Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

Car screens and synthesisers
The current debate over car screens / car as computer design reminded me a lot of the journey that synthesisers have gone through.

I went down this train of thought on car screens thanks to a LinkedIn post by Nic Roope, reacting to an article published in Car Design News in praise of push buttons.

There is a view in car circles that the reliance on screens to mediate so many of the functions of a car can be a bad thing. I can understand it. For enthusiasts driving a car is still a very analogue experience including the haptics of direct steering connectivity and a manual gearbox.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share the opinion of Doug DeMuro who argued the case for screens in terms of two reasons:
- Costs. Buttons cost more money and there would be the associated connectors. Modern vehicles offer such a range of controls, that doing them in buttons rather than soft buttons and car screens would be cost and space prohibitive.
- Technological momentum. DeMuro essentially articulates a position similar to Kevin Kelly’s concept of the technium in his book What Technology Wants. Kelly uses a biological metaphor of progress as an organism or Gaia type metaphor that keeps growing and moving at its own pace. While Kelly has been accused to techno-mysticism, we do know that the development of key technologies like television or the light bulb were happening at the same time in different parts of the world in isolation from each other – there had become a time when they were inevitable.
the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us
Kevin Kelly on the technetium in What Technology Wants

Colin Chapman versus software engineers.

DeMuro’s first point is based on the proposition that all this extra control in car screens is a good thing. Do we really need to have car interior mood lighting? And if we do, do we need to have colours that result in night blindness and make the car interior looks like a booth at a bottle service bar in Dubai?

For some drivers, the answer will be no.

Different car manufacturers have had different models that do very different things. One of the philosophies articulated most by car enthusiasts is that of Lotus cars founder Colin Chapman “simplify, and add lightness”.

Chapman’s design ethos was very in-tune with the likes of mid-century thinkers like polymath Buckminster Fuller and those he influenced notably architect Sir Norman Foster.

Chapman’s world view wasn’t perfect his vehicles were fragile and had quality issues, partly due to his daring use of new materials and techniques influenced by aerospace. It’s also a world away from the Tesla approach, where the vehicle can’t be started up without the screen even as a ‘limp mode’ function.

Instead the Tesla pickup and car screens are infested with boondoggles including:
- A video of a fireplace filled with burning logs
- A game that allows you to break the windows of a virtual CyberTruck
- Customisable horn sounds including celebrity voices
- A pre-programmed light show
Modern car economics.

Car screens have advanced in tock-step with the move towards an electric car future. A technology transition at the best of times is difficult, but the car industry has other problems that will impact consumer views of vehicles.

Consumer choice.

In the 1970s cars cars seldom lasted over a decade, but due to improvements in corrosion treatment and car design that removed water traps the potential life of a car was extended. Given that classic cars are much less damaging to the environment. The average classic emits 563kg of CO2 per year, yet an average passenger car has a 6.8-tonne carbon footprint immediately after production. This means that a new car would need to be run for several years to achieve a similar climate ‘payback’ and older cars can be attractive for consumers, if they meet their needs reliably.

Vehicle affordability.

Over the time I have held a driving licence, the secondhand car market went from being the dumping ground for fleet sales to the Alice In Wonderland after effects of the lease agreements that drove new and nearly-new car sales. The financialisation of the car market isn’t without risk and has been considered a possible future risk in the way that consumer finance and home mortgages have been in the past.

So what do car touchscreens have to do with synthesisers?

In order to answer that question, we need to go back in time. Massive steps forward in electronics had inspired research into different ways of creating sounds based on modulation techniques used in radio broadcast signals for decades. In the 1960s digital technology was also moving forward and provided a more stable base for FM synthesis. Stanford University scholars worked with Yamaha technologists to turn FM synthesis into a product.

The first instrument that it appeared in was the New England Digital Synclavier, who had licensed the technology from Yamaha. The Synclavier, was a couple of racks full of computer storage, a processing unit, cooling and audio interfaces. This was all connected up to a monitor and a keyboard. Over time the Synclavier would evolve into the ancestor of the modern digital audio workstation (DAW) like Apple’s Logic Pro app.

