Adam Ferrier’s Most Valuable Perspective
MVP Episode 1 | A podcast by State of Social & Dear Storyteller
In this episode of MVP, Lead Thinker and CEO of Thinkerbell, Adam Ferrier, takes to the blue velvet lounges with Dear Storyteller GM Mike Drysdale to delve deeper into the fascinating perspectives he shared within his State of Social keynote speech. The two industry rebels delve into the power of a less-is-more philosophy, exploring everything from Elon Musk and Weetbix to the beauty of imperfection.
During their conversation, the pair muse about reconciling customers’ mental and physical availability with ‘doing less’ and choosing not to over-process advertising. They investigate why brands must ensure an idea resonates internally before sharing it externally, before discussing how brands can publicly lean into their imperfections. Does the societal trend towards authenticity open doors for new brand stories?
Read the transcript below or click to listen on your preferred streaming service.
Mike:
Adam, welcome to the show. We’ve just come out from watching your speech, one of the opening keynotes of State of Social 2022, where you talked about minimum viable process. And you shared a couple of awesome examples of the work that your agency Thinkerbell has created, including some work with Menulog and NRMA. And I think one of the takeaways that people could get out of those pieces of creative is ‘do less’. In both instances, not necessarily a lot was happening in the actual creative itself. And I wonder if that’s maybe a tenant or a principle that you think more advertisers could get behind, do less. Sometimes it’s not as complicated as you think.
Adam:
Yeah, yeah. I love it. Thank you. I wish I’d said that. One of my pet peeves in advertising is the over-editing of everything, which I think is a function of lots of people having to justify their jobs. So then lots of scenes happen when you’re just shooting stuff, and then all those scenes need to cram their way into 15 seconds or whatever it is. And then it all looks like noise. And so that whole sense of restraint of process, I don’t over process things, could manifest itself in the creative output as well. I reckon that’s a really astute observation.
Mike:
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I also love that your perspective, that if brands were truly customer-centric, they would just leave customers alone.
Adam:
Well, that’s exactly… Yeah, that wasn’t me who said that. That was Malcolm Gladwell who told me that over dinner once. So that is a name drop, I know, and it’s hideous. But when somebody asked him, “What do you think people really want from brands?” He said, “Oh, I think they just want to be left alone.” So if you did really have the consumer at the heart of your business making decisions, you may not exist at all. And if you did exist, you would exist on their terms, which means you wouldn’t be in their face all the time. And being in their face all the time is really what mental availability is about. So listening to the customer can sometimes be the complete opposite of how brands actually grow.
Mike:
Yeah, and being the opposite, can you tell us a little bit more about mental and physical availability, and how you reconcile the fact that you are doing something that customers inherently don’t want?
Adam:
Yeah, sure. So How Brands Grow, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, popularised by Byron Sharp talks about boiling marketing down to mental and physical availability; which basically means having continuing salience in the consumer’s mind, being omnipresent, and being around them when you want to buy the thing or interact with it. So that’s how brands grow. That’s what you need to do. If you listen to the consumer, there’s no consumer who’s going to say, “I want the brand in my face all the time. And I want the brand around me constantly, just in case I want to buy it.” So nobody gives a shit about your brand. They care about the category. And when the category point is triggered, your brand is in a race to be in the head and physically available. So that’s what marketing’s about. That’s not what customers necessarily want.
Mike:
Another one of my favourite perspectives of yours is the idea that BX before EX before CX, so brand experience before employee experience before customer experience. One of the things that I think gets left out of that conversation the most when it comes to talking about this is the idea of employer experience. And why that’s so important to the expression of your brand.
Adam:
Totally. So one of the people I really respect and admire is Mark Ritson. I had a conversation with him recently around, if you do really good marketing, what’s not marketing? And really, if you do really good marketing, then everything is business. It’s business strategy because every single touchpoint should be building or reinforcing a brand or a brand message. And so I totally agree with you. One of the reasons why we bore that phrase down BX before EX before CX is to try to make our clients aware of the importance of getting a central brand idea that can resonate internally with everybody first, and then put it out into the world and resonate with customers. And that means everything that everybody’s doing all the time, internally and externally is building the same brand message.
Mike:
Yeah, you’re living that central organising thought, I think is the way that you put it.
Adam:
Yeah, that’s right. And then if you’re an employee of that brand and you’re out for dinner on a Saturday night, talking about that brand in the same way as somebody that sees another telly or experiences online or whatever, then there’s just a cumulative multiplier effect of all the messages that people see.
