The danger with trying to understand China with one book (or other cultural artifact) is that one easily walks right into the trap of pigeonholing China.

There are many books, essays and how-to manuals with pretended wisdom about China and, well, in most of them you do find wisdom. However, this country is so diverse, multilayered and dynamic, that you will always find many exceptions and contradictions to these wisdoms.

Hence, my personal favorite among books about China (in German): “Bliefe von dlüben”. Satirical and full of contradictions, it doesn’t even try to give answers. While it is full of well observed anecdotes of day-to-day life out of the perspective of a foreigner in China, it does make fun of East and West and is not ashamed to contradict itself even within a page. Entertaining and still delivering very authentic impressions.

 

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Anyways, they recently published their Tesco campaign, something that people in the industry have been waiting for to see. How would W+K work with a huge supermarket chain, an industry not exactly known for creativity? (Even thought I’d doubt that: there’s a lot of commercial creativity involved in running a retailer). Anyways, here’s the stuff that has been released at the moment, with – my guess – much more happening behind the scenes.

Now I know it’s not exactly the thing anymore in our circles to praise a traditional advertising campaign, or advertising in general. However, I think this is really, really good, and while I have no idea what the brief was and if what I’m thinking reflects anything the ladies and gentlemen in London have been thinking, I thought I’d write down the reasons that make me like the work.

First of all, I think the bigger theme or concept they are going with, “It’s the little things that make Christmas” is very true. When everything is said and done, the small things are what make up the big experience. But it’s what W+K is doing with it that’s impressive, another example making the point that coming up with a concept isn’t the hardest part.

“The little things” fit perfectly with the commercial needs of Tesco. After all, this isn’t an ‘image campaign’ (well, it is, but I assume it will sell), but a campaign that highlights different parts of Tesco’s offering – products, services, member cards, … – weaving it into the bigger story of christmas, and what it’s made of.

(See the other posters at W+K London’s blog.)

So there is the craft of the execution. The always well-crafted and well-told mini-stories, with those little scenes that make them so true and weirdly emotionally appealing (granddad playing Wii, the cooking, the kiss, the music, the helicopter; oh how I professionally love-hate W+K).

However, what really convinces me that this is going to be effective is the ‘branding brilliance’ of the whole campaign working together, even if they seem to be only small things: the champaign from the first commercial being sorted in in the store in the second long one, the paper hat on Tesco’s logo, the synching of the 5 little bars of the Tesco logo to the stories’ music, the association of the different products at the end (Every [...] counts.), the combination of smaller stories about otherwise rather mundane products, like carrots, with the bigger theme (this reminded me a bit of W+K Portland’s 5 second ads for Target). There are many, many different ways this campaign can ‘pick up’ people, many different things it to possibly be exposed to and, after all, like.

Now, Andrew (and here) and Martin have already quoted Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg extensively and promoted the thought that the role of advertising is “building memory structures, making distinctive assets, feelings and associations more famous and familiar over time”.

Brands don’t have a ‘position’, but are rather weak, long-term memory structures that need to be constantly updated. However, most of the time, we are still concerned with what people think about when and if they think about your brand. All those health tracking charts are not doing anything else but showing what adjectives come to mind once people think about a brand (in a rather artificial setting, but let’s leave that out for a second), or how exactly it rates on certain adjectives from, say, 1 to 7.

This really is fascinating, because in real life, we hardly ever consciously evaluate anything. And already 20 years ago, Holden and Lutz promoted a change of perspective already back in their 1992 paper “Ask Not What The Brand Can Evoke; Ask What Can Evoke The Brand?”

“Research on consumer memory and choice has been dominated by paradigms that implicitly assume the availability of the brand, whether it is physically present in the choice situation or symbolically present in working memory as a member of a stable evoked set of brands in a product category. Research attention, therefore, typically has focused on the accessibility of brand information, given the presence of the brand. Recently, brand accessibility has attracted some attention, but only from the perspective that the product category is the stimulus activating brand retrieval processes. In this paper, we propose the alternative view that brand retrieval is more frequently stimulated by consumption goals or consumption occasions, and a model is developed that reflects this ecological dimension of consumer choice, using concepts of spreading activation and goal-derived categories.”

It’s ‘only’ a Christmas campaign, but I think W+K’s work might be a case study for this kind of thinking.

—

Holden, Lutz (1992): Ask Not What The Brand Can Evoke; Ask What Can Evoke The Brand? Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 19, 1992, Pages 101-107.

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A lot of people ask us how I am doing and how we are doing here?
I’d say my mood is mostly sunny with some clouds here and there. I really, really like it here.

I have to admit, it’s a weird feeling to be at a place, living here, getting to know what you like about it and slowly considering it home, and at the same time not working, not meeting a team almost every morning and making things.

When we left Vienna and gave up our jobs, people often asked me, sometimes already feeling they knew the answer, if this was liberating. I never said yes, because I don’t see this as some sort of a self-finding trip or as escaping something I hated. Yes, part of it feels liberating, as everything new does. It’s a great adventure after all, you like to feel brave and what we experienced and learned in only a few weeks is amazing.

That shouldn’t make the impression that it is all easy cheesy. Part of it is stressful, there’s no doubt about that. We have the luxury of not following a daily routine, a schedule that we have to live by. That said, we aren’t on holiday either. So sometimes, I find myself with a bad conscious when I am too focused on work, thinking I’d rather go out there and shoot some photos and hang around and explore with Stephanie. Sometimes, when I do that, I have a bad conscious about not writing emails, or getting information about this or that.
And last but surely not least: I’m missing my friends and my family. Yes, you can write long emails and yes you can obviously have Skype chats here and there. But I’m a sentimental bugger and that doesn’t really do it for me. It has to, at the moment.

So what have we been up to?

A lot, actually.

Apart from the great weekend we spent in Hanoi, which deserves a separate write-up, we were quite busy exploring Singapore.

Pulau Ubin

We went cycling on Pulau Ubin, an island belonging to Singapore, where for now, development is halted.

Blujazz Café

The Blue Jazz Café and later Night of the Living Bass on Halloween weekend showed me that there actually is a music scene here.

Hot.

Red Bull Flugtag, the first of its kind here on what people told me was the hottest day of the year.

Monster etc.

Universal Studios Halloween Special, or standing in line for three hour.

Exploring Singapore’s arts and culture scene.

An orderly life?

There was a little MiniMart, an art market featuring young Singaporean artists, where we got this perfectly themed piece from Sif Doodle, whom I hopefully be able to interview for the blog.

The National Library held Halloween outdoor Night Screenings and showed regional scary movies. As they were apparently too loud the day before, they decided to play the movies basically without sound when we were there. Typically Singaporean, I was told.

Objectifs Films

Objectifs is the hub for the local film and photography scene and they organized free Watch Local! Rooftop Screenings. We went there twice and got a bit of an intro into Singaporean movie culture.

Then there was an event called 10 Years of Shooting Home, also organized by Objectifs. This is where we met Philipp, a German photographer, who has been living and working here for 8 years and explored Singapore visually, and Jean, a documentary photographer who founded her own venture Logue, a while ago.

Oh, and there was also the Singapore Writers Festival, but instead of going there, I got a book by one of the reading authors there, about the life of Malay in Singapore.

Malay Sketches

I guess more about the films, photography and books as a means to expose myself to some local frames of reference will come in a separate blog post.

Oh, and thanks to Simon Kemp we also went to a screening at the Italian Film Festival Singapore, where we watched a short documentary about Refugees in Cinecitta, the Italian film studio. And there was the German Film Festival, where we watched This Ain’t California and Combat Girl and will see Hell on Saturday. (How does that sound, eh?)

Meeting people

I also met people from twitter whom I thought are interesting. Which doesn’t always mean planners. And people not on twitter. And of course interesting planners, and heads of planning. And other people.

We met a really cool Singaporean couple via my lovely ex-colleague Monika, who gave us a great tour across Tiong Bahru and an impressive culinary Hawker Center tour.

There are, obviously, also a bunch of lovely Austrian’s in Singapore and not all of them sell awesome sausages in Chinatown, some of them also work as designers (a few of them, actually) or in advertising.

Singapore is a small city. The different scenes aren’t that big, and they are, at least a bit, connected.

There are some great people here, and an interesting vibe that goes beyond the usual ‘Singapore is too clean, too much of a circus/zoo/Disney World’ that I’ve also been guilty of spreading, after spending only a few days here in June. Yes, it’s undoubtedly very business focused, it’s materialistic and driven. But, at the same time, and as always, this isn’t everything, and there’s much more to be discovered.

Related posts:

1. The first week and a few days more in Singapore

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—

I’m sure everyone doing this is going to tell you that summing up a
region so large in a single artefact is nigh on impossible. A guy I
regularly played football with once told me “after living in India for
6 months, I thought I was starting to understand it, after living here
for 3 years, I realise I never will”. He was right, every turn will be
something new and every little thing apparently has such deep roots
that you will never dig down to them all. But this quote wasn’t mine.
I thought about plannery reading (Amartya Sen, especially Development
as Freedom or the Argumentative Indian, anything by the numerous
‘father’s of the nation’ – Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Bose etc. the short
stories and poetry of Rabindrinath Tagore) but to me they seemed easy
enough for people to find for themselves. I sensed something more
personal might be of more use, so I settled on a journey I took
several times – from my flat in Gurgaon to Karim’s restaurant in Old
Delhi.