1983, comes around and Yamaha is finally ready to launch a mainstream product featuring FM synthesis. it also features MIDI, a standard that is still used to control musical instruments (and other studio equipment) remotely. Roland had released a couple of devices that supported the standard.

But Yamaha’s DX7 proved to be the blockbuster product. At that time electronic music was a niche interest and instrument manufacturers would be very lucky to sell 50,000 units. Yamaha sold over 300,000 units in the first three years of sales over its 7 year life and 10,000s of more devices of the DX and TX families.

Digital changes the interface

Analogue synthesisers wer full of switches and dials. This Oberheim synthesiser above, isn’t that different from its analogue predecessors from five decades prior.

The DX7 was a very different beast, it couldn’t have a dial or button for every parameter, rather like modern car screens with endless settings. So it had a few buttons which changed their function depending on what the synthesiser. A few earlier models had limited sales with a similarly spartan approach, but the DX7 mainstreamed the idea.

A few things happened that might be instructive for how we now think about car screens:
- Other synthesiser manufacturers like Roland and Korg copied Yamaha’s approach to interface design. Some of them tried using devices like jog wheels to provide additional intuitive control, in a similar way conceptually to BMW’s iDrive interface for its car screens.
- Software companies looked to fill the gap to provide a better interface, which eventually begat modern software digital audio workstation applications like Logic Pro. We might see similar developments sold for cars, and this is likely the opportunity that the likes of Apple CarPlay sees. There is consumer demand to support it.
- Despite the obvious benefit of soft button driven instruments, there still remained a strong demand for analogue controls. Now there is a strong demand for tactile interface controls and old style synthesis. In the car world that would equate to providing car enthusiasts with analogue experiences, while the mainstream goes to Tesla minimalism of the car screen. We can see this in the design of Hyundai’s analogue feeling performance electric cars that try and emulate a manual gear box and Ineos’ switch gear that owes more to aviation than automotive manufacturing.
You can find similar posts to this here.

More information

Average Age of Cars in Great Britain | NimbleFins

In praise of pushbuttons (and other physical controls) | Car Design News

Car pollution facts: from production to disposal, what impact do our cars have on the planet? | Auto Express

MIDI Quest Pro Yamaha DX7 software editor

Patchbase Yamaha DX7 software editor
May 22, 2024
Coffee shop problem
One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.

Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.

The barriers to using re-usable cups include:
- Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
- Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
- Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.
Customer habits

Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.

COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.

Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.

Back to my friend’s coffee shop

So back to the discussion that inspired this post:

We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…

This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:

Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).

Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.

A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.

More posts similar to this can be found here.
May 15, 2024
Mobilizing for monuments & more
Mobilizing for monuments

Mobilizing for Monuments is an interesting brand collaboration. Flickr was a natural partner for the the environmental charities due to it being the destination community for serious photographers. Rivian also makes sense, given that they make electric all-wheel drive vehicles – which presumably have a lower carbon footprint.

The Mobilizing for Monuments road trip film that highlights the benefits of the brands involved as well as the conservation messaging. Rivian gets to showcase its vehicles at a time when Tesla’s Cybertruck has a reputation that’s gone from a must-have vehicle to a dog’s dinner. The thing that I am most curious about Mobilizing for Monuments is where Flickr takes it next? Test

Ray Kurzweil expands on his idea of The Singularity

Ray talks about his ideas articulated in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and popularised in The Singularity. He speculates that The Singularity will be in 2045 in terms of what’s technically possible, but not the market forces that are likely to be green light it. I presume that this talk is to coincide with the launch of his book featuring his updated thinking: The Singularity is Nearer.

Writing with large language models

This MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy talk is very pertinent given the current debates that copywriters seem to be having around automation and LLMs. Mina Lee takes a social science approach to her investigation to LLMs including an evaluation model.

Reinvent the model

Swedish fashion retailer Lindex has looked at diversifying its models across its advertising and marketing materials. It is also re-examining beauty standards and the related pressures that its customers face. This a long term process that they have described as ‘Reinvent the Model‘.

