IKEA's interesting approach to customer service

Was spending some time in the Customer Services area of my local IKEA when I noticed the sign below:

IKEA bits buckets, a great customer service idea – or is it?

Genius, I thought, instead of having grumpy customers clogging up the queues just to ask for an extra IC3XB7 washer to replace the one that rolled under the fridge, they can just go and pick one up from one of these buckets.

Full marks for IKEA for thinking of the idea and for trusting their customers not to abuse the system.

So I took a closer look (it was a long wait I was having) and noticed that only two of the fifty buckets had anything in them.

Oh well.

The copywriter recruitment ad I'd write for myelf

Am I the only copywriter who’s tired of being patronised with recruitment ads promising ‘your big break at a multi-award winning agency’?

We all know that that kind of agency doesn’t need to actively recruit creatives. They have bouncers at the doors instead.

More realistic recruitment copy in today's adland reads something like this:

“Given a brief with more propositions than David Beckham on an away weekend, you’ll either come up with a better proposition yourself or, if the client absolutely refuses to budge, cram the conceptual camel through the eye of the needle anyway.

“If the art director has to take time out to do a shoot or gets struck down with norovirus, you won’t twiddle your thumbs until she gets back but just get scamping regardless. And in fact, some of your best ideas have come from working with planners, designers and other copywriters.

“You don't mind working late occasionally. But you’ve found that if you keep the accelerator all the way down during regular working hours, everyone gets to go home on time.

“You have a great track record on pitches, mainly because you savage the strategy on Day One rather than wait for someone else do it at the final creative review on Sunday evening.

“When a drunken research group throws an idea back in your face, you can separate the baby from the bathwater and make it smile even more cutely.

“You’ll fight tooth and nail for award-winning results and to lift the agency’s creative reputation. You’ll also fight for a lump of brown mud if you think it’s a harder-hitting piece of communication.”

If that’s a recruitment ad that’s relevant to your agency, please consider me to have applied.

Premier League final Sunday: a resounding script success

After an agony of strict confidentiality, I can now reveal that the events of the Barclays Premier League’s final Sunday were orchestrated and scripted by none other than myself after a gruelling strategic and creative process.

Initially dismissed by Sir Alex Ferguson and others as “wildly unbelievable”, my script was finally accepted with hardly any amendments by the disparate collection of stakeholders, and the plan flawlessly executed on the day. Here are the details:

Clients: The FA, Barclays Premier League and Sky

Target market: Jaded football viewers and football agnostics

Brief: Revitalise the Premier League brand both locally and internationally. Convert ‘Match of the Day’ viewers to Sky Sports subscriptions. Retain wavering Sky Sports subscribers.

Proposition: “Insane levels of excitement until the very last whistle”

A daunting brief, and without the total support of everyone involved, the final outcome would have been impossible. A special thank you to Joey Barton for playing the villain with such genuine commitment (the sacrifice was worth it).

Re Mr Mancini's extraordinary performance: at times the over-the-top histrionics risked believability but ultimately contributed to the humour of the occasion – in retrospect essential to relieve the unsustainable levels of tension.

See a final curtain call here:

Argentinian Falklands 2012 Olympics ad – creative fail

Seen this Argentinian Falklands/Olympics propaganda ad yet?

In the semi-dark, a man furtively creeps out onto the Falklands streets. Guiltily pulling up his hoodie, he goes for a jog, then hammily collapses into some sand.

“To compete on British soil, we train on Argentine soil,” read the titles.

As a jingoist rallying call to the Argentinians, the ad works fine. But when you consider that it was inevitable that the ad would go viral in the UK as well, it's an own goal*.

Even though I’ve never felt passionate about the Falklands, this ad polarised me instantly: against Argentina. Lord Kitchener couldn’t have come up with something more effective.

Yet the ad could have made its point while also communicating that Argentinians have a sense of humour. Why’s that important? Because I'm sure that British people would find it a lot harder to support a war against people who they think have a similar sense of humour to themselves.

