The Transformation of Saatchi & Saatchi 1970-2006 (C) Navigating in a Shifting Landscape
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- Exhibit 5: Sisomo
Exhibit 4: LovemarksKevin Roberts’ book Lovemarks (2004) explains that in 1997, Saatchi & Saatchi was focused on ‘three great ideas’: becoming an ideas company, delivering peak performance and answering ‘the critical question: what comes after brands?’24 The answer, says Roberts, is Lovemarks. In the first days of commerce, products were simply products. Later, trademarks evolved to identify products made by specific, reputable companies. However, intense competition reduces the impact of trademarks and erodes their power to differentiate, with the result that they become commoditised. Brands provided an answer, embodying and expressing ‘the stuff that has meaning for consumers: consistency, quality, performance and value.’ But in a world where consumers are saturated with unsolicited marketing messages, even branding is no longer enough. Brands that boast about benefits (‘bigger, brighter, better, stronger, faster, easier, newer’) may command respect but can no longer cut through the media barrage that surrounds people every day. Brands are overused, lack mystery, fail to engage with consumers’ intelligence, are often formulaic and/or conservative, and compete with each other ever more fiercely. Brands, Roberts argues, are ‘out of juice… they can’t stand out in the marketplace, and they are struggling to connect with people’. The smart response is to drive more emotion into customer interactions, working with what consumers love as well as respect. ‘People are looking for new, emotional connections… they have higher expectations’. Emotion has become legitimised as a subject for business and management thought in recent years, because executives have realised that ‘human beings are powered by emotion, not reason’. In marketing and branding, this translates into the quest for Lovemarks – brands that inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason. Lovemarks are brands that evoke or generate emotion in both the marketing of a product and its actual use (what Procter & Gamble terms the ‘two moments of truth’). On the dimensions of consumer love and respect, Lovemarks command both. Brands command respect only; fads attract love without respect or true performance and hence fade fast. Businesses, products and services that command neither love nor respect are commodities. In line with the concept that it is consumers’ love (rather than an ad agency) that creates a Lovemark, a Saatchi & Saatchi-run website (www.lovemarks.com) allows visitors to nominate their own candidates for Lovemark status – they range from the predictable (iPods) to the unexpected and largely un-commercial (Fado, a style of Portuguese music).
According to Roberts, the context in which old-style brands succeeded was the ‘attention economy’. Brands that got attention, either through creative originality or the brute strength of mass media, also got sales. (This was, of course, the world in which the ‘old’ Saatchi & Saatchi prospered.) By creating sisomo content and building Lovemarks, marketers can carve out a niche in what Roberts terms the ‘attraction economy’, the new reality in which consumers’ choices, rather than companies’ intentions, are the key determinants of success. Exhibit 6: Hours per person per year using consumer media in US
Source: Veronis Suher Stevenson 1Estimate Exhibit 7: U.S. advertising spending 1999-2009 $m
Exhibit 8: The world’s largest media buying networks ranked by projected billings; 2006
Source: RECMA 2006 Exhibit 9: Key P&L ratios for principal UK marketing services sectors on a per employee basis; 2005
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