For most of my time in India, this journey would have required me to
take a pre-booked cab and this tale would be a dull one of nothing but
the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway and its traffic. We didn’t have a car and
public transport (beyond local cycle rickshaws and the very occasional
auto-rickshaw) were non-existent. But in the last 6 or 8 months I was
able to take the new Delhi Metro. It was a 20 minute walk from our
apartment to the station. We could have taken a rickshaw but the
haggling was such work we tended not to. Anyway, I enjoyed the walk.
Gurgaon is not designed for walkers, it has been built over the last
decade to serve India’s burgeoning middle-classes. Anyone with a bit
of wealth simply does not walk, so no provision for walking is
provided. For this reason, our walking was seen as highly novel and
amusing.

I would pass the local market place where cows crowded around the
rubbish looking for scraps and every waiting rickshaw wallah would
hound us to jump aboard. Crossing the road we’d pass the huge new
Marriott hotel, alongside which a number of ramshackle huts selling
tyres, flowers, laundry services or whatever else huddled together.
Further along, past the gates of the Palms Town & Country Club (of
which, for the final year of our stay we were members – regularly
partaking of the pool and of Geoffrey’s English pub, though not
usually on the same visit as the pub did not allow shorts – a high
level of decorum being required at all times, just like real English
pubs.) Past a shiny new mega-hospital (private of course) and across a
dusty and life-threatening dual carriageway to reach HUDA City Center
station. This station was a terminus which also had space for a
shopping mall built around it (as pretty much everything in Gurgaon
must.) Open “on time” to much fanfare, building was still not complete
when we left 6 or 8 months later. Often as you entered, a hail of
welding sparks would fall from somewhere above.

Unfinished stations aside, the Delhi Metro itself is as slick and
modern as any I have travelled on in Asia, you could easily transplant
it to Seoul, Singapore or Shanghai and people would not bat an eyelid.
Remarkably, it remains clean. In a country known (at times unfairly
but often with some justification) for piles of rubbish, paan spittle
and open urination and defecation it is interesting to see the ‘No
Spitting’ signs being roundly observed and no rubbish being dropped.
Give people a positive environment and they will maintain it, give
them squalor and why not add to it? Being the first station, I always
got a seat and watched as the elevated line ran past Gurgaon’s
ever-growing plague of malls, its empty scrub-land residential plots
and soulless steel and glass office buildings and on up the MG Road
into Delhi. If it hadn’t got too busy and the way been blocked I might
catch a glimpse of the Qutub Minar as we reached the Southern end of
Delhi proper. My hopes always raised at this point that we were almost
there, but from here the metro stops came regularly and progress was
slow.

The closest station to Karim’s is Chawri Bazaar – a brass, copper and
paper market established in 1840 and with a rich history. Originally a
place for royalty and nobelmen to visit courtesans it took a turn for
the worse after we British pulled down the mansions following the
First War of Independence (Indian Mutiny if you read British
textbooks) in 1857. I’d emerge up one of four inconspicuous staircases
from the modernity of the Metro into the cramped, bustling streets in
the heart of Old Delhi. If I were to walk 20 or so metres and turn
around, you wouldn’t even know the Metro was there – a different world
hidden deep below these old streets. Rickshaws, carts, people, animals
vie for the limited space. Some of the wares being peddled may have
changed but I can’t imagine the atmosphere is much changed since the
market was first established.

I’d walk down the narrowing lanes and catch occasional glimpses of the
minaret or one of the three huge domes atop the Jama Masjid, India’s
largest mosque. Eventually you emerge beneath it. Sandstone and marble
fill the view. But it’s hard to stop and take it in as the business of
the bazaar (now car-parts rather than decorative paper or copperware)
went on around me. I’d circle around the mosque to the opposite side,
all three roads off the square look exactly the same so never 100%
sure I was turning down the right one I’d hope to spot the Karim’s
sign pointing down an alleyway no wider than two men stood shoulder to
shoulder. The first time I thought this couldn’t possibly be right,
but it is right. At the end of the alley a man sits cross-legged,
shoes off tending to numerous huge silver pots which bubble away all
day long emitting delicious aromas. Opposite, two others tend to
kebabs over hot coals. Around this little square all doorways seem to
belong to Karim’s. I always favoured the open fronted space on the
right where you could better see the comings and goings.

Karim’s has been open in this spot since 1913. Serving the finest
mughlai cuisine in a form as close to that which was served to the
Mughal emperor’s themselves as you are likely to get. There is no
ceremony, simple bowls of food chucked down on tables followed by
breads served by hand. This place is no secret, it’s in all the
guidebooks, but it absolutely does not lack any authenticity for it. I
was never brave enough to try the brain curry and the naan was always
a bit too heavy for my liking but everything else I tried was
exquisite. I miss the place and the journey to get there.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that most of Indian life is rural but much
of its urban life, old and new, is in this journey. I shall leave it
to you to understand what you will from the description rather than
seeking to impose an interpretation of my own. 

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I also asked Fredrik for his perspective, and this is what he shared:

The first thing that comes to mind: Nesbit’s ‘Geography of Thought’ – a highly valuable perspective on cultural differences.

Having just put that down in writing, an observation I have made is that there is a much greater focus on the differences between the East and the West than there is on the similarities.

It’s not rocket science: You can justify your worth as a planner more easily by amplifying the differences – carve out a niche for your self as a person who knows Asia. Sure, there are differences, of course there are, but there are also a lot of similarities.

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10 days ago, we boarded a plane from Vienna to Frankfurt and from there made a few thousand miles until we arrived in Singapore and got a little stamp that allows us to stay here for 90 days. I’ve only been here in June so it wasn’t the ‘I have no idea what’s waiting for me’ arrival, but I was nervous. I actually still am.

The last weeks before coming here were intense. Stephanie had her masters exam, we cleared out our first flat within a week or so, I had freelance work that lasted a bit longer than I expected. And then there was the emotional stress of saying good bye to friends and family and telling your plans again and again. There are funnier and easier things than doing this, I guess …

Happily, Willem, whom I got to know at the Great Football Giveaway, also moved to Singapore recently and he offered us to stay at his place, while we’re sorting things out. Like with Barbora when I was here in June, it’s great to stay with a friend.

So what did we do so far?

As we always do, walking. Chinatown, Downtown, Little India, Orchard Road, a bit of Geylang, Marina Bay and some areas in between. Walking isn’t particularly popular here, given the temperature and humidity, but it’s still the best way to explore and look humiliated afterwards.

On the second day, we paid a visit to The Substation, the center of Singapore’s alternative art scene. Stephanie had already told me before, but there’s really more going on in terms of arts and culture than I expected. It still seems to be pretty small, but there’s for example the Singapore International Photography Festival going on at the moment.

There’s a big and really interesting Andy Warhol exhibition at the ArtScience Museum (together with a Magnum Photography exhibition and more SIPF)

There was a MiniMart at Substation featuring young, local artists, and we bought our first piece of art here (10S$). I really liked the illustration style and I hope to get to meet the young artist again and hopefully do a little interview.

Then, two days ago, we went to the Comedy Masala, the ‘comedy underground’ in Singapore. It’s a weekly standup comedy night featuring aspiring comedians run by  Umar Rana,  a banker by day and comedy host at night. Oh and he’s Pakistani and likes to make jokes about terrorists. Sitting in the first row, we obviously also got a bit of a special treatment and a little introduction into Singapore’s ‘foreign talent’ discourse. Who doesn’t like a bit of abuse now and then? Anyways, it was fun and interesting to see how the diverse group of comedians worked the even more diverse crowd. Lots of jokes touching cultural stereotypes, sometimes cheap shots, sometimes more sophisticated stuff (but who am I to know the difference?) …  And it’s good to learn those anyways.

Then we’re obviously meeting interesting people about and have chats about job opportunities here.

Oh and then there’s food, really good food (not my photos, so far).

And malls. In Singapore, all roads lead to the mall, as Fred noted. We haven’t really done much shopping but sooner or later we will give in, I guess. That reminds me, I have to get a phone …

Then, yesterday, we moved out of Willem’s and into a new shared flat with a really nice guy and girl from the UK. In an hour or so we’re going to meet an Austrian designer and walk around a bit in the ‘Arabic’ parts of Singapore and later there’s SocialSatay, organized by Simon Kemp and We Are Social.

What’s up for the next weeks?

More walking, I guess, but further out in the heartland.

More chats with more interesting people.

There’s Asian Horror Night (yay!) because of – you guessed it – Halloween.

There’s the German Film Festival and Italian Film Festival.

And we’ll see, maybe some travel planning. There’s so much to see.

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I’m still in the very beginning of understanding all of this better, but I’ve always been very interested in intercultural communication and more broadly the impact of culture on human behavior and cognition. Before I went to study at the UBC in Vancouver for a term a few years ago, we had to take a mandatory course in intercultural competence, to understand why hockey is huge and all. We learned concepts of intercultural theory, like Hofsteede’s cultural dimensions (e.g. ‘cultures’ being more individualistic or collectivistic, Uncertainty Avoidence etc.) or what a high or low context culture is. And I learned that Austrians are more like coconuts while Americans and Canadians are more like peaches. (Interesting, eh?)

