Naked Truths, Big Ideas & Power Concepts
Develop Winning Marketing Concepts that drive your business

Bad concepts are an epidemic. Many concepts don’t meet forecasting objectives. Ones that do aren’t driving strategy and execution, despite scoring big in quantitative testing. This book is a comprehensive guide to developing better concepts; high scoring ideas that will drive your all aspects of your business, from product development to advertising, at any stage of development. You’ll learn how to write concepts that:

Published in May 2017

193 pages

 

 

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Available on Amazon.com

 

The Epidemic and the Cure

A concept is a brief description of a product or service which persuades readers to try it.

The written concept revolutionized advertising and product development less than fifty years ago. Studies proved that consumers’ reaction to written descriptions was predictive of success in the marketplace. A concept has three business outputs:

• It serves as the basis for the comminication strategy. Marketing translates a concept into creative briefs for advertising, public relations and online media.
• It assesses the business potential of the initiative. Quantitative research results are critical input to volume forecasting and ultimately determine if the initiative is worth pursuing.
• It shapes the product and design strategy.  Concepts can give direction to R&D and Design for product development, particularly if the innovation is in upstream development.

The Epidemic of Bad Concepts
Too many poor concepts are written today. Bad concepts are mostly defined as ones that don’t meet volume forecasting objectives. But there is another group too; these generate favorable forecasts, but don’t drive actions because they have unclear strategic implications. So, initiative teams don’t use them to guide their development and execution strategies. Achieving a winning, or top tertile concept, has become a box checking endeavor in some corporate cultures. Here are some common concept problems:

• Squishy
Commonly written by committee, these are concepts that lack a Big Idea. They may have appealing bits and pieces, like a greatest hits compilation, and may even test well. But they can’t drive strategies without a central organizing thought.

• Kitchen Sink
Loading concepts with lots of benefits can generate high scores. However, communication briefs include no more than two mandatory ideas to execute in advertising. Like squishy concepts, they aren’t too useful for communication or development strategies. That’s why they end up in an archive file once the quantitative test is over, despite having great scores.

• TMI (Too Much Information)
Concepts can be crammed with excess information, such as usage instructions and reassurances. It’s often added to respond to questions raised by consumers in qualitative research. However, issues should be addressed by fixing the core description rather than adding more detail. Let’s say you are exploring a new concept for a hard surface cleaner that promises to “Strip away tough residues down to the enamel,” with an “Acid-based formula that dissolves everything it touches.” Focus groups voice concern that the spray may damage their countertops, and worse, is unsafe to use. The solution is not to add a sentence that claims that the product is safe for laminate, marble, porcelain and exposure to skin. Instead the Benefit and Sway should be replaced with a less scary alternative.

• Me too
These descriptions don’t say anything new. They fail to describe innovations as innovations. Often conventions of the category, and what has worked in the past, are used to describe the product. They are rated low for uniqueness and high for believability.

• Illusions of Grandeur
They overstate the importance or impact of the product or service. And that elicits skepticism. Softer toilet tissue isn’t going to change a consumer’s life.

• Cold Fish
These concepts don’t connect with consumers in meaningful, empathetic terms. They describe technical mechanisms of action and use numerical claims without a frame of reference or context. To illustrate, imagine that you have a new fast drying roll-on deodorant. Roll-ons are wet and sticky when applied, which is a major complaint about the form. Claiming that it dries 678% faster than the leading brand is information that has little meaning. However, promising that the new roll-on, “dries faster than you can put your shirt on” is a way internalize the benefit for consumers.

• Condescending
Concepts that negatively judge readers or their lifestyle are destined to fail. Don’t start a frozen food concept with a statement like, “You feel like a bad mother because you don’t give your kids home cooked meals like other moms.”

• Not for me
Some concepts can seem like they were written for somebody else. Despite excellent clinical testing results, Head & Shoulders wasn’t able to write an appealing concept for a new shampoo designed for people with severe dandruff. Consumers were convinced it would be a good treatment for severe dandruff, but no one thought they had that problem. Then, qualitative research discovered that sufferers identified with the term “persistent dandruff.” That became the basis of an enduring premium line extension for the brand.

• Untrue
Concepts that contain unsupportable claims are bad ones. It’s tempting to place them in quantitative testing because they make stronger promises and convey clearer messages. But concepts that over promise generate volume forecasts that over promise.

