Book Excerpt: Bang! By Linda Kaplan Thaler

ByABC News via logo
October 20, 2003, 11:48 AM

Oct. 21 -- Linda Kaplan Thaler, the CEO and chief creative officer of the Kaplan Thaler Group, and Robin Koval, the chief marketing officer, have been behind some of America's most memorable ads over the last decade.

Kaplan Thaler's ideas range from the sentimental "Kodak moment" campaign to Herbal Essences' "totally organic experience" to the chatty AFLAC duck.

In Bang!, Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval of the Kaplan Thaler Group, offer advice that everyone can use when it comes to getting their own message heard.

Read an excerpt from Bang.

CHAPTER FIVE:

It's no secret why sappy tearjerkers play in movie theaters to mass audiences, while documentaries air on PBS. As dozens of books on advertising reveal, emotion sells. An emotional pitch simplifies a message, allowing it to cut across economic, gender, or cultural lines. It's a basic concept. So why do so many marketers and advertising teams have trouble coming up with an idea that touches a consumer's heart?

They think too much. That's right. Just about every advertising agency that we have come across has developed its own process for being "insightful." Time and again we hear about a set of finely honed steps-usually involving a so-called proprietary methodology for mining consumers' innermost thoughts-designed to unearth the inner truths about consumers. But these formal processes usually miss, sometimes widely, because formulas, by definition, apply a similar set of rules to every product or circumstance, thereby ignoring the very tool that leads to great insights: intuition.

A host of recent research indicates that our intuition is much savvier and more reliable than most corporations would ever admit. Today, institutes from Harvard University to the U.S. Marine Corps support research on the power of our subconscious mind. "Many emotions are products of evolutionary wisdom, which probably has more intelligence than all human minds together," says New York University neural scientist Joseph LeDoux in his book The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Timothy D. Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, ran a study that revealed that people who chose a poster for their living room wall on gut instinct were much happier with their choice than people who deliberated over the decision. Reporting on this finding and others, Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal noted that "there is a growing consensus that the unconscious is a pretty smart cookie, with cognitive capacities that rival and sometimes surpass that of conscious thought." Picasso claimed that his genius resided in his intuitive self when he said, "Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants."

Instincts are smart, argues researcher Gary Klein in his recently published Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do, because they are "not accidental. They reflect your experience." To Klein, our intuition is based on pattern recognition and subtle clues from experience that we may be unable to articulate, but that inform our gut instincts. According to Dr. Steve Hymowitz, a New York psychotherapist specializing in hypnosis, these hundreds and thousands of life experiences accumulate in our unconscious, creating an intelligence that has the capacity to surpass conscious thought. He compares the conscious and subconscious mind to a computer. "The conscious mind-like a computer screen-can handle five to nine chunks of information at any given point. The unconscious can hold limitless information, like the hard drive of a computer. And literally everything that is stored can be accessed by hitting the right button."

Many legendary marketing campaigns came about because the final decision maker decided to trust his intuition. "If a strategy comes from the mind," says Maurice Lévy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, our parent company, "then ideas come from the guts." When MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign was first launched, its ads scored below average on USA Today's closely watched Ad Track consumer rating index. MasterCard's marketing chief Larry Flanagan, ignoring the research, persisted with the campaign. He instinctively knew that the commercials got to the heart of those values that money can't buy-values that he was convinced consumers felt were important. And his intuition was right. Eventually, the campaign gained traction, and the spots went on to become a huge hit, helping to narrow the gap between MasterCard and market leader Visa.

The change Volvo made in its advertising approach is another example of the wisdom of intuition. In the early 1980s, Bob Schmetterer, now CEO of global advertising agency Euro RSCG Worldwide, was the partner in charge of Volvo at Scali, McCabe, Sloves. At the time, says Schmetterer, Volvo was positioned as "a high-quality, well-built, last-forever kind of car." But Schmetterer, after doing some exploratory research, had a gut instinct that safety might be a better way for Volvo to appeal to its potential buyers. "We discovered a hidden reality. Most Volvos at that time were being bought by men, but they were being driven by women. We figured that women are very interested in safety, particularly if they have young children on board."

The conventional wisdom at the time, however, was that people don't buy cars based on safety. Instead, they choose cars based on sex appeal, power, or reliability. "Ford had tried back in the 1960s to sell cars on safety, by focusing on seatbelts, and it was a disaster," remembers Schmetterer. "The conventional wisdom was that people bought cars because they look great, they fit their personality, or they can afford them." Consequently, the people at Volvo were initially cool to Schmetterer's idea about safety."But I pushed very hard," Schmetterer recalls. "I said, 'Listen. You've already developed a position based on how well built the car is. People already believe that. But safety is bigger. It's the ultimate end benefit of a well-built car.' "

Volvo began to buy into that strategy and by the early 1990s Schmetterer and his partners at Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee, Schmetterer, Euro RSCG presented a series of commercials that were testimonials by people who revealed that their life had been saved by their Volvo. The original tagline was "Drive safely"-often the last words we say when a friend or relative leaves the house to drive home.

