Mark Vandegrift
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is our patient positionist, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, you've had a lot of patience dealing with trying to get people on the positioning train. So I figured that was a appropriate title, don't you?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, my first I was thinking I was in a hospital bed.

Mark Vandegrift 
No.

Lorraine Kessler
Our patient positionist

Mark Vandegrift 
No, that virtue that is patience.

Lorraine Kessler 
Oh Okay. Okay, Okay, I got it.

Mark Vandegrift
That's the big idea.

Lorraine Kessler
That's the big idea. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Speaking of which, yeah, we're gonna talk in today's episode about what the big idea is in marketing. And I'm sure that a lot of people have a lot of different definitions, but Lorraine, let's give em our answer as to what is a brand's big idea.

Lorraine Kessler 
Oh my gosh. Well there's a great book by George Lois, one of the great creative directors, called What's the Big Idea? And I would highly encourage anyone interested in advertising to read that book. Because there is true genius, and I hate using that word to describe people, but there are genius ideas and then there's everything else. And the genius ideas are big ideas and there's very few of them that really break through. So I would have to answer your question this way. I think the what makes an idea a big idea is really the combination of three things, right? One is the position, and that's having a differentiated idea. Yeah, thank you. Having that differentiating strategic idea that maximizes the relevance to the customer and maximizes the distance from the competition. So it's differentiating and it's highly meaningful. Sometimes it's called the only strategy, how we are the only that do this particular thing. So that's first. You gotta have you gotta have that competitively. And then the emotional trigger, and that's the way the strategy is communicated, or dramatized, I think is a better word. How is the idea dramatized? Because no matter how brilliant the idea, let's say you're gonna be low cost, just saying we're the lowest cost, can be strategically brilliant. It can be competitively genius in the market you're in, but it's not gonna go anywhere if it's not expressed in a way that really connects and resonates with the audience. So words really matter here. I mean capital gains tax took a whole different meaning when it was repositioned under the Bush administration as the death tax. You know, all of a sudden people woke up to what this really is. I'm being taxed not even when I'm living, but when I die. And so, right? I mean that's powerful. Words that matter. And think small versus think big, you know, think small for Volkswagen Beetle. I mean, that's Hitler's car. Okay? So the idea and this was George Lois who said you characterized this Small beetle, called it the Beetle, another genius. He didn't call it Hitler's car and he said think small versus a time when people thought all car cars should be big and as an Italian American, I know what that means because my family always valued the car by the size of the trunk. I don't know why. I was hoping it was for golf clubs, but maybe it was for other stuff. I don't know. 

Mark Vandegrift 
You are Italian, what can I say?

Lorraine Kessler 
I know what that from the East Coast. Yeah, what can I say? Yeah, making no apologies for that. And then part of that dramatization, the third part, is the delivery. I mean you have to deliver the message with constancy. This takes time and money, and this is about media. How do you reach the audience where they're gonna be paying attention? And with commercials that pay, that make them pay attention, that's part of the words, picture and sound. So I think that's what it takes.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, you know, one that always jumps to my mind, and this year it's twenty-six years old, and that's Aflac. Yeah. Think about so we always talk about the position and they're really the only one that most people would know of for supplemental insurance, right? So they stand apart from other insurance companies because they're supplemental, but they're all there are other supplemental insurance companies out there. It's just nobody knows who they are because Aflac has owned that particular category. So they have the position, but I think what's great is the way they introduce the duck.

Lorraine Kessler 
Right. They could have just said, well, they created the category, as far as we know, because they were first to mind with the category. So they could have said the first supplemental insurance. Everybody's like, what the heck is that? And why do I care? Right? Yeah. So

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Yep. But the emotional side of that it was the duck. And they rolled it out. So when you're talking about delivery, you have the emotional side of the duck, the fun personality to talk about a boring category. No one wants to talk insurance, let alone supplemental insurance. But they made it fun. And then the delivery was they started on TV so that we could all get used to the duck.

Lorraine Kessler
Right.

Mark Vandegrift 
Right. Imagine seeing the duck on a billboard the very first time it was introduced. You'd be like, why is there a duck on a billboard? But now when you see a duck on the billboard, you know exactly you can even hear Afflac in your head as you're driving by. And they've kept it fresh. So when you think about it, they've moved into primarily sports and even a subset of that, college football. And so you you have you know, some of your great players, like primetime is in there and the coach from Alabama and I won't say his name because it's no, don't say his name. We're in Ohio State territory. It's like saying Michigan.

Lorraine Kessler
Hey, he started at Toledo actually started Ohio State. He's an Ohio State progeny and then he went to Toledo, University of Toledo.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Yeah, he was under Earl Bruce.

