Make interesting companies, not interesting advertising.

A Report and Provocation by Basic Arts, 2017

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Editorial

Editorial

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Editorial

It’s a dilemma anyone who’s worked in advertising or marketing will be familiar with. How do we sell this terrible product?

You try and think of ways to downplay the negatives, accentuate the positives, and if all else fails tap into a bit of pop psychology to persuade the public to give you a try. If you’ve got the power, perhaps you pull a few strings, muscle your way into the right retailers, undermine your market with the right promotions, and make it at the very least easy to buy your product, if not exactly exciting.

And ultimately this stuff works. At least, it works if you have money. Big money. And that’s why this “brute force” approach is the technique of choice for the big boys; the conglomerates, the big groups, the “blue-chips”.

So, good for them. And good for their agencies too. Selling these kinds of products isn’t only lucrative, it’s fun. It takes real creativity to sell something that can’t sell itself, take it from me. The truth is that as an advertising guy, if the brand you’re working with is genuinely worthwhile,

creating campaigns for it becomes quite boring. The agency gets relegated from being at the forefront of the brand’s creativity to simply being a message boy - telling the public about something great that they had nothing to do with.

Adding insult to injury, these great brands don’t spend much money either. That’s because communication no longer costs money - at least, not if the information is interesting. If a brand is remarkable, and operates in a coherent, consistent, and compelling manner, people will hear about it. The connected economy will make sure of it. News stories, reviews, recommendations, shares, and just general conversation will carry its message for it, bypassing the torrent of paid-for media to build something real. Something organic. Even something iconic.

This is the new school of brands. Independent, purposeful, unique, and blazing a new path. One where the focus of creativity in business has shifted: away from ads, and to the businesses themselves. This is what Basic Arts, and the community we’re building, believes in. That interesting companies beat interesting advertising every single time, and that unlike great advertising this approach is readily available to everyone.

In this report, you’ll hear from research that suggests the general public believe in this approach too. They get what great brands look like, because they use them every day blazing a different path.

So, if you’re an independent business, a business who cares about what you do, and is motivated by creating value and stimulating change, then now is your time. We hope that you’ll be able to join us, and the visionary brands that have gone before us, in showing how business can be done better.

Alex SmithFounder of Basic Artsalex@basicarts.org

It takes real creativity to sell something that

can’t sell itself.

The focus of creativity in business has shifted.

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Contents

Contents6

The New Wave: A look at how business is changing from the inside out

Three questions

14How can we control the message when

we’re not controlling the information

17How should we organise our marketing departments?

20

How do we bring the whole company with us?

23 A view from Mark Constantine OBE, the founder of Lush

26 Contact

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The New

Wave

The New Wave: A look at how business

is changing from the inside out.

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The New

Wave

This report, at its core, isn’t about advertising. It’s actually about how to build a great business - something which just so happens to be a far more effective marketing technique these days than any campaign an agency could dream up. The fact that it also involves having happier employees and making a greater impact on the world? That’s just a bonus.

However in spite of this not being all about advertising, if we want to understand what’s going on, advertising is where we should begin - because this is the battlefield where brands have traditionally defined who they are; what they’re all about.

It’s now common knowledge that advertising is in trouble. As brands have started to lose control of their message and transparency has increased, the public have begun to appreciate the gap between the stories they tell and the humdrum reality of the businesses that lurks beneath.

Incredibly, there is now a correlation between large advertising spends and losing market share. For instance in the United States last year all of the top ten biggest advertisers in FMCG lost share, as did four out of the top five biggest spenders in the automotive industry.

Now, whilst it not might be as effective as it once was, there’s no way that advertising actually damages a brand. If you’ve got the money, then by all means spend it - there are still big wins to be had with a smash campaign. So what’s going on here?

What those brands’ spending habits reveal is something deeper than simply liking advertising. It reveals a way of doing business that believes success can be bought, which is now losing out to something fresher; something more real.