More related posts can be found here.

Spotify showcases inspirational ads

Spotify (at least in the UK) have done a great job supporting strategists and planners with case studies and research reports over the years. This time they have collected a selection of UK-specific campaigns on their platform demonstrating its strengths.
- Channel 4 Streamland—an in-app experience, which personalised show recommendations for Spotify users based on their listening habits.
- Hyundai did a video takeover for their campaign to get consumers to pronounce their name authentically.
May 11, 2024
Shutting down
Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.

At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.

Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.

My Nokia N95

Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:
- Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
- Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
- Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
- Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.
Parent and policy voices.

The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:
- Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
- (Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
- Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).
The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.

There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.

Under-supply.

While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.

HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.

Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.

Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:
- People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
- Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
- Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.
Punkt.

A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.

More related posts can be found here.

More information

Battle lines drawn as US states take on big tech with online child safety bills | Guardian Online

UK children and adults to be safer online as world-leading bill becomes law | GOV.uk

Zuckerberg among tech bosses to testify on child safety | BBC Online
May 8, 2024
Dove 20 years of real beauty
I was privileged to freelance at Ogilvy on Dove a number of years ago and got to understand the brand a little better during that time. My work on Dove was focused on product advertising for Dove soap in Brazil, the US, Vietnam and the Philippines rather than adding to the master brand canon around beauty standards.

When the 20th anniversary of the master brand campaign rolled around my LinkedIn was filled with posts about 20 years of the Real Beauty (or changing beauty as its currently articulated) positioning for the Dove brand. I took more of a slow read/write approach to my take on Dove.

Dove origin.

The origins of Dove lie in the injuries experienced by American servicemen during world war two. There was a need for a milder soap to address the needs of burn victims, and the concept of having moisturising cream (or cleansing cream as it was called in the earlier ads) was included in the soap to rehydrate skin rather than leaving it excessively dry after stripping off the skins natural oils.

Dove was introduced as a consumer product in 1957. The original advertising focused on the functional benefits of the product.

Decades later and the Dove advertising continued to focus on the products functional benefits.

For instance this 1990s advert positions Dove against everyday beauty brands and premium brand Neutrogena.

Dove still does functional benefit advertising, but it’s the master brand level advertisements that tend to get the most attention.

2004.

It is worthwhile considering the context that Dove was entering into with its reinvention. While we were post-9/11 the culture still has the optimism of the early 2000s. Celebrity gossip and paparazzi photos and videos were still a thing. Facebook had been launched for Harvard University students. Myspace had launched a year earlier with a focus on music and blogging was gaining a head of steam as a social channel. Real Media had launched a streaming music service but Spotify was a couple of years away from launch.

iTunes music downloads, CD ripping and iPods were reinventing music. Television shows were used to find the next popstars, while Dido and Eminem were dominating radio play.

DVD series box sets were a thing. Season three of TV show 24 was the must see TV with Jack Bauer trying to stop a biological terrorist attack and deal with his own heroin addiction.

I was using a Nokia smartphone and a Palm Tungsten T personal digital assistant at the time.

Beauty soap category at the time.

Beauty soap was not a new category. Unilever had arguably marketed the first beauty soap called Pears. By the time real beauty happened Pears was no longer distributed or marketed by Unilever in the UK. As well as Dove, Unilever owned Lux which was seen to be a ‘milder for your skin’ soap. By this time, Lux was a heritage brand that my Grandmother had liked and its main market focus was Latin America, Africa and South / South East Asia. Lux has pivoted to a girl power like position against societal sexism in its brand purpose led advertising.

Procter and Gamble had their own Lux analogue called Camay that traded on the glamour of famous actresses and socialites. At this time Camay was not seen as contemporary in the UK, but was selling well in Eastern Europe. By a strange twist of fate P&G sold Camay to Unilever in 2015, it was available in Latin America.

Simple soap was a British market competitor that had been part of Smith and Nephew’s spin-off of their consumer products division to focus on their medical businesses including advanced wound management. Simple’s positioning was that it contained no unnecessary ingredients and that it was ideal for sensitive skin.