I’ve always taken those concepts with a grain of salt. To take all those different, messy things are done around a place up to a very general level and come up with dimensions of how a certain culture ‘is’ is a bit too much pseudo-scientific bollocks for my taste.

As is brilliantly stated in an old review of another book, dealing with cultural differences, The Geography of Thought:

Nisbett seems to think this is a minor issue. At the beginning of the book he ”apologizes” to those readers who might be ”upset” to see ”billions of people labeled with the single term ‘East Asian’ and treated as if they are identical.” But it is not a matter of being upset. It is a matter of wondering whether the differences within these absurdly large categories aren’t at least as large and important as the differences between them. It is in fact a question about the scientific validity of the enterprise.

It’s all a bit more complicated than 5 dimensions as well. And even if you’re interacting with somebody from a different background you still have to acknowledge this:

Taken from: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/12/statistics-to-english-translation-part-2b-calculating-significance/

The fact that you’re also dealing with one person that might be quite different to the ‘average’. I quite liked one of the models, though, the iceberg metaphor. While it’s still, in the perfect sense of the word, monolithic, it puts emphasis on everything we don’t know, things hidden in plain sight. All the things that are there, right in front of us, but never really consciously reflected, because they just are how things are done around here. (That also leaves out things that we’re just doing because we’re plainly copying others without much reason, but I’m sure Mark will be ok with me ignoring this for now.)

I’m not only writing this to sound clever and at least use the stuff I’ve been exposed to at university once. (That, too…). – Embarking on this Singapore adventure, and thinking about living and working there really had me think about this and about how I could prepare myself better for what’s to come. After all, as planners we are partly paid to be insightful and get other people to be empathetic with the people that our clients want to sell stuff too.

Anyways, as I finished a few books about Asia and got to know more people working in the region, as I followed more sources on twitter and decided to move to Singapore, and as I’m obviously not fully engaged in packing up the mess that is our flat, I had a look at that iceberg and wanted to do something that could be useful for planners in the region but also – egoistical as I am – for myself.

So I decided to ask junior and senior planning/ad people in the region and some other people there about one book, essay, documentary, novel, movie, painting or whatever cultural artefact they want each that helped them understand one specific thing about the region they work and live in better. Slow or fast moving, recent or old, I don’t care. Simply a couple of sentences description of what it is or was and why it matters.

I really think this could be great to 1) collect and offer resources but also 2) communicate the diversity and beauty of culture(s) beyond the usual “everything is so, so different”.

So I put this idea forward to Rob, who’s always promoted a more nuanced view of ‘Asian’ culture and asked him for a contribution. It pointed me towards a little issue:

I have a slight problem with this idea.

It’s not that I don’t think it has value or that you would approach it in a lazy way – it’s the fact I believe too many folk would look at whatever list you create and think that makes them ‘an expert’.

I see it now and I don’t want to contribute to that myopic view.

That said, I’m happy to help you – so you should read Lonely Planet, which to me offers far more insight than 99% of any ad book.

I got the point. I’m not a fan of lists either. Especially if they promise something like expert status. It won’t come from reading a list of books, for sure.

So as a little disclaimer ahead and agreeing with Rob, I don’t want to approach this as a list. And none of us will become an expert about the region by reading this. None will read everything anyways, which is why I’d like to put more emphasis on the story behind the object.

What I want is more a diverse and open repository of stuff about a vast and diverse region. A bricolage of insights and hints to sources and stuff rather than a definite thing. So besides all the planners and ad people I’ll be pestering, I’m also asking some friends and acquaintances that have nothing to do with advertising and other people to contribute what they’d find useful.

So with Rob’s caveat in mind, this is supposed to be the start of a little or probably longer series here. If you’d like to contribute, please email me (wagner.thomas1 # gmail ! com) a short story about a critical incident or whatever you read, watched, heard or whatever that made you, upon reflection (or without reflection), realize something about the culture you’re living in.

Not even a week until we get there.

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(This isn’t in Tianzifang, but in Beijing’s Art District.)

When I was strolling along a street close to Tianzifang in Shanghai with my friend Christoph in June, we walked past some modern buildings with a Starbucks and two other, similarly designed coffee shops. I got weak and bought myself a heavily overpriced Macha Latte as we sat down at a raised bed on the side of the boardwalk to rest a bit.

At that point, Christoph sighed a bit and remarked how Shanghai, to him, demonstrated the possibility that in 20 years time, all around the world, things might be and look more or less the same.

I already wrote about Shanghai being a bit like this law about the internet: if you can imagine it, it exists. Shanghai has – obviously – characteristics of an old and new Chinese city; it has a partly European heritage and is apparently greatly attracted to modern European luxury and food. And it has pretty much everything people usually mean when they talk about the McDonaldization of culture (KFC, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks; and many more US chains that are in Shanghai, but not in Europe.) to cinema chains showing the latest international (American) movies.

(Cut.)

I read a book recently about how people from the East and the West think differently, called The Geography of Thought. It described, quoting many different experiments as well as arguing historically that there are fundamental differences in how people think and perceive, how this influences behavior and how this in turn shapes a culture that – via socialization and language – favors a particular mode of thinking. While all those experiments paint a convincing picture about differences and while those surely play a role in the way people construct meaning and communication works – although the book never really goes into much detail about the scale or gravity of differences –, I found the open conclusions of the book most interesting.

First of all, it argues that people’s cognitive tendencies are culturally malleable. Where you live has a profound impact on how you reason, judge and perceive. Nurture doesn’t end when you’re grown up. Living in China or Japan e.g. will probably make you more contextually aware. Living in America will make you more of a logical reasoner. I find that fascinating, and it’s one of the reasons why I look forward to the start of our Singapore adventure.

The final argument however, is about whether we’re up for some sort of globalized Americanism. Nisbett argues what we’re seeing is instead Western and Eastern cultures influencing each other. Westerners seem to have a bit of an issue with this:

“[They] dend to confuse modernization–defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization–with Westernization.”

“But a third view should be considered, which is that the world may be in for convergence rather than continued divergence, but a convergence based not purely on Westernization but also on Easternization and on new cognitive forms based on the blending of social systems and values.”

Yes, we’re seeing people run around with Cokes all over the world. But we’ve also witnessed the influx of Asian horror themes into Western pop culture, fusion cuisine as well as the diffusion of Asian noodles as e.g. middle European street snack (including a hell freezing over moment with McDonald’s now selling McNoodles in Austria). That was obviously only a short list of things that were on top of mind right now; there are many examples in the book. The world isn’t going one way, it never has done that.

All of this, when I read it, reminded me of Shanghai, and of course Singapore, again. Ideas are always travelling from some place and put into action in another one. They are adapted, remixed and shaped to fit another place. That there are some executions of it, like German ‘beer gardens’ in those cities that feel out of place to me or what is called ‘Sechuan’ food in Austria, is another story. Nobody complains about Irish pubs all over the world anymore. “Cultures” are never one static body, they never have been.Globalization has been going on ever since people started to walk.

I think convergence, not towards something known (“American culture”), but rather towards something maybe entirely new is fascinating. And I look forward to acting on the other side of that imaginary fence for a while.

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A scene from Ron Fricke’s Samsara. [Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories]

Anyways, classics, whole genres, TV series, … there’s so much stuff I’m aware of but that I’ve never seen. I don’t know why I’m writing this disclaimer. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to come across as an avantgarde douchebag for writing the next couple of paragraphs. Maybe it’s to apologize in advance for any stupidity that might follow.

Anyways, I recently watched Baraka and Samsara.

Baraka has no plot, no storyline, no actors, no dialogue nor any voice-over. Instead, the film uses themes to present new steps and evoke emotion through pure cinema. Baraka is a kaleidoscopic, global compilation of both natural events and by fate, life and activities of humanity on Earth. – Wikipedia

Expanding on the themes they developed in Baraka (1992) and Chronos (1985), Samsara explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation. – About Samsara

They are both incredibly beautiful. And they provide a glimpse into the current state of our existence on this lovely little planet of ours. It shows our past and present, and how past and present are really present at the same time, sometimes at the same place even. It shows all the beauty and dispair of the human experience and how we collectively muddle through this thing called life in various forms.

Even though Baraka and Samsara are non-narrative, they tell a story, or they at least evoke a narrative about how our world is, how fragile civilisation, how different and at the same time universal our own private existence is. And above all, how much it is changing all the time.

It reminded me about how explorations like that are often the things that make a lasting expression on me. They move me, they make me think and they make me hungry to see the world. Displaying the diversity of life, all those different decisions and actions made everyday, all those different lives lived at this very moment in all their different forms – they will never stop to amaze me.

Some of those films take a more systemic point of view, others, the narrative ones mostly, focus on individual fates. There surely are many more of those, but, to refer back to the beginning – I’m not an expert.

No related posts.

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As for the level of creativity in the output of brand management, it can be argued that the effectiveness and efficiency of everything brand management does, is dependent on its originality and appropriateness. To be successful, advertising and other brand experiences depend heavily on their level of creativity. While this conclusion itself might not be surprising, the finding that creatively publishing a brand and building emotions at low levels of attentions might matter more than the comprehension or recall of a message, probably is.

