask yourself: How can you turn lots of little problems into a series of small wins?

LUCKY BORE

Y

ou know what the ultimate hard-luck story is, in marketing? “Our category is low interest.” As Richard Huntington (chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi London) has said, this is the advertising equivalent of “My dog ate my homework”. The truth is that no sector is really high interest: all marketers should remember that ordinary people have far better things to think about than the minutiae of their brands. Having said that, some categories do feel a bit more boring than others. Grudge purchases like insurance, say. Household staples, like milk. Products associated with chores, like toilet cleaners and detergent. So what should you do if you have the misfortune of working in an industry like this? The answer is: count your blessings. Because, by definition, creative thinking stands out more in a low-interest category than it does in a supposedly sexier sector. Just to underline this point, consider some of the case studies we’ve already discussed. We’ve seen how “tax doesn’t have to be taxing”, how funeral care doesn’t have to be deadly boring, how bread can feed the nation’s imagination and tea can be “properly” interesting. Now, go back to some of the other lessons. I might have used more lively categories to illustrate these ones, but the techniques work just as well for low-interest sectors. For instance, a lucky name can help a boring product (as toilet-spray Poo-Pourri shows). So can a lucky mascot (as various meerkats and geckos have proved in the insurance sector). Or a lucky people strategy (as Timpson has demonstrated by hiring ex-prisoners for its keycutting stores). The point is, if your brand operates in a category that’s written off as low-interest, don’t lose heart. All the methods outlined in this book are still open to you – perhaps even more so. Still, here are a few more ways to turn your boringly bad luck into good. First, say less about yourself. This goes against the modern marketing advice to ‘create a back-story’ and ‘always be on’. It can be tempting to try and talk your way out of trouble with a more in-depth narrative, but remember the quote that’s usually attributed to Voltaire: “The secret of being boring is to say everything.” A smarter approach is to learn from Ronseal. As British readers will know, Ronseal manufacture a range of wood stains, waxes, strippers and varnishes. It’s literally as interesting as watching paint dry. But it’s become famous because of its utterly reductive advertising. For instance, a commercial for Ronseal Quick-Drying Woodstain might simply say: “If you’ve got wood to stain and you want it to dry quickly, you need Ronseal Quick-Drying Woodstain. Ronseal. It does exactly what it says on the tin.” OK, I appreciate that you might not want to be quite so blunt. But the brand’s slogan has now been in use since 1994 and has been cited by prime ministers, comedians and popstars alike. So think about how you can strip away all the layers of your messaging, like paint from a fence. Second, take a leaf out of Francis Joseph Sheed’s prayer book. He was an outspoken Catholic theologian who once said that “One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong thing”. Persil’s “Dirt is Good” slogan is a great example of this. In three words, it turns a dull category into an interesting point of view. What’s the most heretical thing you could say in your sector? Third, reframe the importance of your product. We recently did a short project with Fever-Tree. Launched in 2004, the tonic-water brand has been phenomenally successful in the UK. And one of its smartest moves was to make people revisit their assumption that the mixer is the boring bit of an alcoholic drink. They challenged this idea with a brilliant slogan (which I should emphasise had nothing to do with us): “If 3/4 of your drink is the mixer, mix with the best.” How could you persuade people that your product is more important than they think? Fourth, just have fun. Apologies if this is stating the obvious. There is a huge body of evidence that shows humour to be one of the most effective creative devices – especially in low-interest categories. Perversely, the data also points to a declining use of comedic advertising over the last 20 years. This is a terrible mistake by our industry, but a great opportunity for brave brands. I mean, one of the mostawarded campaigns of the last decade was a very funny railway safety initiative called ‘Dumb Ways To Die’. If they could wring comedy from something as dry and dark as that, the rest of us have no excuse. Finally, if you still doubt that a creative mind can make any subject interesting, please come with on me a trip back to my neck of the woods. A couple of years ago, I was holidaying in Perthshire. It’s a beautiful part of Scotland and there’s lots to do and see. One day, I found myself driving through a little village near Aberfeldy. In contrast to the majestic countryside nearby, there was nothing at all remarkable about this hamlet. In fact, it was literally called Dull. But as we passed through, we spotted a sign saying that the place was “Paired with Boring, Oregon and Bland, New South Wales”. Apparently, the three villages had established a ‘Trinity of Tedium’ and were promoting each other around the world. I think that’s a brilliant idea. And a quick look at all the online coverage suggests that it’s been extremely successful. It proves my point: you can make anything interesting, even if your raw material is Dull, Boring and Bland.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Some categories are intrinsically low-interest. Luck says: Creative brilliance stands out even more against a dull background. So ask yourself: How can you exploit the fact you’re in a boring sector?

LUCKY BASTARDS

I

n 1976, the White House commissioned a survey looking into how American companies handled customer complaints. This poll has been repeated several times over the years and the 2020 data showed that gripes have more than doubled since the first dip.

But more telling than the raw numbers is the fact that the study changed its name halfway through to the Customer Rage Survey. This clearly reflects an increase in vitriol, not just sheer volume – and it’s largely driven by social media. Channels like Twitter represent a challenge for brands because complaints are made publicly, rather than discretely, as they used to be. They can also spread quickly – usually becoming more heated on the way. Sometimes the original issue morphs into something more toxic. For instance, if the organisation’s response smacks of discrimination rather than just poor customer service. If a company isn’t careful, they could be on the receiving end of a full-scale boycott before they know it. In many ways, of course, this is a good thing. If brands are behaving badly, they need to be called out and held to account. If they’re doing so unwittingly, they need to be made aware of the frustrations, before they can improve. And if organisations respond well to criticism, there’s quite a lot of research which suggests that this can lead to even greater satisfaction than if there had been no problem in the first place. So, complaints are a classic example of bad luck that can be turned into good luck. As Bill Gates once said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” If you are a brand custodian, you should encourage complaints – share them, track them and act on them. In a world where over 70% of Twitter gripes don’t even receive a reply, this will put you ahead of most companies. But wait a minute. All this assumes that the customer is always right. What if they’re not? There’s another relatively new phenomenon, whereby members of the public use social media not only to criticise a brand’s customer service but to make bigoted comments in the process. Often this comes in response to a socially responsible initiative – say, against racism or homophobia. As your brand’s custodian, this leaves you with a dilemma. Do you ignore the hateful remarks and risk counter-criticism that you tolerate offensive views? Or do you condemn them and accept that you will lose a different group of customers? My suggestion is to learn from the hospitality industry. In that sector, managers are well-used to barring or ejecting customers who are intoxicated, unruly or obnoxious to other guests. Social media now means that we’re all drinking in the same, very public, saloon. So when you discover you have rude and antagonistic customers showing up on your virtual real estate, you have to use your judgement. Like any decent landlord, you should allow reasonable freedom of speech – but where that involves extremist hatred, you should show punters the door. As I said, if you get it right, you can turn an altercation like this into applause. Importantly, you don’t even have to respond to poison with more venom of your own. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. It’s usually better if you can turn the hate into something positive – which is why I set up an initiative called Lucky Bastards in 2018. As someone whose job depends, to some degree, on social media, I was alarmed by research from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, showing that these channels now account for 59% of all hate crime. Scrolling through some of the horrible messages that they and other organisations had received, my first instinct was to reply in kind. But then I told myself that I would simply be inflaming the situation. So instead, I came up with an innovative way to turn hateful messages into donations to charity. Lucky Bastards was an agency initiative that we backed with a couple of thousand pounds of our own money. The rules were simple. We scrolled through Twitter, looking for bigoted examples of the word ‘bastards’. (We reasoned that we couldn’t tackle all hate speech – this was a good way to focus our efforts). We then tweeted the perpetrators, as if they’d won a competition: “Thanks for playing Lucky Bastards!” If they had said something about “gay bastards”, we told them jauntily that we would be turning their message into a £10 donation to Stonewall, an LGBT charity. If they’d complained about “migrant bastards”, the money went to the Refugee Council. If they’d been misogynistic, we sent a payment to the Women’s Equality Party. And so on. Wherever possible, we’d try to make our replies fun, as this made them more shareable. For instance, when someone complained about “bloody immigrant bastards” we sent our donation to a charity that supplies refugee centres with sanitary products. We also gave them a local spin. For example, when a guy from Manchester complained that “Muslim bastards” had burnt down the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, we pointed out that this wasn’t true but that we’d send the money to a mosque near him, which had been the victim of an arson attack. Our logo was a big, smiley face and we signed off each reply with a kiss, just to reinforce our positive point. This unusual approach not only wrongfooted the haters, it received a huge amount of support online. People seemed to appreciate the desire to raise the tone, not descend to the lowest level. Charities tweeted their thanks, often saying that this little bit of kindness had made their day. The only person who wasn’t happy was our bank manager (apparently the sweary name caused havoc with his email).

Of course, the sums involved are small in the grand scheme of things and represent a mere drop in the ocean of vitriol. But the goodwill has made it worthwhile. The bigger lesson is that hate can be your friend, not your enemy. Instead of ignoring it or attacking it head-on, why not turn negativity into something positive?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: You shouldn’t draw attention to negative comments. Luck says: You should embrace them and learn from them. So ask yourself: How can you turn hate and complaints into laughs and compliments?

LUCKY PENCILS

M

ost of the stories in this section start with a tale of woe. But sometimes, bad luck appears in disguise.

