No matter your background, education, and professional achievements, you are capable of great things. Statistically, 99 percent of us did not go to the top 1 percent of schools, have famous parents, or a hefty trust fund. Yet we can all become successful in our own right by making the most of what we have and taking small steps. We don’t have to succeed immediately but we owe it to ourselves to try. In its campaign “Play New,” Nike encourages people to try without worrying about success. The spot shows athletes trying sports they are not known for while a voice-over says, “Here’s to going for it . . . and being terrible. Here’s to giving it a shot, even though your shot is garbage.” The spot concludes with “You know what doesn’t suck? Trying to do something you’ve never done before.”
My book Assemblage was written to inspire marketers to be creative, try new things, and take risks. Here is more advice on how to manifest this.
1. To Be Creative, Stop Googling Things
“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results,” because a whopping 95 percent of all online searches stop at page one’s results. And when browsing through page one, we only care about what’s at the top; the first organic result on that page captures about 32.5 percent of overall search traffic. The second result sees 17.6 percent; the seventh, only 3.5 percent. Further, search engines and media outlets tailor search results based on users’ previous searches and website visitation—that’s how different users access different results. Eli Pariser coined this phenomenon the “filter bubble,” which prevents us from being exposed to content that could broaden or challenge our views. We don’t decide what gets in our bubble and don’t see what is filtered out.
2. Break Free From The Harmonization Of Taste
We’re overly reliant on the internet for inspiration, which has greatly homogenized people’s tastes across the world. On the one hand, digital platforms like Pinterest have made it easier than ever to search for trends in coffee shops, for example. On the other hand, such searches reveal that all coffee shops look the same; whether in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or London, most independent coffee shops have adopted the same faux-artisanal aesthetic with exposed brick, raw wood tables, and hanging Edison bulbs. The same goes for start-up offices, which often rely on minimalist furniture, industrial lighting, and reclaimed wood. Writer and critic Kyle Chayka calls this phenomenon “AirSpace,” the confluence of style in the physical world created by online technology. “The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the impression of AirSpace,” Chayka argues. “If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases.”
3. Sell Your Brand By Telling People Not To Buy It
We are not perfect and neither are the brands we buy. Counterintuitively, many brands have succeeded by revealing their flaws or admitting flat-out that they are not the best. Perhaps what is most important is to strive to improve. In the 1960s, car rental company Avis had trailed Hertz, its key competitor, since Avis’s inception. Ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach decided to embrace Avis’s second-place status and created the “We try harder” campaign. The ads are credited with finally making Avis profitable.
More recently, Carlsberg evolved its tagline from “Probably the best beer in the world” to “Probably not the best beer in the world” after research showed that Carlsberg was underperforming compared with its competitors. Based on this research, it improved its product and reintroduced the lager as “rebrewed from head to toe,” accompanied by the hashtag #newbrew, “in pursuit of better beer.”
It is not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be. ~ Paul Arden
Some brands even exaggerate their flaws to humor their audience. To promote their new Las Vegas show, magicians Penn & Teller once claimed the tagline, “Fewer audience injuries than last year!” In a similar vein, marketing author Christopher Lochhead created an ad for his podcast that showcased a review from The Economist calling the podcast “off-putting to some,” along with reviews from Lochhead’s listeners: “annoying host,” “uses profanity needlessly,” “very disappointing.”
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Dr. Emmanuel Probst, excerpted from his book Assemblage: Creating Transformative Brands
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