Ben & Jerry's: The Product Is The Medium

I love Ben & Jerry's. The ice cream – sure – but now I'm talking about the brand. Ben & Jerry's just feels genuine in a way that few brands can even get close to. How do they do it? By having a congruent personality would be the simple, but all inclusive answer. The link between feeling genuine and being congruent is as true for brands as it is for people.

In being congruent, they've always used their product as their communications tool, and they use it to display their preferences, likes, and dislikes about different things. An example of this is their flavor Cherry Garcia. Created in 1987, it is a tribute to Grateful Dead singer and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. Following the musician's death in 1995, the Cherry Garcia variety was made with black rather than the usual red cherries to show mourning for a month.

Likewise, in a show of appreciation of another of their favorite bands Phish, Ben & Jerry's created Phish Food, an absolute orgie in marshmallow, caramel, and fudge.

Ben & Jerry's have also pretty much set the standard for CSR. I won't go through all initiatives they have been involved in, but they all have in common that they feel genuine. We can look at one example that recently surfaced on Swedish ice cream shelves. "Baked Alaska" is the name of the new flavor, sporting the tagline "if it's melted, it's ruined". Alaska, having some of the worlds most rapidly vanishing glaciers, is the focal point for this product/campaign (note that these are inseparable). Global warming as a whole is of course the more general focus. Each tub of ice cream sold brings in funds to Ben & Jerry's climate change college (check out this link), which in turn brings attention to the issue.

They even have white chocolate polar bears in the ice cream. How cute is that!

Note how they are not trying to be scary or negative, but rather use humor and a positive tone. And that's how you engage people. It's also of course in complete alignment with the Ben & Jerry's brand.

This is the holy grail of using your product to communicate. It's just so well executed I want to cry.

Communication Driven by Design

In Cannes I got the question several times why I worked in the design business and not in the advertising business, and for how long I intend to stay. My answer was: I intend to stay with it forever. Regardless of how long I work in "the design business", I will always keep design as a main focus. I'm in the business of communication, and to me, that business is severely crippled without design. The designer Yves Behar perhaps says it best when he talks about design being the glue that holds all other aspects together. Watch his TED-talk below and be inspired. I would love to work with this guy.

In the talk he also quotes somebody saying that "advertising is the prize companies pay for being unoriginal". And though I don't entirely agree with this quote, there is some truth in it. With functionality becoming increasingly similar between products, brand personality is what sets products appart, and design plays a very important role in the building of this brand personality. Imagine for a second two different computers looking exactly the same, but with different brand names on them. It feels cheap and fake. Chevrolet and Daewoo selling the same car with different names on them is a real life example of this.



An example of the opposite is boat outboard engine brands Mercury and Mariner. Two identical products sporting different design and communication, and consequently attract two different target groups.




Another good example of this is Coke Light and Coke Zero. I don't have to show you this one, but they've done incredible work in making the feminine Coke Light macho.

Yet another example that I use a lot to explain how advertising and design should be idea driven and work together is that of naked chips. An ordinary approach for a design agency when presented with the brief to create packaging for the product "chips without salt" would be to take the usual bag, type "no salt chips" on it and make it a different color. Maybe light blue. When giving this product to the advertising agency, they can end up doing anything, because there is no idea in the new packaging at all. Another design and branding approach would be to put a bunch of naked people on the bag and call it "Naked Chips". Leave this new design to the same advertising agency, and you'll probably end up with some amazing campaign ideas. Naked chips is a real life example of design found in a London grocery store.



My final example of branding and design driven campaigns is Diamond Shreddies, a Clio winner campaign that was much talked about this year in Cannes. This link will take you to the You Tube search page for Diamond Shreddies. See if you can figure out what's going on.

My point here is that strong branding and design should be at the core of any communications effort. Like I said – watch the Yves Behar talk below and be inspired. When watching the talk, take special note of the "Why Water" case, and consider if good communication could be made out of this design concept. Myself, I got about ten different ideas instantly.

