How much are promises worth?

If you saw an ad for a restaurant and it said “We promise not to spit in your food”, would you be relieved or a little bit worried? Let’s say for instance that Air New Zealand ran an ad campaign and they said “We promise not to crash into the ocean”, would you choose them over another airline?


As consumers, we are entitled to take a few things for granted. Certain professions have an obligation to do the right thing. Assurances of saliva-free food and crash-free journeys shouldn’t have to be made by restaurants and airlines. What the restaurant should be promising is that they make the finest Ossobuco in the world, which is based on a 300-year-old family recipe that is closely guarded by the Mafia. The airline should be promising that they will always be on time, your luggage won’t be lost and that they won’t be retrenching thousands of local staff so they can outsource to Mumbai.

Any fool can make a promise. In fact, Bunnings and Mitre 10 Mega do it all the time with their price promises. However, the reality is they are cheating on the promise. Put simply, you have absolutely no chance of finding the same stocked item anywhere else in the galaxy. Either they’ve negotiated with their suppliers for the best rate or they are the only company that sells that specific product. 

Consumers want something remarkable from promises, simply because all the best ones are so hard to keep.

I wonder if the good folk at BNZ Bank know this?

BNZ's latest ad campaign is all about the six promises they’ve made to help you be good with money.

They are:

1. We promise to listen, and help you make the right choices.

2. We promise to make things simple, so it’s easy to manage your money and make it grow.

3. We promise to provide fast, effective service, that’s right the first time.

4. We promise to recommend products and services that give you the best value.

5. We promise to be honest and straight up, at all times.

6. We promise if we stuff up for any reason, we’ll fix it and do right by you.

Does BNZ Bank really have to promise that they will be honest? Maybe I’m missing something but I always thought that banks and honesty should go together like Ken and Barbi. I guess not. And worst of all, their last promise is basically just a way to weasel out of their other five promises. And what exactly do they mean by "do right by you"? Will I get a cake if they stuff up? 

What I would have preferred to see would be:

1. We promise that our investment bankers will not misappropriate your money and spend it on teenage hookers and cocaine in Bangkok

2. We promise that we will not complain about how hard the banking industry is when we’ve made $700 million dollars in profits in just one year

I could go on and on but the only promise they should make is:

1. We promise to offer the best interest rates, guaranteed.

Now that’s a remarkable promise, simply because it’s so hard (almost impossible) to keep. I can imagine the ad campaign already. 

New Zealand’s Best Brand 2012 - FOUR

There’s something just right about the way FOUR have gone about their branding business this year. Sure, FOUR doesn’t have as wide a target as the other broadcasters, or as small a market as Rialto or the ARTS channel, but they really do a good job of appealing to their demographic.

There’s something of an elegant solution in everything they do. From the way they use the beautiful Gotham font across their network, to their striking colours and their often awful movie choices, there’s not much to fault them with (except that Gotham is the most used font of the past decade). Every detail seems nuanced to the nth degree, which might seem odd based on their young(ish) target market. I guess the sophistication level of the average New Girl and Glee viewer isn’t what many people thought it was. Then again, I’m almost 40 and I’m sure FOUR is one of my most watched channels, just behind the Brainiac Bunch of National Geographic, Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.

Even though FOUR exist in my life at the mercy of the fast forward button, I still enjoy their company. And at the end of the day, that’s really all that matters in the relationship between consumers and their brands.

Merry Christmas!

New Zealand’s Worst Brand - HRV Home Ventilation

The reason for HRV winning New Zealand’s Worst Brand of 2012 has nothing to do with their dodgy sales tactics that came to light late in 2012, but more about how they responded to the allegations. Hundreds of people complained about how bad HRV were, and when hundreds complain you can extrapolate the number of grumpy folks even further due to the lazy, can’t-be-bothered nature of people to voice their frustrations.

When Bruce Gordon, CEO of HRV joined John Campbell live on TV, he humbly claimed that since arriving at the helm he had changed the gung-ho mentality that was rife in his business, and that these reports flowing in about HRV were a thing of the past. At least he was brave enough to appear on TV and try to appease the masses.