Lorraine Kessler
So he's an Ohio guy. He just is made good. He just went bigger.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, we'll give him credit for that. Good. So I think that's a good I mean, to me, that's a good example of all three, right? If you didn't do any of those things, it would fall flat because if the duck represented just insurance, you'd be like, okay, that that's like everybody else. But they did it to represent the name and the name then became synonymous with the category that they started out explaining. If you look at their first few commercials, they explain what supplemental insurance is. Today, none of the commercials do that because everybody knows Aflac and they know what it is. Now it's just repeating and understanding and keeping fresh that duck in the mind. So speaking of success, right? Why don't you tell us what makes a big idea successful?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, you raise some really good points. That's called personification, by the way, when you have the duck. But the duck did something very useful, which most people don't know. The name is an acronym for the full name, which I don't even know. So if you just use the acronym AFLAC, no one could remember that name in a million years. So the Aflac becomes the duck's voice. Now you have name recognition as well as a personification when you see that duck it connects with a complicated new category of insurance that people either didn't care about or didn't know about. So now you you made the point too, and this is a really important part of I think that step two is once you have the position and you have to now dramatize it, you have to have an emotional connection and then whatever you're saying or whatever you're doing has to become contagious, right? Like people other than the advertiser, both its agency and its and the originator of the product or offering, have to be talking about this. They, it just has to connect in such a way that there's a response. So you have to have the right people both acknowledge it, remember it, use it, talk about it. Right. So that's where you get fame's like drink the Kool-Aid is a phrase that became famous. And ironically, my son is 42. Is he 42? I think. I'll get this wrong, I know. But he's 41. But he didn't know that came from Jim Jones and the he was right, he had no idea. He's like, I just watched a documentary and didn't know that's where that came from but great advertising. Just do it. Never leave home without it. When it op absolutely has to be there overnight. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands. Bet you can't bet you just can't eat one, right? Lay's. The big apple, these all things, even TV shows like Seinfeld, yada yada yada.

Mark Vandegrift 
And no soup for you.

Lorraine Kessler 
No soup for you, Serenity Now. I mean that's contagious and if that's in the hands of an advertiser, you have totally won. And you mentioned Aflac, persona, Tony the Tiger, the most interesting man in the world for Dos Equis.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's a newer one, yeah.

Lorraine Kessler 
Right. We came up with the erasable man for stay clean where you could wipe Sharpie off of upholstery. So these are great ways to create what I consider a big idea is contagious. People remember that and then they remember your brand and they remember what you stand for. And so I think those are great assists and that's what is really what's makes for a big idea.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Well, and we have a lot of these back on our, you know, famed wall there, the ultimate driving machine. Think different. You know, these are some of the ones that are on our wall of fame in our agency here because they've stood the test of time. It's not something that is here today, gone tomorrow you mentioned a a current one with Dos Equis with the most interesting man in the world. When I first saw that, I thought this is like really stupid, but I'm all I'm also not someone that would follow, you know, be involved with that particular brand. But it has stood the test of time. They've been using it for what, probably six, seven years now.

Lorraine Kessler 
More than that. I bet you if you I bet you if you went back it's like twenty years. 

Mark Vandegrift 
Is it longer?

Lorraine Kessler
I mean yeah. Yeah. I bet I bet it's much longer than we know.

Mark Vandegrift
Okay it's interesting. Yeah. So I think there's a little bit of commitment that's required as well when you don't necessarily see the initial bump. We've been doing a lot more brand advertising for clients, and we've been able to connect it to the rise in organic search. So you know, if a brand's more known, you should have more search for it, right? What's interesting is any ad we're running that's like a TV spot or radio spot, we've proven on those two media, it takes two to three months to start to see the bump. But if you end after three months, the bump keeps going for about two months. If you keep it running, the bump keeps going up. Eventually it'll flatten out a little bit until you maybe change geos or something. But it's really interesting that organic branded search, branded, so something with the brand name in it, is constantly going up whenever you're using brand advertising.

Lorraine Kessler 
Absolutely. I mean we've known that anecdotally, we believe that, but now we have digital proving it every single day, the long and the short of it, which we've talked about. And that long game, which is the delivery, which was the three parts of my, you know, big idea, is you have to do constancy with consistency, and because branding is time and money, but now we have proved positive that branding improves not only search but short-term sales where short-term sales that is that has no branding does not does not create long-term value so it's it we have the best tools ever to make that argument for clients to get their branding done and also make it not just the strategy which it's easier almost to sell them on the positioning idea, what you should stand for that differentiate you, than it is to sell them sticking with the creative. Look how long Aflac has stuck with the duck and the creative.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep, twenty six years.

