Chapter 2
The Origin Story #2
Read Time:
15.666 Minutes
Without the news story of how and why it got there, and the inscription at its base, the Statue of Liberty is just a tall Green Lady. With the story that includes the inscription, it is a symbol of Brand America.
Your Brand may not be a Green Giant (jolly or otherwise), but without a story it has no more meaning than the colour of your house slippers.
You might like the look of them, but any other colour or makers name would have kept your toes just as warm.
So next time you buy house slippers there’s no reason why you should accept the same view of the floor.
“Creative Marketing”, recently becoming popular in academic circles due to the fear of AI taking their jobs, isn’t just a story woven around your brand – it is your brand story woven around everything else about you and your market place; symbolised firstly by your Logo.
Your “Statue of Liberty”.
See the logo – think the story.
Why would you want that?
SALES.
“Design and Marketing are The Two Wings of Sales – and just like a bird, Sales will never Fly without both.”
So, before you sign up to a part time MA in Creative Marketing and Branding (your worthy contribution to keeping Uni Fees flowing), here’s the real Origin Story of how CM came about.
NOT the start of it all:
In 1967 Messrs Patrick J. Robinson, Charles W. Faris, and Yoram Wind, at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, produced a study entitled: “Industrial Buying and Creative Marketing”.
It is the first known written mention of the word compound “Creative Marketing”.
In this work they proposed a change in the process of B2B marketing from being purely transactional to a complex decision making process.
This isn’t what we recognise as “Creative Marketing”.
To explain further: In 1967 Retail Advertising was well into its post war decades of boom – Radio, Newspaper and Outdoor advertising had been joined by TV – right there in ordinary folk’s living spaces.
Meanwhile, although change was on its way, Business to Business Marketing was still pretty dry, with no incentive to change.
Everyone in business knew everyone else – at least in their own sectors.
“It isn’t what you know but who you know”
still ruled, and marketing still revolved around numbers.
A product was made, costed, offered up and the sale closed with handshakes – more likely than not on the 19th green.
If “marketing” was recognised at all in industrial companies it was usually part of the sales manager’s role.
So the Penn University boys weren’t talking about Creativity in terms of Graphic Design or Paint and Easels, they were talking about how you presented those dry numbers, creatively, throughout each step of the customers buying process.
This became the marketing manager’s bread and butter.
What they hadn’t worked into their theory at Penn was that complex decisions needed oiling.
Moving the numbers around for the journey from estimate to closure was indeed part of the sales / purchase psychology – a simple Penny below the next whole number of Pounds could make a difference to how your price was perceived; but it still left every other “buy prompt” to the imagination – imagination that was still lacking for the lack of being led.
There were no metaphors or analogies to spice anything up – no triggering memories of previous bad experiences to drive the sale in your direction. No colour stimulus or copy strategy to route minds through information in the best order to stimulate a quicker sale.
Almost two decades later in 1985, not much had changed in B2B, but the burgeoning B2B Marketing Industry was starting to be seen for what it was – Men in Suits tweaking numbers and chasing accounts, either for their direct employers or via subcontracted marketing agencies.
Business to Business couldn’t hold a candle to the psychology (as unscientifically street smart as much of that was) used by Business to Consumer marketers.
This realisation ran alongside a mass epiphany in the advancing post-industrial era, that the Old Boys Club way of doing business was no longer enough.
The new buyers, with no loyalty to a network, were younger, even if trained and mentored in an industrial mind set, they wanted fresh ideas to show their bosses how smart and dynamic they were.
The clever number skills of sales and marketing men were being scrutinised in ever greater detail and found to be missing… “something”.
The Next Mistake:
Then came, not an evolution, more of a tactical change, a strategy that spread, typified by The American Marketing Association (AMA).
They decided to claim a new use for the “Creative Marketing” title by validating “a strategic role focussed on creating values and ideas”
Simply explained – a fee and salary justification for their members.
They picked the wrong title – this still wasn’t “Creative Marketing”.
While the AMA redefined its members role, they, although differently from the Three Authors, were still not using the term as the all encompassing philosophy it should be.
In fact – they unknowingly delayed its development.
The job role version did mean creative in the visual sense – in an attempt to emulate the way Ad Agencies had worked in Retail advertising for years, (just without the budget) but they were backing the wrong horses to deliver that creativity.
Instead of recognising commercial arts and artists, talented copywriters and poets, as Advertising Agencies had in the retail sector, (even if besuited Account Handlers still acted as a filter between weirdo creatives and customers) the AMA tried to promote old school Marketing Managers, Executives and Assistants as capable of performing this “value and ideas” strategic role, with no art direction capabilities.
