The Particle Theory of Marketing.

You have to take your hat off to marketing professionals these days.

What used to be the 4Ps is now the 7Ps. They not only have to deal with product, price, place and promotion, but people, process and physical presence. A hyperbolic increase in available marketing channels, a proliferation of process and people-management 'theory', and a massive disruption in the way consumers connect with and experience brands makes their lives even harder. To oversimplify, marketing is no longer a case of reviewing the strategy, reattributing last year’s budget, developing some incremental innovation and approving a funky new advertising campaign the agency cooked up. It’s a maelstrom.

We, in advertising, who spend most of our working lives in only one to three of the Ps — mainly promotion, but more often these days, product and physical presence — often encounter a disconnect when we deal with clients who have become, through rapid fragmentation of media and thus rapid complication of their role, ‘particle theorists’.

The ‘particle theory’ analogy is, of course, from quantum mechanics. Einstein believed light is a particle, or photon, and that the flow of photons is a wave: "It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do".

Einstein was ever in search of a Unified Field theory that would explain away this apparent duality, and the search continues.

So, how does this relate to marketing?

Working on the agency side, we have a great deal to do with solving client problems at a ‘macro’ level. Sometimes that is through a ‘unified theory’ wrapped up in a strategic concept — what is often referred to as a Unifying Idea or Organising Idea — the ‘guiding light’ or ‘north star’ for all of the client’s connected marketing activities to follow in order to deliver their objective. As this is most often an anomalous thought that overarches a range of tactical iterations, the marketer has little choice but to see it as an holistic thing.

Creative concepts tend to be treated much differently. Why? They must be rendered into the physical in order to be understood – a storyboard, a poster, a scamp or thumbnail — even if it’s a poor facsimile of the intended outcome, there is an expectation that we will be able to present something to help get the idea across.

The very act of creating the physical object invites the client to do what they feel most comfortable doing — focusing on the component parts of the message severally — because their day-to-day work life most often requires critical appraisal of the myriad components of their marketing mix.

The results of this approach have become part of the lore of the advertising industry, as demonstrated by the 1966 film ‘Risk & Responsibility’ (youtube.com/watch?v=0EtgPxNaD5Q) which shows creative directors playing the role of clients who, blow by blow, compromise one of the most famous print ads in history, ‘The Man in the Hathaway Shirt’.

Famously, the Hathaway company promised David Ogilvy that, if he took on their business, they would never leave the agency and never change the agency’s creative.

The first print ad Ogilvy ran, with the famous Russian Count in a Hathaway shirt sporting a debonair eye patch, sold out every Hathaway shirt in New York city.

Gawen Rudder and Richard Goodrich presented this film to our agency in a knowledge workshop, reminding me that some things have not changed — but also that it is now an even greater task for creatives to sell the ‘big idea’ to our clients before we all jump straight into breaking the executions down into finite and separable components.

According to Gawen, ‘agency people are different… you get agency people crossing over into marketing but very rarely the other way round because, for one thing, we rely a lot more on intuition’.

Perhaps it is intuition, or perhaps it’s the culture in which we all work that allows us to approach thinking in these different ways. Agency people tend to have an ability to think ‘macro’ and operate ‘micro’ — to create concepts that are the ‘wave’ and then render them as a beautifully arranged collections of ‘particles’.

The irony is, marketers are usually seen as the creatives within their own organisations — but ‘selling in’ creative ideas is only a small part of their ever-expanding purview. It’s one reason we always try to either present our ideas as close to the ‘C-suite’ as possible, or to provide our clients with whatever they need to do the job effectively.

Applying a ‘strategy’ lens to the creative selling process, we could think of it in terms of Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why?’ principle.

Once you know ‘why’ you are doing something, ‘how’ and ‘what’ become much, much easier.

The creation of a concept is a journey that ends with the first rendition of an idea to get that concept or direction across. That is where ‘the rubber hits the road’ for our clients and they start to visualise the impact of the execution on their readers or consumers — now, more than ever, we have to remind ourselves that it will always be much harder to convince a marketer to put their budget behind a demonstration of ‘how’ or ‘what’ than it is to convince them of ‘why’ the concept will work.

(Perhaps this is why it is so difficult, in the digital side of our business, to maintain a ‘why’ for a brand, working within an inherited culture that is largely driven by processing ‘how’ and ‘what’ into a functioning, active piece of work?)

In a small way, I hope this post can help us all to avoid ‘Particle Theory’ and to continue to look for the ‘Waves’ that great branding — and more effective advertising — is built on.

This quote — very loosely translated and paraphrased from ‘Citadelle’ by one of my favourite authors, Antoine de Saint-Exupery — explains it far more eloquently than I ever could:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t call people together to chop wood, weave webs, forge nails and read the stars – but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”