In fact, as my business partner Helen is fond of pointing out, complacency is probably the biggest corporate danger of all. It’s harder to spot though, because it typically arrives wearing laurels. There’s no crisis that prompts an urgent change of direction. There’s no setback to be overcome. There is just an intoxicating sensation of success that feels like it will go on forever – until it doesn’t. That’s why this particular threat is so deadly and deserves a chapter of its own. Of course, Julius Caesar knew all about laurels and the risks of resting on them. Whenever he rode triumphantly through the streets of Rome, a slave accompanied him in the chariot. And while the crowd chanted the great man’s name, this slave held a laurel crown over Caesar’s head. But his most important duty was to whisper in the leader’s ear: “Hominem te memento” (roughly translated as ‘Remember you are only human’). The songwriter Leonard Cohen used to channel something similar. Before he went on stage, he used to get his whole band to chant: “Pauper sum ego, nihil habeo.” Or ‘I am poor. I have nothing’. Not strictly true of a multiaward-winning artist who had a net worth of $40m, although you get the point. My favourite story of this kind though, involves the legendary football manager Brian Clough. Clough was a famously down-to-earth Northerner, so there’s no Latin in this one. But he did strongly believe in keeping his players’ feet on the ground. Clough was worried that his captain at Nottingham Forest, Stuart Pearce, might be getting too big for his boots. So when the player returned from his first England match, he assembled the whole team to welcome him back. They were all puzzled to see that he had placed a plastic bag in the middle of the dressing room. It seemed to contain something heavy. But if they thought it was some kind of trophy, they were in for a surprise. “Our captain’s a fraud,” Clough said to a stunned room. “What do you mean?” replied a bewildered Pearce. “Well in last week’s programme, page nine, bottom-left corner, there’s an advert. ‘Stuart Pearce Electrics.’ Explain yourself, young man.” A still-confused Pearce protested that this was his family’s business and that they were just using his name to give themselves a bit of a boost. Clough wasn’t satisfied. “If my Barbara calls that number, are you going to answer it? If a lightbulb’s gone in the house?” Pearce admitted that no, obviously his brother would take the call. “Well then, you’re a fraud.” Clough now picked up the plastic bag and took out an electric iron. “As it happens,” he went on, “My Barbara’s iron is broken. Fix it by Saturday or you’re not playing.” Now, Clough’s tough love (and mild sexism) might sit a bit uneasily with us today. But to be fair, Pearce not only fixed the iron, he then went on to become Forest’s most-capped player and ultimately their manager. Anyway, the bigger point is that complacency needs to be held in check – whether it’s by a whisper, a chant or a broken electrical appliance. Smart companies recognise this and watch for any signs of laziness. But what about when complacency sets in externally? That’s also a common problem, where a brand becomes so familiar that its audience takes it for granted. A few years ago, we worked with D&AD. For those who don’t know, D&AD is a non-profit organisation set up in 1962 to promote British ‘design and art direction’. It’s now a global organisation that does all sorts of wonderful things within the creative communications industry. But it’s best known for its pencil-shaped awards. In fact, many creatives will tell you that D&AD’s Pencils are the most prestigious prizes around. They might not be given out at a glamorous festival, like Cannes. They might not be tied to results, like the IPA or Effie Awards. They might not be as modern as the Webby Awards. But they are coveted – because so few are given out. This goes right back to the inaugural event, when over 2,500 entries were ruthlessly whittled down to just 16 Pencils. The problem was that the Pencils had been around for so long that it was easy to take them for granted. Put in cabinets all over the world, they were literally part of the furniture at many agencies. With newer, shinier, easier-to-win awards launching all the time, D&AD entries were declining. Our brief was to reverse this trend and remind the global community that the Pencils remained the gold standard. And to do this, we needed to tackle the complacency that surrounded them. So we decided to steal them. Our logic was based on the old adage that you don’t miss something until it’s taken away from you. We recruited accomplices in agencies all over the world: PAs, ex-employees, friends-of-friends and so on. Then, on 11 January 2016, we staged a tightly coordinated heist. From San Francisco to Cape Town, Rio to Melbourne, our assistants crept into offices, broke into cabinets and stole hundreds of Pencils. Over the next couple of days, creatives all over the world started wondering where their treasured trophies had gone. Emotions ranged from worry and sadness to confusion and anger. All-staff emails started flying about (our

spies forwarded them). Phone calls were made to D&AD (we recorded them). In a couple of instances, the police were nearly called in (our accomplices cooled things down). It wasn’t until four days later that our victims twigged that something even odder was happening. They saw from social media that their friends in other countries had also been affected. And just as things threatened to get out of hand, we revealed our elaborate hoax. The whole episode had reminded people how precious the Pencils were and entries to the D&AD Awards rose as a result. Although, as the professionally-paranoid Helen cautioned us: “Let’s not get complacent about that.”

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Successful companies don’t suffer bad luck. Luck says: Complacency is one of marketing’s deadliest dangers. So ask yourself: How can you make sure your brand is never taken for granted?

SECTION 4: PRACTISE BEING LUCKY

J

eff Bezos has a pair of lucky boots. They were given to him by a friend in 2016. He now makes a point of wearing them whenever he is launching one of his Blue Origin space vehicles. He’s been especially scrupulous about this since the programme’s only failure came when he forgot to put them on.

What’s interesting about these boots is that they are emblazoned with a Latin slogan: Gradatim ferociter. This translates as ‘Step by step, ferociously’. As Bezos once explained in an interview: “It’s the motto for Blue Origin. Basically you can’t skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.” I love this expression. Like a lot of great ideas, it contains an apparent tension: in this case, between a dogged methodological approach and an impatient desire for velocity. But it clearly works for Bezos and it sets the scene for my final section. It’s now time to talk about building a lucky culture, where rigour and passion combine to improve your odds every step of the way. You see, in the previous sections, I’ve explored the importance of appreciating what you’ve got, looking out for opportunities elsewhere and turning misfortune into good fortune. But there’s a risk that these remain passive observations. It’s not enough to congratulate yourself on your advantages, wait for opportunities to show up, or simply react to crises after they happen. You need to practise the principles set out earlier, with ferocious discipline, every single day. Crucially, it’s not even enough to work hard on your core skill. In fact, I’ll show that the relentless pursuit of perfection can actually prove counterproductive. No, I’m talking about making space for the practice of luck itself. In this section, I’ll recommend a series of lucky habits that will stack the odds in your favour. I’ll talk about the importance of setting goals that will stretch but not break you. I’ll stress the need to choose your own battles, bend the rules and remove the barriers. I’ll emphasise the power of magic, charm, generosity and random connections. And finally I’ll remind you that luck – like the devil – is in the details. Amy Tan – whose first novel was The Joy Luck Club – claimed that “You attract luck because you go after it”. Likewise, Stephen King believes that: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.” We could all take a leaf out of their books. So what are you waiting for? Let’s go to work and start practising being lucky…

LUCKY SHOT

F

ormer england cricketer Ed Smith has written an excellent book called Luck: A Fresh Look At Fortune. In it, he explores the subject of chance from a sporting perspective. Mostly, he seems to believe that you can’t change your luck – but along the way he tells a story that I feel gives us all a little hope.

The tale concerns the golfer, Colin Montgomerie. ‘Monty’ has won 31 European Tour events – more than any other British player. But more pertinent for our purposes, he’s hit more hole-in-ones than any other player on the European Tour (an impressive nine). Smith met him on the iconic Gleneagles course, not far from where Montgomerie grew up, and quizzed him on the secrets of his success. The former Ryder Cup captain was disarmingly honest: “To hit a ball 1.68 inches wide for 200 yards straight into a cup 4.25 inches wide? Yes, you definitely need luck to do that. Think about what happens to the ball during a holein-one. It flies through the wind. It bounces on the ground. It rolls along the turf. You cannot entirely control the bounce of the ball or the journey of the ball on the grass. Let’s be honest. To put the ball close to the hole is skill; to put the ball in the hole needs luck.” Ed Smith cites this as evidence for his main thesis: that there are some things you can control in life and some you can’t. Of course, I accept this in general terms – it’s patently true. But hold on. I think the really interesting bit of this story comes next, when Monty explains that professional golfers don’t really aim for a hole-in-one anyway. Instead, it transpires that they try to leave the ball ‘stiff’: a foot or so beneath the hole. This gives them a chance of an easy putt uphill, whereas if they try to be too precise, there’s a risk they end up above the hole with a more difficult downhill shot. Because of this, Montgomerie admits that most hole-in-ones (including seven of his nine, by his own estimate) are actually bad shots that go in by fluke. Of course, like all golfers, he was happy to take these at the time, but really, over the course of a round, a tournament or a career, he knows that aiming slightly off will get him better results. This theory seems to be backed up by the story of another golfer, Mancil Davis. Unlike Monty, you probably haven’t heard of Davis, but this Texan ex-pro scored an incredible 51 hole-in-ones over the course of his career. He achieved this by ignoring conventional wisdom and aiming directly at the flag. The problem was that this quest for instant perfection also cost him a lot of misses, which meant that Davis never got beyond journeyman status and his fame (as the ‘King of Aces’) is confined to golf trivia fans. The divergence of these two golfing careers fascinates me, because it suggests that getting close enough (leaving the ball stiff) is a more effective route to consistent success than the pursuit of perfection (aiming for a hole-inone). Crucially, I think this lesson has great application to the world of business too. Now, I should say straight away that I’m not arguing for sloppiness or for a lowering of creative ambition. We should all aim for greatness and continue to push our ideas as far as we can. However, there comes a point when the pursuit of perfection becomes counterproductive. For instance, it can sap morale by creating a culture whereby nothing ever gets made because it’s in research, being finalised or back with the Board. It can also lead to unnecessary delays, during which a rival takes the advantage. Or it can prevent learning, by overprotecting the idea from testing in the real world. Actually, in some organisations, the call for perfection is used as a deliberate strategy to do nothing, masquerading as a desire to do better. It’s hard to argue against further refinement, because it can come across as slipshod. Surely it’s right to commission another round of research, canvass a few more stakeholders or go over the script one more time? The would-be perfectionists talk reassuringly of honing, tweaking or buffing, but often they are simply rubbing the edges off the original, raw idea: like taking a beautiful stone and sand-papering it to dust. This is a particular peeve of my creative partner, Danny. He’s got ridiculously high standards but is also fond of quoting the legendary creative director Paul Arden, who once advised that a great idea is: “One that gets made. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.” In other words, launching a concept when it’s 80% or 90% right is infinitely preferable to holding one back in the hope that it can be made 100% perfect. Another sporting icon – Liverpool’s Bill Shankly – was of the same opinion. While his players scored many spectacular goals, he advised them against overly intricate moves, waiting for all the planets to align before shooting or trying to place the ball in the top corner. Instead, he told players: “When you’re in the box and you’re not sure what to do with the ball, just pop it in the goal and we’ll discuss your options later.” Again, it’s a philosophy which values performance over perfection. Some modern football teams could learn from this, as they indulge in elaborate build-up that is straight out of the playbook but doesn’t have an end result. So could some marketers. Scoring the occasional hole-in-one or worldie is great – but if you want to win tournaments, then prioritise putts from the green and half-chances in the six-yard box.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Aim for perfection, in everything, every time. Luck says: Holding on for 100% can be counterproductive. So ask yourself: How can you get quickly to 90% – and then make it happen?

LUCKY GOAL

T

here’s a brilliant Saturday Night Live sketch that says a lot about modern marketing. And not in a good way. Two ad agencies are pitching to make a Super Bowl spot for Cheetos. Murphy & Kennedy (played by Alec Baldwin and Aidy Bryant) go first. They’re incredibly earnest and deliver a heartfelt script.