Pushing solid, efficient number crunchers into being pseudo art directors, showed an epic lack of understanding.
Note: Business to Consumer marketing is being used as a comparison here. It wasn’t growing through or into “Creative Marketing” – it’s history being solidly founded in mass advertising, we’ll come back to that in a future Chapter.
The Bane of the Artists life.
It was not the first or last time that “art” was thought of as easy; that anyone could “do it” downgrading the skills of actual artists in the minds of those who hold the purse strings.
Sadly, time and money was wasted, often over years, by manufacturers and suppliers of industrial goods and services.
It wasn’t their fault. They very rarely had experience in retail, never equated their businesses to business sales as dealing with individuals, and had no need of systems for promoting themselves beyond their known groups and sectors – other than literally knocking on doors.
And now, they were being led by equally unknowing marketing bods, from one initiative to another – not with the lateral or intriguing ideas needed to gain outstanding traction with real people – but in bland circles of the obvious (see “Magpies and Magic Wands” coming up later).
To go from tactics dealing with stale networks or faceless corporate purchasing departments, to understanding those purchasing departments were populated by real people, with real human “bosses” was a huge leap – and the traditional sales and marketing folk just didn’t “get” that – they still assumed it was all about the money.
Still, the AMA was one of many at least trying to make a shift in attitudes to the value of marketing, if not fully understanding the process beyond a sales funnel.
Even today august publications such as Marketing Week remember this strategic shift in the mid 80’s as “veering away from text heavy ads toward strong visual imagery and brand positioning to make lasting impressions”.
But not really.
At the time of the Three Authors this had already been done for over 80 years by retail brands such as Coca-Cola, Frys Chocolate, Marlboro Cigarettes… but business to business?
Two decades on and still not really moving towards the humans.
Equally, explaining the value of Design, defined by trad marketers as “pretty pictures” and “decoration” was (and still is) extremely difficult when dealing with brains that are wired with lower cognitive ability to visualise but higher cognitive technical skills when mapping in their own sectors.
Some people just have to see the evidence before committing – sometimes a huge issue given the cost of the providing proof and risks around IP.
The “No One Understands Me” complaint.
This is why artists avoid those difficult conversations with Engineers and Construction Company bosses.
By the 1980s, everyone in Design still wanted to work on perfume, cars and album covers. Very few arty types wanted to apply “Design Psychology” to manufacturers of industrial pumps or widgets.
…………
FIRST Use:
I first used the term Creative Marketing in 1980, but that thought was very different from that proposed by Robinson, Faris & Wind – who I’d never heard of at that time (who had?) and was still to prove very different from the AMA’s boost for their members 5 years later.
Then I wasn’t aware my thinking was going to be thrown a curve ball; a twist that didn’t change my view, but with hindsight, did add a powerful insight.
Just before the AMA tried to hype up those unsuited (actually suited) horses, my life had taken an unexpected sharp right turn – sidetracked into pure Sales, specifically the number heavy and most pressurised sales environment of Financial Services, at a time when that industry was also undergoing a massive change offering access to investments and property ownership – for the masses.
It turned out I was quite good at sales. I liked people, I was fascinated by their stories and naturally picked up on the trials and tribulations of commercial customers. Seeing for myself how marketing the numbers could help them achieve their personal and business goals.
Becoming a Member and then Fellow of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management I remember well the argument between my Institute (iSMM) and the Institute, later Chartered Institute, of Marketing (CiM).
The rivalry and disagreements were about semantics really; which discipline had the greater authority; Sales or Marketing.
The many times quoted “A good Salesman is a Marketeer; a good Marketeer is a Salesman” is also a solid memory.
(Note – not Salesperson, the enlightenment was still to arrive in the mid 80s).
MISSING:
“Design”, the missing ingredient, was never part of that discussion.
Luckily for my own sanity I never lost my lifelong addiction to creativity, so coming back fully loaded in 1991, burning ties and giving away suits to charity, I had a much clearer view of what had been missing – and knew instinctively the way this needed to go.
Organising and explaining those thoughts – getting that out of my head – is a difficulty many people face in many circles of life.
The Plan:
The business plan written between 1991 and 1993 was aimed at the niche of manufacturing industry.
The thought process has evolved, got lost, returned to centre, got confused and clarified again, over and over through the ensuing 35 years that brought us to where we are now; very definitely not servicing the one niche.
