After several rounds of creative, a team can be left with a harder question than which route to choose. Does the brand need to express its positioning more clearly, or does the positioning itself need to change? Both can lead to a new agency brief. They ask that brief to do very different work.
A brand needs a new message when people miss or misread a positioning that would give them a reason to choose it, and a new direction when they understand the promise and still aren’t moved by it.
Two problems with one symptom
When communication isn’t doing what the business needs, the problem can be at either of two levels.
The positioning may be sound and poorly expressed. People miss the idea, or take it in a form too faint to matter when they choose. Then better creative is the answer, and the existing strategy deserves a sharper expression.
Or the message may be clear and well made, and communicate a proposition that gives the intended audience no compelling reason to choose the brand. People understand it and aren’t moved. New creative would express the same reason more skillfully, and the outcome is likely to be much the same.
Say a food brand’s campaign promises the most natural choice on the shelf. If people come away unsure what the brand stands for, the expression needs work. If they can repeat the promise, and those who took it in choose the brand no more often than similar people who didn’t, the campaign has done its job, and the positioning is the question. Asking people whether naturalness decides their choice won’t settle it: people are unreliable witnesses to their own reasons, so what they choose has to be read beside what they say.
That caution is long established. In a 1977 review in Psychological Review, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson set out evidence suggesting that “there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes.”
There’s an earlier failure, too: people remember the work but not whose it was. Until that’s fixed, neither the message nor the direction has been tested.
From the outside, the two can look alike: a campaign that didn’t move the business, or rounds of creative that never quite settle. Treat both as a request for new work, and the second problem can absorb a great deal of creative effort without anything changing.
The bigger answer isn’t always the right one
Repositioning is the larger, more dramatic project. That is a reason to be careful before recommending it.
Often the right conclusion is that the strategy is sound and the next task is expressing it better. Saying so plainly is as useful as calling for change, and it respects work the client team has already done well.
Sometimes neither is the main explanation. A brand can have a strong proposition and a good campaign and still lose ground because of the product, the price, where it’s available or what a competitor has just done. A diagnosis that allows only two answers will find one of them, whether or not either is right.
Working alongside the agency
In our experience, this question goes best when research works alongside the creative agency, on the agency’s own material, toward a better next brief.
A home technology brand’s agency had written several early creative platforms, all to one strategy. Before any went further, we set aside which was best and explored what each made people believe about the brand, and how each could be strengthened to stay on that strategy.
Every group included people who already knew or used the brand, so a platform’s pull on existing users could be read beside its pull on people the brand still hoped to reach. Because every route was shown at the same rough finish, people judged the ideas themselves.
Marketing leadership came away with a read of what each platform was doing for the brand, ways to strengthen it, and a recommendation on which to develop. The work is described in Strengthening early creative platforms for a home technology brand.
The two kinds of expertise are different. The agency knows how to make a brand noticed, felt and remembered. Research can add evidence about what people take from the work, and whether that is what the business needs them to believe. A next brief is better for having both.
What telling them apart is worth
Telling these problems apart won’t guarantee the next campaign, and no research could.
What it gives a team is a next brief founded on what actually needs to change, and a shared view with its agency of the job that brief is asking the work to do.
That might be a sharper expression of a strategy that is already right. It might be a harder conversation about what the brand should stand for. Either way, client and agency are working on the same problem.
If your team is facing that question now, we’d be glad to talk it through.