Regarding the role of creativity in the output of brand management, it can be argued that the appropriateness of solutions can be interpreted as well as ‘appropriate for the company’ (not only for its customers). Therefore, and as mentioned before, brand management operates at the creative end of commerciality, producing solutions that are divergent and relevant for both the consumers and the organisation. This is why creativity is not only important when it comes to implementing strategies, but before, when it comes to formulating strategies in the first place.

4.4 Concluding Thoughts

“… chance favors only the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur

To sum it up, the literature review suggests that organisational creativity, the complex aggregate of organisational, group, personal and process characteristics is of paramount importance to brand management. This is because its dimensions brand potential, brand relationships and brand experience depend heavily on creativity, be it as an input or an output:

Organisational creativity increases an organisational ability to operate external complexity by expanding and narrowing down possible valid future courses of action, therefore increasing its chances to intervene in the cognitive and social systems outside the company, build relationships and learn in a world that challenges brand management with complexity, the paradox of structural coupling and the increasing importance of communication.

While the scope of the topic might have been underestimated, the extensive analysis of literature on brand management, advertising research and creativity has greatly advanced my understanding of brand management and further strengthened my believe that brand management can learn a great deal from organisational, complexity, creativity and design theory and research.

Related posts:

1. 3.5 A Place View on Creativity in Brand Management
2. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management
3. 1. The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management

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As for the challenge of relationship building and brand experience, there is the conclusion that creativity is highly contextual. People regard different things as creative, which means that empathy, or understanding what the counter-part sees as creative is an important thing for brand management to know. It does make a difference if one thinks he/she deals with a highly advertising literate audience, able to decode plots and actively interpreting media or if one thinks of people that rationally elaborate on information and messages (Rossiter & Bellman 2005, p.143ff).

In addition, with the lens on the consumer switching from an individualised to a more social perspective, brand management should also reflect on the concept of relationships per se. While this paper can’t go into detail on recent brand relationship theory, Fournier’s (1998) research about the multifaceted relationships people (can) have with brands and Muniz’ (2001) conclusion that people (sometimes) form brand communities could lead to divergent and relevant strategies in that area (keeping in mind that people have relationship foremost with other people and organizations).

Regarding the coupling of an organisation with the environment, an interesting debate has been going on about the co-creation and crowdsourcing of ideas and solutions. Procter & Gamble set their goal to have 50% of their innovations come from outside the company as a part of their overall restructuring initiative (Martin 2009a, p.96), crowdsourcing platforms and agencies bid for and win substantial pieces of business (Klaassen 2011) and academic literature (Malone et al. 2010; Bernoff & Li 2008; Gabor 2009) is making advances in making use of the ‘wisdom’ of the crowds.

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Bernoff, J. & Li, C., 2008. Harnessing the power of the oh-so-social web. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(3), S. 36.

Fournier, S., 1998. Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of consumer research, S. 343–373.

Gabor, A., 2009. The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration. strategy + business, 56(Autumn 2009), S. 1–7.

Klaassen, A., 2011. Harley-Davidson Breaks Consumer-Created Victors & Spoils Ad. Advertising Age. Available at: http://adage.com/article/news/harley-davidson-breaks-consumer-created-victors-spoils-ad/148873/ [Zugegriffen Mai 16, 2011].

Malone, T.W., Laubacher, R. & Dellarocas, C., 2010. The collective intelligence genome. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring.

Martin, R., 2009. The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, Harvard Business Press.

Muniz Jr, A.M. & O’Guinn, T.C., 2001. Brand community. Journal of consumer research, 27(4), S. 412–432.

Related posts:

1. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management
2. 4. Conclusion and Implications About the Roles of Creativity in Brand Management
3. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management

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Related posts:

1. 3.3 A Process View of Creativity in Brand Management
2. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management
3. 3.4 The Role of Personal Creativity in Brand Management

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To understand creativity in brand management, one has to first ask what organisational creativity is. In their much-quoted paper Woodman et al (1993, p.293) define it as follows:

“Organizational creativity is the creation of a valuable, useful new product, service, idea, procedure, or process by individuals working together in a complex social system. It is, therefore, the commonly accepted definition of creative behavior, or the products of such behavior (e.g., Arieti, 1976; Barron, 1969; Golann, 1963) placed within an organizational context.”

In this context, creativity is defined as a subset of innovation, which itself is defined as a subset of organisational change. The conceptual links between individual, groups and organisational behaviour are shown in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Conceptualisation of Organisational Creativity, taken from Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin (1993, p. 309)

Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin (1993, p.309) conceptualise creativity in an organisational setting along three major categories. Creativity as the trait of individual people is applied in concrete group situations that are formed by organisational characteristics. Individuals, groups and organisations together form the traits of the creative process that then leads to an output. Creativity is here seen as both the trait of an output as introduced in the preceding chapters and as ‘creative behaviour’ in the context organisation. This chapter will focus on the organisational traits that influence the latter.

The history of corporations’ relationship with creativity isn’t necessarily friction-free. Feldwick and Heath (2008, p.29) use the information processing paradigm and the case study of an advertising campaign not at all suited to this paradigm for their analysis of creativity in an organisational context. The TV commercial they refer to contained no information as such about the product and used a pop song and surreally linked scenes to advertise a snack food product. In the subsequent testing of the commercial by market research, questions were asked to measure constructs such as ‘ease of understanding’, ‘believability’, ‘relevance’, ‘branding’ and ‘persuasion’ (ibid.) and the research report then followed with conclusions that are included here in full for better understanding:

“This route does not seem to have worked very well … it hampers understanding and comprehension of intended message.

The song acts as the biggest hurdle – there is a strong element of dislike which overrides message takeout, and impressions about the product.

… the taste, or other details about the product are hardly mentioned spontaneously.

The ad … is seen in terms of its format rather than communication, which results in relevance, believability and persuasion being low. This is also supported by the low ease of understanding score.

We feel it may not be appropriate to use this ad as a launch vehicle, given the above concerns. Probably a more simplistic route (a simple story line) which emphasises the brand name and benefits clearly would work the best.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.30)

To sum it up, research conducted with the information processing model in mind would have recommended not to run the ad, because it doesn’t persuade and doesn’t transfer a message.

“The research was conducted among teenagers using familiar ‘impact and communication’-type questions such as ‘Did this commercial give you enough information about the product?’ and ‘Do you think someone would find this commercial easy to understand?’ From such questions, average scores were produced for constructs including ‘ease of understanding’, ‘believability’, ‘relevance’, ‘branding’ and ‘persuasion’. On all these, scores were below norms.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.29)

Feldwick and Heath (2008) now argue that it is not the research that is unusual in this particular case but the fact that the advertiser ran the ad, for reasons of timing. After it had a chance to be seen in the real world by real people, the campaign was a massive success.

“It became the most recalled and liked ad among teenagers and adults for three months in a row, in an independent survey of all advertising in its geographical market. It achieved high spontaneous recall, with 93% liking the ad very much – especially the song. In fact, the campaign became ‘the talk of the town’ with many mentions in the press, on TV shows, etc. Most importantly, the brand took a substantial share of the market.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.30)

Why, then, was the research done this way? They argue that marketing organisations still hang onto the information processing model, while the majority of advertising practitioners – and academic researchers building on researchers like Krugman (1965) or Kroeber-Riel (1975) – believe that advertising works on an emotional – and not necessarily message based – level. This, in turn, leads to

“a benign conspiracy between client and agency in which creativity and communication are able to coexist (Heath 2004) [and in which] huge resources of corporate ingenuity are squandered in retrofitting successful campaigns to ‘information processing’ strategies. So we are led to believe that Heineken’s famous ‘Refreshes the parts …’ campaign worked mainly because it communicated the ‘benefit’ of refreshment. […] It is a bit like saying that King Lear is a great play because it is about families.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.32)

If creativity is important and the message perhaps less so, then the question why the information processing model persists. According to Feldwick and Heath (2008) the reason for this has to be looked for in the underlying organisational culture of business. They point out that these cultures are based on “modernist principles of order, control and rationality, with a strong realist ontology and a positivist epistemology (Alvesson & Deetz 2005, p.61)” (p.47). They tend to rely on argument, analysis, measurement and factual proof, “however illusory the practice of these may be” (ibid.). While these practices can be highly effective in administration and the refinement of processes, they are “very badly adapted to dealing with creative processes, with emotional decisions or in general with anything that cannot explicitly be verbalised and/or measured” (ibid.). The information processing model presents the consumer choice behaviour as a rational and fact based process and therefore allows organisations to bring the logic, words and analytical thinking they value so much into an otherwise “chaotic, intuitive” (ibid.) process.

“For the marketing organisation, then, the IP model fulfils a need to remain consistent with the organisational myths of rational decision making, replicability and control. It does this by reducing the essence of the creative content to a single proposition or idea that can be owned, replicated and controlled; by envisaging the communication process as a mechanistic transfer of this unit of information whose efficiency can be measured; and by projecting on to the consumer’s choices the same myth of rational decision making that the organisation values internally.” (ibid.)

Creativity, as an outsourced process and output is attached to a model that appears “simultaneously rational, replicable, ownable and controllable” (ibid.) and is rarely discussed between agencies and clients (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.36). This practise, then, is the same that is also present in many practitioners’ brand management models, that mostly willingly ignore environmental complexity, relationships and communication and present themselves to brand managers as controllable solutions.

