Translator: Zsuzsa Viola Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I love learning.
And the way I learn is by finding examples that I can learn from.
So when I started my career as a marketer about 20 years ago,
I decided to try to make a list of the top 10 most effective campaigns
so that I could learn
how to teach my clients how to have effective campaigns.
What winded up happening is I spoke to a lot of leaders in marketing,
and no one could give me an answer.
It was like marketing professionals
were prescribing medicine to sell solutions
without ever knowing what prescription worked.
So I joined up with some universities and started to do some research.
It took us over 10 years to do the research,
to fill out a list of what actually worked.
But when we found that research,
we found out that becoming significant
is actually what impacts the financial business of a company.
But not only that.
It's the same formula for leadership, for movements and for religions.
I decided to start telling this story in a very big way.
About two years ago,
I decided to go public with the information.
And when Trump was running,
on June 14th, which was the lowest point in his career,
I decided to write on my own personal Facebook
and in a newspaper in the UK
that I bet my career,
I bet that I will never work in advertising again if Trump doesn't win.
Not because I wanted him to, but because all the signs were clear to me
that he was going to win.
Some predictions are easier than others.
Last year, in Cannes,
this was awarded the most effective campaign in the world
or the best marketing.
Even a business magazine wrote
how this was the best marketing in the world.
Many of you have probably seen this image,
and most of you can't tell me what brand it's for, right?
So it doesn't work if you can't tell what brand it is for.
And this campaign, the best campaign in the world,
only generated about 50,000 euros
for a business that does 10 billion dollars a year.
How's that possibly the best marketing campaign?
Although very inspiring and creative, it didn't work.
And even locally, one of the local companies,
they had a huge viral video that was online, about friendship.
And in a boardroom full of marketing directors, salespeople,
I said,
"Your campaign is not going to impact the brand you think it's going to impact.
It's going to impact your more female product."
They said, "You're crazy.
What do you think? You have a magic ball that you can tell what's going to happen?"
And it wasn't their fault that they didn't know what I knew,
because I had studied it for 10 years.
They were still stuck with the old rules,
the old rules that are really easily identifiable by this scenario,
which many of you have probably been a part of, right?
Either saying it or receiving
"How many times will I have to tell you to pick up the socks off the floor?"
or "pick up your shoes off the floor?"
What happens?
We give that person full view time.
It's coming from a source we trust.
We heard it many times over.
We have full intention of putting it away next time.
All those things marketeers want.
And what happens the next day?
It's back on the floor, right?
We put it back on the floor.
Because we still believe in old methodologies
that don't work anymore.
We still believe that if we're the loudest,
we're going to get attention.
As long as they're talking, that's good.
But every person in this room
probably already took a picture of the TED sign to put on their Instagram.
Multiply that by 8 billion people:
95 million uploads on Instagram alone, a day.
How can you possibly be louder than that?
We still believe that if you're creative,
you're going to save the world by being creative.
You know, create something creative so everyone talks about it.
It's true, probably everyone in this room would love to be that blue banana
or be able to have their business be that blue banana.
But every business is trying to be the blue banana.
So how do you stand out?
Right? It doesn't work.
And then, what makes it worse is marketing is - it's almost like poker.
Everyone has an opinion about what works and what doesn't work,
and every year some guru comes out with a new term or an old term made new
to tell people, "This is how we're going to save marketing."
This year it's been storytelling - and for the past couple of years.
To me, storytelling is what got us in trouble.
Brands have been telling stories for the past 50 years
about how to feel about a product or what to do,
and most of it are lies.
We've developed a huge bullshit filter about things that are lies.
Isn't it better to stop telling stories
and become a brand worth telling a story about?
Isn't that a better way to look at things?
What we found and what unlocked the secret for us
was how people make decisions.
We've simplified how people make decisions
to a degree that I haven't seen anywhere else.
The way we make decisions is, first, we follow people we trust.
When you get to a new airport, you pull out your phone, you look down,
and you just follow a person in front of you to baggage claim:
you trust that that person is going to baggage claim.
Most of you make most of your decisions that way.
You know there's days you reach home and you're like,
"I don't even remember driving home."
That's because the person in front of you avoided all the obstacles for you.
You didn't think, right? You just followed.
The second way we make decisions
is avoid danger,
avoid looking stupid,
avoid bad decisions.
And for the past 100 years, this is why marketing has worked by being the loudest.
Why? Because quality of product was very different:
there was very good cereal, and there was very bad cereal.
The good cereal had enough money to advertise on TV,
and the bad cereal only had money to have a spot on the radio.