Mike:
Sort of that idea of scaling the un-scalable. It’s like, “Yes, that one person isn’t speaking to a mass market, but they’re having a very meaningful connection with one person.”
Adam:
That’s right. In Australia, if you got 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 employees, that’s a lot of people who could be on brand communicating the brand in quite an authentic way to their 10, 20, 50, 200, 500,000 people in their universe.
Mike:
Is there any of your clients or anybody that you can think of that really nails employee experience and a specific example of something that they do?
Adam:
It’s an ongoing process. So your question is, do they absolutely nail it? There’s always room to move, and I think that EX experience is where there’s still a lot of up-side for marketers to go to. But I think that the two companies that come to mind who I work with, focus on it a lot; our Repco client, who are right into unleashing the passion of motorsports and revheads and so forth. And so they’ve done a lot recently to ensure that their whole network and their distribution centres and so forth, are engaged with the brand. And we have a saying, which is ‘bring in the bathos’, which comes to life with the employees and in the physical store environments. And it’s also communicated externally.
And IAG, who is the holding company of NRMA Insurance, is now at the stage where they don’t really do anything externally without engaging their internal employees on that proposition first.
Mike:
There’s another thing that you talked about that I think that you actually demonstrated perfectly in the presentation, but you’ve also mentioned in your book before, is that the idea that weakness is a more valuable tool for brand positioning than strengths. And I just love the way that in the Menulog campaign, you actually didn’t try to stray away from the fact that you’d made a mistake. Or that Menulog had made a mistake with the Katy Perry ad, but you leaned into it. And you used that friction to create a really memorable, stunning piece of content that was interacting and interfacing with the cultural landscape. Can you tell us a little bit more about the idea of weakness as a brand positioning tool?
Adam:
Yeah. And I forgot to mention, when I walked in, you could get to choose the song you walk in on. And I walked in on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, is it? And the line, it says, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” And I love that kind of thought, and we speak a lot about there’s beauty in imperfection. And people, when something’s imperfect, people lean in and they go, oh, shit. I can relate to this person. Or relate to this brand because they’re not perfect. And so everybody knows that. We also have a thing called a negativity bias, where we pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive stimuli. Everyone knows that everywhere, except for marketers. Marketers of brands are still obsessed with often presenting a glib, superficial vainglorious image of themselves. And they haven’t read Brené Brown. Or they have, but personally, but not for their brands.
And so if a brand can be weak or porous, or admit false and apologise and things like that, people lean into that kind of shit. They go, “Oh, I resonate with that. I like that.” Nothing’s perfect. In fact, humans hate perfection and we shy away from things when they do seem too perfect. So what’s a really interesting conversation is talking to marketers about how they don’t have to be perfect and how consumers would like the more, or respect the more, or have a conversation, or lean in a little bit more if they just open up about their imperfection a little bit. And then it can be truly business-transforming when that happens.
So the Menulog example is a lovely example of that at a campaign level. But you think about Avis, “We’re number two so we try harder.” Famous example from over time, but it’s not just a beautiful ad campaign. Coming back to BX before EX before CX. That had a fantastic impact on all of their employees as well, who tried harder because they were number two and they wanted to become number one. So better service, quicker service and all that kind of stuff.
Mike:
I love that. So we’re going to jump in and ask some quick-fire questions that we’re going to talk to all of the speakers about over the course of the conference. Your answers can be as long or as short as you want – here we go. Question number one is where do you go to learn more about marketing?
Adam:
I like to put on conferences and podcasts and things like that, because then I get to invite guests in, who I get to talk to and learn about stuff. That’s the reason why I’ve got the podcast. So I get to learn and that kind of thing. So I invite people in.
Mike:
Love that. Let’s change tack a little bit and ask, what’s a small brand that you love and why?
Adam:
Well, I love Thinkerbell. That’s the first one that comes to mind. Geez, it’s really weird, isn’t it? Now Weet-Bix is stuck in my head and I can’t get rid of Weet-Bix, which isn’t a small brand, but it plays a small role in our lives. But that’s really interesting. And now I’ve got right over here Allbirds, which is a really cool brand that’s had its ups and downs really quickly.
Mike:
The one thing about imperfections that I think is really fascinating is this idea of kintsugi; which is this Japanese form of pottery where if a plate smashes, you put it back together, but with gold filament in the cracks – so that the weakness, the brokenness is actually part of the beauty moving forward.
