When David Ogilvy coined the term the ‘big idea’, calling it the secret to fame and fortune, and the only way to successfully sell products, it is unlikely that even he knew what a cliché it would become in advertising. And yet despite its constant use and abuse in meetings, conferences, pitch presentations and interviews, the quality of Pakistani advertising repeatedly proves that many communications professionals – both admen and marketers – either have little or no understanding of what the big idea actually is, or believe that the concept is not relevant to Pakistan. Aurora set out to investigate whether Pakistani advertising professionals – in creative, planning and research – understand the importance of the big idea and why local advertising stops short of ideas that consumers can truly connect with.

What is the big idea?

There is a popular saying that goes, “if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.” This is just as true for brands as it is for people, and put simplistically, the big idea is the ‘something’ that the brand stands for.

As competition for consumers’ hearts and minds increases within and across categories, product differentiation becomes a notion of the past, and as media outlets and brand messages multiply, brands built on big ideas are more likely to do better in the long run. This has been proved time and again by brands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Google and IBM, which rank among the top 10 on Forbes list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands. Although there are many factors that determine brand success, a single minded big idea that clearly and concisely communicates what the brand stands for is a key ingredient in the success of these brands.

So what is a big idea?

Noaman Asar, Country Manager, Pakistan, Millward Brown, calls it a “catalyst idea that creates movement and motivates people to act in a certain way. This could be a brand idea (aka the brand essence or brand philosophy) which is the most important form of idea, or an engagement idea (a creative or communication idea).”

Asar’s broad definition is important because when talking about the big idea, many creatives are actually talking about the engagement idea – and while there is nothing wrong with that, these engagement ideas usually have little or no relevance to the overarching brand idea (and you cannot have a great creative idea unless it is built on a great brand idea).

A great brand idea is what Shazia Khan, Planning Director, Ogilvy & Mather Pakistan calls “a connection created between the brand and the consumer, whereby the brand has cracked the code about why it exists in the consumer’s life.”

Sounds simple, but it isn’t because brands are often tempted to take the easiest route and build their ideas on functional attributes, for example, the ‘thickest milk’ or the ‘most effective shampoo to get rid of dandruff’, thinking that these are the reasons for its existence. The problem with this approach is that there is probably more than one brand in any given category that could potentially make the same claim and more importantly, this approach talks about the brand in isolation without taking the consumer’s relationship with the brand into account. Therefore big ideas are better able to serve the brand when they are based on emotional connections built on authentic consumer insights.

Aurora asked creatives and planners to define the big idea in a minimum of seven to 10 words. Here is what they said.

Creatives

Your brand’s unique story.
— Faraz Maqsood Hamidi, CE & CD, The D’Hamidi Partnership

Every brand wants to stand for something. The simplest expression of that.
— Ammar Rasool, ECD, Red Communication Arts

The big idea is the plot of a story that can be told for decades and keeps the audience in love with the brand.
— Humaira Saleem, ECD, The Zebra Issue

A story in a sentence based on a human insight.
— Rashna Abdi, ECD, IAL Saatchi & Saatchi

That one thought that works like a magic pill, liberating you!
— Kashan Nasir, CD, Blitz

Something after which the selling stops.
— Shahab Ahmed Khan, CD, Interflow Communications, Islamabad

A story or an idea so powerful that when lived to the end of the world can change the fate of the world.
— Madeeha Noor, ECD, BBDO Pakistan

Planners

A big idea turns a brand into an experience.
— Mohsin Ali Sadiq, Manager Strategy & Planning, Interflow Communications

If it’s not fluid and flexible, it’s not a big idea.
— Nida Fatima Haider, Group Brand Strategy Director, IAL Saatchi & Saatchi

An unbranded thought that can carry and sustain a branded conversation.
— Umair Kazi, Partner, Ishtehari

An ideal the brand chooses to stand for and the consumer wants to belong to.
— Zahra Fatima Ali, Senior Planner, Ogilvy & Mather, Pakistan

Brands proposition transformed into food for thought for creative.
— Abbas Alam, Chief Strategy Officer, Lowe & Rauf

A powerful, deep-rooted insight that can change human behaviour!
— Umair Saeed, GM Head of Strategy & Integration, Blitz

As Rashna Abdi, Executive Creative Director, IAL Saatchi & Saatchi, puts it, the big idea is “an idea built on a solid consumer insight which immediately makes it meaningful for consumers and gives creatives room to play with.”