To identify what that is, all we need to do is look to the brands who are bucking the trend. The ones who don’t attract cynicism or indifference, but who have captured the zeitgeist. The ones who are loved and talked about by even today’s jaded public. From the inspirational usual suspects, such as Red Bull, to transformative newcomers like Patagonia, some brands seem immune to cynicism.

Typically, we tend to dismiss them as outliers; products of visionary leaders, outlandish creativity, or just dumb luck. We excuse ourselves for not reaching their heights. It’s alright for them: they’re ‘cool’, we’re not.

But what if the thing seperating these brands isn’t actually ‘coolness’? What if it isn’t something subjective like creativity? What if it’s actually something quite technical – something as mechanical and accessible as moving your ad spend from, say, TV to radio?

There is, in fact, a common thread of behaviour running through the best modern brands, as obvious as it is rare: the “advertising” concepts they create don’t exist only in external campaigns; they exist in internal makeup of their actual businesses.

Rather than isolating brand strategy and creativity to the marketing department, they extend it across everything they do. They use the kind of thinking normally reserved for advertising to design their distribution models, HR policies, product lines and everything else besides.

Take Bubblekid, a hair salon in Amsterdam with the proposition: “In creation we trust”. The idea is that its stylists are so creative that you should give yourself over to them to do as they will. The proposition itself is not groundbreaking, but the delivery is.

It is now common knowledge that

advertising is in trouble.

Some brands seem immune to cynicism.

8

The New

Wave

Bubblekid asked: “Is the way we operate, the way we actually are, in accordance with this ideal, or is it just an empty piece of posturing slapped onto a generic salon?”

Its response? Removing all mirrors from its premises. If you go for a haircut at Bubblekid, you simply sit opposite another client, and give control over to the stylist, only ever seeing the finished product.By doing this, Bubblekid made its brand and business synonymous, in effect rendering the concept of a “brand-building campaign” redundant.

Or take Google. The target audience it needs to impress are marketers. Safe to say it has done a great job. Most in our industry now view Google as the world’s most progressive and intelligent company, but it never launched a campaign to make us feel this way. The primary brand builder for this image was its HR policies.

Google’s perks are now almost folkloric, inspiring even a Hollywood movie (The Internship), and have done more to shape brand perceptions than any other single act in its canon.

Google, like Bubblekid, demonstrated that, as far as they’re concerned, brand-building is not an exercise of creating interesting campaigns that rub off on the company, but building an interesting company full stop. The brand then follows naturally and authentically, and transparency becomes a weapon rather than a threat.

So effective is this approach that there are a growing number of brands who are actively making a point of spending nothing on advertising at all. Monster are one such example, who have now managed to overtake even Red Bull (no slouch themselves in this area) to become the number one energy drink in the United States. Lush Cosmetics are

another; their “no advertising” approach has led them to be named the most admired brand in the UK - ironic, given that advertising is precisely the tool most brands use to build admiration in the first place.

This new world, and the example set by pioneers such as those mentioned above, presents an amazing opportunity for smaller independent brands, since no longer is media spend the primary factor determining impact. Slowly, the big players are starting to wake up to this fact. But by the time they do, they could already be tasting dust.

Want to become one of these brands?

At Basic Arts we have identified the process that allows any business to start acting like this. To get the lowdown - totally free of charge - email us at contact@basicarts.org, and we’ll fill you in!

There are a growing number of brands

who are actively making a point of

spending nothing on advertising at all.

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What do norm

al people think?

What do normal people think?

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What do norm

al people think?

It’s always a good idea when entrenched in a particular industry to gather opinions from the outside world. It’s great to throw around theory, but we wanted to make sure it could stand up to the ultimate cynicism - that of the British public.

Here’s what they think about the way that brands should be advertising to them.

1. Messages that the brand has created itself matter the least

We’re used to the idea that word of mouth is the best form of recommendation, but we tend to underestimate just how many different forms of independent information people use when learning about brands. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not friends who are the primary drivers of opinion, but actually independent third parties.

Which of these most influences

your opinions on brands?

This means it’s crucial that you’re giving these third parties something to write about - and that’s pretty unlikely to be your advertising.

