What do sound engineers and marketers have in common?
Firstly: Both insist on ‘testing, testing’.
Secondly: The good ones make things crystal clear.
But clear doesn’t necessarily mean loud.

“1,2…1,2…2,2…”

There’s a misconception in our world sometimes that volume = victory.
That the more you raise the noise, the easier you’ll be heard.

But getting your message across isn’t about turning it up – it’s about cutting through. Clarity isn’t achieved through sheer force of decibels. It’s about choosing what to amplify rather than just blindly turning the master volume to ten like seemingly all train station P.A. operators do. If you want the 0925 service to reach its final destination of the quaint town of Engaged Customer, you have to stop off on the way at Cleartown, Plainville, and the famous, bustling station known as Get Yer Pointa Cross.

FACE THE MUSIC

You’ve got to hit the sweet spot between your frequency and your environment. To create harmony between your message and your audience. And this doesn’t require a raw power approach. It takes a deft touch. Balance, precision, consideration. You have to be self-aware enough to know when you’re going too hard or not hard enough. You have to listen carefully for feedback. You have to be keenly attuned to the room.

Have you ever been to a gig and it just…didn’t sound right? Maybe it was too bassy, too muffled. Or too loud and buzzy. Maybe the singing was too quiet or all the loud stuff felt like it was at one side of the room. Or it could be that the sound just didn’t have enough meat. It’s understandable – there’s a million things that could go wrong. So much equalising, balancing, counterbalancing. Not just anyone can squeeze magic out of four teenagers, two cheapo guitars, and a malfunctioning, three-stringed bass.

STRIKE UP THE BRAND

Yep, a lot can go awry. There’s only one way to get them screaming “ONE MORE TUNE, ONE MORE TUNE” – you’ve got to take the time to listen. To really open the ears, take in the crowd and get an overview of the experience of the gig-goer.

You’ve got to identify the nuances in the sound and coax out only the gooiest of bits. Because every brand has something sweet in its sound. An intriguing frequency or tone in there somewhere. This little nugget of interest could be anything – an element of how it’s produced, it could be a distinctive flavour, a feeling that you don’t get from anything else – it doesn’t matter.

Every brand out there has some small ingredient that makes it worth listening to. That morsel must be identified, nurtured, and protected. It has to be balanced in the mix so it’s not overpowered, yet it can’t be out there by itself or it’ll sound isolated and maybe even jarring. Getting the balance right means you can put your best foot forward and create a harmony between your best tones and timbres and the ones you’d prefer be pushed to the background.

OWN YOUR WAVELENGTH

It’s a two-way street, too. Having your own frequency means people know where to go for a certain vibe. It means they know what ears to bring when they’re tuning in. If you’re clear about what you’re saying (and who you’re saying it to), you’ll find you don’t have to shout.

To be heard, you have to say your piece in a different way. A way that better resonates between both what you’re offering and what the customer wants. Finding the sweetest sound for your voice. Finding the frequency that puts shivers up spines. Owning your wavelength.

OVER AND OUT

So don’t just turn it up – craft a sound that’s uniquely yours. One that carries your voice clearly to the eardrums of the world. No pops, no fuzz, no distortion – just hi-res, 3D surround sound marketing.

And, like the bonus tracks nobody asked for, we’ll end with the duds – the sound production/marketing jokes that didn’t cut it for the intro:

• What did the sound engineer say to the marketer who was making coffee? I’ll have one two, one two.
• What did the marketer say to the sound engineer? Were you expecting that feedback?

What’s the difference between a good marketer and a bad sound guy? Whether the buzz was created deliberately or not.

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In this game, we’re all professional attention seekers. We crave the public’s gaze more than a streaker at a cup final. The trouble with attention though, is it’s hard to hold.

Being disruptive and getting instant attention is easy. It’s so easy babies instinctively do it as soon as they board a Ryanair flight. But there’s a big difference between an instant ear-ache and a lasting memory.

The stuff that lasts – that requires commitment.

Think of how long Red Bull’s given you wiiiiings, or try to remember the first time Kit-Kat told you to have a break – these are timelessly ownable concepts that were achieved through timeless dedication.