Analysing creativity and innovation in corporations beyond advertising and brand management, Martin (2009b) argues like Feldwick and Heath (2008) that corporations are built and managed as a means to guarantee reliability. They have refined and pushed forward analytical thinking – deduction and induction – and each year graduates trained in business administration stream into the corporate world. He describes a paradoxical context in which companies long for strategic innovation while at the same time abductive thinking, the thinking style balancing analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, is still largely ignored (Martin 2009b; Johansson & Woodilla 2009). Operating in the realm of “what might be – a realm beyond the reach of data from the past” (Martin 2009b, n.p.) isn’t what most business are good at, or even trying to do. Martin therefore argues for a balance between the two approaches for more creative results.

“A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation.“ (Martin 2009b, n.p.)

As argued before with Nussbaum (2011), the results of the design thinking movement so far have been limited, as the topic that this discourse really is about – creativity – has been largely circumvented. A description of the state of creativity in organisations by one of its widely acknowledged researchers reads like this:

“[T]here can be no doubt: creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. For the most part, this isn’t because managers have a vendetta against creativity. On the contrary, most believe in the value of new and useful ideas. However, creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established – for entirely good reasons – to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity and control.” (Amabile 1998, p.77)

Amabile (1998, p. 81) also argues that the practices responsible for inhibiting creativity in corporations are systemic, widespread and hardly even challenged and suggests management principles that have shown to bring about higher levels of creativity in the workplace. She suggests that “people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – and not by external pressures” (p.79). In general, “challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organisational support” (p.80) are managerial categories that can positively – or negatively – affect the ability of employees who are otherwise knowledgeable and posses creative thinking skills. However, compared to the underlying the culture of business and brand management described by Feldwick and Heath (2008), Martin (2009a) and Nussbaum (2011), Amabile’s (1998) prescriptions for managers appear to be a minor issue in the bigger picture.

In reviewing the role of creativity from a product, process, person and place perspective, a number of conclusions have been drawn. The following, concluding chapter will now merge the findings in the chapter about brand management with those about various aspects of creativity.

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Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S., 2005. Critical theory and post modernism: approaches to organizational studies. In C. Grey & H. Willmott, hrsg. Critical management studies: A reader. Oxford University Press, USA, , S. 60–106.

Amabile, T.M., 1998. How to kill creativity. Harvard business review, 76(5), S. 76–87.

Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), S. 29.

Johansson, U. & Woodilla, J., 2009. Towards an epistemological merger of design thinking, strategy and innovation. In 8th European Academy of Design Conference.

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Krugman, H.E., 1965. The impact of television advertising: Learning without involvement. Public Opinion Quarterly, 29(3), S. 349.

Martin, R., 2009a. The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, Harvard Business Press.

Martin, R., 2009b. What is Design Thinking Anyway? Observatory: Design Observer. Available at: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11097 [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Nussbaum, B., 2011. Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Co.Design. Available at: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/beyond-design-thinking [Zugegriffen April 18, 2011].

Woodman, R.W., Sawyer, J.E. & Griffin, R.W., 1993. Toward a theory of organizational creativity. The Academy of Management Review, 18(2), S. 293–321.

Related posts:

1. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management
2. 3.3 A Process View of Creativity in Brand Management
3. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management

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Related posts:

1. 1. The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management
2. “The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management” aka my Bachelor Paper and Planning Barcamp topic
3. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management

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This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

The product view of creativity looked at the role of creativity as a trait of advertising and strategy. The process view of creativity in brand management shifts the focus from creativity as the trait of specific outcomes of brand management to creativity as being applied in brand management. This perspective is looking at how upstream creativity influences outcomes downstream.

One dominant topic when it comes to creativity in business is design thinking. Coined by Tim Brown (2008, p.2) of IDEO, he defines it as

“[...] a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

Brown (2008) both witnesses and promotes a shift in how companies use design, from using design as a downstream tactical activity to “companies [...] asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires” (Brown 2008, p.2). Design therefore becomes more of a strategic, rather than a tactical activity.

While coming up with products or brand ideas that meet consumers’ needs and desires certainly isn’t a new concept, but rather the foundation of modern marketing theory (Kotler & Bliemel 2006), it is the more explicit use of designers or a ‘designerly way of thinking’ to fulfil those needs that is new. Brown therefore introduces three phases that every design project should pass through, with design being very broadly defined here. These phases, or spaces as he calls them, are inspiration, ideation and implementation. Inspiration is establishing the context that motivates the search for solutions, ideation is the process of “generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solution” (Brown 2008, p.4) and implementation is bringing the winning ideas to the market. This is not a linear process however, as the first two spaces are looped back throughout the process shown in IDEO’s process in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Design Thinking – IDEO Process (Brown 2008, p. 5)

In a critical response to the growth of design thinking, Norman (2010) argues, however, that at the core, design thinking really isn’t limited to designers and suggests to talk about creative thinking instead. According to him, design thinking is a part of myth that has spread within the business community:

“The myth? That designers possess some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought. This myth is nonsense, but like all myths, it has a certain ring of plausibility although lacking any evidence. […] Design thinking is a public relations term for good, old-fashioned creative thinking. It is not restricted to designers. Great artists, great engineers, great scientists all break out of the boundaries. Great designers are no different.” (Norman 2010, n.p.)

He then extends the scope of design thinking by emphasizing that it requires systems thinking:

“It means stepping back from the immediate issue and taking a broader look. It requires systems thinking: realizing that any problem is part of larger whole, and that the solution is likely to require understanding the entire system. It requires deep immersion into the topic, often involving observation and analysis. Tests and frequent revisions can be components of the process. Sometimes this is done in groups: multidisciplinary teams who bring different forms of expertise to the problem. Perhaps the most important point is to move away from the problem description and take a new, broader approach.” (Norman 2010, n.p.)

With his focus on systems thinking, looking at the larger whole, deep immersion, testing and experimenting as a way of validating and group learning Norman’s (2010) perspective appears to be related to the systemic brand management model that was suggested earlier.

As the focus shifts from design thinking as a ‘public relations term’ towards creative thinking, Martin (2009b), dean at the Rotman School of Business, provides a thorough analysis of the thinking styles associated with the term. He first distinguishes between analytical thinking – which includes deduction and induction – and intuitive thinking. Both deductive and inductive thinking, make a logical leap from the past to the future. The major goal behind both reasoning styles is reliability – arriving at the same result in the same situation repeatedly. On the opposing side, there is intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking has validity – the ‘right’ solution – as its major goal, while more or less neglecting reliability. Standing behind ‘design thinking’ is a third way of reasoning next to deduction and induction.

This is abduction, introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 19^th century (Martin 2009a, p.62ff). Peirce argued that no genuinely new knowledge can be derived deductively or inductively from old knowledge. New ideas always come into place through “logical leaps of mind” (Martin 2009a, p.64) to the best solution, when new data points are observed that cannot be explained by existing models. This way of thinking is widely distributed amongst designers who have to constantly observe the world and derive conclusions from it. Even when the conclusions drawn from the environment might be wrong – as everything that has to be proven by the future – abductive thinking, with it’s balance of intuitive and analytic thinking, provides the best balance between the two poles of reliability and validity.

How can the design thinking discourse now be brought back to the sphere of brand management? One point is an observed epistemological merger of design thinking, innovation and strategy, three different business discourses that are closely related to each other and highly present in brand management.

“The discourse of strategy expanded in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be a powerful force. Around the millennium, the discourse of innovation gained new prestige; it was linked to strategy and became the hallmark of companies in the forefront of the global economy. Design thinking has joined these executive discourses as a methodology that enables innovation” (Johansson & Woodilla 2009, p.1)

If strategy was the paradigm and innovation the imperative, design thinking got more and more established as the process that promised creative – divergent and relevant – outcomes. And if design thinking is a generic and process-driven way of working creatively, this means it can be applied to everything from forming brand strategies to creating brand experiences (Brown 2005). It is interesting to note how this description of bringing in the wider context first is close to the distinction Mintzberg (1994) drew up between strategic planning and strategic thinking in his seminal paper on the rise and fall of strategic planning:

“Planners should make their contribution around the strategy-making process rather than inside it. They should supply the formal analyses or hard data that strategic thinking requires, as long as they do it to broaden the consideration of issues rather than to discover the one right answer. They should act as catalysts who support strategy making by aiding and encouraging managers to think strategically.” (Mintzberg 1994, p.108)

Only after broadening the considerations of issues, strategic thinking ensues:

“Strategic thinking, in contrast, is about synthesis. It involves intuition and creativity. Such strategies often cannot be developed on schedule and immaculately conceived. They must be free to appear at any time and at any place in the organization, typically through messy processes of informal learning that must necessarily be carried out by people at various levels who are deeply involved with the specific issues at hand. (Mintzberg 1994, p.108)

Again, the importance of creative thinking in strategy as well as the importance of contextual awareness as a starting point of creative thinking as a process can be seen. Every phase of any project there should therefore be a succession of divergent and convergent thinking, as is also illustrated in Figure 5 (Woodman et al. 1993, p.299).

Phases of generating ideas, possibilities, challenges and opportunities should be followed by phases of reduction, refinement and synthesis.

Figure 5: Divergent and convergent thinking (screengrab from Hulme 2010)

To do this, an important conclusion for brand management, as derived from Mintzberg (1994) as well as the newer proponents of design thinking, immersion into a wider context is inevitable. The more opportunities and different data points and ideas – the more empathy and knowledge – is created in the first place, the more divergent solutions are possible.

