Idea-icide: Failure, Nozzles, and Toasters.

Why be creative? Why try? Sure, if we're in the arts-world it's maybe purely expressive, or to summon feeling in us, the audience / reader / gazer.

The for the rest, it's about Improvement. Making stuff better. Insight to Ideation to Innovation. Oh, and with Imagination.

Here's another 'I': Iteration. 

And one I just made-up: Idea-icide.

Professor Steve Jones, the evolutionary biologist, gave a talk a few years ago at The Hay Festival. [I've looked hard for an online link, can't find one, so I'll try and describe.]

A bunch of scientists in the Unilever labs at Port Sunlight were searching for an improvement. To a depositor which sprayed something onto something. It was a nozzle. They were looking for a Nozzle Solution. [sorry.]

Their start point was a conical nozzle. It was nozzle-shaped. But for some reason it was sub-optimal. So, they applied a logical process of adaptation, changing the bore-diameter, using their knowledge of physics and flows – that kind of thing. Not much change.

Then, someone proposed an alternative approach. A dozen nozzles were tooled, randomly, disruptively – these things looked like a collection of Queen Anne chair legs. And they were tested. The best performing were kept, the others discarded – killed.

The 'winners' were then 'bred' to generate a new generation – and the testing and killing was repeated.

After a few generations, a nozzle had 'evolved' which outperformed anything else they had reached through the application of physics. It looked baroque, ornate. You would never have thought it would work at all. But it was the best.

I don't get asked to fix too many nozzles. But I do keep coming back to this story every time I am given a problem to solve, creatively.

Our world is incredibly complex. There are a lot of moving parts, variables.

In the intro to is latest book “Adapt: Why Success always Starts With Failure”, Tim Harford tells us of Thomas Thwaites' attempt to build a toaster from scratch. Not assembling the parts. Making the parts. Like mining iron-ore, smelting, that sort of 'from scratch'. Along the way, Thwaites learned how complex our world is. That one of the most taken-for-granted appliances – one that a child could quickly grasp the workings-of – is made of over four hundred components. Minerals and metals are extracted from around the world, dragged from the ocean-floor, to help us make bread crispy.

Most of the problems I work-on aren't toaster-related. Or nozzle-like either. But they are complex. They require all the 'I's mentioned, above. Especially Idea-icide.

When I was a client and brand-owner, I used to hate it when agencies would present me with three concepts. Why three? It's not like it's a Magic Number or anything, is it? Mostly, if they were honest, this was a bracketing-exercise. Sandwiching the concept they liked between two less-liked ones. Like an amateur Derren Brown trying-out a suggestion-technique.

What I wanted to see / smell / sense, were dead-ideas. Idea-icide. Little-Darlings – killed through testing. And one idea, left standing.

Let's apply our creativity not just to generating ideas, but to testing our ideas, and to killing them. Randomised Trials. Prototyping. Design-thinking of the sort IDEO practise. Harness the crowd.

Stand them in the wind-tunnel and let the failures fall.

Questioning for Insights

Like so many things in branding, the search for insights is a tight-loose process. I consider it to be like drawing a splinter. Some of your approaches need to be oblique, peripheral, circumnavigating the subject. Other times, you need tweezers.

First, I would like to share a story.

Last night, I went to a lecture / discussion at the Said Business School in Oxford, given by Sir Winfried Bischoff, currently Chairman of Lloyds Banking Group.

The Subject: Would society be better off without banks?

Tasty subject - right? 

Of course, Sir Winfried disagreed with the 'motion'. Frustratingly (for me) - he spoke rather formally, carefully - and he occupied a large portion of his podium-time with a recitation of banking history. 

Then: the questions. I listened to question after question, trying to 'work' Sir Winfried for an insight. And - because, I think, the askers wanted to encircle him, the questions had a spirally shape. Multiple questions. Giving Sir Win the option to select which strand to answer, and to wriggle. When my chance came, I had had the benefit of witnessing the wriggliness, and had constructed a tighter question. A pincer, rather than a lasso. 

A closed question. "If bank lending before the crisis was, in your words, responsible - then does it follow that your agreement to the increased requirements for lending [£100Bn] under Project Merlin  - is irresponsible?"

Not much wriggle-room? Of course, he still wriggled - because he's smarter than me. But he was still forced to reply with "It's stretching." Not a massive admission, and if I had the chance, I'd have loved to keep probing.