2. Great brands don’t need to advertise

Thanks largely to the fact that they have ample sources of information with which to inform their purchase decisions, the vast majority of people now believe that great brands shouldn’t need to advertise at all. Instead they have faith that, to quote one, the internet will allow “the cream to rise to the top”.

Considering that they voted a non-advertising brand - Lush - their most admired, this opinion appears to ring true.

“I don’t think great brands need to advertise” 95%

0 10 20 30 40 50

45% Reviews, journalism, and other impartial coverage

29%

10% Advertising messages from the brand

What friends tell me about it

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What do norm

al people think?

3. Advertising isn’t bad, it’s just a bonus

In spite of appearing to pour cold water on advertising in general, people felt there was no correlation between the volume of advertising a brand does, and how much they liked it. There is no suggestion whatsoever that advertising is “damaging” - at worst it’s just ineffective.

The brands I admire tend to do…

Ultimately advertising remains an effective communication channel if done well, and so if you have the budget available, and underneath it all you’re a worthwhile business with something exciting to say, then why not?

4. If you’re creating advertising, make it a window into the businessPeople now draw a distinction between advertising that simply informs them of something impressive about a product or company, versus advertising that tries to persuade them of something by

using an alternative device (say a story, a psychological trick, cute kittens, etc.). They showed a strong claimed preference for the former “factual” style.

I would be more inclined to buy from a business who advertise to me with straight facts

The best form of advertising is a business being transparent

and letting me make my own mind up

In spite of these results, we know that people are prone to overstate how rational their decisions are, rather than emotional. The learning here is not create dry, fact-based advertising, but to imbue the facts of your business with creativity and emotion so that you then have the best of both worlds.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

55% Agree

7% Disagree

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

53% Agree

8% Disagree

0 10 20 30 40 50

18% More advertising than average

18%

41% About the same advertising as average

Less advertising than average

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What do norm

al people think?

5. Admiration is driven by factThere is a strong appetite from people to know more about the brands they buy into; about their processes, their people, their values, and so on. This is because this deeper knowledge is now the point that carries the most weight in their preferences.

Thinking about a brand you admire, what made you admire them?

The brands I admire are typically more transparent than others

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

58% Agree

6% Disagree

6. Most brands can’t stand up to such scrutiny

As we’ve already explored, this new school of brands who are creative and interesting inside and out remain quite rare. On this the public concur, damning the majority of businesses as simply not worth their time.

Whilst we need to take people’s claims about what motivates them with a pinch of salt (just as we might struggle to correctly analyse our own industries, people too can struggle to correctly analyse themselves), a clear trend emerges that supports the creation of interesting companies first, and interesting advertising second.

Let’s explore some of the challenges presented by this new world…

69% Agree

69% Agree

79% Agree

The majority of brands bring no unique value to the word

Most brands don’t need to exist

Most brands are pointless

0 10 20 30 40 50

42% What I know about what they do

20% 16% Their advertising campaigns

The opinions of people I know

7% Other

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Three questions

Three questions

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1. How

can we control the message w

hen we’re not controlling the information?

1. How can we control the

message when we’re not controlling the

information?

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1. How

can we control the message w

hen we’re not controlling the information?

If there’s one central fact about this new media world we’re living in which brands are yet to get used to, it is this: there’s a lot of information sloshing around out there about you which you do not control. It’s a slightly simplistic example, but if you punch “Coca-Cola” into Google, you get 160 million results back. What proportion of those results are “Coke approved” pieces of content, like their website, Facebook page, ads on YouTube and so on? Less than 1%? Less than 0.1%? Less than 0.00001%? Let’s be (monumentally) charitable and say 1%. Well, that still leaves an awful lot of unofficial Coke chatter going on out there, and every ounce of it is a form of marketing (or in many cases “anti-marketing”) for that brand.

Bearing that in mind, is there any way Coke - or whoever - can make all that diffused information in any way consistent? If we were to gather it all up, step back, and look at the trends within it, would the general flow of conversation be “on message”? Would it, in a rough kind of way, carry the same themes that the brand would put out in its advertising messages? Or would it be a jumbled mess?