Adam:
That’s right. So there’s two concepts there in the Japanese culture, is wabi-sabi, which literally means beauty in imperfection. So the bowl’s wobbly to start off with and looks old. And then there’s kintsugi, so if a bowl breaks, they fix it up with gold leaf because there’s character in the actual flaw. And there’s lots of different evidence of that across different cultures and so forth, of there being this concept of beauty in imperfection, but we shy away from it. And we present an overly perfect image of ourselves often, which causes all sorts of issues. But in brand world, it ends up being these glib, superficial brands.
As a macro trend, we can see… Brands used to play a more aspirational role in our lives, buy this brand so you could be this person. The macro narrative at the moment is, be happy with who you are. So we’re seeing brands trying to be more authentic and less aspirational, so that we think they’re going to try to show their human side a little bit more. And it makes me want to get your hair and just mess it up a little bit. There we go – thank you.
Mike:
Do that for the rest of the show. Let’s finish off with a few more of these quickfire questions. If you could spend four hours with any marketer or business person in the world, who would you choose and why?
Adam:
Elon Musk, I think.
Mike:
What would you say to Elon?
Adam:
I just think he’s playing a different game to everyone else. He’s the Bradman of business, and I think he’s doing more to save the world, expand thought. He’s the person of our time. And I would love to just hang out with him. I mean, I’m sure he’ll be quite an irritating, unlikeable person. But I reckon we could learn something from him. I reckon I could learn a lot, but he was so… Yeah, anyway. Him.
Mike:
Love that. Is there an emerging customer behaviour that you think will be highly influential over the next decade?
Adam:
I’m really interested in this concept of reactance. So if you tell somebody what to do and you’re too literal with that, then people form counterarguments in their minds. And now that they can counteract, you can easily act against a brand as well now. Get online and so forth, and you can start to put out negative messaging about a brand. I reckon there’s something interesting happening there, where it’s not just important to get people to like you, but it’s also important not to build reactance by pissing people off.
Mike:
Interesting. Is there a major public opinion that has recently flipped, where you felt or noticed that marketing and communications played a crucial role?
Adam:
Oh. Yes. I think both Black Lives Matter and MeToo were both marketing-driven, in terms of they got the nomenclature right, they got easy taglines. They got the language right, which allowed mass participation. And then because there were easy concepts to endorse because they were around equality, everybody jumped on board because there was no real downside to it. Do you know what I mean? Because there were populist movements and you’d be crazy to say, “No, we don’t want a quality.” So therefore the cause was strong. So really good, clear, simple brand codes, the strong populist message behind it. And then everybody gets on board, creates critical mass, and bang. Interesting things start to happen.
Mike:
Love that. Awesome. Last question before we give you a little gift to end this podcast. When you think of the term prized possession, what’s the first branded thing you own that comes to mind? And I’ll give you a little follow-up while you think about it. Do you remember a specific ad or piece of marketing that convinced you to buy it?
Adam:
I remember Channel Nine, Still the One, growing up in Perth with that tagline a lot. I remember being at a concert when 96FM gave me a hat and a Move drink, and that had a big impression on my mind. My favourite branded possession, I think our Volvo car gives our little family an infinite amount of joy because all the extras are included in the base model. So it’s all leather seats and popup thing for the kids, booster seats for the kids. And it’s all got wireless so it connects with your phone and all this kind… I haven’t really owned a car before. So that’s amazing what a car can do these days. Before you say branded possession, I was going to say my kids, but they’re not. They’re obviously not branded.
Mike:
I don’t know, the Ferrier is a strong brand.
Adam:
Oh, thanks.
Mike:
We have a little gift for you here. At Dear Storyteller we’re all about branded entertainment, but we’re also about playfulness. And you’re pretty playful as well, I think. You actually created a board game. We created a game too.
Adam:
Oh, great.
Mike:
And so we wanted to give it to you. It’s called The Concept and it’s a way of creating show stopping pieces of branded entertainment based on the cards in these two packs.
Adam:
Unreal.
Mike:
So I wanted to give that to you and ask you to do me a favour, which is at some point, pull those cards out, have a go and play the game.
Adam:
I’d love to, mate. That is absolutely fantastic, and good on you for doing it. That’s really cool. Thank you.
Mike:
Appreciate it. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show.