So I bought the one on TV
because I trusted they must have better quality.
Nowadays, the qualities are almost the same.
There's not a big difference in quality.
So we don't make decisions this way anymore -
at least not about buying products.
And the third and most important and the people you need to impact the most
are the people who are interested in the subject,
who make those decisions based on what makes them happy.
A great example is
imagine you all won the lottery,
no restrictions on what decisions you can make.
Most of you have probably already thought,
"How would I spend lottery winnings?"
And all of you think you have a really unique answer.
But all of you answer the same thing.
You say, "I'll go celebrate with friends.
I'll go buy homes, cars and travel.
I'll take care of my family.
I'll take care of some strangers.
I'll invest in a charity.
Eventually, I'll put in some money to help out the future of my family,
to invest so they don't ever have to work again."
Outside of those things, do we think of much?
Not immediately, we don't, because this is what makes us happy.
Why? Because we look for benefits in life.
Buying a home, cars and traveling gives us a functional benefit.
When we take care of our loved ones, it makes us a leader of that family,
so we give an emotional benefit to people.
When we take care of society, we see a better world.
So that's a social benefit.
And those are our goals in life.
Our goals in life are to find functional benefits, emotional benefits
and social benefits.
It's also the formula to happiness.
There's four chemicals to happiness.
One of them has to do with avoiding danger,
which is not included here.
But the other three, this is actually physically what happens in our brain.
It's when we get dopamine, serotonin or oxytocin.
When you take a photo, and you get a like,
and you check every minute if you have more likes,
it's because we're searching for dopamine because we want attention,
and we're getting attention when we get a like.
If I help someone cross the street that was having a problem,
I get oxytocin because I'm part of a good community,
part of a good society.
If I see someone else help someone cross the street,
I also get oxytocin
because I feel like I'm part of a good society.
Serotonin you get for being a leader;
if you're a leader, you get serotonin because someone followed you,
and it changes your emotion.
It's also what has to do with leadership.
A good leader tries to fix something.
He fills a need.
He generates love for what he's trying to do,
and he added value to society when he's finished.
Good leaders have all three.
Just like business - it also ties to business.
If I fill a need, I make a sale.
If I generate love for my brand, I get more loyalty,
which increases my market share.
If I add value -
example, if I have shoes that donate 50% of the money to saving elephants,
you're willing to pay a little bit more because it saves elephants.
Because I have added value to the product.
An easy way to remember this is
if you want to be a top brand or a significant brand,
you need to own the functional benefit.
Example - a soap with moisture.
If I'm the person
who talked the most about our soap has moisture to protect your skin,
I'm going to own that category.
So anytime you want soap to make your skin nice,
you're going to buy the soap that has moisturizer.
If we do so because we're trying to help women's self-body image,
to protect the way they feel about themselves,
that's going to attract some women
that believe they don't feel good in the way they are.
Right?
And then, if I say I'm doing all this
because I want to change what fashion magazines
do to women's images before they publish them,
I attract even men.
Because men will be like, "Yeah, that's not fair."
I'm able to attract a larger audience.
So I can target; it's part of my strategy.
If I'm talking about my product,
I can attract people who are indifferent to what brand it is.
If I talk about protecting women's self-image,
I target a specific niche of people,
the people who are actually searching for happiness with that product.
If I talk about changing the way fashion magazines treat women,
I'm talking to a mass market.
So when someone says,
"Should you target or mass market or segment?"
Both. You should do both.
Remember I said purpose, ownership and values is what leads a brand?
We call this an iconic POV.
And what's an iconic POV?
It's a point of view.
Leaders, people, brands, religions that mesh all three of those messages -
the functional, the emotional and the social together -
they become iconic to us.
Martin Luther King was here to end discrimination.
Okay?
He inspired us not to be indifferent to the evils in the world.
This spoke to people who were suffering from racism
because, so we may all be treated equal one day.
That attracted everyone else: all of us want to be treated equal.
So it's a message that attracts me as well.
It's the part where I start to follow other people
when I make that decision.
A more recent example.
Many people don't know Lady Gaga's story,
but Lady Gaga was signed to Def Jam Records; she was let go.
She played at Lollapalooza as Lady Gaga and Lady Starlight
and completely different bands -
also didn't work.
And then she came up with an iconic POV.
Was she known for her music at first? No.
She was known because she dressed weird as hell, right?
She wore meat dresses to awards or showed up in an egg.
Why?