Consumer insights are generally the result of sustained research into the motivations that fuel behaviour in a particular category. According to Asar, research may often reveal several consumer insights. In an ideal situation, the insight mining process should be followed by concept testing to ascertain which insights have popular appeal, with creative people using the most popular ones to arrive at the big idea. Not only does this process ensure meaningful connections,

it results in an idea that can be stretched and adapted for use in multiple creative executions. The latter condition is important because big ideas only become big over time and therefore need to be elastic, so that they can be used in a variety of situations over the years in order to cement what the brand stands for – and as Umair Saeed, GM Head of Strategy and Integration, Blitz, says “to change, alter and reinforce consumer behaviour to benefit your business/brand objectives.”

Although research and insights are essential for arriving at the big idea, they are merely parts of a process. Ultimately it is the job of planners and creatives to assess whether the idea is worthy of being a brand idea. So how do they do it? What criteria do they use?

Most use a checklist which is based on two or more of the following questions (these can be added to Ogilvy’s original list: did it make me gasp when I first saw it; do I wish I had thought of it myself; is it unique; does it fit the strategy to perfection; and could it be used for 30 years?): Does the idea excite you the next day/week/month and can it work long term? Does it address the brand challenge? Is it relevant, believable, differentiable and linked to the product offering? Is it the result of in-depth study? Does the idea have a number of concepts coming out of it?

Why do Pakistani brands struggle with big ideas?

Although it is relatively easy for advertising folk to come up with a definition of the big idea, when it comes to providing a local example that fulfils these qualities, most professionals admit to being stumped. One idea that emerged repeatedly in different conversations was Tarang’s ‘Chai ka sahi jor’ which one professional called “simple, profound and excellent, and the reason why Tarang has destroyed Nestlé EveryDay.”

Sadly, however, Tarang is really an exception and there is very little excitement about big ideas in the local context, although there was a great deal of discussion about why such ideas are so elusive. The professionals agreed that if big ideas are connections between brands and consumers, then coming up with such ideas requires that brands go to the consumer and figure out what their needs and motivations are. However this process takes effort and according to Khan, this is where local brands struggle because “they focus too much on selling instead of thinking of the brand from a consumer’s perspective. Most brands think they brighten the consumer’s life while the consumer is quite oblivious of this.”

Understanding the motivations of consumers requires investment in research. Despite the fact that Pakistan has one of the lowest GDP to research ratios in the world, some brands do invest in research, although it is not always done at the right time or for the right reasons. While many brands spend a great deal of time, effort and money on link testing for ad copy and ensuring that these copies are aired at the right time on the most effective media, most will not spend a fraction of that amount on getting to know their consumers better. What this boils down to is that brands spend more money on fine-tuning their messages rather than on figuring out what those messages should be.

Yet, as Asar points out, even when investment is made into understanding consumer behaviour, the purpose of this exercise is often simply to support a preconceived notion or gut instinct instead of mining for insights. Or in other cases, “brands want the research to make decisions for them and that is the biggest sin you can commit,” says Atiya Zaidi, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather Pakistan.

One of the problems with not investing enough in getting to know consumers is that brands tend to cast their net too wide in the hope of fulfilling their sales targets and being something for every consumer. This makes brands incredibly reactive, so that instead of bringing anything new to the table, they merely react to what the competition is doing and ultimately there is no focus on providing value and making meaningful connections. If there is a surefire way for a brand to stand for nothing, then this is it.

