A few bright sparks

That is the fundamental hypothesis of Spark: The Insight to Growing Brands by Paddy Rangappa. Though we know that consumer insight is the basic building block of a great brand, a popular campaign and a sustainable strategy, few marketers or their teams know where to look for those insights or how to put them to use fruitfully. “While there are references to the role of insights in advertising, and how to recognise an insight, there is no literature on developing insights. This book fills that crucial gap,” says the author in his introduction.

That is the primary task and differentiator of Spark, Mr Rangappa adds, and he does the job by taking a deep dive into the workings of great brands such as P&G, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and trying to unravel what makes them recognisable and successful. On the way, he tackles such issues as how these brands have grown their franchise, how their advertising engaged the target audience, how they turned hard data into knowledge and how they are leveraging the new marketing “conundrum” presented by the relentless spread of technology.

The most distinctive element of this book is that the rules presented here are tried and tested; they have been found to hold over a variety of conditions and countries. That is contrary to what most marketing books profess and indeed, many of the case studies in Spark offer evidence that much of modern marketing theory is not always firmly grounded.

A student of advertising or a marketing rookie could find it useful to grab a copy of this book. But if you've been in the profession for a while and have some hands-on experience you are likely to question or even disagree with parts of it. In the main, you will find that Spark ends up over-simplifying the business of advertising to a process aimed at increasing profitability and growth by increasing the brand’s “mental availability” with consumers.

Good advertising, which is relevant, likeable and visually arresting, the author says, helps elevate a brand in the consumer’s memory. These are certainly important drivers of a great campaign or brand growth. But they are not the only ones. If you are a marketer you really have to roll up your sleeves and think of creating new usage occasions (for example, Haldiram’s following in the footsteps of McDonald’s and offering breakfast); increasing the volume per usage occasion (Axe’s “Spray More, Get More” urging people to spray all over, not just under their arms); or stretching a brand (Dettol soap to sanitiser, Horlicks health drink to biscuits).

Indeed, there are many other ways to grow a brand’s franchise but they don’t get a mention in sections in which the author talks of the sales impact of advertising. Is that because these points have been made before?

Then there is the creative process. Many other advertising professionals and theorists before Mr Rangappa have said the process of creating a great piece of advertising should be more intuitive, less structured and cannot to broken down into step-by-step processes. To that extent, creative thought is often contrasted with analytical thought, which is more rigid and precise.

Creativity does not just happen by luck — the author acknowledges that. He would like professionals to follow a structured process but the steps suggested thereafter appear a bit touchy-feely. Can an individual put seemingly random thoughts together into an ideal combination or solution simply by writing the perfect brief? Natural scientists and psychologists including Hermann Helmholtz, Graham Wallas and Jacques Hadamard have unravelled the creative process with precision but I am not even going there. Those studies were different in scope but if you have taken the pains to study them, the way some of today’s writers describe the process would appear shallow, if not flippant. And frankly, I didn’t even get why things like developing insights as a team would require a diagram for readers to understand (there is a diagrammatic representation of a three-step framework to writing insights also!).

The one chapter that has some real pearls is the one on building knowledge (Chapter 7: “Building knowledge: The Foundation for Insights”). The Dove case study, the transformation of the brand from a soap to a beauty product, the thinking behind the creative leap, the “insights” — all of it just fell in place. This book would have profited with more such examples. And why include those hypothetical brands and challenges (Real Foods’ entry into food delivery market, for example)?

My Eureka moment was the piece on the transformation of the Nike print advertisement — it drove home the point that clients can often mess up a perfectly good piece of creative. The lessons apply equally to many other aspects of corporate life, but that’s a different story. The Insight to Growing Brands Paddy Rangappa Simon & Schuster 193 pages; ~499