In ’93 The B2B sector had hardly any properly designed marketing materials, the artwork that existed was pretty ugly and the best of it was explanatory Engineering Technical Drawings.
Any efforts, driven by marketing guys who may have believed in their own validated job titles, or were simply being pushed into producing something, anything in colour at least, (just as they are being pushed into using AI now) to compete with imports from the States and burgeoning Far East manufacturers – was all, at best, very ordinary.
My idea was to “make the unglamorous, glamorous” to help “small firms look bigger and big firms look better”.
But, by the time I was “back” at the start of that decade, waving the flag for my version of Creative Marketing, that old black magic of synchronicity meant I already had competition.
Designers and Regional Ad Agencies were booming, picking over the post-industrial survivors in what suddenly felt like a “sector” of its own, which it truly did become for a while.
You can’t buy experience.
My answer was Sales. Old fashioned, list from the yellow pages, fax template to personalise, hitting as many telephone numbers as I could in a day.
Then work. I claimed the slightest glimmer of any opportunity to pitch ideas. And it worked.
In a world already dominated by suited and booted Agency Account Handlers and Sales Execs I pitched a promotion for the regional Bus Company’s Festival of Transport.
The competition was the area’s largest Ad Agency.
Working through two nights to produce A1 (A One not AI) mounted visuals, rushing out between times to buy sheets of Leteraset; for the sake of one letter that couldn’t be bodged from any other two, I fell out of bed on the day and rocked up in leather jacket and jeans to present to the Regional Manager.
An hour into that discussion a bike courier (studio junior on a scooter) turned up and dropped a brown envelope with A4 Magic Marker roughs on the client’s reception desk. It was brought into the manager’s office, who took a quick glace without completely removing the thin sheets from the envelope, and I was given the job.
Getting all Lateral.
B2B is the ultimate test of Creative Marketing. Anyone can sell a chocolate bar with a pretty picture; it takes a “lateral leap” to make a procurement officer feel an emotional connection to a piece of heavy machinery.
Creative Marketing in my mind – had to be led by the art.
Not Marketing Managers or Account Handler’s but Copywriters, Graphic Designers, Photographers and Artists all coalesced by good Art, Photographic and Creative Direction.
The number crunching is still needed, but number crunching and design are two completely different mind sets.
My advantage was that sales experience; which nearly killed me at the time, but I’ll never regret because it allowed me to take that lateral leap (yes I did read Edward de Bono) combining the “Salesman’s” understanding of the customer’s immediate needs with the “Artist’s” ability to visualise and write the solution.
I was using lateral thinking to find solutions while my peers were using spread sheets (marketeers) or playing with the latest computer aided design packages (designers).
With hindsight I was practicing what is now called Integrated Marketing Communications – years before it became a standard industry term later in the 1990s.
Nothing beats hard work and there is no such thing (see more in Chapter 12) as wasted experience – be that playing in Rock Bands or working in drawing offices, sign shops or on Engineering shop floors to keep the beer money flowing – it all helps to keep you real.
Solving the Struggle of Semantics.
The argument between Sales and Marketing was a distraction. Sales has its own discipline which stands apart from the professions and channels that support it.
Sales is about looking someone in the eye while putting a card in the hand you’re not shaking.
A hand you shake regardless of whatever their work covered it in – oil, soil, sawdust or moisturiser; because you can wash your hands – you never get a second chance to make that first personal contact.
The biggest part of a Sales support system has to be clearly defined, Design and Marketing should work together, with definitive demarcation and human interaction.
Everything else – Advertising Channels, the Marketing Mix, Brand Carriers, Websites, even Google Ads are just mechanics – ways of spreading automated hints of what the humans created, and the Salesperson explains.
REAL Creative Marketing is the bridge that ties it all together.
By using this definition of Creative Marketing:
(46 year overnight thought success)
Marketing still uses its PCs to crunch the data and Design takes their Market Segmentation and imagines the real people in those sectors – producing concepts and communications that inspire attention, accurately, in each part of each segment by using Human Frameworks, design psychology and originality.
Creative Marketing makes Wings from Design and Marketing – so Sales can fly!
Chapter Epilogue:
This is what we are trying to relate throughout this new website – we are collating all this experience with everything we have been doing, (with hardly a chance to breathe), for many years; recognising we are what our story made us. How that story has been added to by colleagues and associates, clients and providers, so we might become more strategic in for Blue Strawberry Elephant.
The way we think of Creative strategies for our clients.
