If you saw Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro about Leonard Bernstein, it’s worth noting that the movie chose NOT to tell this story. Yet the truth is far more inspiring. And for the practitioners, commissioners, and end-users of brand strategy, far more instructive.
Read MoreIf they want it.
Read MoreWe can debate the imminence of cultural collapse. But what feels more certain is that the sense (and promise) of development and progress feels less in evidence, despite the incessant hosepipe of novelty and entertainment and distraction we find ourselves on the receiving end of. Perhaps we really are, as the author Peter Watts has put it, “in love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future”.
Ian Leslie is right to caution us that “We exaggerate the permanence of the moment we’re in, and under-estimate the possibility of change.” Nonetheless, what gives?
Read MoreBut does everything, like everything always have to be a story all of the time? Cause and effect. If-This-Then-That. The reassurance that stuff will make sense. The comfort and warmth of knowing that there’s a bulwark against meaning-void chaos. The promise that we can figure it out. The reassurance that there is a pattern, and there is a structure to all of this. That it is graspable. The comfort that the possibility of learning and anticipation is possible. The satisfaction of joining the dots. The satisfaction of closure. The satisfaction of causality. The need for causality. The promise that we can be agents of causality. That we can not just understand, but shape and bend the world to our will and desires. Christ, we need this stuff so fucking badly. And let’s not forget the intoxicating knowledge that everything that can be turned into a pattern (and made to look like a pattern) can be replicated, codified, merchandised marketed and (praise be!) financialised (and infantalised) as Let Me Show You How expertise and sprayed over everyone’s LinkedIn feeds.
Read MorePeople who live in bubbles. People who don’t know they live in bubbles. People who don’t care they live in bubbles. People who deny they live in bubbles. People who hang out with people who agree with them. People who don’t travel outside the confines of their own minds. People who don’t travel outside the confines of their own habits. People who don’t travel outside the confines of their own culture. People who travel outside the confines of their own culture and compare everything with the culture they stepped out of. People who are uncomfortable being outside their own culture. People who can’t wait to get back to the familiarity of their own culture. People who can’t change their minds. People who won’t change their minds. People who don’t like their faith in the reality they’ve constructed for themselves being even mildly shaken. People who aren’t up for revising their most cherished beliefs.
Read MoreWe have to release the brakes. To get our minds around the truth that old solutions cannot unlock new problems. We must champion and elevate strategy to its rightful role as being by its very nature an imaginative discipline (nor merely a precursor or fluff-job for somebody else’s). We need to retire the policers and enforcers. We should ask “and what happens next?!” and seek to surprise ourselves again. We should take the mental shopping trolley to the top of the hill, set it alight (if only for dramatic effect)… and then let go.
Read MoreIn other words I was being asked, how - when working in advertising can so often feel like some kind of Groundhog Day experience in which we encounter the same kinds of stresses, frustrations, and disappointments again and again - could I keep going?
Now I will be the first to acknowledge that I’m ill-qualified to dispense life lessons. I’ve made too many mistakes and failed too often to credibly peddle success recipes. They’re mostly (as I’ve argued elsewhere) the work of unreliable narrators anyway. And I’m a slightly better provider of brand advice than personal development advice. That said, I think I can be bold enough to argue that if you want to have fun and be of help and value and do so consistently, over the longer (or even very long) term, then cynicism is the best strategy for failure.
Read MoreLook now how small, how timid, how pusillanimous, how domesticated and de-clawed, how full of narcissistic hot air, how demoted to nothing more than a cabaret warmup act so much of what passes for ‘strategy’ appears to be, when set against its true nature, its true possibilities, and - irrespective of the size and nature of the canvas - the true, the urgent, and the thrilling need for it.
Read MoreWhat it is, where it is to be found, how we are to recognise it, its shape and dynamics… all this remains a mystery. And while we’re confident that we can be a part of it and even change it (whatever ‘it’) is, it’s a mystery we seem happy to keep as such. This absence of specificity calls to mind the words of the sixteenth century philosophy and statesman Francis Bacon: “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” If words are tools for thinking then perhaps if we had a clearer view on what it is we are talking about, we could have a clearer view of our place and role within it, better direct our energies, and more accurately chart and measure our impact and progress.
Read MoreThere’s nothing like reclaiming a decades-long neglected garden to teach one about the creation and nurturing of things that last.
Read MoreThe plates of culture are grinding and shifting beneath our feet. Forces are at work in the land. Fissures are opening. The fractal consequences bloom. All that is solid melts into air. Never did splendid isolation look so untenable.
Read MoreWe are creating more and more advertising which neglects that part of the brain we must engage if we want to create the associations and connections that lie at the heart of long-term brand building. Client businesses are failing to leverage the real power and advantage that creativity confers. In fact when we insist that marketing marketing’s priority is not the longer-term health of a brand and business but the short-term, we are in the business not of value creation but value destruction.
Read MoreEach step along the long, long hard journey to getting work out into the world is an opportunity to exercise our innate negativity bias and focus on what’s not working; to fall victim to group think; to feedback simply in order to have one’s voice and participation made felt; to add and complicate; to shave the edges off; to second-guess how people in the real world will (or will not) respond; to second-guess how other people in the organisation will (or will not) respond; to lose sight of the original intent and objective; and ultimately, to lose conviction and run out of fucks to give. When great work has to navigate this many steps, running the gamut of feedback at each any every one of them, we need better process, and better conversation.
Read MoreAt the end of the day, strategy is the art of getting other people to do something.
In the pursuit of that, narrative (call it ‘storytelling’ if you really must) is the strategist’s tool.
Strategy is narrative.
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