HEAD BLOG

I’m interested in choice. Or the lack of.

Any regular reader of this blog who ISN’T paid to read my ramblings may have noticed this. Whether I’m talking about the rise of the supermarket own brand and the way in which it elbows out brands who have spent the better part of a century worming their way into our homes; or the iPad with a gloomy eye to a single entertainment gateway and the way we will all willingly walk through it as a direct consequence of our genetic tendency to gather in mobs, choice is something that is often, in my mind, off the menu.

It’s easy to see this effect in the shops we use. Amazon, iTunes, ebay – the giants have set up store not so much along our most popular bus routes and busiest retail spaces in the way M&S did, but right in front of our eyes. They are hard to avoid and the lazy majority (guilty) don’t even bother trying.

Less easy to see, perhaps, is the same effect in products.

As a company, Head First are hired to promote video games, books, films and other entertainment products (all of which, increasingly, are sharing the same digital and promotional spaces using many of the same techniques to make them more visible to the consumer, quick-eyed as she is). In ten years of business, we have shepherded a large number of these products through our creative process and, from the middle of the forest, it rarely feels as though we are repeating ourselves.

I say this not to brag of the way in which we find unique solutions to our projects but to highlight the range and flow of product; and it’s apparent diversity.

Yes. Apparent diversity.

On the face of things you only have to walk into Game to see a wide array of products. Game after game lines the shelving, a barrage of action shots vying for your attention. But split these down into genre and choice begins to lessen.

Advertising is about finding a compelling reason to buy that the consumer can latch onto. As products seek to compete with each other these reasons often become marginalised. It may be a slight improvement in taste, a tweak of image or a reduction in price but the obsession with becoming the next big thing in Genre A takes over and genuine innovation takes a backseat.

It’s inevitable. Risk costs money. It costs more money to launch a new IP than to issue a sequel. With films this risk is lessened by the inclusion of a Star. Bruce Willis may be starring in the same old action flick time after time but hey, it’s Bruce Willis and we like him. So that succeeds. Bring in an unknown star and the film better have something unique about it for advertisers to sell us the concept. Think back to The Matrix and yes, Keanu was a star but the concept was something new(ish). So the marketing looked fresh, taking its cues not from the genre (sci-fi) but from the concept. The stylistic approach entered the lexicon and today we see parodies in all forms of product lines (Money Supermarket being the one that most springs to mind).

Just asking yourself how often this happens provides the clue as to the extent of diversity within what we consume. Books are wonderful at providing cutting edge graphic design for certain genres but they also know when to piggy-back another style. Because book marketing understands what some other products don’t – that people like their choice in one flavour: limited. Movie marketers know this as well of course which is why we all fall for the same old poster with the goofy guy and the gorgeous girl when it comes to finding a simple movie which EVERYONE will like (but which nobody really does).

As someone who writes advertising, this apparent contradiction intrigues and challenges me. It demands that I be blunt in the face of a brief’s assumptions of what is the product’s unique selling point and prepared to find new ways of helping make a product noticeable.

A guy in the office owns a Blackberry.

He traded in his iPhone for a Blackberry. I have to remember that detail because it’s that which makes the least amount of sense.

I don’t understand the Blackberry. A tiny screen. A tiny keyboard. A confusing menu system and connectivity that is a pain to set up.

My colleague can’t give me an answer to explain his decision because I tend to shout at him when the topic rears its head.

I’m sure it has a future but deep down my feeling is that future will increasingly be shaped like an iPhone.

* * *

My wife does our food shopping. Each week she comes home angrier and angrier, telling me that yet another product range has been taken over by the Tesco own label brand. Where once she was loyal to a particular brand (remember when brands were simply “makes”?) now she is being forced into the arms of Mr Tesco.

She’s angry that Tesco create vast walls of a product which looks almost like the old, more established one.

The future is being shaped into a Tesco logo.

* * *

We are all guilty of wanting a simpler world. In the realm of the world-wide-web and even the wider world of email, we gravitate towards a simpler way of doing things. Often this means preferring to only buy our books from one place because we either see no value in personal service or else believe everybody is selling the same product anyway.

Last year a post by Seth Godin led Dave Trott to argue that the “perfect” social number of 150 (the number of meaningful relationships an individual can realistically maintain) could be extended to Twitter. I didn’t agree because I see Twitter as something to dip into rather than collect. But Seth’s précis of Dunbar’s Number is important for the way we develop socially on and off the web. As individuals and as groups we interact with only a small number of brands and as the web becomes bigger and bigger I believe, commercially at least, we search out fewer and fewer brands to interact with. These might shift as alliances are formed and broken or as new products come online but, by and large, we’ll continue to buy our books from Amazon over choosing the smaller bookshop; we’ll look to consolidate all our data in one area of the cloud; choose our clothes from just a small number of retailers and wait patiently for the single device which enables the vast majority of us to pursue our relatively simple pleasures.

Of course there are exceptions just as there are varied tastes there will always be a variety of stores and services. Just not as many as the global aspect of the Internet could allow for and not half as many as we might think.

There will be the Blackberry and there will be the iPhone and some may ask what the difference really is.

Aol. is talking about becoming a content provider. It appears, on the surface, to be a sensible move. Indeed, as ISPs consolidate and Internet access becomes yet another of those services that have become devalued, entering the ‘freeconomy’ content inevitably becomes the first choice to attract consumers and, with them, the advertising dollar.

Yet the move has parallels with the opening of shopping centres up and down the country (and across the world). Seem strange? Bear with me.

As shopping districts turned into shopping arcades and malls (and now just supermarkets) we’ve seen consolidation of the kinds of shops available. Choice, it seems, is everywhere. Or so we are told. Yet as companies buy out chains of stores all we have is the choice of which store to enter. The contents of those stores is becoming increasingly similar. Just as we were told that we are all, more or less, one of only five or so different sizes, so too are we finding that really, a shirt is a shirt.

Choice disappears.

The debate is on regarding whether Yahoo! and Microsoft will form a credible alternative to Google. For me, there is no choice. It’s become a habit to type www.google.co.uk into my browser or use the built in search window. It’s not a matter of choice. It’s not a thing I even think about. It’s a matter of habit.

Choice disappears. All I want to do is find a webpage. Easily and quickly.

For information on a subject I will probably end up at one of the top searches and will find what I need there. I may look harder but it’s just a matter of working down the list.

For a shop, the same process unfolds.

Choice disappears.

And so to Aol. What content will they provide? Will it feed its content to other sites or is it really only talking about becoming a content portal, consolidating other people’s content?

Because that content is becoming subject to the whims of consolidation. Our choice of news seems to be getting narrower, our choice of opinions becoming polarised between Left and Right.

If it is to succeed, if Yahoo and Microsoft are to succeed, then they need to provide something radical. They need to think in terms of a paradigm shift of their respective business models.