“We open on a little immigrant girl. She’s dusty, she’s tired. She’s come a long way. She looks up and sees… a wall. How will she get over it? A boy appears at the top and throws down a rope… but the rope is made from American flags. The girl climbs the rope. She sees her new country for the first time… and she cries. Hard cut… Cheetos.” It’s ludicrously overblown for a packet of cheesy snacks, but the client team loves it. In contrast, they hate the efforts of A.K. Foster (played by Kyle Mooney and Melissa Villaseñor), even though they represent a much more straightforward attempt to sell the product. The two agencies slug it out for a couple of rounds, with Murphy & Kennedy’s ideas getting more and more ridiculous: “We open on a Mexican man wearing a sombrero. He takes it off and underneath is a Muslim woman. The Muslim woman takes off her hijab. And underneath is a Jewish person. The Jewish person takes off his yarmulke and underneath is a Cheeto.” The clients still prefer their nonsense to A.K. Foster’s sensible work. Eventually, Murphy & Kennedy share an ad where there are “no actors, no make-up, no lines, no lights, no props, no costumes, no cameras… no Cheetos”. The marketers go into raptures – it’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, transported to Madison Avenue. When comedians start laughing at your industry on Saturday-night primetime television, you know you have a problem. In this case, it’s the malpractice of brand purpose. This concept was arguably born in 1994, with the publication of Built To Last by James Collins and Jerry Porras. This seminal work suggested that the world’s most successful companies are driven by a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG for short. To be fair, many of the missions cited by Collins and Porras were highly commercial and related to objectives like dominating an industry or crushing a competitor. But with time, the idea has snowballed to take on much weightier, social ambitions. The result is missions that stray into the realms of achieving world peace or abolishing unkindness – more BWAG (Big Woolly Amorphous Goal) than BHAG. Having said all this, I do believe that an inspirational purpose can improve a brand’s chances of success. I’ve already mentioned several companies who have been driven by just that – from Oatly to the Co-op, and Disney to Hostelworld. But before you follow in their big hairy footsteps, tread carefully and check that your proposed purpose meets some key criteria. First, the mission should be based on an organisational truth. Ideally, one that honestly describes the intentions of the original founder. For instance, Warby Parker can talk about “good eyewear, good outcome” because they have donated a pair of glasses to non-profits for every pair sold, right from the start. If the purpose is a newer addition, then it should at least be an accurate reflection of the organisation’s current values and behaviours. It should shine a light on the truth, rather than conceal it, as many companies try to do with their purpose-driven marketing. Next, the purpose should be pitched appropriately. By this, I mean that it should be ambitious enough to inspire employees and customers – but not so lofty that it loses all connection with the product. For instance, the BBC can credibly claim to “enrich people’s lives” because they offer “programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain”. But this would be a stretch for most brands. So, before you ladder up to some fancy higher-order benefit, it’s probably wise to calm down a bit. Another requirement is that the purpose is expressed in distinctive language. Given that the whole point of these constructs is to capture the defining motivations of their individual organisations, it’s odd how similar they all are. The strategies are typically expressed as turgid manifestos, on well-trodden themes like “bringing people together” or “empowering humans”. The advertising uses the same tone (mawkish, sentimental or pseudo-inspirational). Even the executions blur into each other, with their tinkly piano tracks, social experiments and vox-pop vignettes. How much better to tell it like Channel 4, whose original mission simply focused on the idea of “making trouble”. Finally, a brand purpose should be a long-term commitment for the whole organisation, not a strand of tactical marketing. For instance, Celebrity Cruises believe in the power of progress and the ability of travel to broaden people’s horizons. But they don’t just bring this to life in ads – they champion female captains and engineers; they pioneer LGBTQ+ weddings; they eject racist passengers and so on. As their inspirational president and CEO Lisa Lutoff-Perlo (the first woman to run a major cruise line) says, this isn’t a one-off campaign but “something we are working at each day”. My point is that if you satisfy all these criteria, then you’re lucky. You have a social purpose that is true, appropriate, distinctive and long-term. You can use it to galvanise your whole organisation and inspire your potential customers. But if not, don’t despair. Social purpose isn’t a silver bullet – and when organisations use it as such, they often end up shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of inventing a spurious mission that your employees don’t believe in, and which consumers find ridiculous, adjust your aim.

For instance, Mattel exists “to be the premier toy brand, today and tomorrow”. Nordstrom sets out “to give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible”. American Express tries to be “the world’s most respected service brand”. These are all very ambitious goals, but they’re expressed in more straightforward commercial language. That’s fine too. One of my favourite mission statements belongs to TED. It is beautifully captured in two words: “Spread ideas.” Talking of which, we should spread the word that brand purpose comes in all shapes and sizes – just like Cheetos.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Every organisation should have a lofty social purpose. Luck says: There are lots of different ways to inspire. So ask yourself: What is your brand’s true mission: why do your people really get out of bed each day?

LUCKY DIP

I

t was 1958 and Nikita Khrushchev was visiting Mao Zedong in Beijing. It should have been a friendly trip to a Communist ally, but the two leaders were not the best of comrades. They disagreed both on ideology and foreign policy. These differences threatened to undermine their common desire for worldwide socialism, so a conference was called to thrash things out. As he prepared for the meeting, the Soviet premier felt very confident of his negotiating position. And no wonder. In the last two years, he had crushed the Hungarian Revolution and emerged as a winner from the Suez Crisis. He had also surprised the world with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. So Khrushchev was coming to the talks at the height of his power. In contrast, Mao was on the back foot. China was still the junior partner in this relationship and he realised that he would be rolled over if he conducted a conventional debate. So he decided to wrongfoot his opponent (or, as he put it: “stick a needle up his ass”). What happened next was one of the most extraordinary incidents in diplomatic history. When the Soviets arrived for the talks, they discovered that Mao had switched the venue to his private swimming pool in Zhongnanhai. Khrushchev was naturally puzzled by this but rerouted his entourage and continued to rehearse his arguments in the car. It was only when he arrived at the pool that he realised something very strange was going on. Mao was wearing a bathrobe and handed his counterpart a pair of ill-fitting trunks. Khrushchev was mortified, because he was badly out of shape and couldn’t swim (a fact which Mao knew very well). But he was determined not to lose face, so he followed his rival into the water. Khrushchev hoped that this little dip would just be a precursor to the formal negotiations. But it was not. Big mistake. In contrast to Khrushchev, Mao had a fine physique and was a great swimmer (he would later claim to break a world record at the age of 72). So he chugged up and down the pool effortlessly, leaving his opponent bobbing about in the shallow end. As he swam, he shouted his demands over his shoulder, forcing the Soviet translators to jog along the side and then report back to their humiliated boss. There was no negotiating table. This was it. Khrushchev no longer looked like one of the most powerful men on earth – but a short tubby bloke, who was literally out of his depth. Mao, on the other hand, was triumphant. He won all the arguments and rubbed the victory in by giving his rival a pair of children’s water-wings. Some historians trace the Soviet Union’s demise and China’s rise all the way back to this very moment. This story reminds us that we can defeat a far mightier opponent by moving the goalposts. Too often, we allow others to dictate the battlefield. We play by their rules, on their pitch, at a time of their choosing. We answer their arguments with incremental points of our own. The problem is that we rarely win, when someone stronger has picked the setting and set the agenda. Like Mao, we need to move the argument to a completely different place. Richard Branson has always understood this well. I’ve already recalled how we coined the idea of ‘rockstar service’ for Virgin Holidays. That was a classic example of a lateral move: we didn’t try to beat five-star service with sixstar service, we shifted the battle to a completely different territory, where only Virgin could win. Now I want to talk about my time working with another part of Branson’s empire. At the time of writing, Virgin Atlantic is experiencing some severe turbulence. But in the late 1990s, it was flying rings round arch-rival British Airways. Branson had launched his airline in 1984, despite having absolutely no experience in the aviation industry. By the time I started working on the advertising account in 1997, it had established itself as the definitive, feisty, challenger brand. In particular, Branson had proved adept at outflanking his bigger rival, rather than trying to tackle it head on. For instance, rather than just creating a slightly better seat in Economy, he introduced ice creams to be eaten with the movies. Likewise, instead of following the usual First and Business Class conventions, he introduced something called Upper Class (“a First Class service for a Business Class price”). And within that, he didn’t just create incrementally better facilities for business travellers. Instead, he introduced a chauffeur service and a drive-through check-in, as well as an onboard bar and the option of a massage. He even used the salt and pepper pots to sprinkle some magic (engraved on the underside is the message “Pinched from Virgin Atlantic”). Although BA still had a far bigger route network, a better loyalty programme and a highly professional service, they began to look old-fashioned and unimaginative. “BA don’t give a Shiatsu.” We chortled, in one of our ads. And every time the national carrier tried to edge ahead, Branson simply stepped aside and moved the conversation elsewhere. Once, I witnessed him unveil a double bed in a hangar at Schiphol Airport. Unlike most of his innovations, this one was pure bullshit. It had simply been cobbled together to spike BA’s relaunch of its Club World cabin. This involved

the first ever completely flat bed and Branson knew he couldn’t beat it. So instead of fighting a losing battle on product, he waged a war he knew he could win: one of publicity. He rounded up every journalist he could muster and flew them all to Amsterdam. Then he gave them an easy ‘mile high club’ headline. It wasn’t very sophisticated. But as the editor of Campaign noted, it was a “masterclass in PR” which led to “acres” of coverage. Meanwhile, back in London, BA’s CEO Bob Ayling was doing his own launch at a City Institution. He was wearing a sensible suit and talking about a very serious innovation. But nobody was watching. He might as well have been bobbing about in the shallow end of a Beijing swimming pool, wearing children’s water-wings and a pair of oversized trunks.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Market leaders get to choose the battlefield. Luck says: Think laterally and shift the conflict to a territory of your choice. So ask yourself: How can you move the battle to a place that suits you better?