The general public really don’t care about our brands. They don’t sit eagerly anticipating our ‘key messages’. They’re busy living. They’ll maybe catch half a TV ad on the way back from the loo, a glimpse of a social post while thumbing through Instagram, a passing slice of a billboard while driving home. If we haven’t thought ruthlessly about the big idea we want to be famous for, we stand very little chance of being famous for anything.

Like Guinness World Records.

Let’s say there’s a fella who tries a different record every week: most people in a VW mini, then longest toenails, then most tattoos, then highest freefall without a parachute.

And another person who just does baths of beans. They dedicate their life to beanology and bathonomy. They pore over different models and volumes, they become an authority on the bean-bath rules, study the different brands with different tins and who has the most beans per can, etc etc.

Who’s more likely to break a world record?

Did Michael Jordan spend his youth committing evenly to a bit of basketball, some crochet, a wee touch of theoretical physics, writing a novel about Louis XIV, and rehearsing the double bass for the big hoedown?

No, he played basketball.

He shot for the hoop again and again and again probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times until he was a master. He dedicated his young life to one idea. (Before becoming a largely unsuccessful baseball player and actor but he was already famous for basketball by then so we’re ignoring that).

Every ball that left his huge hands didn’t swoop through the hoop flawlessly. Some dinged the rim. Some banged awkwardly against the backboard. But he always aimed for the same thing. It’s a numbers game and you can stack the odds in your favour by having focus. By throwing all your creativity at one single, sharp idea.

So go.

Research your tins. Measure your tub. Slide in and let the cold, viscous tomato goodness caress your skin like an expensive balm…

Find your bath of beans.

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The human brain. So clever it named itself. The most complex structure in the universe, some say (those people have obviously never been trapped in the ever-shifting maze of the IKEA shop floor).

Yep, the brain is a beautiful thing. Not aesthetically, of course, but in what it’s capable of. But one thing our minds aren’t so hot at is focusing on multiple things at once. Apparently “the brain can’t effectively handle more than two complex, related activities at once”.

Well, let’s test that theory out – try to multiply 13 x 17 and remember the name of the guy who played Tony Soprano and envision the colour of your front door and conjure up what your high school gym teacher looked like…your beautiful brain just turns to a formless buzz of white noise.

Our brains filter out what they can in order to accomplish one or two tasks at a time effectively. That’s why when Derren Brown gets his cards out and starts to ask for your National Insurance number, you don’t notice that he’s nicked your watch.

Throw us a ball, and we’ll catch it. Throw us three, and we will more likely than not (unless circus performers are currently reading this blog) drop them all.

This is exactly why we need to keep messages to a minimum in advertising. If a t-shirt says:

MIKE’S MOTORS of MUSSELBURGH
–– Best deals on old cars in town ––
‘We always match competitors’ prices’
£££ Get a quote today £££
“Don’t pay more than what you’re here for”

There’s no telling which message you’ll remember. If any. So even if you do remember something, it might not be the important part.

In the over-saturated world of advertising, it’s tough enough getting people to take in one message, never mind five. Keep your communications single-minded, straightforward, and as soak-up-able as they can possibly be.

Think of it like texting your ex – keep the messages to an absolute minimum.

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We love to learn and in a normal year you’ll find us on a tonne of training courses. Whether it’s trying something new or just hearing a fresh perspective on something we do every day, training keeps the wheels turning. Last year was a little different. Neither us, nor our wheels, were going anywhere. So we committed to remote learning and four of us studied Mark Ritson’s Marketing Week Mini MBA in marketing.

It was extremely valuable. To anyone thinking of doing it – go for it. It’s quite a big time commitment on top of a busy work life but you won’t regret it. Here are a few little gems that have stuck with us…

1. Embrace the humility of marketing.

The second you take a job in the industry you lose your genuine opinion. You’re no longer a normal customer and your opinion is biased and dangerous. The trick is to know you’re not the customer and make sure you connect with them. Understanding your weakness becomes your biggest strength. Once you accept that you’re in the dark, you’re going to want to switch the lights on. Enter Market Research. One of the first things you’ll learn is that while your brand means everything to you – it means almost nothing to your customers.

2. Don’t take it out of the horse’s mouth

Research insights are most powerful when you don’t paraphrase them. Ideally present video footage or audio recordings… if not try direct quotes – ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’.