Lorraine Kessler
Look how long Yeah. We just talked about the most interesting man. The biggest thing about that is that they've stuck with it. And think different Apple has it's been its mantra. It's stuck with it. We have clients who just have amnesia or they suffer from creativitis where they just feel the itch that they have to be creative all the time and they're the ones that don't build a strong brand.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Yeah. Well, and a lot of them go, well, you know, there's so much competition there. So my next question to you is, you know, how can a brand build a big idea that sets them apart from the noise of the competition?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, I mean, how do you get that winning idea, that winning big idea? Well it's really it really takes it's almost like creating a a Hollywood movie or any movie that's successful, right? You need different talents to come together and work together as one. So that's not always easy as you know, right? But let's say different talents, I'm not just talking people, but I'm talking the way you think. So you need a really good strategist who's naturally competitive to start off with the position. Someone who really understands and kind of sees the laying field, the playing field, and is able to strategize, like a football coach who can strategize against a team because they see the inherent weakness of that team and they craft the right strategy for their team based on its talents and its innate skills. So you need that. Then you need the execution side. You really need great creative people. I mean people who are just talented with words and pictures and sounds and who think they think about the strategy now not so much when I when, and I did the strategy. That's inside out. That's you as a company looking out and say, what do we have that we can capitalize on? How can we take advantage of our strengths and the inherent weaknesses of the competitors that we're going against? So that's inside out. Now you need someone who thinks outside in from the point of view of the consumer, the customer. And they can say, well, how does this idea resonate emotionally with the target or distinctive customer? And they're thinking about how to deliver this idea and the benefits of it. And if you have a differentiating idea, it should have very differentiating benefits to the target audience. So they focus more a little bit on the benefits of this unique idea and how it how a regular person would think about it using very simple words and simple concepts that anyone can understand. If it's complicated, it's not going to work because we know minds are simple. And people don't think about brands the way we think about them inside the business. They just don't. So this is a creative individual who really can align with the public, with the consumer. And they have to think about what words, pictures and sounds are going to connect and how to be creative with it. I mean they're good with language. At the end of it, language is most important. And how to dramatize that idea and bring it to life. And then you need someone who can think about the media that you were just talking about. What media reaches this audience? Where are they going for information? So the dramatization is both the creative and the media and both are thinking more about the end customer that we want to deliver this idea to. And so these are very different people with different foci and different talent in my opinion.

Mark Vandegrift 
So in all of that process, what do you think are the most common mistakes? Let's throw out the fact that we're seeing a bunch of people trying to create things with AI these days, which I don't think can emulate the human brain in this regard or the teamwork that it takes to pull these things together. But give our listeners some common mistakes or things to watch out for when they're trying to put the big idea together and execute on it.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, one, they make it too complicated and then the you're dead in the water. So the best positions are simple. You know, we're gonna be low cost, we're gonna be about performance, ultimate performance, we're gonna be about speed, we're gonna be about long lasting, we're gonna whatever that is. Better ingredients, better pizza, simple, right? So if you make it too complex, or you don't stay focused, you try and pile on other things. We are both low cost, great service, downtown. Like, forget it. Like you you've lost me already. Like choose one. So so I think that's the mistake that we make at the very beginning, and that can happen in the strategy, it can also happen in the expression of the strategy. The second thing I think that sometimes people they're afraid to take risks, right, with new ideas. And people are, according to Derek Thompson, this is great book too, is called The Hit Makers, and he studied what made hit making songs, hit making movies, and many genres. And he found that people are at the same time are neophilic, meaning they're curious about new things. They want to learn new, new and different. Remember they have to be big when you would make an improve, new and improved or new in this. And neophobic, meaning they're afraid of anything too new. So his conclusion from all that is that you need familiar surprises.

Mark Vandegrift 
Hm. I like that.

Lorraine Kessler 
I do too. So how do we have a familiar surprise? And I think sometimes people are either afraid they either are on something too new that's too disconnected. Remember the Newton that Apple tried to bring out that was like a fax machine and a PC and I don't know what else. It was too soon for that. It was too unfamiliar, too new. But the cell phone works, right? Because time has evolved and people's technology is and now it's more than a phone. So I think you have to think about familiar surprises and not be afraid of too new, kind of have this sense that we wanna be new. But how do we connect it to something people understand? And so it becomes a an aha, if you will. Red Bull didn't have that problem. That was no one had energy drinks. They went way out in their advertising. Tesla doesn't have that problem with self-driving cars. And I don't think Volkswagen would think small selling Hitler's car, as George Lois said to Jews in New York, that was his how he framed the challenge was too far out. So I think those are those are sometimes problems that clients tend to be afraid of the new. Agencies love the new, sometimes too new. And I think that sometimes you just have to look at things that are familiar too so that they connect.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, let's close up today, but why don't you leave our listeners with either one piece of advice if you want to call it that, or even they're I know they're all looking for the formula and the formula just doesn't there's no perfect formula for it. There are certain elements that almost are always part of what it is that creates that big idea. So why don't you leave our listeners with that one piece of advice or that one thing that you want us to take away from the episode today.

Lorraine Kessler 
Sure. I think it comes back to what we said at the top, right? You want a big idea? It's one plus two plus three in order when syncing. So what are one, two, three? A differentiated strategy that's truly meaningful to a distinctive audience. Two, how is that strategy dramatized in word, picture, and sound so that it creates an emotional connection and becomes contagious. And then three, delivering that strategy with constancy and consistency. Because branding at the end of the day, and even fame is about time and money. Time and money. It's as you said, it's you see things build over time. And so you can't get away from that.

Mark Vandegrift 
Perfect. Well, that's good information and advice to leave our listeners with. Thank you for joining us, Lorraine. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to like and share and hit that subscribe button as much as you can. Until next time, have an amazing day.