LUCKY TRICK

O

n 20 june 2020, President Donald Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was an inflammatory gesture, even by his standards. The town was the site of a notorious massacre of African Americans and the previous day was the anniversary of Black emancipation in the States. With tensions rising in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and with Covid-19 gripping the nation, Trump fanned the flames further by offering free entrance and predicting a bumper crowd. “Almost one million people” had requested tickets for the 19,000-capacity venue, he boasted on 15 June. Fast forward five days, though, and only about 6,200 people showed up. It later emerged that one of the main factors behind this mass no-show was that Trump had been pranked. Thousands of TikTok users and K-pop (Korean pop music) fans had snapped up the free tickets, with absolutely no intention of attending. In fact, quite the opposite – they wanted to humiliate the President by raising his expectations and then dashing them. They didn’t quite get their wish, of seeing Trump completely alone in the arena, but the empty blue seats of the BOK Center were viewed all over the world as a fitting comeuppance. The film director Ed Morris hailed this stunt as proof that teenagers are currently creating ideas that are “lightyears ahead of anything brands are doing”. I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view. As noted in a previous chapter, young people are unencumbered by the assumptions the rest of us have grown up with. They don’t always play by the rules – or at least, they don’t follow the spirit of the law. That’s what happened here: there was nothing remotely illegal in what the teenagers did. They just took advantage of the terms and conditions and used them in a surprising way. It’s not quite true to say that all brands are behind the curve though. A few years ago, we did a lot of work with Paddy Power, a maverick Irish bookmaker (now part of Flutter, the world’s biggest online-betting company). The leadership team there saw themselves as being in the entertainment industry, rather than the gambling business. Or, as one of the founders, Stewart Kenny, was fond of saying, “we’ll take your money but we’ll give you a laugh as well.” As you can imagine, this made for a very unusual corporate culture. At its centre was a Mischief Department, whose sole responsibility was to poke fun and cause controversy in the world of sport. We got up to all sorts of tricks with them: erecting statues of football managers outside their rivals’ grounds, launching bids to take over FIFA, trolling foreign embassies before big matches and so on. We even tried to save a giraffe from being put down at a Danish zoo and enter it in a British horse race (we weren’t allowed in the end, although we were confident it would have won by a neck). Anyway, one day in early 2014, we were approached by Paddy Power’s Head of Mischief (which we all agreed was the best job title ever). Harry Dromey is a very funny, hugely creative person – and he had a half-baked thought which was right up there with his most madcap ideas. The World Cup was going to be held in Brazil that summer and England was set to play its first match in Manaus, in the heart of Amazonia. Paddy Power wasn’t officially involved with the tournament (it always preferred to hijack events rather than sign up to the rules that come with being an official sponsor), but the occasion was forecast to be the biggest commercial opportunity in the company’s history. Harry wondered if we could steal the limelight by appearing to carve a message into the precious rainforest. Our feelings were mixed. On the one hand, we accepted that this would certainly generate headlines. But on the other, the stunt seemed to lack substance. We talked about the need to combine mischief with mission: not just to provoke outrage for the sake of it, but to do something good as a result. We wondered whether there was a way to tell a more interesting story, that would genuinely surprise people rather than just confirm their suspicion that Paddy Power would do anything for attention. Harry liked the sound of this, so we got to work. Fast forward to 6 June 2014 – a Friday. We chose this day because it was a week before England’s first match: a time when all the players would be locked away in training camp and there would be a shortage of news. That night, we leaked some photos onto the dark web, taking care that there was no trail back to us. The pictures appeared to be helicopter shots of the rainforest, with the following message carved out in enormous letters: “C’mon England. PP.” It was absolutely shocking – and so it should have been, because we’d spent the last two months faking the image with the help of the best special-effects artists in the world. It took a while for the images to filter through from the micro-blogs where we’d planted them. Some sources fizzled out; others failed to spark at all. But the following afternoon (basically when America woke up to Reddit), the story started to explode all over social media. Within a couple of hours, we were in the middle of a full-scale Twitterstorm. Experts weighed in to confirm that the photos were real (we were glad we’d got our boffins to factor in the right kind of trees, the altitude of the supposed helicopter and the position of the sun). Environmental groups registered their disgust (“We didn’t cut down that much!” we replied). We even got death threats (including one memorable campaigner who hoped we’d “die of Chlamydia”, which we thought was medically unlikely but admirably specific).

Then, after fanning the flames for 24 hours, we used Sunday to reveal the truth: we hadn’t really cut down any rainforest, in fact we wanted to raise awareness about its destruction. After all, “every 90 minutes, an area the size of 122 footy pitches is chopped down and nobody gives a monkeys.” We then directed people to Greenpeace (who had been advising us informally, behind the scenes). The activists who had been berating us the day before were now calling for us to get pay rises and knighthoods (note: neither were forthcoming). All in all, #ShavetheRainforest generated 35m Twitter impressions and Paddy Power started the World Cup as the most talked about brand. It was probably the most terrifying weekend of our professional lives, but we’d taken on one of the planet’s biggest threats with a well-intentioned sleight of hand. I think all marketers could learn a trick or two from that.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Play by the rules. Luck says: You can improve your odds with a sleight of hand. So ask yourself: What trick could you play to overcome your enemy?

LUCKY LACES

S

ticking with paddy Power for a minute, here’s another example of ‘mission and mischief’ in action. A couple of months after #Shavetherainforest, we had a really interesting conversation with the company’s CMO.

In some ways, Christian Woolfenden was an unlikely person to work in that madhouse. He had started life as an accountant at the rather more conservative bastion of Procter & Gamble. But as he was fond of saying, maths comes in handy when you’re working at a bookies. On this occasion, we were talking about a campaign against homophobia in British football. We’d launched it the year before, in partnership with the leading LGBTQ+ charity, Stonewall. The idea was to send rainbow-coloured bootlaces to every professional footballer in the land and ask them to wear them in support of LGBTQ+ colleagues. Back then, Rainbow Laces had literally been a shoestring operation (our young creative team, Gareth and Martin, had not only written the ads but had stuffed the laces into envelopes themselves). The campaign had also met with some initial resistance within the sport. But by year two, it was such a success story that lots of other brands wanted to show their support. That’s what we were debating. The conventional answer would have been to politely decline: after all, Paddy Power had had to do all the hard work to get this off the ground. But Christian saw the maths differently. He said: “I’d rather be a small part of something big, than a big part of something small.” This thinking meant that over 40 brands (and 72 football clubs) took part that year. Six years later, Rainbow Laces is an annual campaign that the whole of British football endorses. The arch of Wembley Stadium has been lit up as a rainbow and the laces have been a storyline in the UK’s favourite soap opera. Paddy Power is still involved but has effectively handed over control of the campaign to the public. And it’s gained much more credit as a result. I think this reveals a great paradox about luck: namely that you can improve your good fortune by sharing it with others. The temptation is always to hoard your winnings, but you can actually gain more by spreading them around. Now, let’s get back to Brazil. Not to the rainforest though – to our sister agency in Sao Paulo (Lew’Lara\TBWA). It was 2015 so the World Cup bandwagon had rolled out of town. Ulisses Razaboni and Leandro Pinheiro were working late at the office. They had finished all their regular work and were thinking of ideas for a visual impairment charity. It was nearly midnight and they were both exhausted. Then Leandro looked at his computer screen, which was full of Braille letters, and turned to Ulisses. “Hey! Have you ever noticed that these look like Lego bricks? Maybe we could use the bricks as letters, to teach blind kids?” Fast forward to some rough prototypes. And some even rougher rejections. First, their charity client turned them down because their key audience was visually impaired rather than blind. So Ulisses and Leandro took the idea to Brazil’s biggest charity in their area: the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind. They were more receptive, but they pointed out that the prototypes were too crude to work. There were two versions at that time – one made from wood, the other from silicon – and the bumps were too irregular for a blind child to read properly. So the determined duo started experimenting with actual Lego bricks. These attempts proved more successful, if hard work. Ulisses and Leandro bought hundreds of bricks and cut off some of the ‘pins’ with a scalpel. They then sanded down the gaps so that they were completely smooth and wouldn’t cause confusion. They now had a perfect Braille alphabet. But when they uploaded the concept to the Lego Ideas website, it was immediately rejected for “violating the integrity of the bricks”. Ulisses told me that this decision was “devastating”. By now, he and Leandro had been plugging away for the best part of two years. It was beginning to look as if the project would never find a commercial backer. But the Dorina charity kept encouraging them, because they could see how popular the prototypes were. Over 300 children were now playing with them, at 12 institutions. They knew they had an amazing innovation on their hands but wanted more kids to benefit from them. So, like Christian and his rainbow laces, they decided to give their precious idea away. Specifically, Ulisses and Leandro made a film to attract toy manufacturers. The video explained that the bricks not only promoted literacy among blind kids – but encouraged social inclusion too. This is often a challenge for visually impaired kids, but the film showed that these toys were a fun, common currency. Sighted children were fascinated by the strange bumps and asked their blind friends lots of questions as they played together. Crucially, the film emphasised that Dorina would waive all intellectual property rights if someone would make the bricks at scale. The appeal ran on social media, using the hashtag #BrailleBricksforAll. There was virtually no media spend, so it was really a cry for help into cyberspace. Luckily, it struck a chord. The campaign clocked up over 140m impressions and gained coverage in the likes of Fast Company and Wired. Even the White House voiced support. But the real breakthrough was when Lego got back in touch with Dorina to say that they would love to be involved, after all. In fact, after further pilot tests, they have just started to roll out the product across 20 countries. All free of charge to blind charities and institutions. It’s the first time the company has adapted its bricks in this way.

Of course, you could say that this type of generosity only makes sense when you’re promoting a good cause. But ‘open innovation’ is also an increasingly popular strategy in the commercial space. Hard-nosed firms like Microsoft, Philips and Siemens invest huge amounts of money in research each year, then share it with others in the hope that the technology can be improved and expanded. Whether you’re promoting laces or bricks, software or devices, the logic is the same: it’s better to be a small part of something big, than a big part of something small.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Intellectual property is to be jealously guarded. Luck says: Sometimes it’s more profitable to share your thinking with others. So ask yourself: What could you give away to make your idea go further?