For most brands, including Coke, it’s safe to say that there’s probably very little correlation between the content and vibes of the unofficial information flow and the official one. If you’re lucky, the unofficial content is a random mixed bag of things - some good, some bad - which add up to not much of great import at all. If you’re unlucky, the unofficial content actually does have consistency and a collection of common threads, but they’re entirely at odds with your official brand message. This is the kind of dilemma that typical “brand villains” such as McDonalds and BT have had to contend with in the internet age. For a select few brands however, a positive consistency has been achieved - where their official brand line and the unofficial brand chatter are basically in agreement, creating an incredible multiplier effect for their marketing efforts.

A typical example would be the eco-conscious outdoor clothing brand Patagonia. Let’s take a look at a collection of tweets from within a 10-minute period:

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1. How

can we control the message w

hen we’re not controlling the information?

As you can see not every single one is necessarily gushingly positive about the brand - this would be more or less impossible - however they all do add up to give a pretty consistent picture of the business, and one which pretty much harmonises with their core message. Clearly, they are “ethical”, innovative, and a bit zeitgeisty and hipster - pretty much the same impression I would get about them if I looked on their website. With this kind of consistency, it’s little wonder they don’t go overboard on advertising, because why bother? The gist of the message is getting out there anyway.

We would see a similar phenomenon with Red Bull. There’s plenty of chatter going out there about Red Bull, and in general it has a pretty consistent thread running through it which broadly supports their “gives you wings” message. Now of course, generally speaking people don’t actually use that phrase, but instead they imply it, or something close to it, in their own way - which is kind of better when you think about it.

So what’s their secret? How do they make impartial information carry essentially the same message that they’d happily pay to put out in their advertising? The key is coherence. When people talk about a brand, they don’t just talk about it completely at random - they talk about something specific. It might be their product experience, a customer service issue, some initiative the brand’s just undertaken, the job that their cousin’s just gotten there, whatever. It might even be the advertising. Whatever it is, the nature of what they’re talking about will influence the way they talk

about it. Brands like Patagonia and Red Bull ensure that everything they do is creatively aligned with their big picture purpose, meaning that whenever people talk about them, they can’t help but communicate their message too - even if that wasn’t their intention. Average businesses silo their brand into their “marketing activities”, and leave the rest of the business - the important bits - neutral. They don’t think about the

brand implications of distribution, office spaces, customer services, and all the other fundamentals that make businesses work. This means that none of these things are doing a marketing job for them, and therefore neither is the content that they’re constantly creating in the hands of real people.

To be fully coherent, you need to be thinking things like “hmm, if we claim to be all about [x], then what kind of office chairs should we buy?”. Only by operating with that mindset can you start to create a truly coherent (and remarkable) business, and only then will your unofficial information start to work for you. Without this holistic thinking, you are leaving yourselves at the mercy of chaos - which at best is wasteful, and at worst fatal.

This is coherence - the application of “brand thinking”

to every single thing that they do.

35

2. How should we

organise our marketing departments?

2. How

shall we organise our marketing departm

ents?

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2. How

shall we organise our marketing departm

ents?

had a huge amount of money to support it. Unsupported pieces of information - say the type produced by a normal person - quickly dissolved away. The chances are that if you won the promotion wars then you won the game full stop, even if your business was technically inferior to a competitor. After all, who’s going to buy them if nobody’s heard of them? Thus, marketing adopted a very outwards-facing mindset, turning their back on the real business, seeing it as almost incidental as to whether it became successful or not. This created countless farcical situations where brand teams and agencies would agonise over how to position and sell a substandard product, with nobody ever thinking to say “hey, what if we just changed the product?”.