When we're searching for Insights, it helps to have lots of time, and a naturally inquisitive demeanour. Sometimes the approach will require an analysis of data, often it's a more humanistic, observational, probing thing. Insights are - usually - emotional connections. Hearts - and occasionally - Minds things, the ways we connect with wants and desires, rather than the more apparent Needs of our consumers / clients.
And then, to seize the insight when you feel you've 'worried' it towards the surface - you will need a tight grasp.
When this is during a qualitative research phase, perhaps interviewing a consumer or other stakeholder, it is worth practising your questioning technique.

Luckily, we are able to witness questioning - good and bad - at work, just by tuning in to Paxman, Humphreys, Wark, Dimbleby, Davis and other BBC grandmasters/mistresses. And of course, the showcase of PMQs every Wednesday (although we should be wary of the direct relevance of the more combative of these.)

Practise. Know when it's right to be oblique, and when to use the tweezers.

charge your mind with chit-chat

PechaKucha (roughly translated as chit-chat) is a format for sharing ideas, and PechaKucha Nights are evenings dedicated to idea-sharing. Like an open-mike poetry slam without the cringeing.

www.pecha-kucha.org

20 slides times 20 seconds - that's the structure, and as an ideas-excursion it's a wonderful head-blitz.
The creative stages of branding can be playful skips over stepping-stones, taking our thoughts as close to the waterfall of taboo as we dare. The stepping stones are only there when we collect ideas and then lob them into the stream of consciousness, for our minds to leap to, when the time is right. (that should've come with an extended-metaphor alert, sorry).

In a recent PechaKucha Night at Science Oxford, we heard from a guy who was nuts about rollercoasters and mechanical engineering and who needed no help to perform enthusiastic somersaults as he showed us his world of loop-the-loops. And we heard from this guy
www.james-king.net
a Speculative Designer, who, as well as taking science to the Secret Garden Party Festival - shoed us his 'Scatalog'  and told us how colour-reactive e.coli bacteria could one-day help us discern our health from the pantone-chart examination of our poo.

Chit-Chat, Hop-Skip, stepping stones. Dunno when I'll need to lob these, but my ideas-rucksack is a little heavier.  

Brandishing: Stade Francais

Ugly Beautiful, Non? There are many dimensions to the success of Parisian Rugby Club - Stade Francais - and pink shirts are one of them. Pink shirts, and sometimes pink shorts - stretched like delicate sausage-skins over the mammoth frames of their prop forwards.

In 1992 the radio-station entrepreneur Max Guazzini bought the club, then languishing in the lower orders and playing in front of deux hommes et un petit chien.
Today, with bold branding at the heart of his efforts, Guazzini has a club which regularly commands crowds of 50,000 - at family-friendly fireworks-dazzled games.
The marketing know-how is right out of the 'difference versus indifference' text-book (if / when I get around to writing the book). How better to redefine perceptions of a just-for-blokes sport than to clad the team in shocking / stunning pink kit. And to keep splashing the story with an annual update - Parisians are treated to a new take on bold rugby fashion every twelve months (along with an artful calendar that might make Helmut Newton's lens shake).
And - they're successful: showing that strong brands collect trophies, win euros and attract top talent. Like all good challenger brands, he has grown the category as well as his own share. Paris claimed only 5000 rugby fans when he started, now le ballon-parc figure is more like 80,000.

Vive le difference!

Brandishing: Lurpak

First of all - that name. Lurpak. Lurpak. Lur-pak. Lurp-ak. 
For everyone who frets about the naming of their brand - I give you: Lurpak.
No attempt to add French chef-iness and transform it to L'Urpak. Nope, just Lurpak. 
If the soviet system had paused from their five-year plans, lightbulb manufacture and collective farms long enough to have a stab at naming butter, they might have called it Lurpak.
Ugly name - but now invested with beautiful meaningfulness. 
Just watch their slots on the telly, or great print ads. 

Proud, didactic, confident tone-of-voice, raised just that modicum above the consumer so that it avoids aloofness, yet insists on trust. And the consistent adherence to a strong, simple idea. Simple, but big enough to give consistent use, time and time again. 

No celebrities, just 'real' (blokey) home cooks. Drama in the imagery gives us a strong narrative - home-cooking is self-satisfying performance art. 

Emotion-packed: no features and benefits, just a dart - fired straight to the bullseye of 'this is how you're going to FEEL'. 

Boom. Triumph indeed.

Sure, if you're building your brand from scratch, give the 'naming' a lot of creative thought - in those early stages we often have so few toots to blow on our brand-trumpets, a strong, meaningful name can deliver a fugue for us. 

But if you've stuck with a name that's as unhelpful as a London traffic warden - don't let it stop you from filling your brand with delicious meaning. 

Just whip your ideas into soft peaks and bake at 180 degrees until golden.