LUCKY LINES

L

egend has it that ancient cartographers made maps with the words ‘Here be dragons’ at the edges. This doesn’t seem to be true: there’s only one known instance of this phrase and it’s on a globe, rather than a two-dimensional chart. But the idea has gained credence in modern times because of what it says about us versus our forebears. We are explorers, we smugly tell ourselves. We’re not scared to push boundaries or seek out new land. We tackle our demons, rather than shy away from them. This spirit is very much the driving force in our industry. Several marketing theorists have written that it’s helpful to define a monster that your brand can go after. Almost everyone uses the language of trailblazers and pioneers (I’ve done it myself in this book). We all admire work that is edgy. But sometimes this natural desire to push to the extremes blinds us to a much bigger hinterland that we could be investigating, in our own backyard. In 2018, we found ourselves exploring just such an uncharted territory close to home. In the wake of Hollywood’s #MeToo movement, a group of prominent women came together with the aim of eradicating sexual harassment in the British ad industry. They represented all the major trade bodies, so created a new campaigning brand to tackle the issue: #timeTo. One of these inspirational leaders was my own business partner, Helen Calcraft. She was personally invested in this battle, not just as a feminist, but as somebody who had experienced sexual harassment early in her career. This issue was raw. It was public. There was a lot of pressure on us to get it right. Somewhat incredibly, the issue had never been researched before – let alone addressed. So the first step was to commission adland’s first-ever survey into the subject. The results were very troubling. Overall, 26% of respondents had experienced sexual harassment at some point in their career. And this was clearly still happening to the next generation of women – 20% of 18–24-year-olds had already suffered it. Some of the stories were truly horrendous and we knew that they would just be the tip of the iceberg. After all, part of the problem was that people were understandably reluctant to come forward. We knew we couldn’t fix this overnight, but it certainly felt like advertising could help bring the problem out into the open, as part of a longterm strategy. The challenge was how. The most obvious answer was to shock people with some of the stomach-turning stories we’d discovered. Then communicate a zero-tolerance policy, in the starkest possible terms. The timeTo committee had just published a code of conduct, so we could pick some of the no-go areas and remind people that there were certain behaviours that could never, ever be acceptable. In fact, an American campaign (on the adjacent issue of sexual consent) had recently taken a similar approach to great acclaim: it had set up the binary nature of Yes and No using a clever analogy with making someone a cup of tea. For instance: always ask the person if they want it first; never assume they will want it just because they wanted it on another occasion; never force it on someone when they’re asleep or inebriated – and so on. This campaign showed that you could make very serious points about very specific behaviours, but in a lateral way. Given that our audience consisted of creatively sophisticated people, it seemed like a really good reference point for our task. Well, for a few weeks, we charged off in this direction. We tried to spell out the ‘rules’ using shocking examples and unexpected analogies. To be fair, this did generate some very edgy work. But that was the problem: as we reviewed the ideas, we felt we’d sailed so far to the extremes of the issue that it would be easy for our audience to reject it. The more disturbing truth is that you don’t have to be Harvey Weinstein to be a sexual harasser, so showing some kind of monster might allow people to say, “well that’s not me”. Likewise, the most extreme transgressions might have been shocking but they weren’t particularly thoughtprovoking (‘obviously that’s wrong’). And frankly, sexual harassment is more complicated than making a cup of tea: certain behaviours lie in a grey area, dependent on the power relationship of those involved, the time and place, and so on. Hmmm. This grey area got us talking a lot more than the black-and-white rules we’d been exploring before. Instead of knocking down easy targets, we began to have more difficult conversations about the ambiguous middle ground. Was a congratulatory hug ever OK? What about asking to meet a colleague outside of work? Or sharing a cab home, late at night? These were all scenarios that featured in our research and yet they were also things we had done ourselves. Perhaps you have too? Armed with this insight, we created a much more thought-provoking campaign that asked people “where do you draw the line?” Instead of portraying clichéd predators, we never showed the perpetrator at all. And instead of positioning sexual harassment as a simple binary issue, we showed it as a continuum – one which therefore requires everyone to consider their actions, every step of the way. For instance: “Meet me/at 10pm/in my hotel/room/come alone. Where do you draw the line?”

Almost every agency in the UK has now signed up to support timeTo. We’ve created specific campaigns for two notorious flashpoints: Cannes and the Christmas party. And the initiative is now being translated into training. We wouldn’t have had such a widespread impact if we’d simply confirmed offender stereotypes and focused on extreme behaviours. Of course, this is a societal initiative, rather than a classic brand-marketing exercise. But the bigger point is that human life is complicated. The best ideas aren’t always found at the edge of the chart. Sometimes the creative high points lie between the contour lines of the map.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Great marketing is about pushing boundaries. Luck says: Sometimes it’s better to explore a grey area closer to home. So ask yourself: How can you find an insight between the lines?

LUCKY LORD

Q

uincy jones is a colossus of the music industry. Over 60 years, he’s clocked up a record 80 Grammy nominations, 28 Grammys and a Grammy Legend Award. He’s also had seven Oscar nominations and countless other industry gongs, while selling hundreds of millions of records.

You could call him Mr Lucky (the name of one of his many songs), except that Mr Jones is a firm believer that you make your own luck in life. It would take a whole book to explain how the Chicago-born maestro does it. After all, his virtuosity spans everything from song writing and composition to performance and production. Likewise, he’s worked with everybody from Frank Sinatra (“he took me to another planet”) and Aretha Franklin (“she turned this country upside down”) to The Beatles (“the worst musicians in the world”). In fact, he’s crossed paths with so many great figures that he’s often been likened to Forrest Gump. But if there’s a common theme that pulls together all his diverse strands of work, it’s his practice of creating space for unexpected moments of genius to occur. He sums this up with a favourite mantra: “Leave 20–30% of room for the Lord to walk through the room. Because then you’re leaving room for the magic.” What’s interesting is that this is a very deliberate strategy, rather than a passive hope that something good will happen. ‘Q’ is actually very rigorous in his approach: he has an incredible grasp of musical theory and is scathing of those who don’t apply the fundamentals of melody, harmony, counterpoint and orchestration to their work. But he also knows when the science must stop and artistry must be allowed to take over. He builds this into his process, rather than leaving it to chance. Jones likens this approach to painting (yet another area in which he excels). His songs start off as rough shapes, akin to charcoal sketches. Then as they take form, he plays around with different washes, like a watercolourist might. It’s only right at the end that he commits to their final execution and “puts it in oil”. This way of working was responsible for Jones’ masterpiece as a producer: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The 1982 classic is the best-selling album of all time (with up to 66m sales worldwide) and is often credited with the invention of the pop video as well as the breaking down of racial barriers in American music. It was the product of a relentless process – Jones and his team worked so hard that one of their amplifiers eventually caught fire – but one which allowed for regular deviations along the way. Take the album’s title track. ‘Thriller’ originally started off as a brighter piece called ‘Starlight’. But as the songwriter Rod Temperton got to know Jackson better, he discovered his love of horror films and gave it a more sinister feel. Then Jones revealed that his wife knew the horror actor Vincent Price, so they asked him to record the now-famous spoken-word sequence at the end. That’s two lucky breaks that wouldn’t have happened if the team had stuck rigidly to the original script. The smash hit ‘Billie Jean’ benefited from a similar moment of magic. From a technical point of view, Jones felt that the intro was too long, but Jackson wanted to keep it. He couldn’t really articulate why other than it made him want to dance. So Jones gave him some wiggle room (literally). “When Michael Jackson tells you that’s what makes him want to dance, well the rest of us just have to shut up.” Finally, the breakthrough number ‘Beat It’ should never have happened. It wasn’t on the original track list and the team had already recorded nine great songs. They were delighted with the album as it was and were ready to call it a day. Jackson, however, wanted to try his first rock number, so Jones scrubbed one of the existing tracks in favour of a new composition. He then roped in Eddie Van Halen to contribute an unlikely guitar track. After some initial scepticism (it took five calls for ‘Q’ to convince the rocker that it wasn’t a prank), Jones won him over with the promise of complete creative freedom: “I’m not gonna tell you what to play – the reason you’re here is because of what you do play.” Again, Jones had carved out some space for the Lord to do his work. In contrast, the modern advertising development process sometimes seems designed to keep the Lord locked out of the room. Once ideas have been sold up the chain, it’s hard to amend them on the hoof. Instead, storyboards and music tracks are locked down as soon as possible and directors are asked to shoot the script, rather than add too many flourishes of their own. Finally, the researchers are allowed longer to research the work than the creatives are given to come up with it in the first place. And any spare time is used on logic, rather than magic: meetings, pre-meetings and pre-premeetings are called to make sure everyone knows exactly what is going to happen next. The whole process is designed to make sure there are no nasty surprises, but it does also remove the opportunity for good luck. If you just want a quick burst of Starlight, then that’s fine. But if you want a genuine Thriller, then you need to leave room for some dancing, some horror and a little bit of Van Halen on the day.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: A good process removes the possibility of surprise.

Luck says: A truly great process allows for magic on the day. So ask yourself: How can you engineer some space for the Lord to walk through the room?

LUCKY CHARM

G

ary lineker has signed a lot of autographs over the years. No wonder. Not only is he one of England’s greatest-ever footballers, he’s also the country’s favourite pundit. What’s more, he’s known as Mr Nice Guy. Someone who really appreciates his fans. So it should come as no surprise that he once found himself signing off a personalised message: “With love from Gary Lineker.” The only problem was that it was in a birthday card. For his wife. Suffice to say, she is now his ex-wife. This story shows the perils of personalising a message. Get the details wrong and a half-arsed attempt is worse than doing nothing at all. It reminds me of the time a company contacted me to promote their targeted email capabilities. The snag was that their message to me began with “Dear Alan”. The truth is that personalisation has not lived up to its billing as twenty-first-century marketing’s greatest hope. To be fair, the argument was seductive. Artificial intelligence would allow brands to tailor messages and products to specific individuals. The recipients would appreciate the increased relevance of these interactions. Meanwhile, marketing would become more efficient. There would be no more ‘wastage’ as advertising would only target shoppers when they were actively in the market. The problem is that ordinary people dislike many of the clumsy techniques used right now. Even when companies don’t do a ‘Gary’ or an ‘Alan’, their attempts to woo us often come across as creepy or insincere. For instance, about two-thirds of Britons complain about re-targeted ads following them around the net. These are certainly seen as artificial, but not always intelligent – often they’re harassing us to buy products that we’ve already purchased. More surprisingly, the financial case for personalisation is not as strong as you might think. There’s a growing appreciation that wastage is not the deadly sin that it’s sometimes made out to be. While you can gain some shortterm efficiencies by going narrow, long-term effectiveness (which is more important) requires reach. Put simply, you generate higher returns by allowing people to overhear your marketing messages, even when they’re not actively shopping. That way, they’re well-disposed to your brand when they do come to buy. So should we all give up on personalisation? Well, not quite. Maybe we just need to rethink the way we look at it. In particular, perhaps we should take a more charming, human approach, rather than treat it as a robotic exercise in driving efficiencies. That was the thinking behind a campaign I once worked on for Radiocentre. Radiocentre is the trade body responsible for Britain’s commercial radio industry. It’s funded by over 200 stations and exists to promote the virtues of the medium to advertisers. Over the years, it’s assembled an enormous body of evidence, showing that radio can be a really powerful platform for brands. But as its top marketer, Lucy Barrett, explained to us, the medium still receives a smaller share of client expenditure than its share of consumer usage would warrant. The target audience for this campaign was very clear: a few thousand marketers and agency types who were responsible for buying media in this country. A micro-audience, if ever there was one. The problem was easy to define too. Our decision-makers were immune to all the rational evidence. They just didn’t want to include radio on their schedules – it seemed old-fashioned and creatively limiting. We needed to get them to feel something different about the medium. Or, as our new slogan said: “See radio differently” The real challenge though, was that we’d have to use radio to do this. In conventional media terms, this made no sense at all because our VIP audience didn’t listen to it. Worse still, 36m other people did listen, so there would be enormous wastage. But we could hardly ask other advertisers to use radio if we didn’t use it ourselves. So rather than employ more obvious choices (like email, direct mail or trade press) we were saddled with a conundrum: find a way to use radio, to promote radio, to people who don’t listen to radio! I have to admit that I found myself going round in circles at first. The combination of a targeted message and a broadcast medium seemed completely unworkable. But gradually, a kind of hybrid model began to emerge in my mind. One that was more rooted in human insight than machine learning. To illustrate this approach to the team, I used the example of embarrassing secrets. I reasoned that if we broadcast personal details about top marketers (such as their unusual hobbies or the silly dance they did at the Christmas party), they would soon find out about it. That’s because their friends, families and junior colleagues (who did listen to radio) would forward it on. The decision-makers would be flattered by the attention – and surprised by the medium’s incredible reach. In a nutshell, they would see, with their own eyes, that radio worked. The team seemed to like this general approach. They could see it working in our own agency (and for once, we were the target market). But they pointed out that literally focusing on secrets might prove creepy. The wrong kind of personalisation. This chimed with me, so we briefed a creative to come back with a better spin on the model. And Yan came up with a vastly superior version, using music. We were a radio brand, after all, so what could be more powerful than to create funny songs, with bespoke lyrics, dedicated to the top decision-makers in British advertising?

