This article was published in Nov 1995

DID YOU LEAVE YOUR HEART IN BUSINESS SCHOOL?

It's two o' clock in the afternoon. The steering wheel burns the palms of your hand. You reach a fork in the road and are suddenly forced to take a decision. Which way should you go? One sign reads 'Share of Voice'. The other points to 'Share of Heart'. The decision would have been easy were it not for two important passengers travelling with you. Your boss, and a guy from your ad agency.


It's a common dilemma. Marketers who often wax eloquently on the need to empathise with their customers, and admonish their advertising agency to aim at emotional bonding with their target market are nevertheless forced to make inexcusable, short-term, media and advertising choices. Typical Share of Voice reaction : "We know this is slightly off strategy, but we can't afford to let the competition drown us." It suddenly becomes OK to tinker with strategy. Curiously the competition begins to dictate budgets. But woe be unto the Account Manager for suggesting a 2% increase in costs to enable higher production values in the interest of corporate image.

 
It's only when the ride begins to get bumpy that one of the passengers - usually it's the outspoken agency fellow, not the confused boss - suggests you get out the road map and check your position. Too late. By then you are miles off from your destination, and a long way ahead from where you took the wrong turn, to go back. Why are there so few good formula-1 drivers in the world of marketing? The answer to that lies in the fact that there are too many brand managers - designated navigators - with little say in the final decision making of brand plans. This makes two types of bad drivers. The ones who drive on their brakes (indecisive, uncommitted, and reckless), and those who drive on their horns (reactive, always making a lot of noise, and a lot of enemies). It happens because of one big dichotomy that pulls the marketing process in opposite directions : SALES versus IMAGE. Left brain versus Right brain, Head versus Heart.

"WHERE'S MY BRANDING?"
The 1994 launch commercial for Apple computers would never have run had Apple listened to its board of directors. "You're not really going to run that thing, are you?" one asked when the agency presented the 60-second commercial. The storyline, set in George Orwell's fictional future, was essentially a room filled with brainwashed skinheads addressed by Big Brother on a giant screen. The room is intruded upon by a young woman in athletic gear, who flings a sledge-hammer at the screen. End of commercial, save for a title card announcing how, when Apple introduces Macintosh, 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-four. The metaphor was one of a rebel, standing up for individualism - perfect for a company that began in a garage, now challenging IBM, the company that made computers the size of one's garage. Left to the marketing risk-takers, the million-dollar commercial ran only once during Superbowl, but it was a road that, weren't it not taken, would have sent Macintosh on a different journey altogether. The commercial was as awesome and revolutionary as the product concept itself. From that day onwards, it positioned Macintosh as the first computer for people, rather than institutuions.
The ad broke every rule. In the entire sixty seconds, it showed no product, refered to the brand name only once, and mentioned none of the remarkable features. But apart from what it did not do, it fit perfectly with Apple's marketing strategy, which was to keep public attention focused on its innovativeness. It's job - the agency's job - was to do more than sell product. So rather that a product pitch, it was a marketing vision. Marketing is not synonymous with sales. Salesmen are obsessed with monthly achievements, and quarterly gains. Right-brain visionaries are constantly looking beyond the sales curve, at unthinkable - sometimes unquantifiable - horizons.

What then makes marketing managers so disinclined to break out of this straitjacket?

"WHERE'S MY THESAURUS?"
John Sculley, former President of Pepsi, lays the blame squarely on the disciplines of marketing which mistakenly worshipped the god of science, when it actually is an art. The 'scientific' way, he says, forces you to operate within a competitive framework, while the 'Creative' way would be to change the rules, and force your competitor to compete on a field he isn't familiar with. This struggle is patently obvious in any shaky decision-making process. Especially so when 'Creative' middle managers are over-ruled by numbers-driven superiors. It is the constant tug-of-war between Share of Heart and Share of Voice (or Share of Market).

In one camp are the innovative risk-takers. Attempting to tap into a hitherto unchartered emotional side of the consumer. The kind who want to use an unconventional production style in a TV commercial, who want to use radio as a theatre, rather than a loudspeaker. In the other camp are the types who check their Thesaurus everytime they read body copy, recommending - no urging - you to replace a colloquialism with something more profound. The ones who insist that 56 words in a radio spot means the listener will not hear his unique selling proposition in the 9th, 13th and 28 second. Phew! You know those chaps. They want their logo to fill the page, and want top-of-mind awareness irrespective of what the creative concept attempts to build up in the long term. Hey! They want publicity, because they are paying for it, damn it ! Publicity? Since when did that become synonymous with Advertising? Not in my book, it isn't. Publicity is paid noise. Advertising is an investment in a whole cycle of communication. Sometimes the best advertisement is not measured in eyeballs or decibels. It is often a whisper across a supermarket aisle, a snippet of an overheard conversation on the bus. To John Sculley, "consumer marketing requires ...investing capital to make capital." Investment. We don't hear that word often. Some prefer to think of it as a gamble.

