“Good direction doesn’t stifle creativity, it stimulates it.”

OPEN LETTER

The BBDO Advertising Discipline

Creativity without discipline is a gamble with bad odds. And discipline without creativity is a clear waste of money. Good discipline provides good direction. Good direction doesn’t stifle creativity, it stimulates it. And by discipline, we don’t mean a research system. We mean a thought process…a way to sort out data…a means for judging what information is valuable and what is not…a flexibility for interpreting information imaginatively.

Simply stated, BBDO’s Advertising Discipline consists of four steps:

1. Understand the market
2. Know the prime prospect
3. Know the prime prospect’s problems
4. Position the brand

1. Understand the Market

Consumers are the final arbiters when it comes to making a brand decision. Their perspective counts most. How they perceive a market and the choice of brands within it will certainly affect their decision making at the time of purchase.

BBDO has developed a research tool called Market Structure Audit (MSA) to accurately measure consumers’ perceptions in virtually any product or service category. It asks consumers to tell us who they think your brand’s competitors are and which brand would be the most likely substitute if yours were not available. Understanding which brands are perceived as similar can help us determine if a brand should be repositioned and where gaps might exist in your product line. MSA is just one of several proprietary tools we use to better understand your market and competition.

2. Know the Prime Prospect

For every product, service or company there is a small group of people that’s more valuable to a marketer than all other groups. It might be traditional heavy users, occasional users or even, in some cases, non-users.

Often there is more than one prospect for the same message. Mothers as well as children. Customers and sales men. Employees, opinion leaders and the financial community. But the thought process we go through is the same for all. We learn everything worth knowing about these prospects. Not just their demographic statistics, but their psychographic profiles, too.

We learn prospects’ age, sex, income, marital status, size of household and so on. But equally important, we learn about their attitudes, how they think, what gets them emotionally involved, what their lifestyles are or what they would like them to be. What we learn is of critical importance. Whatever advertising message we create, we must create with these people in mind.

3. Know the Prime Prospect’s Problems

Our next step is to find out our prospect’s problems. Its BBDO’s experience that the most effective way to gain people’s attention, to be remembered, to have people prefer our brand—to sell—is to solve people’s problems. It’s also our experience that advertising based on traditional benefit / attribute research is usually inadequate. With that research, most consumers end up simply playing back the same basic benefits they’ve already been told about in ad after ad. Which means there’s nothing in the way of preemptive positioning that you can dig out of what they say.

On the other hand, BBDO has found consumers to be quite original in describing problems they have with products or services. Using our proprietary technique called Problem Detection, we’ve found, almost without exception, that all consumer problems are related to one or more of three elements—performance, image or price. Undoubtedly, with any product we’ll uncover problems in each of these areas. But the evaluative skills we’ve gained from hundreds of case histories involving problem research enables us to identify which problems will form the basis of the most persuasive brand positioning.

4. Position the Brand as a Solution to a Problem

Only after we know our prime prospects and their problems, do we look at the product, service or company to learn what solutions it provided. That way, we can look from the right perspective—the consumer’s point of view.

The fact is, most agencies start with the product or service and try to find a way for consumers to respond to it. This approach is based on the premise that it’s the agency’s job to represent the client to consumers. BBDO believes that it’s just as important to represent consumers to the client. Because we represent both, we can find how the product or service can best respond to prospects and their problems. And we’ve developed a marketing technique called Brand Equity, which helps narrow our judgment and determine the most persuasive selling message. A message that convinces the prime prospects that our brand can best solve important performance, image or price problems. It’s the most effective marketing strategy you can have.

As more and more consumers impressions are gathered, we become increasingly sensitive to the subtleties that influence the choice of a brand. Our information gathering techniques, many of them originated by BBDO and unmatched anywhere, gives us the best available data. But they don’t dictate strategy to us. Expert judgment does. Long experience in working with these techniques has given us the judgment needed to turn raw marketing intelligence into a convincing selling message.

Even so, our judgment must be made over and over again. People change. Markets change. Companies change. Strategy must be reviewed regularly to ensure that assumptions that were once correct are still correct.

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