Is collateral dead?
“Play Cricket” (fully endorsed by the Milo corporation) came to my son’s school yesterday. Here is a photo of our kitchen bin this morning. It contains a sheaf of stickers and coloured flyers.
I asked what happened. Our 8 year old said “There was these people who came to our school and gave us Milo.” I had to explain to our boy that “4.5 stars” doesn’t mean that Milo is “healthy food that’s low in sugar”. (Milo is actually 46% sugar).
And there’s more. If we were to sign up our son to Milo-endorsed cricket he’d get a “Bonus Player Pack” with logo-emblazoned backpack, bat, ball, hat, T-shirt, water bottle and sachet of Milo.
Amazing!
Not really. It would all end up in the bin too. Along with the Surf Groms backpack, water bottle etc, with their Weet-Bix and Quicksilver logos. Along with the local rugby league’s child-labour produced footballs and sheets of KFC-logo’d stickers. It’s all going in the bin.
Here’s the thing. We parents are in an anti-corporate resistance. Our job is to put this stuff in the bin and de-program our kids when they get home.
Cricket, surfing and football, of course, are all good things in themselves. However, if our son wanted to sign up, it would because he was genuinely excited about cricket: Either a) he knew someone who loved cricket; b) it was a memorable experience when “Play Cricket” came to his school; or c) the “Play Cricket” ambassador had a magnetic personality our son wanted to be like.
In other words it would be because of experiences and relationships.
It would not be because of branded collateral: stuff with messages and logos. Maybe in the 20th century, when this idea was original, branded stuff might have meant something.
But in the 21st century almost everyone has enough backpacks, bottles, and hats. The corporate versions are just more clutter in already over-cluttered lives. They ONLY belong in the bin. A colleague who works for a very large and well-known NSW government agency told me: “Years ago we used to have to lock up the promotional gear otherwise our work colleagues would steal it. Nowadays we can’t give it away.”
I expect PR operatives (whose worldview is obsessed with brands and messages) to delude themselves branded stuff makes a difference. What is interesting is how often our public good projects do it too. I know. I used to be the brochure king. I used to design clever, die-cut brochures for all kinds of public good efforts. I was wrong. This stuff makes no difference to human behaviours. Experiences and relationships are what do the work.
Oh yes, there one other vital factor: unpredictability. It’s the unpredictable that “cuts through” and makes us notice things, buzz about them, and come closer to find out more. Collateral therefore has another fatal flaw: predictability. There is nothing memorable or buzzworthy about yet another plastic water bottle, colouring-in page, key ring, mouse pad, or set of stickers. People are going to forget about them the minute they look away.
I look at the boxes of branded water bottles, pens and stickers in the offices of government, council and NGO project managers, and wonder: Maybe if we invested less on stuff maybe we could invest more on experiences?
The secret life of the bell curve
Revelations about the Bell Curve always seem to score well on the “yes I can still remember that the next day” scale in the Changeology workshop.
Graduates might recall our discussion about how knowing (or guessing) just one vital statistic – the current rate of adoption in your target audience – provides such valuable guidance for project design and the crafting of communications.
I’ve finally got round to properly illustrating this idea. Here’s a one pager that summarises it. I hope you find it useful. Click here to download a PDF version.
https://www.enablingchange.com.au/One_page_bell_curve.pdf
Upcoming CHANGEOLOGY and FACILITATION SKILLS workshops, Sydney and Melbourne
The workshops are on again in October. This time Changeology is looking more and more like a hybrid design workshop and a creativity camp. There’s still a grounding social psychology and step-by-step process, but the more I deliver it, the more I find I’m emphasising processes which push the imaginations of project designers into seekingly wacky places. As Albert Camus said: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”
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Melbourne 17-18 October | Sydney 25-26 October
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Les this piece captures my sentiments beautifully. Inspired by the War on Waste series our household has been quite gobsmacked at the amount of unnecessary waste generated by organisations who are supposedly fostering social and environmental health and wellbeing. My strategy is to return to sender with a note offering a couple of waste free marketing initiatives that would have encouraged me to sign my children up or helped them hear the message. It takes a while to do this but I think it’s worth it.
Hi Phoebe, I like your proactive approach! The amount of waste is so senseless. And as you suggest it’s not even good marketing. It’s lazy, unimaginative marketing by numbers. Although… maybe we should be relieved junk food marketers are so out of touch!
Thanks for your reflections on collateral and marketing. We had an issue when our (then) 10 year old was taken on a school excursion to an Apple store (https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/apple-store/). These types of marking tactics raise real ethical (and environmental ) issues. We’ve always tried to avoid buying branded stuff for our children, and have encouraged them to be aware of marketing tricks to encourage them to consume – but it is difficult.
I’m now facing an interesting challenge in that I have quite a few students majoring in marketing enrolling in a uni elective I offer on community engagement. I must admit my gut reaction to marketing is fairly negative, so I have to do some thinking about the relationship between meaningful community engagement and marketing.
Any pointers in this direction would be great!
A friend from a large NSW state agency just commented “It’s true about collateral. Years ago we used to have to lock up the promotional gear otherwise our work colleagues would steal it. Nowadays we can’t give it away.”
Hi Graham, marketing seems to be concerned with the magic of the message and branding (owning ideas in the audience’s mind: Toyota is jump for joy). The basic concept is transactional: Carry out this action (buy, sign up) and you’ll get the specified benefit. But because the benefits are indistinguishable (all beers get you drunk, all cars drive you around), brand warfare descends into psychological sleights of hand like celebrity association and artificial urgency.
Community engagement, on the other hand, is a constellation of corporate outcomes in search of a methodology. I’m not sure what it is and different professions understand it in different and convenient ways. I try to ‘be real’ and unpack it as: 1) The desire to be noticed; 2) The desire to be talked about positively; and 3) The desire to have people come and play with our offerings.
When you unpack in more concrete terms it’s possible to strategise what these three outcomes might require in each specific situation. Community engagement as it’s taught in the IAP2 framework has a ridiculously large hole it it because is neglects the need to “be actually engaging”, that is, to create events or processes that people would actually want to break their busy schedules and come and play with?!
I actually think that Design Thinking is superior replacement for both marketing and community engagement! Plus a massive dollop of creativity of course.
Best wishes – Les
Thanks for your details reply Les!
That should have been thanks for your detailed reply Les!