Contributing to this superficial approach was the very idea of the “marketing department” in the first place. Most businesses are divided into different departments each with a different responsibility; HR, sales, manufacturing, marketing, etc. These departments, for obvious reason of symmetry, are generally all of equal seniority, lined up side by side, sitting perhaps underneath a board of directors. Generally, this makes pretty good sense - but not for marketing. If we think of marketing not as a department, but as a discipline, we can see that it is the body of thought which essentially defines what a business’s role in the world is. Why is it here? What’s the point of all this? If you answer that question well, and then deliver on it across all the Ps (however many of them there might be), then you’ll have a great business on your hands, one which is doing great marketing every day just through its very existence. This means that rather than being a department that sits alongside other departments, marketing should instead be an umbrella approach which sits over them - ensuring that everything is done in a joined- up and on-message kind of way.

Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best. You might be familiar with the concept of the four, or latterly seven “Ps” that comprise marketing - product, price, promotion, place, process, people, physical environment. Whilst this list has been around for a long time (the original variation cropping up around 1960), it actually represents a far more cutting edge approach to marketing than that seen in the vast majority of contemporary businesses.

Marketing today has come to be almost synonymous with “advertising”, or to put it another way “Promotion” in the list of Ps. Few are the marketing departments which are actually defining business processes, designing the products, managing the people, building the physical environments, etc., however today as we have seen it is this holistic, “total business”, approach to marketing which is essential to build a coherent and inspiring brand.

It makes sense up to a point that marketing got trapped in this narrow definition, since twenty years ago the primary battleground where brands fought was in paid media. The only way information could really travel or get purchase with the public psyche was if it

Marketing should be an umbrella approach that sits over other departments.

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2. How

shall we organise our marketing departm

ents?

It is for this reason that many of the new breed of inspiring brands - whose marketing everyone admires so much - actually have no marketing department at all. They know that to have a dedicated marketing department sends the message that actually fulfilling the business’s place in the world isn’t everyone’s responsibility - a bad move in today’s world. They might have a publicity department (which is essentially what most marketing departments are these days), but the responsibility for defining what the brand stands for sits at a much higher level, and is activated by everyone in their own field.

So what’s the best way to place marketing internally? Whilst the traditional department model is clearly not ideal, there’s not necessarily any one “best” alternative - you just need to make sure

that everybody is involved. If you already have a marketing department, you might simply repurpose them so they sit across all your other departments, helping to keep them all aligned and operating creatively. Or you might re-label them something more appropriate like the “promotion” or “publicity” department, and instead assign

someone in every other department the role of “brand thinker” whose responsibility it is to ensure that their department acts in an distinctive way. Or you might try something completely different. Many businesses now are adding the role of “creative director” to their organisations as they start to take creative control back from their externally-focussed agencies.

Ultimately the answer to the question will depend largely on what the current status quo is in your organisation, and how you can most smoothly manage the transition. So long as you find a way to bring that kind of thinking to every corner of your business, you’ll immediately be far ahead of the competition.

You just need to make sure that

everybody is involved.

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3. How

do we bring the whole com

pany with us?

3. How do we bring

the whole company with us?

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3. How

do we bring the whole com

pany with us?

A slightly cheesy, but nonetheless good example of this same principle was at play with the oft-quoted anecdote about what happened when President Kennedy visited the HQ for the Apollo

missions. Coming across a janitor sweeping a hallway, he asked “what is it that you do here?”, to which the janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon”. You can bet that this janitor did his “janiting” in a slightly different way than a janitor in a regular office building. He certainly did it with

more pride and more focus. The combined effect of his mindset and that of all the other workers doing menial jobs on that project resulted in something pretty impressive.

How? How can we get all our employees, regardless of their role, to be as in-tune and engaged as those at Dogs Trust or the Apollo missions? The crucial question here comes in identifying what the true output of the business is, what exactly the point of it all is.

We’ve established so far that to become the kind of inspiring business that wins friends and fans in the modern world is a team effort. We can’t just bring in a hot shot marketing director and expect them to “do” some great marketing for us - instead we have to make everyone marketers, all working creatively towards a perfectly defined and consistent brand purpose.

However, this isn’t easy. Most of the people in your business weren’t hired to think this way. Chances are they are simply looking at their given task within the machine, and rarely raise their head to ask what the point of all this is. If that’s the case, they will perform their given task in a completely generic way (in just the same manner as they did with their former employer probably), and will, with the help of all their colleagues, end up creating a vague and generic business.