BK Crown Card

Burger King's lifetime crown card is one of those ideas that are just so simple, yet incredibly effective. They've understood that celebs (or anyone for that matter) are not impressed by burgers, but by status. Giving out a lifetime card for free burgers to these celebs is not done to feed them, but to make them uniquely spoiled. And are the rest of us interested in this super celeb perk on steroids? 50 000 Google hits this soon after launch says we are.

(For us regular folks, we can also buy regular prepaid crown cards, though not lifetime ones).

Again, read more on Ad Age.

Cannes 2008 Day X: R/GA

Like I said, seminars are getting better. The R/GA one about Nike+ and three other Nike projects was interesting. Though perhaps a bit shallow (hey, they only had 45 minutes), their projects are impressive.

For the sheer scale of it, The Human Race-project is also interesting, gathering 1 million people to run on one single day.

The Nike ID-project was nicely executed, but it really didn't get my juices flowing. I've seen it before.

Most interesting to me was their new Ballers Network project, which can most accurately be described as NIke+ for basketball. Cool.

Cannes 2008 Day X: Wunderman

The Wunderman talk, featuring Nick Moore was one of the better ones this far. Clearly one of the not so many who has really put thought into digital communications (or simply 2008 situation for communicators). Interesting company as well. I'll keep a closer eye on them.

Nick's statement of "don't make big campaigns, create ongoing conversations" is one that we've been talking about for a while on this blog and elsewhere, but it's a good (though simple) premise for creating good brand relationships.

Cannes 2008 Day X: Invasion & Psychology

Cannes is now under siege. There are so many advertising people here now, from Sweden and elsewhere, it's just ridiculous. Counting days doesn't feel relevant anymore. It's just intense.

Seminars seem to have picked up ever so slightly in quality. MRM Worldwide at least had the sense to put psychology at the center of their media map. Correctly so of course. For anyone trying to use people as their vehicle of viral (I prefer the word "social", but "viral" seems to be the standard) spread, psychology is simply earth, wind, and fire.

So – Walter Naeslund tip of the day: Next time you recruit a planner, look in the psychology department, not the marketing one.

Ronald Jones at Identity Works

Last Thursday Identity Works invited former Harvard professor, and current Konstfack professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Ronald Jones, to the agency to talk about creative work across disciplines. The talk was just jam packed with interesting stuff. We probably all see it as obvious that interdisciplinary projects run a much higher risk of failure, but did you know that almost NO breakthrough innovation happens in monodisciplinary projects?

That means that we need to work across disciplines to really achieve disruptive results. And when we do, we need to put major effort into handling risk. We also need to embrace failure and learn from our experiences. We need to have a learning culture rather than a performance culture.

The 9/11-commission concluded that "...don't think we had the imagination to envisage such an attack". But perhaps what was lacking, and that led to a lack of imagination, was interdisciplinary skills, both between the different American institutions and between cultures. When comparing the 9/11 attacks to the rise of companies like Linux or Napster you see similarities. Microsoft and the music industry didn't see them coming either. I guess it's a Trojan Horse phenomenon.

Fortunately imagination isn't just talent, knowledge or luck. Institutionalizing innovation is a very real possibility. Sometimes it's as easy as shifting perspectives, like when Black & Decker stopped viewing their products as power drills, and started viewing them as holes.

Professor Jones also had plenty of other perspectives and examples in store, from Bill Gates to one of my favorite visionaries Daniel H. Pink. If you ever get a chance to attend one of Professor Jones' seminars, you should really take advantage of it. Inspiring and fun, and not least a source of hope for our business.

Z-Cards Everywhere

Z-Card. They now have my attention. Just today I've received direct marketing by regular mail, I've seen their ad in Resumé, I've gotten an e-mail from them and something else that I don't even remember. Omni-presence works. They have my attention, but not so much my interest. They sort of have my involvement in this blog post (which spreads the word), but not my desire, and definitely not my post purchase alignment.

But again, omni-presence works to some extent. Now just imagine what they could have done if all that frequency would have meant something, if they would have inspired me, if I would have actually come up with a couple of ideas on how to use Z-Card. It would have been pretty easy to get me there by using actual creativity when creating communication for all that space. But the communication in their ads is just not interesting. Their website is flat out awful.

On the upside they have shown great understanding for the focused use of media. And they do boost my conficence by setting an example on how not to use that media.