“Invention is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing. He who has laid up no material can produce no combination.” (Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1732-1792; qtd. in Offner, 1990).

There is, however, a critical perspective on design thinking that goes beyond Norman’s (2010) critique of its use as a marketing label. Nussbaum (2011, n.p.), one of its strongest earlier proponents argues that design thinking is a “failed experiment”. This is because designers and consultancies tried to use design thinking as a sellable, generic process to get creativity and creative thinking into the hallways of corporations, which failed because what corporations took out was merely the process, and not the core of design thinking, which is – as has been argued – creative thinking itself.

“Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business–which is defined by a culture of process efficiency–a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.” (Nussbaum 2011, n.p.)

Nussbaum (2011) goes on to argue that it is creativity that really needs to be understood and valued by corporations. He is therefore promoting the concept of ‘creative intelligence’, which he wants to be broadly accepted, not only by managers and corporations, but by society as a whole. This leads to the final two perspectives on creativity in brand management: the person view and the organisation view of creativity in brand management.

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Brown, T., 2008. Design thinking. harvard business review, 86(6), S. 84.

Brown, T., 2005. Strategy by Design | Fast Company. Fast Company, (June). Available at: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html [Zugegriffen April 18, 2011].

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Kotler, P. & Bliemel, F., 2006. Marketing-Management. Analyse, Planung und Verwirklichung 10., überarb. u. aktualis. A., Pearson Studium.

Martin, R., 2009a. The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, Harvard Business Press.

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Mintzberg, H., 1994. The fall and rise of strategic planning. Harvard Business Review, 72, S. 107–107.

Norman, D., 2010. Design Thinking: A Useful Myth. Core77 – design magazine and resource. Available at: http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/design_thinking_a_useful_myth_16790.asp [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Nussbaum, B., 2011. Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Co.Design. Available at: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/beyond-design-thinking [Zugegriffen April 18, 2011].

Offner, D., 1990. „ Hitch-Hiking“ on Creativity in Nature. Journal of Creative Behavior, 24(3), S. 199–204.

Woodman, R.W., Sawyer, J.E. & Griffin, R.W., 1993. Toward a theory of organizational creativity. The Academy of Management Review, 18(2), S. 293–321.

Related posts:

1. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management
2. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management
3. 1. The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management

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In a more and more cluttered market space with a myriad of media and non-media options for brand managers, doing the right things is at least as crucial as doing things right (Rose & Zuckerman 2009). So while research shows that creative advertising might be more effective and efficient than non-creative advertising (doing things right), not advertising at all, or using a different form of marketing communication, or different content, or targeting different people or changing the packaging might be even more effective (doing the right thing). This again points to the contingency and complexity that Tropp (2004) introduced as one of the major challenges for brand management. Every decision made could have also been made differently, and therefore brings about the risk of omitting a possible better solution. – You never know.

The landscape for brands to act in contemporary culture is vast and options for brand management are abundant. While Holt described the branding paradigms he identified as happening in a sequence, the world is still full of ‘modern’ branding. ‘Post-modern’ branding techniques are still in use and only some brands have recently started to embrace what he coined a post-postmodern branding paradigm (Holt 2002) – being genuinely creative contributors to culture.

In light of this and the pressures on brand management, the creativity – the divergence and relevance – of companies’ brand strategies becomes one of the most crucial outputs of the brand management. Robert Campbell, head of planning at the independent agency network Wieden+Kennedy coined the phrase of the advertising industry ideally being at the “creative end of commerciality” (Campbell 2008, n.p.), not at the “commercial end of creativity”. This point of view looks at advertising agencies and specifically account planning not merely as a supplier of creative advertising and communication, but as a resource that can provide an original and relevant perspective –strategic thinking – on the question of what to do to solve a specific marketing or business – and only therefore brand – problem. It is brand management in companies and (account) planning in agencies of all sorts that have the task of not only making sure the level of relevance and divergence of a chosen solution (e.g. advertising) is high once it is determined, but to make sure the right solution is pursued in the first place (Baskin & Pickton 2003, p.419). This calls for creativity in the strategy development process, both on a macro- and a micro-level.

From a macro-perspective, creativity as a trait of a firm’s or brand’s strategy is closely related to Holt’s (2004a) and Grant’s (2006) arguments of brand innovation, brands as cluster of cultural ideas and branding as cultural activism. They suggest that for brands to become successful they have to stay culturally relevant. To illustrate that point, Levi’s is an example of a brand that stuck to the same strategy while always delivering highly creative advertising within a strategic brand framework:

“Levi Strauss seems to believe that TV ads are the only thing that drives its business. That is unlikely to be the only reason its sales have declined for eight consecutive years, wiping out $3 billion in annual revenues. Yet you do have to wonder about what Einstein said – that doing the same thing over and over, in the hope of a different result, is insanity. […] Levi’s is hoping the £21 million campaign will help reverse a seven-year decline, which has seen its sales plummet by 42 per cent.” (Grant 2006, p.23f)

“That whole tragedy unfolded while the advertising went from strength to strength, with two of the company’s most popular TV commercials – ‘Flat Eric’ in 1999 (glove puppet and a rumbling techno track) and “Odyssey” in 2002 (two lovers leap through walls to escape what looks like a mental asylum, before running up trees to jump towards the moon). So what gives? It appears it is possible to have some of the best ads in the world (judging by their success in international awards) and still be out of fashion. Levi’s was short of a cultural idea – a reason for having a vital role in people’s lives.” (Grant 2006, p.30)

During this time, Levi’s used highly entertaining and highly creative television advertising, and still, when the demand for denim in the UK returned, Levi’s was stuck between cheaper brands and “cooler, more expensive designer brands such as Diesel” (Grant 2006, p. 30). Levi’s – at that time – apparently missed changes in the social and cultural context and it subsequently didn’t come up with a creative strategy for their brand, while producing one award-winning ad after another. This of course is Grant’s reading of the scenario. He didn’t publish BBH’s, Levi’s then long-standing agency, point of view in his book.

On a micro-level, AMV BBDO’s “Try something new today” for Sainsbury’s can serve as an example for creative strategy. This is a piece of thinking that won the 2007 Grand Prix at the Account Planning Group creative strategy awards (Dutta 2007). AMV BBDO was briefed to jumpstart a process that would lead to an increase of profits by about two and half billion over two years.

As the first step, they broke that sum down into a more manageable number and calculated that they needed to get around £1.50 more per visit from their existing customers. This is what Andrew Howell (2007, n.p.) called “a brilliant re-framing of the objective. It’s a credible goal everyone can work to. Creatives, the Sainsbury board, every member of staff” . Their insight into the cultural context was that while people were sleep-shopping in supermarkets, food culture had evolved from basic menus and foodies were always looking for new ideas. And that is where the brand idea came to live: “Sainsburys, the mid-market food mecca could encourage people to spend a little more by giving them failsafe tips” (ibid.). Using Jamie Oliver as a credible spokesperson, being true to the food-heritage of the brand and linking every piece of communication to a otherwise very abstract commercial objective, this might serve as an example for the creative thinking on a more micro-level.

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Baskin, M. & Pickton, D., 2003. Account planning–from genesis to revelation. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 21(7), S. 416–424.

Campbell, R., 2008. The New Home For The Ambitious. « The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]. Available at: http://robcampbell.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/the-new-home-for-the-ambitious/ [Zugegriffen März 8, 2011].

Dutta, K., 2007. Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO scoops APG Grand Prix. Advertising news – Campaign. Available at: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/766451/Abbott-Mead-Vickers-BBDO-scoops-APG-Grand-Prix/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Grant, J., 2006. Brand Innovation Manifesto: How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets and Defy Conventions 1. Aufl., John Wiley & Sons.

Holt, D.B., 2004. Douglas B. Holt on Branding as Cultural Activism. Emory Marketing Institute. Available at: http://www.emorymi.com/holt.shtml [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Holt, D.B., 2002. Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(1), S. 70–90.

Hovell, A., 2007. Sainsburys. Northern Planner. Available at: http://joymachine.typepad.com/northern_planner/2007/11/i.html [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Rose, J. & Zuckerman, N., 2009. Can You Reach the Masses Without Mass Media? Available at: https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/cmos_dilemma/ [Zugegriffen Februar 4, 2011].

Tropp, J., 2004. Markenmanagement: Der Brand Management Navigator. Markenführung im Kommunikationszeitalter, VS Verlag.

Related posts:

1. 3.2.1.4 Branding as Creative Cultural Activism
2. 3.2.1.1 Creativity and the hierarchy of effects
3. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management

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This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

A last perspective changes the lens further away from an individualistic, to a social and cultural perspective. It is routed in a view of the market as mediating cultural meanings:

“[C]onsumer culture denotes a social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, and between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets.[...] The consumption of market-made commodities and desire-inducing marketing symbols is central to consumer culture, and yet the perpetuation and reproduction of this system is largely dependent upon the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life [.].“ (Arnould & Thompson 2005, p.869)

Holt argues that there have been different branding paradigms in the last 100 years. The first one, the modern branding paradigm as exemplified by pre-Creative Revolution (Bernbach etc) advertising was built on cultural domineering. This meant marketers relatively bluntly prescribing ways of life as templates for the then emerging culture of mass consumption. However, advertising and market consciousness led to an increasingly anti-corporate or advertising-skeptic audience that didn’t want to be domineered by marketers’ cultural power or life-style blueprints promoted by advertising.