Nivea had cleaning products like shower gels rather than soap per se but was in the personal care space.

At the time, Dove like Palmolive and Simple might be bought by a housewife and used by all the family. My Mum and Dad still use Dove or Simple soap bars, based on which they find first on their supermarket run.

Real beauty.

Dove’s global brand team wanted to reposition Dove more firmly in the beauty category. The story that is promoted revolves around how the brand team presented the Unilever board at the time with interview footage from their wives and daughters about their opinions on beauty.

There were a few iconic images that came out of the campaign.

The tickbox images that appeared in a lot of out of home executions at the time.

The Dove evolution video which captured what lots of people knew in the media industry, but tapped into wider public discussions about the use of photo manipulation that were appearing around that time.

How real beauty memed.

Dove’s outdoor execution in the London Underground had wags using pens and markers to suggest the negative answers. I remember on the escalator in Holborn station seeing every advert with the box ticked. It even memed with online celebrity news site Holymoly launching the campaign for real gossip.

Dove Men+Care range.

Dove brand extension Dove Men+Care was launched in 2010 and now has a comprehensive range of everyday products. Unilever described this as a ‘white space’. But Nivea for Men had been in this space since 1986 and Nivea had sold shaving products to men as far back as the 1920s.

Dove Men+Care’s purpose wasn’t that clear when I worked on Dove as the master brand is so focused on empowering women and girls.

We believe that care makes a man stronger, and in order to best care for those that matter to you most, you need to start with care for yourself first.
Unilever website

This take from the Unilever website about what the Dove Man+Care brand stands for is still very generic and it could cover anything from Gillette or a Jordan Peterson sound bite to Andrew Tate’s various manosphere-oriented, fitness-focused enterprises.

The risk of a male counterpart.

It would be a major undertaking to build this into something a bit more pointed, yet fit for purpose. I could understand why it would be low on the priority list, particularly when Gillette’s effort was received so badly at the time.

We know from behavioural science that positive reinforcement works better than taking a negative stance. I have heard a couple of hypotheses put around at the time that:
- Men may use Gillette razors; but women in households buy them.
- Women represent the largest growth market for disposable razor systems due Gillette’s male market dominance, male consumers inertia to change brand once chosen and facial hair growth – meant that the Gillette brand team didn’t feel that they were taking a risk.
In both cases, men feature in the advert, but may not have been the ads target audience.

However I think that the media buying suggests these hypotheses were wrong. The ad was run during a prime TV spot on the Super Bowl. Critics point to Procter & Gamble taking a $8 billion non-cash writedown for the shaving giant.

P&G reported a net loss of about $5.24 billion, or $2.12 per share, for the quarter ended June 30, due to an $8 billion non-cash writedown of Gillette. For the same period last year, P&G’s net income was $1.89 billion, or 72 cents per share.

…The charge was also driven by more competition over the past three years and a shrinking market for blades and razors as consumers in developed markets shave less frequently. Net sales in the grooming business, which includes Gillette, have declined in 11 out of the last 12 quarters.
Reuters – P&G posts strong sales, takes $8 bln Gillette writedown (July 30, 2019)

From a societal perspective in general masculinity related topics is a cultural land mine; particularly when #allmenaretrash and similar h a s h t a g s are now commonplace, so it is harder to use in an effective manner the kind of nuance Gillette attempted.

Egard – a watch brand made this response video to Gillette.

Impact

Dove grew as a brand and became a form of social currency. It made the agencies involved (Ogilvy and Edelman) famous for years to come. What Edelman actually contributed to the creative concept is open for debate.

In terms of the Dove real beauty brand purpose, the results seem to be more mixed.

The current Dove master brand ad ‘The Code’ seems to be very similar to the original ‘Evolution’ ad, the only changes have been that Photoshop was being used by an expert and AI has now put it in the hand of teenage girls.

The distortion remains the same. The Girl Guides Girl’s Attitude Survey ran at the end of last year indicated that things have gotten worse over the past decade rather than better. And this was supported by another research driven article I read in The New York Times: What It’s Like to Be a 13-Year-Old Girl Today.