Because she said, "I'm the weirdest person here,
so all you people who feel awkward in your room,
don't feel awkward.
I'm weirder.
Why?
Because the beautiful people in this world are the ones who are actually unique,
right?
You have to be truly unique or awkward to be completely different in this world.
And that attracted most of us as well.
Because we said,
"I'm not like everyone else. I have my own little uniqueness.
I'm also a little monster."
Today, on your way here,
or anyone who's watching this anywhere in the country,
you pass thousands of coffee shops a year.
How many of those coffee shops
have an opportunity to become a top 50 brand in the world?
Almost none of them.
Because they don't have an iconic point of view.
And that's all that's missing.
Starbucks was one coffee shop in Seattle, okay?
With a very different point of view.
They didn't just focus on their coffee;
they created a place that was a second living room.
You had free Wi-Fi, big couches,
you can order a coffee and hang out for as long as you wanted.
It was a place to hang out outside of your home.
You could even have meetings there.
Why did they do this?
Because people didn't even know their neighbors' names
in the United States at that time.
So it was a place to build community.
It's something he saw while traveling in Italy,
that people hung out at the coffee shop to get to know each other.
We didn't have that in the States.
So he did it to build community.
It's the reason why they ask your name and put it on the cup and say,
"Paige, your coffee's ready."
It's so that everyone else in that "neighborhood" can know your name.
Why did they do this?
Because they wanted to create a culture of warmth and belonging.
And that's something that attracts the rest of us, right?
There's never been an advertising for Starbucks that's run in Portugal,
and many people walk by a Starbucks, and it's completely full.
Why? Because we follow other people that we trust.
And because so many people in the US love this brand,
it made us love the brand because we trust it's a good decision because of them.
Research firms say
that this is four times more effective than normal marketing.
The great part is this adds value to society.
Instead of trying to squeeze people
or make them - emotionally manipulate them
and take as much money as I can from them, right?
Instead of extracting the maximum value from people, this gives it back.
Think of a world where brands are actually the Martin Luther King of the day.
Because we don't have many Martin Luther Kings anymore;
we have more of the evil leader, it seems like.
So imagine you vote every time you buy a coffee
whether they stay in power or not.
Remember I said Trump would win?
I want to explain how I could predict that.
It's actually quite simple.
When you look at the functional benefit between Hillary and Trump,
they were opposites.
Hillary was going to do the same Obama has done,
but maybe even a little bit better;
Trump was going to change everything.
They were both known equally for those two functional benefits.
So there's no advantage there.
If you talk to people who were ex-military
or used to work in minefields or extracting coal,
they had a passion about Trump
like I've never seen about a political leader ever.
Except maybe Bernie Sanders at the time, but he didn't have enough.
So the love that was around Trump
was much greater than what was around Hillary.
Because what was Hillary's purpose?
It was to put a woman in office, right?
The woman, that wasn't enough for women.
It wasn't even attached to the functional benefit,
which is we're going to continue doing the same thing Obama did.
It has to be a match.
And then the response,
the way they added value was I was part of a tribe.
If I have that red hat that said, "Make America Great Again,"
I was part of that tribe, and I can show everyone.
Those people didn't, probably, even take those hats off in the shower.
They wore those hats 24 hours a day.
They created a huge tribe.
That's why I felt comfortable saying he was going to win.
It was quite obvious to me.
So when you see other gurus talking
like, "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it."
No, I don't say, "I want to build community,
so let me go to Starbucks."
I say, "I want a coffee," or "I want to meet a friend,
maybe Starbucks is a good place."
And "What a load of nonsense, brand purpose is."
That's bullshit too.
Because if I'm only developing the product,
which needs to be good,
I don't have a brand; I only have a product.
So the truth is typically in the middle.
Just like natural versus artificial, the truth is in the middle,
at least to me.
I want the self-driving Tesla car to drive me to the biomarket on Saturdays
in Expo where I live.
I want the natural, but I want what's good from the artificial.
So why does this work so well?
For us to be truly happy, it's human.
We need something to do, someone to love and something to hope for.
If you don't have these three, you can't be truly happy.
And that's why an iconic point of view works so well.
So create an iconic point of view and become a brand people love,
that vote for you every time they buy something.
Create that kind of point of view and become a leader to people.
At work, let people know why you're there,
what you're trying to do with the company.
Lead people.
Leading is not simply telling them your purpose, which is really popular,
which is, "I'm here because I want to save the world."
Well, tell me where you're going in five years, so you can lead me there
in five years.
Create an iconic point of view and be significant.
(Applause)