“Branding could no longer prescribe tastes in a way that was perceived as domineering. People had to be able to experience consumption as a volitional site of personal development, achievement, and self-creation. Increasingly, they could not tolerate the idea that they were to live in accord with a company-generated template.“ (Holt 2002, p.82)

The creative revolution that followed was in many ways a reaction to these social shifts and led to post-modern advertising and branding tactics Holt (2002, p.85ff) calls Authentic Cultural Resources, Ironic, Reflexive Brand Persona, Coattailing on Cultural Epicenters, Life World Emplacement and Stealth Branding. Tactics that were built on a distance from a profit motive. Holt argues that, like in the 60s, when Packard and other critics pushed the then dominant branding paradigm into public consciousness, today’s post-modern branding paradigm is confronted with major contradictions. Ironic distance as an aesthetic method has lost its power, stealth marketing came under scrutiny for more and more hidden and aggressive techniques, to be perceived as authentic brands must dig deeper then ever in counter- and subcultures and people more and more compare brands’ advertising and branding devices with their ‘real’ activities in communities around the world. Last but not least, people have been confronted with a torrent of appeals and suggestions of identity projects that can only be viably conducted using brands.

“To feel sovereign, postmodern consumers must adopt a never-ending project to create an individuated identity through consumption. This project requires absorbing an ever-expanding supply of fashions, cultural texts, tourist experiences, cuisines, mass cultural icons, and the like. As a result, we are in the midst of a widespread inflation in the symbolic work required to achieve what is perceived as real sovereignty.“ (Holt 2002, p.87)

For Holt (2002, p.85ff) all of those phenomena pointed to an end of this post-modern branding paradigm. His projections about what comes after (a post-postmodern branding paradigm, as he calls it), introduce the concept of brands as ‘citizen artists’ (Holt 2002, p.87). While brands would also in the future strive to contribute authentic and relevant cultural resources, authenticity will not be communicated by distancing the brand from a for-profit motive, but through a genuine creative (‘artist’) and responsible (‘citizen’) contribution to society.

“Rather than take a free ride on the backs of pop stars, indie films, and social viruses, brands will be valued to the extent that they deliver creatively, similar to other cultural products.“ (Holt 2002, p.86)

The question, then, is about how these authentic, creative and relevant resources should be understood. If one talks about contributing creatively to culture, advertising or in general marketing communication might only be one of many relevant measures a brand could take. John Grant for example – like Holt using post-modern identity crisis and social tensions as starting point for his argument – argues against what he calls the “brand image school” (Grant 2006, p.22) that relies heavily on image advertising and argues instead for a very action oriented way of building brands – what he calls “brand innovation” (Grant 2006, p.4). While this paper can by no means open the debate about authenticity and what is ‘real’ and what is ‘percepted’, the perspective of brands having a role as an active player in culture, or in Holt’s diction – as a cultural activist (Holt 2004a) should illustrate that creativity in brand management today goes beyond creative advertising. This consequently opens up the question about creativity as a feature of a company’s brand strategies.

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Arnould, E.J. & Thompson, C.J., 2005. Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 31(4), S. 868–882.

Grant, J., 2006. Brand Innovation Manifesto: How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets and Defy Conventions 1. Aufl., John Wiley & Sons.

Holt, D.B., 2004. Douglas B. Holt on Branding as Cultural Activism. Emory Marketing Institute. Available at: http://www.emorymi.com/holt.shtml [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Holt, D.B., 2002. Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(1), S. 70–90.

Related posts:

1. 3.2.1.3 Advertising as Creative Publicity
2. Master Thesis Topic (update)
3. 2.3.2 Projective Paradigm

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This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

While the ideas of Feldwick and Heath “offer a more plausible explanation of how 30 seconds of apparent nonsense, watched through half-closed eyes, can affect brand preference and buying behaviour, than the old idea of the ‘selling proposition’” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.51) there is another perspective that, while agreeing in the rejection of persuasion and the rational message, instead sees the role of advertising in “creative publicity”, as marketing science’s sage Ehrenberg (2002, p.7) labeled it.

Ehrenberg concluded early that advertising “is not as powerful as is sometimes thought, nor is there any evidence that it actually works by any strong form of persuasion or manipulation” (Ehrenberg 1974, p.25 qtd. in Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.40). In fact, in an article published in 2002 he listed brand differentiation and persuasive advertising as some of the marketing’s most persistent “romantic fantasies” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.1).

According to his decade-long research into buying behaviour “[p]eople don’t differentiate in that way among most brands. It has been shown repeatedly that users of brand A feel about brand A much as users of brand B feel about brand B” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.2). Consumers are then not loyal in the strictest sense but really polygamous buyers of a set of habitual brands:

“In a year, say, customers of brand A in a product category typically buy its competitive brands B, C, D, etc. in total more often than they buy brand A itself. It follows that if the consumer wants the product — he or she is nearly out of gas, or coffee, or condoms, or needs a hotel room for the night — then he or she has no great difficulty in choosing a familiar and more or less look-alike brand.” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.3)

This means that advertising for an established brand can hardly persuade people into a differentiating attitude change nor can it persuade them to more loyalty, as those things hardly vary from brand to brand within a category (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.9). What advertising can do however, is create publicity for the brand, i.e. present it to the public and remind it that it exists.

“The realistic task for advertising is not to change what people think about your brand, which is always hard to achieve, but to have them think about your brand at all.” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.4)

Ehrenberg argues that advertisements usually don’t feature persuasive content and that it consequently doesn’t change people’s opinions (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.7). This is also coherent with what communication researchers have long argued for regarding the agenda setting function of mass media, i.e. that media does not tell people what to think, but more what to think about (McCombs & Shaw 1972).

What advertising does by creating creative publicity is affecting the brand’s salience, which – according to Ehrenberg is the best measure of a brands’ success.

“Salience concerns the ‘size’ of the brand in one’s mind (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2002b), i.e., all the memory structures that can allow the brand to come forward for the wide range of recall cues that can occur in purchase occasions. With this “share of mind” come feelings of being familiar and feelings of assurance (‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. It should be all right.’). That is our broad designation of “Salience”—awareness and memory traces, plus familiarity, plus assurance.” (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.11)

As there is usually a long time-lag between an advertising exposure and the actual act of purchase, effective advertising requires long-term memory (Ehrenberg et al. 1997, p.9). This associations in long-term memory are built on the one hand by repetition and on the other hand through all kinds of other brand exposures, such as WOM, brand usage, POS or even recalling memories. Once associations are stored in the long-term memory, they are hardly ever completely forgotten. As people build highly individualized memory-structures, “[p]ublicizing a brand is [.] about what consumers do with the advertising rather than what advertisements do to consumers […]” (Ehrenberg et al. 1997, p.10). So with long-term memory in mind, advertising’s task is then to find creative ways to publicise the brand, refresh and build new memory traces and “to make the brand distinctive rather than differentiated” (Sharp 2010a, p.353).

Ehrenberg argues that this ‘mere publicity’ perspective might actually be liberating for creatives, as advertising then becomes “making distinctive and memorable publicity for the brand out of next to nothing” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.16) and communication being less inhibited by the self-replication of one single minded proposition (ibid.)

“The Ehrenbergian view places much greater importance on creativity, on branding, on understanding memory structures. It is a positive story for advertising practitioners, many of whom were attracted into the advertising industry by creative brand-oriented advertising.” (Sharp 2010a, p.353)

This point of view on advertising leaves the very individualized perspective of hierarchy of effects models behind, in that it focuses on making the brand salient for the public. It states that the more people view a brand as salient, the more buy it and the bigger the brand will become. Thinking about publishing, however, always implies thinking of a public, which is usually comprised by more than one person. Therefore, criticising advertising’s and brand management’s individualistic view of consumers, Mark Earls argues that human behaviour and advertising might actually be better understood from a herd perspective.

“The publicity model itself would seem to be built on the notion that advertising can – even for large and stable brands – work through the herd: it draws the attention of the herd towards the brand and stops it being forgotten by the herd. The examples of tribal advertising cited by Cova and Cova (2002) would also seem to support this view;” (Earls 2003, p.328)

Advertising then, is viewed as something that “[...] sometimes at least, works in the context of groups rather than individuals” (Earls 2003, p.327) and creativity’s role is to make something salient in the context of social networks, not of isolated consumers.

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Ehrenberg, A., Bloom, H., Barnard, N. & Kennedy, R., 2002. Brand advertising as creative publicity. Journal of Advertising Research, 42(4), S. 7–18.

Ehrenberg, A., 2002. Marketing: Are you really a realist? strategy + business, 27(Second Quarter 2002), S. 22–25.

Ehrenberg, A., 1974. Repetitive Advertising and the Consumer. Journal of Advertising Research, 14(2), S. 24–34.

Ehrenberg, A., Barnard, N. & Scriven, J., 1997. Differentiation or salience. Journal of Advertising Research, 37(6), S. 7–14.

Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), S. 29.

McCombs, M.E. & Shaw, D.L., 1972. The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), S. 176.