3. Kill the hypothetical customer.

The ‘hypothetical customer’ never surprises us, does exactly what we want, and somehow always has the needs we want them to have. They’re all basically the same so they make marketing plans very easy to develop. Unfortunately they don’t exist. And marketing plans built on them are doomed to fail. Segment your market based on real data not stereotypes. And remember they’re individual people. Never, ever try to average them out – the average person in the UK has one testicle.

4. Segmentation is making the map. Targeting is taking the hike.

Good market segmentation should be purely descriptive not strategic – it’s not about you, it’s about the market. Once you have the market segmented up then you can pack your bag and trek onto targeting – where you’ll be glad to hear it is all about you. You can’t please everyone though so think carefully about where you want to go. And where you don’t.

5. Don’t be in a rush to position your brand.

Be disciplined and make sure you do your strategy in the right order. Segment the whole market first, pick your targets second, and only then should you think about how to position your brand. Otherwise who are you positioning it for? And how could it possibly be relevant to them if you didn’t know who they were when you did it?

6. Don’t get carried away with all the brand fluff.

When you do come to position your brand don’t get bogged down by all the latest lingo (DNA, essence, promise, purpose, proposition, beliefs, values, principles, personality, voice – we could go on). Keep it simple and make sure you’ve answered the important question: “What do we want to stand for to our target customer? What should they think of when they think of us?”. Remember, this has to be clear enough to unite a tonne of people with conflicting priorities and different backgrounds and experiences. If your computer died just as you were about to save your positioning slide, you should be able to remember it word for word.

7. The only difference between a brand and a commodity is meaning.

Both have a function, and both have a price, but brands add meaning where commodities don’t. Deviate too far from the meaning you’re trying to build and you’ll erode your brand back into a commodity – which is, of course, a race to the bottom.

8. You’re more likely to be too cheap than too expensive.

Pricing is tricky, with risks of going too high or too low. But if you’re on the fence take heart in knowing where history stands on this: 80-90% of pricing errors are underpricing.

9. Look at the job before you choose the tool.

A plumber who arrives at the job with only one tool is a bad plumber. A good plumber looks at the job and goes back to the van to get the right tool. The same is true for creative. An open-minded, output-agnostic approach will always beat a prescriptive, fixed approach. All media plans take into account your audience, but the best ones take into account your brand and your idea too. A brand built on being ‘big, bold, and untamed’ might suit outdoor more than editorial. While a brand built on being ‘discrete and personal’ should maybe only be seen in private – like on mobile ads.

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Imagine a football coach marking out areas for exercises. He’s whistling away as he innocently lays out those cheap, plasticky little UFO-cones. But, with every cone he picks from his mesh sack and lays out, one of the annoying little kids sneaks behind him and puts it back in the bag. Cone after cone he places delicately on the astro, cone after cone the kids pick it back up. After five minutes of graft, he looks up to get the lay of the land, and he’s got nothing. Not a marker on the ground. Everything he put out there – gone.

This is what happens when you have a ‘nae sayer’ in a brainstorm. The aptly-named devil’s advocates may be trying to help, but ideas, especially freshly-born ones, need space to breathe. They’re barely formed, and someone’s already saying they’re not right.

These delicate little ideas need to be nurtured, cultivated, and actively grown in a safe place – a creative greenhouse where nothing is thrown away.

Editing while you’re still coming up with the ideas is a very dangerous game.

Imagine opening your Lego pirate ship set and throwing away bits that don’t immediately look useful. Then, when you get to the end, you realise you needed all those unassuming little pieces to actually hold the mast up and set the sails.

It might not be immediately clear why an idea is relevant, or where it’s going to go, but even if you’re taking a line from that idea you were gonna chuck, or a word, or a ghost of a whisper of a rumour of a thought. It still deserves its place at the table.

Original ideas are messy. They don’t arrive the right way up. Quite often they don’t even have an obvious start, or end, or shape.

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull described them as “ugly babies” that “are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete”.

But with an open mind and a little patience, an idea can go anywhere.

John Steinbeck said “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.” And this guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Whatever you do, don’t be the fireman at the BBQ dousing the glowing coals before we even get a sniff of a sausage.