Not all businesses have this problem of course. It goes without saying that the interesting companies we’ve been discussing in this report have employees who really believe in what they’re doing. Rather that focusing on them by way of example however, we can look to something a bit more obvious - charities.

Generally speaking, everyone who works for a charity is passionate about whatever that charity’s cause is. If you work for, say, Dogs Trust, it’s pretty likely that you like dogs. And this doesn’t just go for the dog-handling roles in that organisation - the secretaries, the accountants, and all other generic roles will probably share that passion. This is because the end result of what this body does - helping dogs - is something that certain people care about, and therefore the business is likely to attract these certain people as employees. This shared passion results in charities having much more coherence and harmony than your average business. It also changes the way the employees actually carry out their jobs, because they are all able to link their actions to that bigger purpose.

“I’m helping put a man on

the moon”.

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3. How

do we bring the whole com

pany with us?

Naturally this can’t be profit. Well, it can be profit, but if that’s the case then you have to accept that this goal will be shared by all your employees, which will result in them orienting themselves around their personal renumeration. If the business is here for cash, then so are its employees. If the business is here for dogs, then the employees will be motivated by that instead. Thus, it’s best to define profit as being the reward for a job well done - not the job in and of itself.

The job needs to be defined as the worthwhile thing that the business is on this earth to achieve. A good way of articulating this is the business “purpose”.

The term “purpose” has come to be rather distorted in recent years, since it has become synonymous with “worthiness” rather than being simply worthwhile. This definition is dangerous as it has shut many businesses out, leaving them thinking that they aren’t a purposeful kind of operation. However, to be a purposeful business you don’t need to be solving the world’s energy problems, or feeding the homeless - you just need to be achieving something which, if it wasn’t for you, would be missed.

Red Bull is an extremely purposeful business, but there is nothing worthy about it. People make sacrifices to work for Red Bull in the same way as they would with a charity. At a push, a purpose can even be negative and still work - at least in terms of difference and coherency. This was shown by the brand Death Cigarettes, who promised “we kill you faster” before they were put out of business in a legal dispute. Of course, those involved with the brand weren’t motivated by killing people; instead they were joined by the

“punk rock” spirit that such a claim implied. With such clarity of purpose, an identity is created, one which runs through employees as well as the brand itself.

Most businesses are made of people who bounce from company to company, even industry to industry, with only things like advancement, ease of commute, and a bit of extra cash as their driver. They are passive

and reactive, letting circumstances dictate their decisions, rather than any genuine preference. It’s no coincidence that this attitude is mirrored by consumers. If you can’t get the people who work for you to be motivated by what you do, then with the public you’ve got no chance.

Ultimately, they’re all people, they all have the same desires, and thus contrary to conventional marketing wisdom all their desires can be answered in the same way - by being a company which is doing something great.

If you can’t get the people who

work for you to be motivated by what

you do, then with the public you’ve

got no chance.

47

A view from

Mark C

onstantine

“We want to restore people’s faith in human nature”.

A view from Mark Constantine OBE, founder of Lush

24

A view from

Mark C

onstantine

Constantine’s self-identification as “small” might raise some eyebrows, with the business now turning over in excess of £300million per year through its 940 shops in 50 countries - however when playing the advertising game you’re competing for attention with with businesses like Apple who are 1,000 times that size, or even in the case of one of Lush’s competitors L’Oreal, 100 times the size. For Lush, this marks advertising out as a billionaire’s playground where anyone other than the global titans should tread carefully.

Nonetheless they are, by anyone else’s standards, an extremely successful business. How then have Lush achieved this status if not through advertising spend?

“You need to walk your talk and sustain the message you put out there”, summarises Constantine, highlighting the internal behaviours which have made Lush a highly distinctive presence in cosmetics - a market where differentiation is normally hard to discern, and consumers find most brands to be interchangeable.

