I’ve been fortunate enough to work on many great award winning marketing campaigns over the years, from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, First Direct’s Little Fella and The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Orange, to two time campaign of the year for 118 118. All won awards for both creativity and effectiveness, and like many before me, I’ve often wondered what the magic ingredients were that delivered such outstanding success.
They were all undoubtedly great clients, with great people, great ideas and great budgets. The kind you seldom see nowadays. But what there wasn’t, or at least didn’t appear to be at the time, was an outstanding, genuinely superior product. Dove’s quarter moisturising cream recipe was originally formulated to help wartime burn victims, First Direct was no longer the only phone bank in town, and actually had an inferior online offer, while Orange was fourth to market with patchy coverage when compared to established players Vodafone, Cellnet and Mercury 1-2-1. But perhaps least promising of all was 118 118, one of a slew of new market entrants to the recently deregulated telephone enquiries sector, when few saw the need to change the incumbent BT number 192 anyway. Not only was there no real distinguishing feature to the product (it was in some ways worse than the old BT service it replaced), but most people genuinely didn’t care about what number they used. In a list of category choices people might make during a given week, only their choice of petrol was seen as less important.
In my early days of planning, this would have been a real headache. I’d been trained in the old P&G school of product superiority, looking for genuine points of competitive advantage that, if backed by a big enough media spend, would persuade people to choose brand A over all the others. In each of the cases above, that wasn’t really there, at least in the beginning.
If there’s little to no competitive advantage in the product, what better place to look for differentiation than in the advertising itself. Take a stance for those on the flip side of beauty with Dove, champion customer satisfaction with First Direct, or take the high ground with Orange. But more than anything, just keep people engaged and interested, by making your promotion engaging and interesting. Which is just what 118 118 did.
I suspect that, were any of these brands to have had a genuine product advantage at the the time, they wouldn’t have been half as successful as they are today. As the saying goes, if you have no money, you have to think instead. The same goes for no discernible product advantage too. It can be daunting when you look at a marketing strategy that is largely characterised by a blank sheet of paper, but hugely liberating too. In some ways I now welcome product and service propositions where the advantage is hard to find, at least at first.
Without the constraints of product superiority to persuade people of, you are free to engage and interest them instead. No idea at first is an advantage, not a hindrance.