We started with a banging grime number that name-checked the Global CMO of Unilever, Keith Weed. “What a wake-up call,” he tweeted within hours of it airing on national radio. “You cannot believe how many calls and emails I received from people who had heard it.” Later that year, he made it the centrepiece of a speech at the Cannes Festival. We then aired a wistful piano ballad, aimed at the master of that genre – Craig Inglis, customer director of John Lewis. “I love radio!” he told the world. “We spent over £1m last year but after this, who knows, it could be more!” Others followed. For instance, an indie spot charmed Hugh Pym of L’Oréal. “I’m very impressed!” he announced. “On holiday (Puglia) … but the spot made its way quickly out here to the enjoyment of all.” Meanwhile Jonathan Mildenhall from Airbnb clearly loved his house anthem. “Nothing like knowing your audience intimately,” he enthused. “My love for radio just went BOOM!” He went on to say, “My team all over the world have taken notice. Talks are indeed ahead!” The problem with highly targeted campaigns is that they can be so specific that they don’t hold much learning for the rest of us. But in this case, I think there are two lessons. First, micro-targeting and mass-marketing don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The business guru Mark Ritson has argued that marketers sometimes polarise debates like this unnecessarily. He says we should pursue “bothism” instead. It’s a lovely phrase, and I think it applies here. As in: the most successful brands will be those who use both reach-driving communications and personalisation in a complementary way. Second, all the intelligence in the world counts for nothing if you don’t demonstrate genuine charm and imagination. As the ex-Mrs Lineker would tell you, if you’re going to personalise, make sure you show some personality yourself.

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Personalisation requires AI (artificial intelligence). Luck says: It works better when you also apply GI (genuine imagination). So ask yourself: How can you put more personality into your personalisation?

LUCKY EGGS

‘Y

esterday’ is the most covered song in musical history. But it started off life as ‘Scrambled eggs’. Paul McCartney came up with the melody in his sleep and was so desperate not to lose the results of his dream that he seized on the first words that came to mind over the breakfast table. Unfortunately, these were: “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as scrambled eggs.” These remained the lyrics for months and the song became a bit of an in-joke among The Beatles. It irritated Richard Lester (the director who was filming their second movie) so much that: “It got to the point where I said to [McCartney], ‘If you play that song any bloody longer, I’ll have the piano taken off stage. Either finish it or give it up!’” John Lennon eventually came to the rescue with an alternative title and the song morphed into something more serious. But it had been the eggs that had provided the original spark. The Beatles aren’t the only musicians to have employed unusual song-writing techniques like this. David Bowie was a devotee of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up approach. This involved snipping phrases from newspapers, books or diaries – then juxtaposing them at random. As with McCartney’s eggs, the words didn’t usually make it into Bowie’s final songs, but they helped “ignite anything that might be in my imagination”. Tom Waits has his own spin on the technique: he plays two radios at the same time and then looks for interesting overlaps. The thing that all these methods have in common is the desire to create new ideas from completely random connections. As such, they’re an extreme version of what we’ve been exploring all the way through this book. With our previous examples, we’ve used existing assets, outside inspiration and misfortune to fuel our creative thinking. But what if we stripped out all the logic and just threw some stuff at the wall? This scattergun approach sounds like sacrilege to a strategist. So I think I’ll give it a try. To make this simple, I’m going to set myself an imaginary brief. That way I won’t have to go through all the set-up. Let’s say I’m working on a brand of bacon (like McCartney’s eggs, this is what’s on my breakfast table this morning). And let’s use ‘Yesterday’ as our stimulus, as I’ve already mentioned it and most of us know the words. How many strategies can I come up with in two minutes and three seconds (the length of the song or just about long enough to fry a rasher)? Well for a start, the song’s title (and first line) has reminded me to think about heritage. How long has this company been going and what’s its history? Next, “All my troubles seemed so far away” makes me think about bacon as a solution to life’s problems (anyone who’s ever had a hangover will relate to this). “Now it looks as if they’re here to stay” begs the question: where is “here”? Perhaps there’s a provenance angle that we could exploit? That’s often a successful approach for food brands, as we saw in the first section. “Oh I believe in yesterday” is obviously a nudge to a more belief-driven strategy. What’s this brand’s manifesto or point of view on life? OK, that’s four starting points already. Now let’s move onto the second verse. “Suddenly” clearly suggests an impulse-driven approach. Could this brand be a spur-of-the-moment purchase? Or cooked on more spontaneous occasions? “I’m not half the man I used to be” could yield a demographic angle. Who uses this brand? Is bacon more of a male thing? If so, could we bring masculinity to life in a more progressive way? (None of us are the men we used to be, right?) “There’s a shadow hanging over me” prompts me to think about health concerns and whether there’s a positive story there. That’s another three contenders, but I’m running out of time now. So let’s up the ante and see how many more I can squeeze out of the last few lines. “Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.” This sounds mysterious – I wonder if there’s a way to position this brand as a well-kept secret. “I said something wrong” makes me think of taboos and misinformation. Are there any category myths that we could demolish? “Now I long for yesterday” sparks thoughts of deprivation. Could we make people pine for our brand by taking it away? Like a “Got milk?” for bacon? “Love was such an easy game to play” is a bit of a gift. It contains three separate ideas: desire, convenience and fun. I’ll take them all. “Now I need a place to hide away” makes me think of bacon as a guilty secret. Finally, we have the immortal lyrics “Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm”. If that’s not a taste strategy, I don’t know what is. By my reckoning, that’s about 15 strategic starting points in two minutes. OK, most of them probably wouldn’t last the course any more than our song-writing friends’ early lyrics. But as a light-hearted exercise, it hopefully shows that forcing random connections can get you very quickly to a wide range of interesting ideas.

Of course, at some point these will need to be refined by a more considered and serious process. But to get yourself started, why not cut up some papers, switch on all your radios and scramble some eggs?

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Marketing strategy is a logical thought process. Luck says: A scattergun approach can be helpful in the early stages. So ask yourself: How can you use random connections to get yourself started?

LUCKY YOU

I

n the previous 39 chapters, I’ve shared the thoughts of the world’s greatest philosophers, writers, leaders and scientists. But for my grand finale, I want to rope in someone wiser still. Dolly Parton.

I’m not being facetious. In fact, quite the opposite. For decades, people have underestimated the country legend, writing her off as a blonde, busty bimbo. But she’s actually an extraordinarily talented and clever woman. As a performer, she’s made a record-breaking 44 top-ten country albums. As a composer, she’s written 3,000 songs (including ‘Jolene’ and ‘I will always love you’, which she came up with on the same day). As an actor, she’s been nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe. As a businesswoman, she’s built a multimedia empire with her own theme park (Dollywood) at its heart. And to crown it all, she partly funded the Moderna Covid vaccine in 2020. But what’s really amazing about La Parton, is that she’s clawed her way up from a shack in the woods to a $500m fortune by being herself – and then some. She’s never forgotten her roots – instead, she’s played up to them. From the clothes to the wigs, the merchandise to the events, she’s managed every aspect of her public life so that each detail reinforces an exaggerated essence of herself. She’s even proudly responsible for all the best jokes about herself. For instance, she laughs that: “It costs a lot to look this cheap.” She also muses that: “I look just like the girl next door – if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.” And as for the bimbo jibes: “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb – and I know I’m not blonde.” This winning combination of self-awareness and positive reinforcement has now become her go-to piece of advice for others: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” It’s also one of my favourite quotes about building a brand. When I look back at the successful companies mentioned in this book, I see the same attitude, writ large. For instance, it’s the kind of self-awareness and commitment that prompts Yorkshire Tea to launch a social-distancing teapot. Or that encourages Virgin Atlantic to make stealable salt shakers. Or that drives Paddy Power to enquire about a giraffe. I see the same spirit in other brands too. For example, it’s the sort of self-assurance that allows Patagonia to insert labels in its clothes, carrying the message “Vote the Assholes Out”. Or that lets Innocent Smoothies place tiny knitted hats on its bottles to raise money for Age UK. Or that helps Marvel make amazing 404 pages featuring its superheroes. All of these companies are driven by important missions. They have ambitious goals and big ideas. But they also carry their sense of purpose into even the tiniest of details of their operation. They practise what they preach, over and over again. Talking of which, if this book is any good, I should be able to apply its lessons to its own marketing. So here goes. How could I improve the odds of a book that’s all about improving the odds of brands? Well, Section 1 preached the need to appreciate what you have. In my case, I realise that I’ve led a charmed life, both domestically and professionally. But I also appreciate that many people have not had my advantages. In fact, the strategist Lisa Thompson has argued brilliantly that certain aspects of our industry actively work against social mobility. So, to carry the theme of this book to its logical extension, I’m going to give away all my royalties to a deserving cause. Specifically, there’s a great organisation called Commercial Break which helps young people from workingclass backgrounds get into (and thrive in) our sector. I like the idea of a book about luck helping to give someone else a lucky break. Then Section 2 advised us to look out for opportunities everywhere. You may remember Professor Wiseman’s experiment, where he hid an advertisement in a newspaper offering research respondents $250 if they spotted it. I might bankrupt myself if I tried that here, but I’d love to try a more limited version. So I’ve hidden a deliberate mistake in one of the chapters and will give £250 to the first person to spot it. Email me at [email protected] to claim your reward. Then Section 3 was all about turning misfortune into good fortune. I think there might be an interesting twist on the promotional calendar here. Most cultures have numbers (and therefore dates) which are considered inauspicious. For instance, 4 April (4/4) in China. Or 8 August (8/8) in India. Or Friday 13 in many Western countries. So I plan to focus my promotional activities on those dates. After all, what better time to sell a book about luck, than on the days when people are feeling most unlucky? Finally, this last Section has preached the need to practise being lucky. You might remember how the people behind Rainbow Laces and Braille Bricks made their ideas go further by giving something away. This makes me think I should donate some copies of this book to advertising colleges and business schools. Maybe to make it more on-brand, I’ll just leave them lying around campus, with lottery tickets tucked inside, for whichever lucky students find them first. It won’t cost me much but will get the book talked about among a key demographic. I’m sure there are many more ways to ‘do’ this book on purpose. But most of the ideas won’t emerge until it’s published. Because that’s the beautiful thing about luck – opportunities are always presenting themselves in unexpected ways. When you have a clear mission, it’s a joy to seize these little chances as you go. Or as the sign at the front of Dollywood says: “Enjoy every moment.”

