Guest Column – David Gluckman

Creative Claptrap – David Gluckman (Brand Development Consultant) in this month’s Guest Column:  “Constant consumer consultation has the effect of dumbing down. Imagine Jagermeister being manipulated by consumer research – it would be modified to taste like Malibu”

I read a piece in Marketing Week recently about Stella David, CEO of Bacardi. “I do not think the creative process needs to be a long, drawn-out affair,” she was quoted as saying. And she did not allow herself, or those around her, to ‘luxuriate in processes’. How refreshing.

Having spent the past 36 years developing new brands for IDV and then Diageo, when I meet new innovation people they don’t so much ask me ‘what have you done?’ or ‘how did you do it?’ but rather ‘what is your process?’ People are looking for complex pseudo-scientific programmes that will underwrite success and allow them to avoid taking brand decisions. These days, innovation is all about consensus, consumers, need states, stage gates and emotional benefits.

I believe there is a much simpler path. For what it’s worth, here it is:

1) The hero of an idea is the buyer, not the creator.

Buying or appreciating ideas is a real skill, arguably greater than creating them. Think of Van Gogh. He sold one painting, to his brother, because there was no one around to appreciate how great he was.
The real heroes of Baileys were Tom Jago, the man at IDV who bought our off-the-wall idea, Mac Macpherson, who believed he could produce it and, perhaps above all, the late David Dand, who accepted the brand as a fait accompli, with the only research support being the anecdotal evidence that two policemen had drunk a bottle in one sitting in The Allsop Arms pub.

Identifying people who understand and appreciate ideas should be a major focus in companies that want to be innovative. And maybe new brand decisions are made at too junior a level.

2) More solutions = more expense = less of a clue.

I submitted 48 ideas in the first new brand presentation I ever made. The reason? I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But in every successful development in the drinks business, we worked on the basis of a single solution.

It was simple ‘scientific method’ to develop a clear hypothesis and test it. The calibre of people I worked with would not have tolerated rafts of ideas. They paid me to solve problems, not play with processes.

It’s really easy coming up with 12 solutions to a brief. That way you don’t commit yourself to an answer. And the more solutions you work with, the more money you make: more design, more research, more time. In other words, more process.

3) Consumers simply can’t innovate, they can only reassemble what they know.

These days, people turn to the consumer for everything. That’s why so many of today’s new brands lack freshness. Constant consumer consultation has the effect of dumbing down. Imagine a brand like Jägermeister being manipulated by consumer research. In two groups it would be modified to taste like Malibu.

4) Look for the rational, functional reasons that people use to buy your product.

The current preoccupations are with ‘need states’ and ’emotional benefits’, the intangible stuff that provides the basis for advertising. But you must find ways of functionally differentiating new brands, even in highly regulated product fields such as whisky, vodka or gin.

Smirnoff in the US did not have the image credentials to make an impact on Absolut. It needed to be a better vodka. We developed the perceptibly smoother Smirnoff Black. Ciroc vodka differentiated itself by being made from grapes, not grain. Tanqueray Ten’s fresh botanicals, delivered a fresher, cleaner-tasting gin.

5) Market research is more  psycho-analysis, than it is rocket science.

I am amazed to see the status to which market research has been elevated. How many brands that are subjected to exhaustive research scrutiny, and at vast expense have failed? Some success stories with which I’ve been involved (Aqua Libra, Purdeys, Baileys) were hardly researched at all.

6) History isn’t bunk.

Having come to the business from a background in fast-moving consumer goods, I was enchanted by the people who defied principles of cast-iron logic. I love how Abe Rosenberg built J&B, a Scotch with an Italian name and watered-down appearance, to 3m cases in the US. I love the Bacardi bat, how Bombay Gin was transformed by a blue bottle, and the sheer chutzpah of selling Russian vodka to Americans in the teeth of McCarthyism.

As may be gathered, I’m no fan of process. Anyway, as an outside consultant, who am I to impose my particular process on some giant public limited company? Brand development is about ideas, simply expressed, and people and companies making a commitment to those ideas.

Sidney Frank died the other day. Though I never met him, he was one of my heroes. He managed to sell a vodka from France (a country with no vodka credentials), called Grey (the most boring colour in the paint box) Goose (the stupidest bird in the aviary). It was bought for $2.3 billion. What process did he use?  db April 2006