Power Concepts
The aim of this book is to help you and your team to write concepts that appeal to consumers, while having clear implications for your organization and key stakeholders. These are Power Concepts. They go beyond winning scores to drive the actions and choices of everyone they touch in the organization. They share the following traits:

• Strive to express a Big Idea rather than just describe product or service. A Big Idea is the central thought that underlies the innovation. It can serve the organization as the goal, aspiration or integrity of the product or service.

• Provide inescapable relevance for the product. Making the case for relevance stems from Naked Truths about consumer needs, challenges in remedying the need, or something the consumer has experienced in the marketplace.

• Power concepts are unexpectedly simple and concise. Ideally between 75 and 100 words is a good a rule of thumb.

• Make a promise that is internalized by consumers. It transforms objective facts into communication that carries subjective meaning.

• Use contrast to impress. Differences are portrayed in stark and impressive ways.

• Persuade at emotional and functional levels. They have information that sways consumers to believe that the product will do what it says, or entice them to desire it.

I confess to committing many concept development sins in my career, including word niggling, unsupportable claims, lengthy descriptions, copy writing, too many ideas and many others. It was only after writing thousands of concepts that I realized what really mattered. Great concepts aren’t Big Ideas; they are merely descriptions of them.

 

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What’s New

attended the recent Procter & Gamble Alumni Global Conference in 2017 where people asked me, “what’s new?” It’s a fair ask.

Concept development is a codified activity at P&G. In the early 1980s, consumer research validated that test scores for written descriptions for new products could predict their success or failure in the market place. That precipitated a boom in P&G concept development for Marketing and R&D about 30 years ago. It wasn’t long before methodologies were developed and templates were cemented. And that’s about the time that my concept writing career began, spending several years as an internal team leader and coach.   It was a lively field; many innovative approaches to writing better concepts were explored. But the fundamentals didn’t evolve very much through the years. Eventually a manual was written. Efforts to improve on the company’s approach shifted from creating better outcomes to doing the work more efficiently.  I wrote thousands of concepts as time passed. Sometimes with teams; sometimes independantly for skunkwork ideas. My personal expertise and “know-how” grew. But expressing new learning outside of the conventions of the manual smacked of heresy. So my concept development methods were gently injected into my projects, sometimes stealthily.

The book, and distance, has given me an opportunity to unpack my thoughts on advanced concept development from Procter & Gamble’s conventional thinking and “Procterisms”. This led to a stripping and simplification at some levels, expansion and deepening on others.
After reading this book, I believe that you and your team will be writing “Power Concepts”; ones that have more appeal to consumers, while having clearer implications for your organization and key stakeholders. It’s for those embarking on their first concept development project, and just as much for seasoned veterans who want to find a better way.

In part one, you’ll learn about the 4 parts of a Power concept:

• The Big Idea: This is the central organizing thought that runs throughout the concept, and will ultimately focus the communication and/or technical strategies. There are five types of Big Ideas (Evidence, Providence, Mimic, Transformation and Specialization). You’ll find tools in the book to generate them. This is departure from most concept development efforts, where writing concepts are the goal, rather than to describe Big Ideas.

 

• The Relevance: It introduces the product via a Naked Truth about the consumers’ need, the remedies available to them, or a force at work in the marketplace. Naked Truths are deep, undercurrent facts or beliefs that shape reality. There are simple two-part frameworks to extract these Truths (real/deal, underlying problem/solution, dynamic/response) from your knowledge. You’ve probably heard of using insights or consumer beliefs to set the stage for concepts, but these are only a slice of the possibilities for Relevance.

 

• The Benefit: It is the promise to the reader about how the product will improve their lives. It must be wanted (by the consumer), straightforward and distinctive. It’s best when it goes beyond fact-based information to internalize the advantage in terms that carry meaning to the consumer. The marketplace is flooded with impressive claims (10 times this, 100% that). But these statements don’t convey meaning… how life will be better.

 

• The Sway: The final part of the concept persuades the reader to try the product or service. It can be an explanation of how it works, a demonstration, credentials or tapping into a brand’s equity. It can also be an enticing description of the product experience. Together with other elements of the concept, it satisfies the left and right brain. Reason and logic is not the only path the convince, which was a mind-opening discovery for me.

In Part 2, you’ll learn how to write concepts. Highlights include:

• Learning plan
• Team Work (and how to manage personalities)
• Generating Claims
• Naming and Versioning
• Internalizing Change
• Drawing contrast
• Case Study