Change by Design, Revised and Updated by Tim Brown

Author:Tim Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

Propagating the Faith

Should an idea manage to survive the perilous journey through an organization and out into the market, storytelling can play another vital if obvious role: communicating its value to its intended audience in such a way that some of them, at least, want to go out and buy it.

We are all familiar with the power of great advertising to tell stories, and create myths, about new products. I remember as a kid in the United Kingdom in the 1970s watching the great TV “adverts” for Hamlet cigars, Silk Cut cigarettes, and Cadbury’s Smash. They were clever, funny, and engaging. Advertising, in those days, greased the wheels of the consumer economy, and it resonated with a more optimistic, less skeptical public. By then, however, there were already indications that things were changing: I loved the ads, but I never took up smoking and the taste of the powdered potato mix that went into Cadbury’s Smash still makes me slightly nauseous.

Many observers have commented on the decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising. One simple reason is that fewer people are reading, looking at, or listening to traditional forms of broadcast media. But there are other reasons why thirty-second spots no longer serve as an effective vehicle for new ideas, including what the Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz has identified as “the paradox of choice.” Most people don’t want more options; they just want what they want. When overwhelmed by choice, we tend to fall into behavioral patterns used by those whom Schwartz calls “optimizers”—people paralyzed by the fear that if they only waited a little while longer or searched a little harder, they could find what they think they want at the best possible price. That was not a problem in the days when “automobile” meant a black Model T or “the phone company” meant AT&T. The other camp is populated by “satisficers,” who have given up on making consumer decisions and will put up with whatever works. Neither presents marketing departments with a happy situation, and marketers have been driven to increasingly desperate measures to deal with the fact, with dubious results. I suspect that I am not the only one who can recall an ad but have no idea which financial service, pain reliever, or limited-time offer it advertised.

From the perspective of the design thinker, a new idea will have to tell a meaningful story in a compelling way if it is to make itself heard. There is still a role for advertising, but less as a medium for blasting messages at people than as a way of helping turn its audience into storytellers themselves. Anyone who has a positive experience with an idea should be able to communicate its essential elements in a way that encourages other people to try it out for themselves. Bank of America launched its successful Keep the Change offering with plenty of advertising, but the campaign served mostly to build on a habit many customers already practiced and make them propagandists for it.

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