GO LUCK YOURSELF Convention says: Focus on the big picture. Luck says: Fortune is in the details. So ask yourself: How can you make every touchpoint, memory and moment more ‘you’?

CONCLUSION

T

he writer E. B. White once said that “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men”. I hope this book will change that.

There’s overwhelming evidence that chance plays a strong role in commerce – just as it does elsewhere. To acknowledge this isn’t to downplay the toil and talent that shape success. Neither does it contradict Emily Dickinson’s assertion that “Fortune’s expensive smile is earned”. In fact, the whole point of this book has been to highlight yet another factor which smart and industrious marketers must navigate to propel themselves forward. What I hope I’ve proved though, is that effort and talent are not enough. Likewise, that good luck shouldn’t be taken for granted nor bad luck viewed as a curse. The truth is that we are now living in a very unpredictable world, where businesses can be thrown into chaos by external events – no matter how hard-working or clever they have been. Alternatively, they can ride powerful waves that are not of their making – if they get their timing and technique right. This book sets out 40 ways for you to stack the odds in your brand’s favour, in this chaotic environment. But it isn’t a guarantee of success. The Lucky Dudes, Dogs, Rabbits and Mice will hopefully prove able assistants, but the rest is down to you. You must work out which techniques apply best to your business. You must think creatively about your assets, enemies, limits and processes. You must remember Dolly’s advice and work out which ones are most ‘you’. In short: life is tough, but these lessons should help. Now Go Luck Yourself.

REFERENCES The vast majority of campaigns referenced in this book relate to work by Lucky Generals – the agency I set up with Helen Calcraft and Danny Brooke-Taylor in 2013. To avoid unnecessary repetition, please assume this was the agency responsible for any work, unless stated otherwise. In a couple of other instances, I reference work by MCBD – the agency Helen co-founded with Jeremy Miles, Paul Briginshaw and Malcolm Duffy in 1999 and which Danny and I then ran with her, prior to Lucky Generals. As ever, apologies that I can’t acknowledge everybody who helped on these. Finally, there are a handful of occasions where I reference work by other agencies and I will, of course, acknowledge them where I’ve not already done so in the main text.

INTRODUCTION Luck: A Key Idea for Business and Society by Chengwei Liu. Routledge, Abingdon. (2019) Slouching Towards Adulthood by Sally Koslow. Plume Books, New York. (2012)

SECTION 1 Speech at Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting by Warren Buffet. (1997) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Knopf, New York. (1964) LinkedIn post by Tal Ben-Shahar. (2017)

LUCKY NAME Mumsnet survey of 1,000 British parents. (2016) Positioning: The Battle for your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. McGraw Hill, New York. (1980) We created the Loyd Grossman campaign at MCBD, with Malcolm Duffy and Paul Briginshaw as creative directors.

LUCKY PLACE ‘Phileas Fogg snacks set for welcome return’. Chronicle. (September 21, 2009) The Phileas Fogg campaign was created by BBH. ‘Planning Done Proper – the story of the Yorkshire Tea campaign’ by Loz Horner. APG Awards. (2019)

LUCKY LEGACY ‘From a rare urn to JFK’s jacket: the most valuable Antiques Roadshow finds’. Starts at 60. (2018) ‘Is Premier toast?’ by Ben Laurance. The Sunday Times. (March 2, 2008) The 1974 Hovis campaign was created by CDP. We created the 2008 Hovis campaign at MCBD, with Danny Hunt and Gavin Torrance as creatives. ‘Hovis – as good today as it’s ever been’ by Andy Nairn. IPA Effectiveness Awards. (2010) The attic analogy was inspired by the excellent 2018 IPA Effectiveness paper by Tom Roach: ‘A Rembrandt in the attic: rediscovering the value of “Have you had your Weetabix?”’

LUCKY FEET ‘Is that myth about big feet and penis size true?’ by Erika W. Smith. Refinery29. (September 5, 2019) How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (2010) ‘Life expectancy is shorter, the bigger your feet’ by Emily Hodgkin. Daily Express. (January 23, 2017) ‘Runners’ feet and toes: the long and the short of it’ on Americanfoot.com (2016) The British agency referred to was WCRS (and to be fair, their “interrogate the product” mantra brought them a lot of success in their heyday). ‘The Wookie won: how Peter Mayhew brought Chewbacca to life’ by Tristram Fane Saunders. Daily Telegraph. (May 3, 2019)

LUCKY DUDE How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Vermilion, London. (1936)

LUCKY MASCOT ‘The rise and fall of Japan’s mascot empire’. Tastemade. (October 5, 2015) ‘Adachin: stray mascot’. Mondo Mascots. (September 9, 2018) ‘Short-termism and the demise of the fluent device’ by Orlando Woods. EffWeek (October 20, 2017) Colonel Sanders was reinvented by Wieden+Kennedy in 2015. The Pillsbury Doughboy was created by Leo Burnett and the PG Tips Monkey by Mother.

LUCKY PEOPLE ‘Sainsbury’s changes Tiger Bread to Giraffe Bread after advice from 3-year-old’. The Telegraph. (February 1, 2012) ‘Richard Branson: Success from hard work is not luck’. Business Insider. (September 10, 2014) ‘Virgin Holidays issues Rockstar manifesto’. Campaign. (May 11, 2011) We created the Virgin Holidays campaign at MCBD, with Matt Lever and Helen Rhodes as creatives.

LUCKY FUEL The Spotify campaigns referenced were created in-house. The Ruavieja campaign was created by Leo Burnett Madrid.

LUCKY PACK An interview with John Schoolcraft, the creative director of Oatly, for The Challenger Project. (September 27, 2016) The Oatly packaging was designed by Forsman and Bodenfors.

LUCKY TIMING When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink. Canongate Books, Edinburgh. (2018) Lucky Generals’ Cressida Holmes-Smith and Alice McGinn were particularly instrumental on the Co-op project.

SECTION 2 Heroides by Ovid. (c.5 BCE) The Luck Factor by Dr Richard Wiseman. Century. (2003) ‘You may not know where you’re going until you get there’ by Jeremy Bullmore. WPP Annual Report. (2014) Speech at Lille University by Louis Pasteur. (1854)

LUCKY GEORGE ‘How VELCRO® brand fasteners were invented’ on Velcro.co.uk (2018) ‘Biomimicry: the natural blueprint’ by Nitin Sreedhar. Mint. (October 7, 2018) ‘Predators and prey: a new ecology of competition’ by James F. Moore. Harvard Business Review. (May/June 1993) Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Changing Our True Nature by Mark Earls. Wiley & Sons, Chichester. (2009) ‘An evolution of weeds and trees: reimagining growth in the 21st century’ by Omar El-Gammal. IPA Excellence Diploma. (2020) ‘Ideas work like Velcro’ by Russell Davies. Recounted by David Hieatt. Unbound. (January 14, 2014)

LUCKY LEAP ‘How to do a Barani flip’ on Rebounderz.com (2020) The ‘Slag of all snacks’ campaign for Pot Noodle was created by HHCL. The ‘Why try harder’ campaign for Pot Noodle was created by Mother.

LUCKY PAINT ‘How cubism protected warships in World War I’. Wired. (November 29, 2017)

LUCKY DOG ‘John le Carré: An interrogation’ by Michael Barber. The New York Times. (September 25, 1977) ‘7 types of conflict in literature’ on Scribendi.com (2020) I have omitted the seventh form (character versus supernatural) as this doesn’t naturally apply to marketing. ‘Amazon wins 30th annual USA Today Ad Meter competition’. USA Today. (February 5, 2018) Sarah Quinn has been particularly instrumental on our various Amazon campaigns.

LUCKY NUMBERS ‘How lottery legend Joan Ginther likely used odds, Uncle Sam to win millions’ by Peter Mucha. The Philadelphia Inquirer. (July 2, 2014) ‘What are the chances?’ by David Hand. Aeon.com (July 16, 2014) ‘The big debate: Are the ‘4Ps of marketing’ still relevant?’ by Jonathan Bacon. Marketing Week (February 9, 2017) How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (2010) ‘Everything you need to know about Pinduoduo, the fastest growing rival to Alibaba and JD in China’ by Arjun Kharpal. CNBC. (April 21, 2020)

LUCKY SHRINK Benjamin Franklin’s famous words were contained in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy. (1789) The ‘Hector’ campaign for Inland Revenue was created by Leagas Shafron Davis. The ‘Mrs. Doyle’ campaign for Inland Revenue was created by M&C Saatchi. We created the ‘Tax doesn’t have to be taxing’ campaign at MCBD, with Paul Briginshaw and Malcolm Duffy as creative directors. ‘How a change in advertising direction proved that tax doesn’t have to be taxing’ by Andy Nairn. IPA Effectiveness Awards. (2006) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Caravan. (2008)

LUCKY CAKES ‘How the cupcake ATM became a $9m chain’ by Caroline Fairchild. Fortune. (March 28, 2014) ‘Sometimes the best ideas come from outside your industry’ by Marion Poetz, Nikolaus Franke and Martin Schreier. Harvard Business Review. (November 21, 2014) The currency exchange and night-bus activations for Tennent’s were developed by Bright Signals, working to our strategy. James Fox made the Tennent’s campaign (and many others in this book) a lot of fun. Sometimes too much fun...

