The Brilliance of Bullmore
Over the course of a career I suspect all Planners and Strategists will build a virtual tool kit of techniques which they use to help accelerate their understanding of a new problem or brief. Little rules of thumb. Cheat codes that get them to answers quickly and efficiently. Personally, mine range from reading a company’s annual report to visiting the places that a product or service is bought, to searching Reddit. Nothing revolutionary, but incredibly instructive - especially when working with a new brand or category. Each provides a clue as to what the answer to the problem at hand may be.
Jeremy Bullmore features in this toolkit. When in doubt, read Bullmore. Invariably, he will have written an article or an essay dealing with the subject matter at hand. Often directly, sometimes adjacently, he will have expressed an elegant and straightforward opinion on the task in front of you.
A discussion with a colleague about the challenges for the discipline of Communications Planning this week led back to two pieces.
The first, comes from his contribution to Rewind: Forty Years of D&AD. His assignment is to close the book and provide a view on the future of our industry. Every word is placed perfectly. It remains one of my favourite pieces of writing about the communications industry. Part History lesson, part warning for future leaders and practioners, it is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago when published. On the disintegration of the full service model and the challenges this caused for the effective design and deployment of communications activity, he writes:
“All this has happened at exactly the time that the value of communications consistency and brand coherence has never been more widely recognized. We may not much like the term integrated communication - but we accept its importance. Yet, at precisely the moment the brand owners expect their brands’ communication to be seamlessly complementary, the suppliers of those communications have become irrevocably splintered”
In a world of paywalls and ‘web 3’, reach from traditional commercial channels is a real issue. Continued fragmentation of media means that we still face this issue today, perhaps even more profoundly than at the time of writing. Brand consistency across a vast array of consumer touchpoints is crucial, especially as the discipline of ‘marketing’ becomes less focussed in the marketing department of client organisations.
At the essay’s conclusion he offers this stark warning around the challenges facing many agencies. Effectiveness and orientation around business outcomes is our north star. Again, these words are as relevant as they have ever been:
“Over the next 40 years, as always, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be those who continue to combine an informed and intuitive sense of business with an alchemist’s ability to turn strategy into enviable execution... the losers will will be those who turn their back on the business of business in their sole pursuit of some unanchored concept called creativity”
I often talk about outcomes versus outputs. In a fractured and siloed media landscape, most agencies gravitate toward outputs. After all, they represent a factory which is highly specialised in producing a specific product for their clients. These factories need feeding, lest they wither and die. Agencies such as Naked and M&B were able to practice Communications Planning effectively because they were not attached to such a factory. They could be genuinely ‘media neutral’ and orientated around ‘the business of business’.
The second article related to this topic was his 1999 essay Why Every Brand Encounter Counts: Seductive, Anarchic or Catastrophic, which was published alongside WPP’s annual report that year.
“You read a compelling advertisement for a piece of electrical equipment and you buy it. And then you open the instruction manual. It is incomrehensible in seven languages... The advertisement understood the reader; the manual does not. In design and empathy, the brand of the advertisement and the brand of the manual have nothing whatsoever in common.”
Again, he argues for a broader and more comprehensive view of brand management - noting the importance of strict and rigorous control of every touchpoint a consumer may come into contact with. Many brands suffer from an ‘expectation experience’ gap - a gap consumers experience as a result of the difference between by highly crafted, idealised advertising and what they encounter when actually transacting with a company or business. Similarly, there is huge and often under utilised media opportunity in physical assets such as delivery vehicles and even the corporate office itself. Brands are like icebergs. We are guilty of overly scrutinising the parts which poke above the waterline - such as the advertising - but there are many more touchpoints which may detract or build the brand’s image in the mind of the consumer. Referring to a financial services brand at the close, this provocation is rendered vividly for the reader:
“Financial services companies were slow to undertand the need for simple brand distinction - but they’re catching up fast. Savings schemes and pension plan are now packaged far more attractively and the language... is sometimes even coherent. But then you get a letter from head office - and your conclusion is immediate, The presentation was a sham, no more than cosmetic....In it’s planned, seductive encounters - a large British financial institution makes much of it’s friendliness. But a recent head office communication from the same company contained the following sentence: “This is a computer generated message and therefore has no signature””
In an industry that is overly obsessed with the novel, it is useful to be reminded that there are rarely new problems - only new solutions. Jeremy Bullmore’s body of writing - much of which is easy to find online - represents the York Notes of our business. From his essays for the WPP annual report, to the more light-hearted On the Couch series for Campaign magazine, to his brilliant - almost Two Ronnies style exposition of what constitutes a brand alongside Stephen King, he has written about every major issue that will face a professional in our industry. Not only has he covered every topic, but he has done so with clarity, brevity and fertility - qualities often lacking from modern discourse on the subject of brands, business and communication.
When faced with a new brief or problem - you could do much worse than to start your thinking by asking what Bullmore has already said on the subject.
