BLUE-COLLAR BRAINS

 

 

When my son, Lee, was very young he came home from school upset.

I asked him what was wrong, he said there was a boy in his class making fun of him.

I asked him what he said, he said “He keeps calling me ‘Lee Trott, fat pot’”.

I said I used to get called worse than that, every teacher I had thought it was hilarious to call me Trott-and-gallop and all my mates called be Trotsky.

Lee asked me what I did about it. I said, well you have to do it back but better.

He asked what I meant, I said well what’s this boy’s name?

Lee said “Gbimini Soyinka”

I laughed out loud, I said that is a gift – if I had a name like that I wouldn’t take the micky out of anyone else.

He asked what I meant, I said “Well, for a start you can sing the chimney-sweep song from Mary Poppins: ‘Gbim-bimini, bim-bimini, bim-bim beroo’.”

I was amazed he didn’t learn to do it in his playground, he said no, his school wasn’t like that.

It’s true, we sent him to a good school whereas my school was the worst in the area.

But I hadn’t realised the benefits of a rough school, you quickly learn to verbally defend yourself.

By being forced to make fun of each other’s names, you learn basic mnemonics, a verbal device to log something into someone else’s mind.

That training later came in handy in advertising.

People don’t remember brand-purpose, or emotional appeals, or trendy execution, but they do remember a simple mnemonic.

If you’re using advertising space to sell a product, that’s what you need to be doing, if no one remembers your name you’re wasting money.

When I was a junior at BMP they were pitching on Halfords, a cut-price auto-parts store, John Webster asked me if I had any ideas.

I said DIY is all about saving money, so how about “Do it for half at Halfords”.

John loved it and ended up using it, apparently mnemonics wasn’t how the rest of the middle-class copywriters thought.

Later, at GGT, I was briefing Paul Grubb on what we needed for Knirps umbrellas – “They’re strong, and they’ve got a German name that’s difficult to pronounce, so we’ll need a mnemonic that does both things.”

Paul asked me what a mnemonic was.

I said “Something like ‘You can break a brolley but you can’t k-nacker a K-nirps”.

Paul said “What’s wrong with that?”

I thought fair enough, so that was the strapline we ended up using.

Later on we had to re-launch Toshiba into the UK.

I say ‘re-launch’ because they’d been advertising for several years but nobody knew their name, all the advertising had been about picture quality.

The problem was, there were so many Japanese and Korean brands flooding into the market everyone got confused, so establishing brand familiarity was essential, we had to get the name remembered.

I remembered when I was little boy my uncles used to tousle my hair and call me Tosh, it was a common nickname.

So we did the strapline “Hello Tosh, Gotta Toshiba” and in 6 weeks the brand was as famous as Sony.

Later on Dave Waters and Dave Cook had a similar problem.

Ariston had been advertising in the UK for several years, but still consumers hadn’t heard of them.

Reliability was the crucial message, but even more important was brand familiarity, getting the name remembered.

So the two Daves did the strapline “Ariston and on and on and on and on….”  which did both jobs, reliability and memorability.

Saatchi did a really good job when they were advertising Flymo, the strapline had to say that it was easier than other mowers, but branding was crucial so the line that did both jobs was “Why slow-mo when you can Flymo?”

University graduates in marketing have tried to turn advertising into something so complicated that no one outside advertising understands it, which is why most of it doesn’t work.

As Bob Levenson said “When advertising ignores people, people ignore advertising.”

Actually it isn’t much more complicated than getting your name heard and remembered in a very noisy playground.