The risk of playing it safe
Mediocre just doesn’t cut it these days. No longer can a brand simply put out a solid, yeomanlike marketing campaign and expect to get away with it. Not with the CEO, CFO and even the kids in the mailroom weighing the quality of the work. And, of course, consumers from school age on up are now more savvy — even jaded — about the marketing that has become part of the fiber of everyday life. Everyone’s a critic. So, to paraphrase modern philosopher Garrison Keillor, every promotion must be “strong, good-looking and above average.”
Reaching above average, becoming the best: these are admirable standards. Of course, it is a mathematical impossibility for all work, by all marketers, to exceed the average (hence Keillor’s irony). But, especially in the sputtering economy of recent years, the pressure is on to produce the best every time. And the result has been two very divergent outcomes.
On the one hand, there is a lot of creative, smart branding going on. For some prime examples, see the review by PROMO’s editors of our choices for the 12 best-promoted brands of 2003 (pg. 83). While prepping this feature we were struck by some commonalities across these very different products and companies. For one thing, they’ve defined their target customers very well and they work at learning more about them; for another, they aren’t daunted by playing with a mix of integrated marketing tactics, from events to online and more. Finally, they were willing to push the norm, even if just a bit. The same can also be said of the beverage behemoth Diageo, portrayed in our cover story by Matt Kinsman as a stable of brands with a newly sharpened focus on being not only big, but also the best (story begins on pg. 76). More examples? Take a look at the PRO Award finalists announced last month (see pg. 21) for brief descriptions of some of the top-notch work of the past 12 months.
All of which is very heartening for those of us who get to look at so much promotional work every day. Of course, we also see the second outcome of the unrelenting pressure to be the best: pablum. Safe, formulaic, and ultimately boring marketing that retreads previous campaigns. Why? Because along with the push to do better is an equally powerful urgency to not screw up. For too many brand managers (and the agencies they hire), risky and potentially brilliant work is a luxury they just cannot afford these days. And so they fall into the mediocrity they dreaded in the first place, and generate results that are as flat as the program.
So, in the end, which is the riskier course: innovation or regurgitation? You decide. We’ll be watching.