"WHERE'A MY BULLET-PROOF VEST?"
Is Marketing an investment? There is always the risk, but as Magement gurus like to say, decisions and risks are closely related. If there was no risk, if the alternatives are so clear, then we wouldn't need brand managers and marketing directors. It depends on what strategy you are pursuing. Positioning strategies lay claim to the consumer's heart, not his purse. Product strategies, fixated on sales, therefore hinge on short-term sales margins to offset the expense of running the as. Ergo advertising as publicity. Sometimes it backfires. While both good and bad publicity can move product, the long-term image consequences have to be reckoned with.
Take the example of two international companies that in the same week achieved more image (or publicity, depending on how each looked at it) than any conventional adspend could have got. Calvin Klein (Jeans) launched a series of TV, Magazine and outdoor ads that, going by their previous campaigns, were designed to be provocative. Provoking outrage. The most predictable strategy for a clothing manufacturer is to exploit the unclothed human form, a.k.a. nudity, a.k.a pornography. Predictably, too, the TV ads drew howls of protest from the public and were withdrawn, because they featured glass-eyed teenagers wearing crotch-hugging denimn shorts and skirts, legs wide open to deliberately reveal parts of the models' underwear. It was as if a funny thing had happened on the road to publicity. Actually not so funny. An elderly man's voice off camera questions them in the format of a perverse screen test. The deliberately tacky production style apparently resembled child pornography.
Man's Voice : "Why don't you open that vest up?"
(Boy model takes off vest)
Man's voice : "Where'd you get that tattoo?"
Boy : "At the tattoo studio out by my house."
Man : "Uh huh. Any other tattoos?

INDECENT EXPOSURE OR MEDIA PLUG?
Feigning humility, Calvin Klein took out a full page as to apologise to people who were offended by the ads. The publicity furore didn't stop with that. The FBI moved in to investigate the pornographic implications of the campaign, and the age of the models. A toy creator countered with a promotion (appropriately themed "Take off your pants, so children won't") offering free roller-blades to the first three-hundred people who sent in a pair of CK jeans. And Ad critic Bob Garfield branded it "the most profoundly disturbing campaign in TV history." Historically, however, this has been Calvin Klein's strategy for years, using a powerful concoction of titilation, controversy, and media reaction to counter its relatively small media buy. While scoring high on Share of Voice, it 's doing poorly on Share of Heart.

If that was indecent exposure, Microsoft that same week launched its long-awaited Windows '95 (the computer operating system software that promised to make PCs less intimidating to humans), with more excitement - and hype - than paid advertising. It was not the stuff of conventional marketing. It was word-of-mouth build up through a trade network, and media speculation (spiked with legal implications over the possible unfair trade practice allegations). True there was an ample budget, but much of it is rumoured to have gone toward the imponderable purchase of Rolling Stones hit, "Start me up". A four-storey logo was floated on a barge in Sydney, Australia, and Microsoft made an unusual 'media buy', paying for the entire print run of the Times of London on launch date August 24th; in effect, handing out the paper free to 1.5 million Britons. Even cyberspace was in the media plan : Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' speech was broadcast live on the Internet. Oh, and there was mainstream advertising - as un-mainstream as you could expect. Microsoft bought a half-hour infomercial (which it prefered to call a 'syndicated television special') that aired in seventy major US markets. As its ultimate coup d'etat, Microsoft persuaded Coca-Cola, eastman Kodak, Compaq, and CompUSA ( a computer store) to buy 30-second mini-commercials within the infomercial.

When we compare the two campaigns, there is no mistaking what got customers through the door. As an image campaign for Calvin Klein, the controversy overshadowed the product. As a strategy of getting people all worked up and anticipated about software that strikes most people as the most boring category on earth, Windows '95 captured the imagination of not just consumers, but marketers, and the media itself.

Now was that Share of Voice or Share of Heart? Or both?

It's 5 O'clock in the evening. The magazine you're holding is quivering. You want to rip out this article, copy it and anonymously leave it on your left brained, tight-fisted, publicity-hungry boss' desk. There could be one small problem : what if you're the boss?