To rally the Argentinians, while keeping British fence-sitters firmly (if slightly uncomfortably) on the fence, all the ad needed was a smarter endline: “This August, we’ll lay claim to all their islands.”

Provocative, but with just enough wit to make their point without being crassly warlike.

*Of course, the fact that the best athlete they could find to represent Argentina's medal-winning aspirations was a hockey player doesn't really augur well, but creatively that's splitting hairs.

For a better B2B copywriter, try one who’s owned one

Writing B2C copy isn’t too difficult. After all, we’re all consumers. So we can always sense-check our copy by asking ourselves whether we’d find it relevant and compelling if we were to come across it on the web or on our mat.

But most B2B copywriters have never owned a business. So they have no way of checking whether their copy is convincing enough to make a business owner risk even one pound of their company’s money.

That’s why most B2B copywriters tend to write in a fairly simplistic and patronising way. “For a better bottom line, call now” is a typical example of the genre.

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that there are always a hundred different opportunities, demands and problems clamouring for their attention at any moment. The idea that a particular product or service is going to magically improve their cash flow with no further investments in terms of time, training or reorganisation is usually a fantasy.  

·      New, cheaper internet? Fine, but would I risk my business’s connectivity even for one hour?

·      Cheaper business insurance? Great, but how long would I have to wait for my payout?

·      Cloud computing? Brilliant, but again, 100% data availability is far more important than getting rid of my server.

I became a B2B copywriter only after running my own business. So I know what it’s like to negotiate the tightest possible deals, to eke out your cashflow, to get a lifeline from a bank, to grow customer relationships phonecall by phonecall, to fight competitors tooth and nail, and to celebrate a major sale.

So every time I write a piece of B2B copy, I check it off in my own head to make sure it’s “real” and not a bunch of empty-sounding bullet points and platitudes. And that the copy makes it implicitly clear that the prospective customer’s business is a product of 100% commitment, not a cash cow. 

To see what I mean, read one of my B2B samples here. 

Flerm behaviour: the new brand planning paradigm

Precarious stacks of dog-eared psychology and sociology textbooks clogged the only office window, blocking the light and my view of the Yale quadrangle. In the gloom, a desk-hogging assemblage of old and new monitors showed constantly changing word- and image-clouds: the ever-updating zeitgeist as intermediated by Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.

Professor Gluebender finally got a match alight, lent back in his duct-taped chair and puffed smoke at the stained ceiling.

I hoped my jetlag wasn’t obvious as I asked him about his research: research which looks set to overturn current advertising thought.

“Ah yes, well, you see, advertising planner and strategists have always tried to model the human consumer to an easily understandable, pattern-following animal. A flock animal, that follows a leader, for instance.”

“So you create your advertising for that leader?”

“Exactly.” Puff. “Of course it always turns out that leaders are only leaders when they champion products and causes that their flock likes. Soon as they get it wrong, their flock deserts them for someone else. So. Begs the question. If the flock has already made up its mind, how did it do so?”

“Hence the pack model?”

“Ah yes, the pack model. Where every creature in the pack is constantly working to maintain or improve its position in the pack through its likes, dislikes and alliances.  Its brand preferences, if you will.”

“And how did that go?”

“Well, humans tend to jump from pack to pack according to likes and dislikes, so the pack model didn’t go too well either, of course.”

“I’ve read of the herd model?”

“Ah.” Cough. “The herd model. Turned out the only herd-like behaviour to be found in the human world was amongst advertising planners.”

“What came next?”

“The swarm, of course. With just six rules or fewer, an infinite number of creatures can co-exist in harmony… so advertising becomes simply a matter of pressing a very few buttons in the right way.”

“And?”

“Still works for hair care products. That’s about it, though.”

“But now you’re onto something new?”

“Ahem. I like to think so. Indeed. My model assumes that you have early adopters, followers, deviants, authorities, evangelists, dependents, influencers, critics, laggards, bewilderds, confuseds, and the just plain uninterested.”

“Mmhm?”

“And then of course, they all switch roles at random intervals for no particular reason.”

“And you call your model...?”

“Flerm behaviour. For now, anyway.”

It was a long ride back to the airport.