Stay positive and let ideas do their own thing. You’ll be surprised where they go.

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Towards the end of last year, we took the leap and decided to overhaul the office. Before we got the sledgehammers out and started knocking down walls (fun!), we finally had to sort out the bookshelves (no fun).

What started as a boring task quickly became a pleasure. Sifting through pages we hadn’t seen for years, we found a few favourites to share:

Marty Neumeier – The Brand Gap

The brand-building bible. A sermon on substance. Marty closes the gap between business strategy and brand strategy – making it easy to see how all the parts fit together. Thousands of us have tried to explain that a logo is not a brand, but never quite as well as this…

David Crystal – Words Words Words

If you like words you’ll love this book. Where they come from, what they mean, why we enjoy them, how they evolve, how we play with them. It’s just a lovely little book packed with great anecdotes and guaranteed to rekindle your love of language.

“Words aren’t harmful. They are, after all, only mouthfuls of air, handfuls of marks on a surface, or clusters of pixels on a screen. It is the people who control the mouths, hands, and screens that are the problem.”

Matthew Syed – Rebel Ideas

This one’s a real eye-opener. From the CIA to Johan Cruyff, via the Google HQ and an Everest rescue operation – Syed shows us how diversity can help remove blinkers and reveal blind spots. It’s a warning against building a kowtowing culture – and a little glimpse into the power of diverse teams who have the freedom to disagree.

Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace – Creativity, Inc

A must-read for anyone building a creative business. Half handbook on running a creative company, half behind-the-scenes exposé on life at Pixar. Packed with a tonne of useful little nuggets and funny stories.

Alan Fletcher – The Art of Looking Sideways

The heaviest book on the list, this is one to keep handy – in case you ever need a weapon, or just a little boost of imagination. 530+ hardbacked pages of playfulness, this self-proclaimed ‘primer in visual intelligence’ reads like a giant scrapbook of ideas, words and visuals. All jumbled together and bound into a paper soup. In a good way.

Les Binet & Sarah Carter – How Not to Plan

There’s no shortage of thought-leading nonsense in the world of strategy and planning. This book is the perfect antidote. A myth-busting guide, each chapter takes an often-repeated, seldom-worthwhile slice of ‘wisdom’ and rips it up. Challenging assumptions, using evidence, and setting out a better way of doing things. You’d be hard-pushed to find a more practical and useful planning book.

“Anyone could be called Les Binet or Sarah Carter. But over time our names accrue meaning. And we grow to own them. So let’s stop ducking responsibility. When next presented with a potential end-line, the right question isn’t ‘Is it own-able?’, it’s ‘How can we own it?’”

Dave Trott – One + One = Three

A collection of immensely readable anecdotes of creative thinking in all walks of life. The book’s philosophy and content can be summed up in this one quote from the intro: “The more varied the input, the more unexpected the combinations, the more creative the ideas.”

Jeff Tweedy – How to Write One Song

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s book of songwriting tips serves as a great little intro to any creative pursuit. He strips away the mystery and fear, and gives away practical tips to get started, to make creativity part of your everyday, and to keep going despite the tricky bits.

“We have a choice – to be on the side of creation, or surrender to the powers that destroy.”

John Hegarty – Hegarty on Creativity

A collection of 50 provocative little thoughts gleaned from decades at the top of the ad industry. All the advice you could ever need is in these pages.

“Inspiring people isn’t a mathematical process. You’ve got to surprise yourself as well as your audience. There is a randomness to creating that must be celebrated not scorned.”

James Webb Young – A Technique for Producing Ideas

Just 48 tiny pages. And with big writing too. First published in 1965, you can dust this one off in an hour or so but it’ll be a really valuable hour. A step-by-step guide to coming up with new ideas. Love the notion of the ‘mental digestive process’.

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Last week, our Head of Creative and Strategy, Dave King, chatted about branding and food provenance at The Knowledge Bank, delivered by Scotland Food & Drink Partnership.

Dave’s talk, part of the Profiting from Provenance session, focused on what we do best – getting to the guts.

On the face of it, food provenance is about where the food is from. Scottish products aren’t shy about showing their colours these days. It’s common to see saltires on packaging and places in names – from Scottish salmon to Ayrshire bacon. But how can you take it further?

