The Big Idea Won’t Fix Your Marketing…think Small and Frequent

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The December 3rd issue of BusinessWeek featured an article about Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts, and the company’s struggles to significantly grow revenue. More than anything, this article discusses the transformation that Saatchi and other large agencies are undergoing to stay relevant.

Times have clearly changed, and agencies, as well as traditional media companies, are struggling to find their way. The article states:

“For most of the 20th century the so-called creatives ruled the industry. They didn’t worry about where or how an ad ran. They didn’t analyze market niches. They were about Big Ideas that would connect a brand, emotionally, with millions of consumers. Today, you might say, the
Small Idea is ascendant. Ads are targeted at individuals or communities of consumers. That’s because the media universe is so fragmented–into blogs, social networks, television, magazines, and so on–that finding the right medium is fast becoming more important than the message itself. “

Couple of takeaways here. First, most agencies and creatives I know still search and believe in the big idea. I believe all humans do, to some extent. We believe and have faith that all our problems (and in this case, communication challenges) have one great and almighty solution. Sometimes, they do. But in media and marketing, this very rarely happens. Today, it’s never just one big idea.

Look at it this way. If a heart attack victim survives and is on the road to recovery, it’s not one thing that brings her back to health. It’s many little things, accomplished and executed over many days, weeks and months. It’s eating better, exercising regularly, maintaining a more positive outlook on life, smiling more…and so on and so forth. If you did just one of these, it would be ineffective. If you did all of them, just once, that’s no good either. No “big idea” fix.

Now look at today’s marketing. If you have a customer communication challenge, is one big idea going to fix that? Not in the least. It won’t be fixed by a glam-packed 30-second spot, or print campaign or even the integrated strategy itself.

Here’s the solution for 99% of the businesses out there: It’s not one big idea but a series of small, ongoing conversations with your customers, distributed through the media your customers use. This requires intimate knowledge of your customer, and a determination to leave your customer, on each occasion, in better shape than you originally found them. Instead of one big bang, it’s one brick per day that over the course of weeks, months and years builds a house, a true brand relationship with your customer.

This is done by communicating great content to your customer that helps them become, not necessarily emotionally tied to you, but intellectually tied to your brand. Educating your customers is probably the single greatest gift you could give them.

Second point, specific to this quote: “…finding the right medium is fast becoming more important than the message itself.” I’m not sure anyone really has the answer for this, but I’d position that it’s neither. The most important is finding the right customer. The customer dictates both the medium and the message. Without the perfect concoction of both, the communication effort will fail.

To some extent we are all suckers for the big fix. Who really wants to create ongoing, educational content for customers anyhow? It’s too much work. Yes, it may be too much work, but it sure does work.

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