Nevertheless this discussion points to an important aspect of the big idea process, which is that clients have a significant role to play in it, and here, creatives, planners and researchers offer a few tips about what brands and clients should and should not do:

Understand the brand; don’t expect research to figure it out: Just as important as doing research, is doing it for the right reasons, i.e. to understand consumers and how they interact with the brand. However brand managers must have an innate understanding of the brand’s values – don’t expect the research (or Google) to figure this out for you!

Know what the brand can and cannot deliver: Part of understanding the brand is knowing what it can deliver and what it cannot. This information is crucial in terms of connecting the brand offering to the consumer insight that the brand is trying to cater to.

Think beyond your preconceived notions and what has already been done: As one planner points out, most brands are either risk averse and prefer to stay with the tried and tested or they have already made up their mind about how they want to be positioned and are therefore unlikely to be impressed by anything new. Big ideas cannot emerge unless brands are willing to veer away from what has been done before.

Recognise a big idea: Abdi says that the only thing greater than a big idea is a client who is able to recognise the idea for what it is. To this Muzaffar Manghi, GM, Adcom adds that even if an idea makes a brand team uncomfortable, “they should know that this sense of anxiety we are feeling after this presentation may be a horrible thing or it may be a fantastic thing.”

Passionately own the business and brand challenge: Saeed from Blitz says that agency professionals who have been in the business long enough “generally look at the client and the project at hand and then switch their output levels accordingly”, which is really just another way of saying that clients get the ideas they deserve. “If the client is passionate and owns the business and brand challenge,” he says, “we will reciprocate.”

What kills big ideas?

Despite the fact that local brands struggle with big ideas, communications professionals point out that many brands often have a kernel of a good thought based on a genuine consumer insight, yet for one reason or another, this fails to translate into a big idea. They identify the following as the greatest killers of big ideas:

Fear and egoism: It is fairly common for a new marketing director or brand manager to come on board and start changing everything that was done by the previous brand team. The brand team’s need to prove their own value by rubbishing previous initiatives instead of building on them, coupled with a fear of criticism and what their superiors will say, are the greatest killers of big ideas.

Too many layers of approval: The typical client response of ‘we like this idea but…’ is well documented, but agency professionals say that brand ideas become weak and ineffective when different insights and concepts are mixed and matched together as they go through various organisational levels in an effort to please everyone.

Fixating on execution: Abdi says that a fixation on how ideas will be executed is very distracting. However, good ideas can also be killed by bad execution.

Preconceived notions: Asar points out that brand and communications professionals who have had a great success at some point in their careers with a certain kind of idea will often try to replicate the same idea in different settings, which kills new and different ideas.

Lack of hard work: Manghi says big ideas are not rocket science but there is a lot of hard work that goes into bringing big ideas into life. Not putting in the hard work into refining insights into concise and clearly understandable statements kills big ideas.

Lack of vision and ownership: The lack of a long term vision, becoming too mired in individual campaigns to the detriment of the overall brand vision and lack of ownership by the client or the agency or both, all kill big ideas. No single mindedness: When brands try to be something for every consumer, they end up standing for nothing. There is no greater killer of big ideas.

A sense of urgency and emergency: Clients often approach the agency at the eleventh hour and expect a quick turnaround on their work. Big ideas take time and research and rushing them is a surefire way to court disaster.

In conclusion, the process of arriving at big ideas takes effort, time and investment, a process which begins with knowing the brand, investing in getting to know consumers (and this involves insight mining as well as challenging one’s own notions), being open to new ideas, recognising big ideas and finally ensuring that big ideas do not get killed due to a mixture of fear, egoism, risk aversion and a fixation on execution.

Sadly, the Pakistani communications sphere is littered with examples of how often and badly this process fails. They say self awareness is the first step to improvement and the key to success, perhaps it is time for brands and agencies to allow for introspection so that big ideas can flourish in Pakistan.

Illustrations by Creative Unit.