The origin story

It all starts with seeing provenance as more than a place…

Your brand is a shortcut for shoppers. A hook that helps people remember you. From a brand point of view then, provenance isn’t a place. Provenance is your origin story.

It’s Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider. It’s Batman’s mum and dad getting gunned down in a Gotham alleyway. It’s your blockbuster biopic peeking behind the scenes of your formative years.

Closing the gap

From Rocketman to Ray, biopics sell like crazy. They add context, layers, and depth to a star’s story but, most importantly, they reveal truth where there was mystery. And they add some much-needed empathy where there was apathy.

Getting back to food and drink for a second – the modern shopper is about as disconnected from food and drink production as we are from celebrities. A good origin story can close that gap, helping us remember you and choose you.

It takes confidence and transparency to show off your origin story, and that gives us shoppers confidence in the quality of your products and the ethics behind them.

But is it relevant?

Work forward from your origin story and back from the consumer story. Rinse and repeat til they overlap in an interesting way. If you do, you’ll find you suddenly have something with genuine and intriguing depth and substance – we call it guts. You’ll have something people might just believe in and connect with, something uniquely yours that couldn’t belong to anyone else.

The relevance of your origin story is where your power really lies. How strong a link can you find between your origin story and your consumer proposition?

While competitors will always be trying to muscle in on your consumer proposition and your product range, it’s very hard for them to take your origin story with it. Can you honestly imagine trying to sell another story about a bloke getting bitten by a spider and turning into a superhero?

All killer no filler

Like any good biopic, you need to find the drama – think of it like the Rocky IV training montage. Ok, the metaphor isn’t perfect – Rocky Balboa is, unfortunately for planet Earth, not a real boxer – but the montages are the perfect example of cherry-picking the interesting bits in a process. You don’t have to summarise the whole thing, you just need to find the little gems that tell people something about you. Rocky chops wood and runs in the snow, surrounded by his family and friends, while Ivan Drago is rigged up to a high-tech machine surrounded by stone-faced scientists with syringes. We’re supposed to believe Rocky is therefore more authentic,
harder-working – the everyman hero.

Find your provenance’s version of that. Who are you as a brand, really?

Your provenance story will be different if you’re, for example, a down to earth, homely brand or, say, a cutting-edge tech enterprise. The crucial part is to find your own version.

Provenance is not for sharing

At a basic level, provenance can lift the whole Scottish food and drink industry. Saltires on stickers and place names on products are definitely effective. But if you dig a little deeper and find a real connection between your brand’s origin story and consumer proposition there’s still plenty of room to stand out with substance.

Real provenance should be yours and yours alone. Real provenance should give you an edge against the competition.

You can get your mitts on a handy PDF version of this blog here

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Today is our birthday and we’re not likely to forget our 17th year in a hurry. Somewhere between the million Zoom calls and the ebb and flow of anxiety, we did some of the gutsiest work we’ve ever done with some of the gutsiest people we’ve ever known.

A huge, huge thank you to everyone who supported us on this rollercoaster year. 🙌

And since the world isn’t quite ready for blowing out candles and sharing cake just yet, we’ll save the party for next year. But for now we’d like to celebrate the two things that matter most to us – looking after our people, and making gutsy work for clients we respect and who respect us…

Substance and Standout

A few of our recent favourites

A rock solid new Volvo Group brand.

Refreshing the Jura Whisky brand.

A blockbuster National Galleries of Scotland campaign.

Sharing seafood’s unsung heroes with Seafish.

Who the LR are we?

A tight-knit team of total troopers. Some of this year’s highlights:

• 🌟 Nic won Rising Creative Star at the Marketing Society Star Awards
• 😎 The incredibly talented quartet of Mel, Ben, Joy and Lisa joined us, and instantly made us 50% cooler
• 🙌 Andy was nominated for Inspirational Agency Leader of the Year
• 👴 Dave celebrated 10 years at StudioLR
• 🎓 Mark, Rhona, Andy and Dave all completed Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing (and swear they didn’t copy each other’s answers)
• ❤️ We were named the Marketing Society Scotland’s Employer Brand of the Year

Shout if you want to stand out

Andy@StudioLR.com
Lisa@StudioLR.com
0131 454 3200

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