Sharp, B., 2010. Ehrenberg’s View of Advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 50(4), S. 352–353. Available at: [Zugegriffen März 8, 2011].

Related posts:

1. 1. The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management

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This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

Feldwick and Heath (2008, p.32) challenge the very notion that advertising works via the conscious processing of a message or the transmission of information. This dominant model stresses the importance of one clear message being communicated and therefore appropriates creativity by merely acknowledging its effect on either processing or outcome variables, as it is shown e.g. in the research by Smith et. al.

Consequently, Feldwick and Heath (2008) identify an information processing (IP) paradigm at work that builds on core assumptions visible both in industry practise as well as academia and business school textbooks:

• “For any ad to be effective, it must communicate a clear (i.e. verbally describable) message about the product or service.
• Success in advertising is indicated by ‘recall’ of this message, which must also be ‘believed’ and ‘understood’.In addition, it is commonly held that:
• the advertising process is essentially a one-way communication from the advertiser to the consumer
• the role played by creativity and emotional elements is to support this communication, either by fostering liking of the advertising, which transfers to the brand, or by increasing attention, which aids memory of the key message
• advertising is most effective when processed with high levels of attention and the active involvement of the viewer.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.31)

While being presented as common sense and ‘natural’ way of understanding and measuring advertising and viewing advertising creativity, this view can easily be traced back to advertising’s historical routs. On the one hand it is related to Lasker and Kennedy, who looked at advertising as salesmanship in print (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.34ff), which in turn led to the development of the famous AIDA formula and numerous other hierarchy of effects models. ‘Salesmanship in print’ was in practice understood as reaching a few people only, giving them as much information as possible and then providing them an opportunity to order. What made sense in print then and in direct response advertising today, developed – with the increasing importance of the Starch ratings in the 30s – into the dominant view in agencies and marketing departments alike: advertising had to grab all the viewers attention by all means (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.36).

Another root is Rosser Reeves’ Unique Selling Proposition that he invented after asserting – without empirical evidence – that “[t]he consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement – one strong claim, or one strong concept” (Reeves 1961, p.34 qtd. in Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.36). This verbal proposition in turn developed into one of the most dominant constructs in advertising, as it further increased the dominance of the word over other cues. Consequently research practice tested if consumers correctly and exactly remembered the proposition. Even though communication science and theory (e.g. Watzlawick et al. 1967) have long ago refuted the notion that communication works as information or message transmission, the message is still dominant in briefing formats, research, testing and marketing textbooks.

However, there have been numerous challenges made to the IP paradigm both from practitioners (the Stephen King papers in Lannon & Baskin 2008; Hedges 1974), as well as from recent research into attention and the mind (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.39). Already in 1965 Krugman noticed the strength of low-involvement or low-attention reception of television advertising:

“Does this suggest that if television bombards us with enough trivia about a product we may be persuaded to believe it? On the contrary, it suggests that persuasion as such … is not involved at all and it is a mistake to look for it … as a test of advertising’s impact …” (Krugman 1965, p.353 qtd. in Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.39)

Heath and Feldwick therefore list empirical evidence that the IP model of advertising is flawed, that advertising does indeed work without much conscious attention (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.42f), that Krugman was right asserting that advertising is watched at very low levels of attention (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.43f) and most importantly that it is the emotional content that drives brand choice, and not information (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.45; Heath et al. 2006).

“So the experimental results show clearly that it is the emotional ‘creative’ content in advertising that builds favourability, not the rational message. This again contradicts the idea in the information processing model that it is the communication of the factual message that gives advertising its power.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.46)

This assertion is further backed by Les Binet’s and Peter Field’s meta-analysis of the data and advertising behind 880 IPA effectiveness cases, an award that purely measures the business effects of advertising campaigns (Binet & Field 2009). Their conclusion about advertising content determining effectiveness determinants is as follows: “The more emotions dominate over rational messaging, the bigger the business effects. The most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content.” (Binet & Field 2009, p.132)

Contrary to popular belief, it seems that the active processing of a message itself, or the central rout to persuasion as it was dubbed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), is less important, while “the sounds, symbols, music, gestures and context are not aids to recall or attention (or ‘engagement’), but exist in their own right as central elements in communication” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.51). Managers, researchers and advertisers, according to Heath and Feldwick (2008, p.51) have to understand that human communication is a complex system, that people can indeed be powerfully influenced by something of which they have no conscious recall and that emotions and pre-conscious associations are not following cognition but themselves drive decision-making.

The purpose of creativity, in this view, is therefore to create holistic communication that influences emotions and brand relationships. Brand managers have to acknowledge that reducing the emotional content of advertising in favour of a proposition or rational message will in general reduce effectiveness and creative departments will have to forgo their desire to create ‘impact’ – as in attention – by any means (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.51). Interestingly enough, these findings are also backed by the research of Smith et. al. which is conducted from the perspective that Heath and Feldwick criticise.

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Binet, L. & Field, P., 2009. Empirical generalizations about advertising campaign success. Journal of Advertising Research, 49(2), S. 383–94.

Heath, R., Brandt, D. & Nairn, A., 2006. Brand relationships: Strengthened by emotion, weakened by attention. Journal of Advertising Research, 46(4), S. 410.

Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), S. 29.

Hedges, A., 1974. Testing to destruction. A fresh and critical look at the uses of research in advertising, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Krugman, H.E., 1965. The impact of television advertising: Learning without involvement. Public Opinion Quarterly, 29(3), S. 349.

Lannon, J. & Baskin, M., 2008. A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King, Wiley.

Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T., 1986. Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change, Springer-Verlag New York.

Reeves, R., 1961. Reality in advertising, Knopf.

Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J.H. & Jackson, D.D., 1967. Pragmatics of human communication. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. 1. Aufl., W. W. Norton & Company.

Related posts:

1. 3.2.1.1 Creativity and the hierarchy of effects
2. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management
3. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management

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This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

The dominating view of how advertising works is through the conscious processing of a more or less explicit message or information (Hall & Maclay 1991 qtd. in Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.31). Advertising effectiveness in this perspective is measured according to one of many hierarchy of effects models and creativity will therefore be judged within this framework.

In this research stream, Smith et. al. conceptualized and tested a construct for advertising creativity as seen by the consumer and then measured its mediating effects on advertising effectiveness (Smith & Yang 2004; Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz, u. a. 2007; Smith, Chen & Yang 2008; Yang & Smith 2009). Creativity is seen as determined by divergence, relevance and the interaction between divergence and relevance (Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz & Darley 2007, S. 819ff). This is in accordance with the view that a highly divergent ad might catch consumers’ attention, but still fail to resonate with him or her. Therefore, to be creative, an ad has to be both divergent and relevant (Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz & Darley 2007, S. 820). Variables representing the effectiveness of an ad in this research are outcome and processing variables such as “amount of attention allocated to the ad, motivation to process the ad, and depth of ad processing; and three response variables: ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intentions” (Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz & Darley 2007, S. 821).

Smith et. al. (2007, p.829) could for the first time empirically validate the interaction effect between divergence and relevance as well as the mediating effect of creativity on the attention to the ad, the motivation to process, depth of processing, ad attitude and brand attitude. Whereas the effect of divergence on attention was expected, the identification of a “multiplicative nature of ad divergence and ad relevance” (Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz & Darley 2007, S. 829) and effects that go well beyond attention effects have strong implications for the way brand management should conduct ad and creativity testing (Smith, MacKenzie, Yang, Buchholz & Darley 2007, S. 830).

In a subsequent study Smith et. al. tested the effect of divergence and relevance on the hierarchy of effects. Conceptualizing advertising effects as a cognition → affect → conation chain, they measured the direct and mediated effects of creativity in five stages: Building Brand Awareness, Learning and Remembering Ad Claims, Accepting/Rejecting Ad Claims, Brand Liking, Brand Intentions (Smith, Chen & Yang 2008, S. 50ff). In the discussion of results, they come to three conclusions regarding the effect of creativity:

“(1) creative ads are significantly more effective than any other combination; (2) ads low in creativity are significantly less effective than any other combination; and (3) creative ads and divergent-only ads are equally effective, followed by relevant-only ads, and then ads with low creativity.” (Smith, Chen & Yang 2008, S. 59)

Showing mediating effects on all stages of the hierarchy of effects, they recommend managers to always chose divergent advertising as the first option while avoiding advertising that is both low in diversion and in relevance (Smith, Chen & Yang 2008, S. 60).

Next up: creativity in a low-attention setting.

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Hall, M. & Maclay, D., 1991. How advertisers think advertising works. Davies Riley Smith Maclay, London.

Smith, R.E., MacKenzie, S.B., Yang, X., Buchholz, L.M. & Darley, W.K., 2007. Modeling the determinants and effects of creativity in advertising. Marketing Science, 26(6), S. 819–833.

Smith, R.E., Chen, J. & Yang, X., 2008. The Impact of Advertising Creativity on the Hierarchy of Effects. Journal of Advertising, 37(4), S. 47–62.

Smith, R.E. & Yang, X., 2004. Toward a general theory of creativity in advertising: Examining the role of divergence. Marketing Theory, 4(1-2), S. 31.

Yang, X. & Smith, R.E., 2009. Beyond Attention Effects: Modeling the Persuasive and Emotional Effects of Advertising Creativity. Marketing Science, 28(5), S. 935–949.

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