Keep Talking

A long long time ago, in an agency far far away, someone had a moment of genius: “Keep Walking!” He or she knew right there and then that this was the ‘big one’, the one that was going to run and run and run and win awards and sell and get him or her a promotion and a raise and ensure the jealousy of all other creatives for ever and ever afterwards.

It is that feeling, the ‘Eureka’ moment, that keeps people in the ad game. There is no other reason. There are much easier ways to make money, and there are many more fulfilling ways to express yourself artistically, but absolutely nothing beats the feeling of knowing that you’ve cracked it.

As with many of the best campaigns, the ‘Keep Walking’ idea is blindingly obvious, but as is always the way with these things, the answer is never obvious until such time as you have found it.

The ‘Keep Walking’ campaign is a classic example of the art, power and efficacy of brand positioning. Ogilvy have a concept that they call the ‘Big Ideal’. What this means, to my understanding, is that the most powerful way to build a brand is to align it with an aspirational and inspirational positive human attribute – an Ideal.

The Keep Walking campaign isn’t a Big Idea, it’s a ‘Big Ideal’, and the big ideal in question is persistence.

This campaign has nothing to do with whiskey per se. Trying to sell this campaign in Nairobi would be an adventure of note. Given the ever-decreasing standards of Tusker’s work, one wonders if the people at EABL (or is it now lower-case?) are actually paying any attention to the ads that they themselves are placing in the papers, though I guess that’s kind of beside the point.

The point is that the Keep Walking campaign is about a brand deciding to take a stand: “We, Johnnie Walker, are going to champion the case of persistence, we are going to evangelize the gospel of determination, preach the principle of razor-sharp focus and practice the philosophy of the iron-willed mind.”

What has this got to do with whiskey? Not much. What has this got to do with building a base and a following for your brand amongst your target audience? Pretty much everything.

The way it works is this (kind of…) When you take a stand, in other words when you declare that there is something you believe in, you present your audience with one of two choices: the first is to agree with your stand i.e. your (brand) position, whilst the second is obviously to disagree. Thus if you as an individual do not see value in the principle of persistence, do not subscribe to it, the chances are that the keep walking campaign will mean nothing to you.

However if you are one of those people who does believe that persistence is an important attribute in life, then your first reaction to the keep walking campaign will be to nod your head – “I agree!”

This act of nodding the head, the conscious agreement of a potential customer (buy-in) is, as any good salesman will tell you, the first and most crucial step towards closing the deal (crate of black label please!) It’s called getting your ‘prospect’ on the same page, and it is of inestimable value.

It is human instinct to follow that, and those, which we believe in. Therefore, if a brand stands for and champions an ideal that a sufficient number of people amongst its audience agree with (and support), it follows that the brand will be enduringly successful.

Note. First you take a (clear) stand and then you champion it persistently. The keep walking campaign has proven to be so successful precisely because it has been so persistent in preaching the principle of persistence, which is somehow fitting…

It’s called waiting for the world to turn. When you position a brand in a particular place in the collective mind, the chances are that you will not see the returns in the first quarter. The reason for this is that it takes time for people to come round to your position – it does not happen overnight. One ad is not going to do it. Bringing people round to your position requires patience and persistence (‘Keep Talking^TM’), and more fundamentally it requires a deep and unwavering belief that the position that you have taken is the correct one for your brand and for your business. That is why the strategic decision as to where you are going to position your brand is so fundamental, and that is why so many brands shy away from making it in the first place, and therefore essentially ‘fly-blind’ through the market-place hoping to pick up and retain customers by some combination of luck, accident and witch-craft.

It takes great courage to build a great brand because it inevitably involves taking a risk. Deciding that your brand is going to stand for an ideal, and committing the resources required over time to champion that ideal, knowing that it will take time for the world to come round to your position, and knowing that you may be fired before the world has turned sufficiently, and further not knowing until the world has turned if the position you have taken is one that enough people in the world (of your brand) agree with, is a decision not for the faint hearted. It’s kind of the definition of leadership – taking a stand, pointing the way and convincing people to follow. It is a very very hard thing to do, but for the brands willing to do it, it is very very rewarding.

N.B. "Keep Walking", "Just do it", "Think Different" - these are all instructions, not questions, or statements, or word-play... Why is that?