Volvo finally agreed to run the campaign, and Donald Sutherland signed on to become the voice behind the ads. They succeeded beyond the company's wildest dreams. Volvo was soon the car of choice in suburban driveways. "The result was great for Volvo in terms of sales, but more important," says Schmetterer, "they now own the position of arguably the safest car in the world."

In an era when cold, hard facts rule the day, senior management and marketers are reluctant to just trust their instincts. Having "good instincts" usually means introducing messy emotions, which is anathema to today's rational businessperson. "When I come into a business situation," says Dr. Ona Robinson, "I see how terrified most employees are of their feelings. I change my whole dialogue when I work with a company. People feel vulnerable if they show their feelings in a business situation."At KTG, intuition has been our secret weapon. We recognize from many years of experience that our best ideas stem from an original creative impulse. Of course, we would never argue that facts, research, and left-brain thinking aren't crucial to the development of a Big Bang. They are. The difference is that we put intuition first. During the creative process, we encourage employees of KTG to listen to their inner voices to come up with ideas. Only then do we put our rational mind to work, to vet the idea and evaluate its merits. As nineteenth-century mathematician Henri Poincaré put it, "It is by logic that we prove. But it is by intuition that we discover."

How do we harness the power of intuition to come up with Big Bang marketing ideas? Here are some of the techniques we use:

Stop Ignoring Your Feminine Side

Perhaps the reason we at KTG are so successful at tapping into the consumer psyche is that we're a firm run by women. There's enough estrogen around our offices to make Arnold Schwarzenegger ovulate. Perhaps because of that, we aren't afraid to make big decisions by following our gut. Feminine instinct, we believe, is no myth. "Women's intuition has been scientifically tested and measured since the 1980s and, for the most part, comes down to a woman's superiority in all the perceptive senses," claim Barbara and Allan Pease in Why Men Don't Listen and Woman Can't Read Maps. David G. Myers, in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, seems to agree, stating that there is a "gender intuition gap," that "women generally surpass men at decoding emotional messages." He cites research that says that although boys average 45 points higher on the SAT math tests, "girls surpass boys in reading facial expressions."Women may have developed better intuitive powers as a defense mechanism, honed over centuries as the weaker sex: If I can't beat you up, I somehow have to figure you out to get what I want. Or maybe it stems from the maternal instinct, the ability to quickly figure out what babies want so they will survive (or at least stop crying at 2 a.m!). "As childbearers and nest defenders," say the Peases, women "needed the ability to sense subtle mood and attitude changes in others. What is commonly called 'women's intuition' is mostly a woman's acute ability to notice small details and changes in the appearance or behavior of others." This search for a competitive advantage is hardly unique to Homo sapiens. Researchers studying elephants in Africa made a startling discovery while observing boy and girl twin elephants. When going to nurse, the male would simply butt the female out of the way. As a result, the female rapidly learned to nurse when the male was sleeping, playing, or otherwise occupied. In other words, to survive she had to be clever.

Stop Thinking About the Business

The classical model of decision making, taught in business schools around the country, is based on analysis and logic; managers evaluate options based on a set of criteria about the issue at hand. It all sounds very scientific, says intuition researcher Gary Klein, and "comforting. Who would not want to be thorough, systematic, rational and scientific?" he writes.

"The only problem is that the whole thing is a myth. . . . It doesn't do so well in the real world, where decisions are more challenging, situations are more confusing and complex, information is scarce or inconclusive, time is short and stakes are high. And in that environment, the classical, analytical model of decision making falls flat."Randi Dorman, group director at Interbrand, a New York City-based brand-identity consulting firm, agrees. Working with brands such as Crest, which relies on packaging to grab the consumer's attention in the supermarket aisle, she encourages her clients to think about "shelf interest" rather than "shelf impact." While package designers traditionally rely on loud graphics and the age-old "new and improved!" approach, Dorman insists that's not enough. "If you go to the supermarket, there are aisles and aisles of products, and there is so much to look at. It's created kind of a loud wallpaper that has led to a grab-and-go mentality. They know the products they like so they grab and go as quickly as possible."But it's not enough to be loud and impactful at the shelf," Dorman continues. "You have to do something more intriguing. You have to speak to something that's going on in the consumer's life, that speaks to what the consumer is looking for and how she might be changing. And you have to make it easy for her to shop."Dorman cites Campbell's soup as an example of a manufacturer that hasn't focused enough on consumer needs, and as a result, they've missed the mark both emotionally and with regards to shopability. "If you go to the soup aisle, you see condensed soup, chunky soup, and ready-to-serve soup, and it's all so confusing. You can tell that they've been doing everything based on what different things they can make versus making it easy for the consumer to find what they want."I, unfortunately, have an example of how this kind of rational thinking can lead you astray.Bad Medicine

In early 2000, we were vying with another agency to win the Bristol-Myers Squibb corporate account. Bristol-Myers Squibb is one of the leading manufacturers of cancer drugs, among other things, and we heard plenty from CEO Peter Dolan about how Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong had beaten a deadly cancer by taking drugs created in the company's labs.