LET'S STICK TO BASICS

 Let’s stick to basics

After endlessly talking about geopolitics with stand-offs between soft liberals and the extreme right, I’ve concluded we need to focus on what we know most about, calmly and thoughtfully. For me, this is mainly advertising, marketing and fmcg (fast-moving-consumer-goods).

Let’s ignore the increasing trend towards marches and protests so often bad tempered although a Gay Pride march down Oxford Street last week was cheerful with a diverse bunch representing various facets of sexuality having a good time.

It made a change because cheerful is not how the media is describing our economy . We are going to be very cold, very hungry and very depressed this winter they predict. 

We’re regularly told by pollsters that the ‘cost of living crisis’ is the most important issue on people’s minds, ahead of Party-gate, Ukraine, Climate Change and corrupt, drunk or libidinous  politicians. Of course it is. Did you need to go to University to acquire the mental equipment to discover that? 

Fact: issues really close to home are the ones that always matter most to people. The amount of money they have and what they can buy with it.

 

Government is panicking  as they often do. There’s talk of  an upcoming campaign calling on businesses to divert marketing spend into cutting prices.  Silly story. Daft idea. And one which shows how little this government understands marketing or people.

Here’s a real marketing story. There’s a battle currently between Tesco and Heinz. It’s being staged as a classic Mohammad Ali v George Foreman, “rumble in the jungle”, or, in this case “knock-out at the check-out.” Two giants. One supporting the poor people, the other the poor food industry. How many customers will Tesco lose if they don’t stock Heinz Baked Beans and Heinz Tomato Ketchup? How many cases of the above will Heinz lose in sales by being destocked by their biggest UK customer? This is high drama and a great story.  And I bet sales go up for both of them.

The price increase of food in the UK since January has gone up 11% (source: IGD) and Reuters are predicting 15% increase running into 2023. Apparently the average household spend on food including take-homes and restaurants is around £4,000 – around 20% of total spend.  

I can empathise. I too was once in that hand-to-mouth, month-on-month world of balancing nice-to-have versus necessity. 

In that battle healthy eating was beaten by a full tummy. Chicken nuggets became luxury food and McGuigan tasted like Lafite (almost). What was different back then was the world was less intense in terms of competition, in terms of marketers pushing prices back down or finding clever alternatives. 

We now have Aldi and Lidl highly competitive and growing rapidly, taking £1 in every £6 grocery pounds spent, and about to take more. They’re no longer the mere “German discounters” as Tesco once disparagingly described them. Go there and be impressed by price and quality.

Since one of the biggest issues right now is food  and our alleged inability to recruit able pickers. This smells of a PR campaign. There are plenty of people who’d be happy to work outside in our glorious weather if only we pay them enough.

We used to be creative. Let’s get creative about issues like this. Let’s find new sources of “pickers”, let’s create more delicious low-cost recipes and let’s stop getting depressed because we can’t always afford to buy what we don’t really like, want or even need.

Let’s go shopping again, being choosy as opposed to just buying and hurrying on. Let’s, in short, get back to basics.

WHY YOU NEED TO BUILD A CREATIVE HEART IN YOUR COMMUNITY

I spoke recently about creativity and talked about human ingenuity, the amazing ability that’s lurking in all of us, waiting as someone, rather graphically described it, “to seep out”. As Ken Robinson so engagingly said it’s there when we are children and they educate it out of us, they take the dancer from our body and instead make it a way of transporting our left brain from meeting to meeting.

We need to be creative in the same way as we need to be alert to danger. Indeed I think I’d argue that creativity is the equivalent of having an agile and effective sword arm in mediaeval times. In a world where so much is changing, where so much is unpredictable,  having our creative nerve pulsing away ready to find a new and a better way of doing things enables us to survive.

But can it do more than merely be a system of defence. My favourite quote is Maurice Saatchi’s “creativity is the last legal way to gain an unfair advantage”. Think about it. Imagine having the ingenuity of finding an unthinkable solution to an unspeakable problem; the imagination to see the problem through a new lens and the balls to try something brave and original. 

Put ten bright people in a room tickle their brains and start thinking positively and something amazing happens, something wonderful seeps out. Yes, creative ideas. The room becomes awash with “what ifs”, “why not’s?” and “yes, we could’s …”

And now the task is to let this permeate and shape the centre of your culture.

Tell people they can be creative.

Get them to talk about creativity and they become creative.

Creativity is infectious.

As the environment around us becomes more complex and competitive we need witty solutions that delight and amuse consumers, customers and clients alike. I know a few people who mistrust creativity and call it just a clever marketing idea. They also dislike jokes and laughter. Some of them are very rich. They don’t much like that either.

Think of one thing you love for its creativity and think about why it’s so great, why you love it and why you aren’t doing things in your life like this too.

Did you know the start button on the new Jaguar beats like a human heart as it waits to be pressed….now that puts creativity and the heart in the same place. It also makes a machine feel human. 

Awesome.