The problem was the fire was raging and nothing changed. After Bruce Gordon’s TV appearance, HRV set up a dedicated “No Pressure Hotline” for customers who wanted to discuss a “sales experience or customer experience”. And that was it. 

The truth of the matter is that every brand can learn more from the customers who complain then they ever can from the customers who don’t. The first step they should have taken was to take stock of the enormity of the problem and call every single customer they have (surely there must be thousands?) and say “Thank you for being an HRV customer – what are your experiences with HRV?” If the vast majority were negative then HRV knew they were boned. They didn’t do this, and perhaps this is the cynic in me talking, but I think they already knew what the answer would be before the calls were made.

This is why I wasn’t very surprised when I received two calls from HRV in November asking me first if I could recommend a friend for  HRV, for which I would be rewarded with a cheap bottle of wine, and second if they could help me heat my house in winter. To both of these, I replied with a polite “Get Fu##ed!”

HRV’s current advertising agency is Y&R. They used to be fairly cool, especially back in the day when Vaughn Davis was in charge of their creativity, but now they’re as limp as month-old celery. I have no idea what they proposed to HRV to help them put out the fire but if they think they can carry on fighting their sentimental hogwash of a sixty-second ad and things will go away, then they may just be wrong.

But I doubt it. Consumers are very forgetful and we tend to forget the injustices of the past. So I can only predict that HRV will remain fairly well-off after this debacle and that Y&R will continue to be their agency for a year or so before the “new broom” sweeps them out the door and HRV appoint some other indistinguishable agency to the role.

All in all, HRV is still the winner of New Zealand’s Worst Brand 2012. Merry Christmas! 

What's the similarity between Jackson Pollock and advertising?

They both do something anyone could do. Or so the story goes.

Many people have looked upon the work of Jackson Pollock with much disdain. Cries of "I could've done that!" and "My six-year-old could've done that" echo across the gallery. But you didn't and your six-year-old can't. So regardless of what you think, for once, you're not right. And any work done by Pollock will still sell for $30 million, no matter what you think of it.

The reason a Jackson Pollock sells for so much is because that's what someone is prepared to pay for it and they understand its value. Just like everything, from houses to cars to sex, people only pay what they're prepared to pay and what they see as valuable only matters to them. Your perception of value and worth is meaningless to the purchaser.

When it comes to things like creativity, such as art and advertising, which are traditionally hard to measure and quantify, the lines pointing to value and worth become almost invisible. What difference is there between a logo designed for $50 and a logo designed for $5,000? If the client is happy to pay $50 or $5,000 then surely it boils down to the Jackson Pollock principle of perceived value? A logo's a logo, right? And a watch is just a watch? Yes, but people don't buy watches to tell the time. A $50 watch is just as accurate at telling the time as a $25,000 watch, so why do people buy them?

It's the same with advertising. There's advertising that's cheap and there's advertising that isn't. I'm not saying that the expensive stuff is superior because it often isn't. Harvey Norman spent over $60 million advertising in 2011 and their work isn't good. From a creative point of view, it's really awful.

The reality of the situation is that advertising agencies have been making money the wrong way. Advertising agencies were born from the fact that businesses needed an intermediary between the media and themselves, to negotiate the best rates and spots. For a long time, it wasn’t the creative work that was making agencies money, it was the fat, juicy commissions that they were getting from booking media and from hiking up print and production costs. Eventually, when creativity became a factor in choosing one agency over another, it was almost impossible to put a definitive cost to it. This is most likely where the idea of advertising awards came from.

If Agency X had more awards than Agency Y, then it stands to reason that Agency X are worth more. But that’s not entirely right. The vast majority of advertising awards are developed, curated and judged by the people within the industry itself. In the same manner that the aloof, fine-art cognoscenti look down their noses at the common folk, so do the advertising Illuminati. For too long they’ve been trying to justify what they do and the high costs involved but they shouldn’t have had to.

An accountant or a lawyer (even a plumber) knows exactly what they do. And most importantly, so does Joe Public. So they know the value of choosing a good lawyer over a bad one. Isn’t it time that advertising agencies reevaluated their business? We’ll take a look at how this could happen in a future blog.