While the public discourse has changed behaviours haven’t and the wellbeing of girls and women seems to be in a similar or worse position today than it was 20 years ago.

Part of this is likely to be societal, we live in more anxious times and the status quo may have been even worse, had Dove not sparked the kind of public discourse it had.

Brand purpose?

At the time when Dove’s campaign came out, I can’t remember purpose really being a ‘thing’. The closest thing I could remember in the marketing zeitgeist is that people would occasionally talk about technology in terms of the pitch a young Steve Jobs made to PepsiCo executive John Sculley: do you want to sell sugared water all your life, or do you want to change the world?

There was talk about changing attitudes and creating a movement – but it was seen in terms of creativity, rather than a higher purpose.

At the time Unilever’s fragrance brand Lynx / AXE were running creative like this.

AXE / Lynx is still the world’s number one men’s fragrance brand, but its positioning has changed a bit.

When you smell good, good things happen. You’re a little more confident and life opens up a world of possibilities. We believe that attraction is for everyone and between anyone. It doesn’t matter your race, your sexuality, or your pronouns. If you’re into it and they’re into it, we’re into it. That’s The New AXE Effect.
Unilever website

Lynx and AXE content wasn’t that far out. Advertising in the late 1990s and early 2000s wasn’t so serene. You has several ad campaigns that were subversive or transgressive in nature.

A good deal of this was cultural zeitgeist. If you were a creative director in your mid-30s at the time, your terms of reference were very different. You would have likely enjoyed sub-cultures like the rave scene and independent music that drew from 1960s psychedelia and counterculture icons. You probably watched the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow film, one of their TV appearances or attended one of their live shows. Russell Brand was considered funny.

Brands getting attention and critical acclaim like Sony’s Playstation gaming console, Levi’s and Skittles were taking brand risks with campaigns that were far edgier than we’d be likely to see now. One direct mail shot from Sony Playstation designed to promote the Tekken 3 fighting game was sent out in a plain manilla envelope stamped ‘private and confidential’. Inside was a convincing medical card advising that the recipient receive immediate medical treatment for a potentially serious condition. Some of those mailed were waiting for hospital test results and complained to the authorities.

Meanwhile in the US, Mountain Dew was promoting pager plans as part of a co-marketing deal. But this was happening in the middle of a moral panic on pagers being a portal to drug dealer hook-ups and teen prostitutes receiving bookings from johns. Kids were being arrested and charged for possessing pagers in schools and colleges.

Failed online business Pets.com had a distinctive shouty voice that we probably hadn’t seen since Poundland’s ‘teabagged’ social posts.

Two examples give a good temperature check of what was happening in agency teams at this time up to just before 2010.

The Volkswagen ‘terrorist’ film that was used as a door opener by creative team Lee Ford and Dan Brooks. It leaked online, much to the bemusement of Volkswagen. Creatives thought it would be well received by a brand marketing team with a sense of humour. While VW didn’t like it, it did get them work with a large production house in the US and London agency Quiet Storm.

The second one was Lean Green Fighting Machine’s Facebook campaign for Dr Pepper in 2010, that referenced an online Brazilian porn clip known as ‘2 girls, one cup’. The client had signed it off, without knowing the context. Controversy ensued on Mumsnet and the agency was fired from the account.

Amidst all this cynicism, boundary pushing and counterculture; Dove’s real beauty would have been distinctive and differentiated. Even if it did run a risk of being perceived as cynical self-serving corporate schmaltz.

Brand purpose as an idea seems to have gained popular currency after Dove’s campaign for real beauty.

You can see in this chart based on Google Books data how the English language mentions of ‘brand purpose’ took off.

Data from Google Books Ngram viewer

Brand purpose critic Nick Asbury places the rise of brand purpose to the 2008 financial crisis and related events such as the Occupy movement, which supports the post-2014 surge in interest. 20 years later, Dove is now seen as being emblematic of brand purpose. Dove took on brand purpose as a concept over time, with the increasing prominence of the Dove Self-Esteem Project being a case in point.

More related posts can be found here.
May 5, 2024