[MUSIC] I'm here at M&C Saatchi with David Kershaw, the global CO of the group. I'd like to ask you a few questions about your view on branding, and maybe M&C Saatchi's view on branding. And also over the nearly four decades of your career. Some of the changes you've seen. >> Thanks for reminding me. >> [LAUGH] >> I think it's interesting. I think some fundamentals actually have not changed. I think they are immutable truants of branding, essentially brands are there and they're differentiated to have a purpose. And that purpose is clearly for consumers to meet their needs and in doing so consumers will buy more of them, buy more than the expensive brand and also the reasons why marketing exists. And I think that those principals have not changed that much. However, what has radically changed, and particularly say in the last ten years, has been the way that that brand is communicated to consumers, and also the speed with which those brands come in and out of fashion. Say, we used to talk about the brand life cycle, and the brand life cycle when I first started It could be 50 years. Now brands can be become irrelevant. Be overtaken. Get out of fashion at an amazing speed. At a matter of years rather than decades. So it's sort of like two speeds. I think the philosophy of brands remains constant. I think the practicalities of managing brands is unrecognizable. >> What would be an example? You mentioned brand purpose and that you start with a consumer insight and you work backwards. What are some examples, maybe in different industries that you might think of? >> In an industry I remember we did for a Glaxo SmithKline when they came together and they wanted a noble purpose, as he says. And this is very much to stakeholders, it wasn't really to consumers. It was to a whole array of stakeholders, governments to regulators to shareholders, etcetera. And we tend to here, we use what we call three box thinking. Which is basically what I was referring to earlier. We will find what we call a simple university recognizable truth about the target audience. Something that the target audience will always know unquestionably, and overwhelmingly believe. And then we'll find a brand truth. And then we'll put those together for a purpose. So, in the case of Glaxo SmithKlein. The consumer truth was, the target truth, was that everybody is frightened of disease. Hard to argue with. The brand truth was that Glaxo SmithKline spends more on R&D in that field than any other company in the world. And the noble purpose of the company, you don't have to be Einstein at this point, was that no one fights disease more than Glaxo SmithKlein. And so we fight disease became their rallying cry. And often with companies, I'm sure you've seen it, that particularly for corporate brands, you can get stuck in a mire of values, and missions, and objectives. It's very hard for people and huge organizations and all their stakeholders to really understand what you're about. If you can put that in to three words, we fight disease, then it's a great way of galvanizing those stakeholders together. And as you also might know the other sort of mantra of this company is beautiful simplicity of thought. And we are passionate believers that if you are going to make a brand, stand for something. And for people to remember it and for it to stick, you have to distill it and distill it and distill. And get it down to absolutely, brutally simple communication. Like we fight disease. Because it's always easy with a brand to say six things. It's getting it down to one, because you always, the dreaded word is and. If you get a brand brief, as soon as you see the word and, you start to panic that it's going to difficult to get really concise communication, particularly in the brand truth. In that second box I talked about, because companies and brands quite rightly want to talk. They're very proud of lots of aspects. They'll talk about the ingredients, they'll talk about the quality, they'll talk about sustainability. There's so much. And of course, the more things you put in, the less likely you are to be able to communicate effectively. >> And assume the changing environment that you mentioned with the fragmentation of the media landscape, having a brutally simple thought also leads to more simplicity and sort of consistency, I guess. >> It's the glue that holds it together. Because I think, again, if I go back to my grainy nostalgic days when I first came into the industry. You could run maybe two weeks' worth of TV and you'd get up to 80% coverage of the population and you'd have a big outdoor campaign. But I mean you didn't have to spend that much money or to be a brilliant communication media planner to get to everyone with sufficient frequency to have impact with your message. Well, now trying to put together coverage, as you know, it's like a mosaic. There's hundreds of pieces you've got to put together, through traditional media, digital media, social media. And so, each of those media will require a different length, so you might be talking about a 30 second TV commercial. Might be talking about a ten minute piece of content that sits on someone's Facebook page. So there's even more need to have some glue, that brand glue, that purpose which will hold all those different formats together. Because the consumer is seeing these thing in lot's of different places, at lots of different times, in lots of different formats. Say the chance of them having a coherent view on what that brands about, it's a lot tougher to pull off. >> And you mention different stakeholders in terms of communication, to what degree are you involved in internal communications of the brand? >> A lot. A lot. I mean we, we can't be working on a brief, I would say four, but it's a good example. It's very kind of right for a very, very well known investment bank and yes, they want to influence people that they seek to advise on, help raise capital, but interestingly enough the first thing that they talked about in the brief and which we spent huge amount of time. Was how we could unite the internal audiences. Because, it's like investment banks. There might be people taking wealth management, there might be bond traders, their advisory people, they've all got very, very different view, of what that brand is about, and what their role is in it. And so having, getting back to the glue word, being able to make people in a very diverse organization, with very different motives operate to the same drum beat of what that brand and what that company is about, is extraordinarily important. Particularly in service businesses, where you're asking people to behave in a certain way. It's a lot tougher than saying each chocolate bar is going to deliver that brand value. I really I cut my teeth for many years on British Airways which we looked after for probably 25 years or so. I worked on it for about 15 of those. That was fascinating because you had genuinely trying to effect people's behavior and the great insight of Colin Marshall, when he became Chief Executive of British Airways all those years ago, was that he did not want to do anything externally, he got to communicate with people, of course you hear that all the time now, but this was back in the mid 80's. This was a revolutionary thought, so I think in the service business you've got to go inside out rather than outside in when it comes to establishing the brand and brand consistency. And those two words should go together. But it's obviously a much tougher ask in the service business than the product business. >> David, you took some time out and you got your degree at London Business School in 1982. How did a business degree play into your career and how did it affect you as an advertising man. >> Well I'll tell you how I got into it. Because that was interesting, that really was the part that I was after. Was that I had come out of the university where I studied politics, and got into graduate school in the agency. And then after some three years of photocopying, preparing all that work, production estimates. I thought I don't really understand what the client's businesses are about. And so it was a matter of confidence that I could have those conversations, because it did exactly that. It gave me an understanding of business, and not just how to make adverts. So I think from learning basically how to read a set of accounts, to marketing strategy to business strategy, to organizational behavior. I mean all these things and interestingly enough some of them at the time you thought well with is not particularly interesting or relevant. And then of course when I came back, I was fortunate enough to sort of get up the management ladder. And when I became the CO of Sachi in the UK, which was 1990, so eight years after I'd left LDS. It was amazing how many of those things kicked in, because finally I wasn't just talking to clients about their business. I was thinking about how we ran our business. And invaluable. I've still got my file of NBA names. And occasionally I'll just go back, that's a long, long time ago, so it played a huge part in my own personal development. And long may it last. >> Thank you for your time David. >> Thanks very much. [MUSIC]