This distinctiveness runs like a seam through the business, from core beliefs, to behaviours, to the end product itself. “We want to restore people’s faith in human nature, which is particularly pertinent at the moment” he explained, a commitment which has seen the brand engage in many high-profile ethical battles from the reasonably uncontroversial (like animal testing), to more stretching issues such as Brexit, which has prompted the brand to start moving some of its employees from their Poole HQ to Dusseldorf in response. Constantine sees having strong opinions and beliefs as a key ingredient in staying top of the news agenda without advertising spend - “we invariably have an opinion on the topics journalists want to cover” - a stance which would horrify the average corporate press office.

In conducting this research, we asked people to tell us which brands they really admire. Naturally, we saw a decent presence from the usual suspects such as Apple, Google, and Nike: businesses which all adopt the interesting company philosophy, but which are so big that they are difficult to use as a point of comparison. The whole point of this new world of brand building is that you don’t need a billion dollars to play with to make an impact, and that’s why we were delighted to see an independent UK-based business coming out on top - Lush Cosmetics.

It’s this underdog status which has driven Lush’s “no advertising” approach according to their founder and managing director Mark Constantine, who we caught up with following the results. “If you are small, you are just wasting money” he said of advertising. “We tried it a few years ago, and it

wasn’t very effective. It’s not effective now and it’s very expensive. Great if you have a billion pounds to spend. The big boys do well as they blanket everything”.

“We invariably have an opinion on the topics journalists want to cover”.

“You need to walk your talk

and sustain the message you put

out there”.

25

A view from

Mark C

onstantine

Crucially however this sense of purpose doesn’t end - as it does for many brands - as words on a page or statements to the press. It carries over into the physical way they operate, which departs from standard industry practise in many different ways. “We are the only reasonably sized cosmetics company where the formulators are also the bosses” he noted, a fact which creates an experimental, “home-made” feel in the brand. This can be seen not only in their

live streams from the “kitchen” (where they cook up highly limited and original creations which are sold briefly online never to be seen again) but also in every tiny moment both online and in store. “Of course, it must be the same message throughout the business”, he notes. “Having the formulators at the top

of Lush allows it to go through everybody… Each cosmetic brand has its own strengths and weaknesses. L’Occitane are great at packaging as they were packaging guys beforehand. The Body Shop do discount marketing very well. Everyone has different styles. At Lush we formulate, work like hell on the quality of the ingredients and focus on making the finished product as effective as possible. We want to serve our customers”.

The end result of these strong beliefs and these unusual business practices is a product which is fundamentally different. Anyone who’s ever stepped into a Lush store will have been struck by the remarkable array of colours, textures, and shapes surrounding them, as well as the unconventional display style which has more in common with a market fruit stall than a high-end cosmetics array - appropriate perhaps, as their core offer is “fresh, handmade cosmetics”. Crucially these superficial differences came as an organic result of the more high level thinking that came before them - not simply the jazzy creations of a designer with a good eye.

Ultimately what this allows, as Constantine sees it, is the ability to communicate to the world with complete honesty. “The more honest you are, the more effective [your communications] will be”.

“Transparency is great if you’ve been telling the truth, but not so good if you’ve been lying… companies who have been using advertising to say they are something they’re not were never in control of the brand [even in the past]”.

It is only brands who see total honesty as an opportunity, rather than a threat, who are equipped to thrive in a world where other people are guiding the conversation. Few businesses, when being honest with just themselves (let alone the public), can say that this applies to them. Lush show us that it is as good a measure of success as any - and lets you know if there’s more coming your way.

“Transparency is great if you’ve been

telling the truth, but not so good if

you’ve been lying…”

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Join usIf you believe in the ideas discussed here, and want to help build a future where great businesses earn their success, then let us know.

If you’re a brand we can help you adopt these techniques for yourself, creating something your customers and employees will love

If you’re an agency we can help you bring some of this thinking to your existing clients, and expand what you do into a broader,

more holistic space

And if you’re simply an individual who finds it interesting we’d love to hear from you, and keep you up to date with the latest

developments and ways to get involved

Second Home, 68 Hanbury Street London E1 5JLP: 0203 734 0091

E: contact@basicarts.org