LUCKY ALIEN ‘The role of graded category structure in imaginative thought’ by Thomas B. Ward, Merryl J. Patterson, Cynthia M. Sifonis, Rebecca A. Dodds and Katherine N. Saunders of A&M University. Memory and Cognition. 30 (2), 199–216. (2002) ‘Neurodiversity as a competitive advantage’ by Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano. Harvard Business Review. (May/June 2017) ‘People with disabilities are some of the best problem-solvers in our society’ by Colm Gorey. Siliconrepublic.com (July 16, 2019) ‘Is there a gay advantage in creativity?’ by Amelia Noor, Chew Chee and Aslina Ahmad. International Journal of Psychological Studies. 5 (2). (2013) Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. Pandora Press, London. (1985) ‘The history of advertising in quite a few objects: 31 The Smash Martians’. Campaign. (May 10, 2012)

LUCKY CARROTS ‘Why are children so creative? The link between childhood and creativity’. Dropbox. (July 24, 2018) ‘10 incredible things invented by kids’ by Shlomo Sprung. Business Insider. (June 14, 2012) ‘Child’s play: facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation’ by Daryla L. Zabelina and Michael D. Robinson of North Dakota State University in Psychology of Creativity. Aesthetics and the Arts. 4 (1), 57–65. (2010) ‘Aging and a benefit of distractability’ by Sunghan Kim, Lynn Hasher and Rose T. Zacks of University of Toronto. Psychon Bull Rev. 14 (2), 301–305. (2007)

SECTION 3 ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ Itstimetomeditate.org (June 21, 2017)

LUCKY RABBIT Walt Disney. The Biography by Neal Gabler. Aurum Press, London. (2008) Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson. Little, Brown, London. (2011) John Steinbeck: A Biography by Jay Parini. William Heinemann Ltd. (1994)

LUCKY COFFIN A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean by James Cook and James King. (1821) ‘#MyPersonalCoffin’. Ju-schnee.com (2019) Bild headline from Heimat’s Cannes case-study video. (2019)

LUCKY ESCAPE The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes. (1936) A Counterblaste to Tobacco by King James I. (1604) ‘Tobacco control. A new approach to an old problem’ by Andy Nairn, Kate Waters and Pete Kemp. IPA Effectiveness Awards. (2010) We created the ‘Real kids’ anti-smoking campaign at MCBD, with Matt Lever and Helen Rhodes as creatives.

LUCKY LOCKDOWN The KFC campaign was created by Mother. ‘Spirit Airlines mishap tells customers “never a better time to fly” amid coronavirus pandemic’ by Sophie Lewis. CBS News. (March 12, 2020) ‘Willing and able: building a crisis-resilient workforce’ by Deloitte. (2015) Lucky Generals survey of 1,000 British adults via Toluna. (2020) ‘Roaring out of recession’ by Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen. Harvard Business Review. (March 2010) ‘To emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, companies should start reskilling their workforces now’ by Sapana Agrawal, Aaron de Smet, Sébastian Lacroix and Angelika Reich. Mckinsey.com (May 17, 2020) Anti-Fragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Random House, New York. (2012)

LUCKY HITCH Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd. (2015) The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton. Harriman House, Petersfield. (2018) Bill Bernbach created the VW and Avis campaigns at DDB. Dave Trott on Twitter. (July 7, 2020) Our Hostelworld campaign won the Grand Prix at the YouTube Works for Brands Awards. (2018)

LUCKY LIMITS A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform your Limitations into Advantages and Why it’s Everyone’s Business by Mark Barden and Adam Morgan. Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. (2015)

LUCKY MICE The Inquisitive Man by Ivan Krylov. (1814) Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. (1872) The Stolen White Elephant by Mark Twain. (1882) ‘Kevin Harvick irritated with Kurt Busch’. East Bay Times (March 25, 2006) ‘Harvick name replaces Busch beer in one-off NASCAR paint scheme’ by Shane Walters. racingnews.co (October 4, 2019) ‘Small wins: redefining the scale of social problems’ by Karl Weick. American Psychologist 39 (1), 40–49. (1984)

LUCKY BORE ‘There is no such thing as a low-interest category’ by Richard Huntington. Adliterate. (April 14, 2006) Voltaire’s quote seems to have been invented by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her biography The Life of Voltaire. (1903) The Ronseal campaign was created by HHCL. The Church and I by Francis Joseph Sheed. Doubleday, New York. (1974)

The Persil ‘Dirt is good’ campaign was created by JWT. ‘A meta-analysis of humor in advertising’ by Martin Eisend. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. 37 (2), 191–203. (January 2009) Data from Kantar (2020) shows that use of humour declined from 53% of all ads in 2000 to 34% in 2020. ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ was created by McCann Melbourne for Metro Trains in 2012. ‘Dull, Boring and Bland day: together in tedium’. The Independent. (August 9, 2018)

LUCKY BASTARDS National Customer Rage Survey by Customer Measurement and Consulting in collaboration with the Center for Services Leadership at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and Kraft Heinz. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy by Bill Gates. Warner Books, New York. (1999) ‘70% of companies ignore complaints on Twitter’ by Jay Baer. Convince&Convert. (2020) ‘One quarter of Britons witnessed hate crime in last year’ by Caroline Davies. The Guardian (January 27, 2018) I first used the analogy with the hospitality industry in a piece for Campaign. (June 11, 2020) James Mylet is the only finance director in the world who would have signed off on Lucky Bastards, let alone managed all the payments. So he deserves special thanks.

LUCKY PENCILS Apologeticus by Tertullian (AD 197). The authenticity of this has been questioned by others, including Mary Beard, but it remains good advice! ‘Leonard Cohen: before the gig, a chant in Latin’ by Elisa Bray. The Independent. (September 6, 2012) Brian Clough story recounted by Dean Saunders on TalkSport. (September 21, 2017)

SECTION 4 ‘The story behind Jeff Bezos’ lucky cowboy boots’ by Ali Montag. CNBC. (May 3, 2018) ‘A conversation with Amy Tan’ by Dana Gioia. The American Interest. (May 1, 2007) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. Simon and Schuster, New York. (2000)

LUCKY SHOT Luck: A Fresh Look at Fortune by Ed Smith. Bloomsbury, London. (2012) ‘Did this Texas pro really make 51 holes in one? We put his astounding claim to the test’ by Josh Sens. Golf.com (April 15, 2020) Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite by Paul Arden. Penguin, London. (2006) Bill Shankly in quotes on Liverpoolfc.com (September 29, 2012)

LUCKY GOAL ‘Saturday Night Live’. NBC. (February 11, 2017) Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. (1994) ‘How Celebrity is bridging the gap in the cruise industry’ by Allan Jordan. Cruise and Ferry. (April 10, 2020)

LUCKY DIP ‘Khrushchev in water wings: on Mao, humiliation and the Sino-Soviet split’ by Mike Smith. Smithsonianmag.com. (May 4, 2012) ‘Branson’s mile-high masterclass shows that PR cuts through’ by Stefano Hatfield. Campaign. (June 11, 1999) I first used the story of Mao in a piece for Campaign (March 18, 2019). I worked on Virgin Atlantic while at a great agency called Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe. Martha Riley created the ‘BA don’t give a shiatsu’ ad mentioned.

LUCKY TRICK ‘TikTok teens and K-Pop stans say they sank Trump rally’ by Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning, Sheera Frenkel. The New York Times. (June 21, 2020) Ed Morris’s comment is from his LinkedIn (June 21, 2020).

LUCKY LACES Open Innovation: The New Imperative For Creating and Profiting from Technology by Henry Chesbrough. Harvard Business Review, Boston. (2003) As well as Lucky Generals, which launched and led the Rainbow Laces campaign from 2013–2014, Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Mr President have also been involved at various stages.

LUCKY LINES timeTo was created as a partnership between the Advertising Association, NABS and WACL. Credos survey of 3,600 people working in advertising and marketing (2018).

LUCKY LORD ‘Thriller: how Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones made the bestselling album of all time’ by Alan Light. Rolling Stone. (October 2009) ‘Quincy’ Netflix documentary (2018). ‘Q on producing’ (The Quincy Jones legacy series) by Quincy Jones and Bill Gibson. (2010) For a broader view of Quincy Jones’ relevance to strategy and creativity, see Jim Carroll’s excellent piece: ‘Q Tips: The Wise Counsel of Quincy Jones’ (2020).

LUCKY CHARM Gary Lineker story recounted by Moose Allain on Twitter (August 5, 2012). ‘“Bothism” is the cure for marketers’ fascination with pointless conflict’ by Mark Ritson, Marketing Week. (September 3, 2020)

LUCKY EGGS ‘Yesterday: the song that started as Scrambled Eggs’ by Alice Vincent. The Daily Telegraph. (June 18, 2015) ‘Cracked actor: a film about David Bowie’. BBC. (1975) ‘Tom Waits: the fresh air interview’ with Terry Gross. NPR. (November 31, 2011)

LUCKY YOU ‘Dolly Parton: Gee, she’s really nice’ by Robert Ebert. RobertEbert.com (December 7, 1980)

Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business by Dolly Parton. HarperCollins, London. (1994)

CONCLUSION E.B White, writing in Harpers (1943). ‘Luck Is Not Chance’ by Emily Dickinson. (1945)

PUBLISHING DETAILS HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD

3 Viceroy Court Bedford Road Petersfield Hampshire GU32 3LJ GREAT BRITAIN Tel: +44 (0)1730 233870 Email: [email protected] Website: harriman.house First published in Great Britain in 2021. Copyright © Andy Nairn The right of Andy Nairn to be identified as the Author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85719-888-4 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85719-889-1 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library. All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior written consent of the Publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that information in this book is accurate, no liability can be accepted for any loss incurred in any way whatsoever by any person relying solely on the information contained herein. No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Author, or by the employers of the Author.