Written by Mark Artus, CEO at creative branding agency 1HQ (which also stands for One Hard Question), this book is a cross between a selective and quite lightweight history of advertising and branding, and a self-promotion for agencies in general, and his own agency in particular.
Artus sets himself the challenge of attempting to “explain how great brands came into being and how companies and individuals can produce great brands today”. For Artus it comes down to making sure that the company in question asks itself One Hard Question, by which he means, the right one, to get the right answer. (This is “The secret behind the world’s biggest brands”)
He doesn’t make any claim that this is original, even quoting Einstein to the effect that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution, but in a sense, the Einstein quotation applies to the book as a whole. The majority of it is a look at successful and unsuccessful brand campaigns, with only the final few pages summing it up in “Brand Strategy: 1HQs Ten Top Tips.” It’s an enjoyable read, and if you don’t know the stories, a reasonably entertaining one, but revelatory insights aren’t its strong point.
Many of the anecdotes (they definitely aren’t case studies) recounted in the main body of the book are familiar to us – everything from Saatchi’s “Labour isn’t working” to David Ogilvy’s campaign for Rolls Royce (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.”) If there’s one problem with the whistle stop tour of advertising and branding in the US and the UK over the last 50 years (other than the absence of any notes, bibliography or attribution), it’s that many of the stories are in the first place familiar, and in the second seem tangential to the book’s stated purpose.
For instance, Artus has a few pages on IBM’s reinvention, which along with General Motors is probably one the most discussed turnaround case studies in business books of the last 20 years. He summarises the arc of IBM’s fortunes, and how CEO Lou Gerstner effected a turnaround. To Artus this came about because IBM asked itself the hard question: “How do we survive in a market that has changed beyond recognition?”
Well that’s one way of putting it, but you could also say he did a SWOT analysis, or PEST (or PESTEL as it now seems to be more commonly termed), or perhaps Gerstner used Mintzberg’s Five Ps for Strategy, or Porter’s Five Competitive Forces analysis, or, since he was ex-McKinsey, probably he had some other method. The danger with trying to boil everything down to one question is that it simplifies the process of getting to the question, then all the strategy that comes after it. And execution is all.
In addition, the connection here with branding is tenuous. Artus says that as a result of the new focus “IBM was able to reinvent itself and communicate the truth about its proposition in a credible way to the marketplace.” That’s undoubtedly true, but it wasn’t marketing that was at the root of IBM’s problems, and it wasn’t marketing that solved them. To be fair, Artus doesn’t claim it was, but once he leaves marketing and advertising behind and moves to strategy, he is competing with some formidable authors and texts.
The tips at the end of the book are worth considering, though inevitably, they aren’t exactly earth-shattering (“No.5 Wherever possible, take a distinctive stance in your market. No.10 When times are tough and budgets tight, focus is essential). In addition, by the time they arrive the book has turned into a direct sell for HQ1.
“What’s needed is a different way of thinking and looking at brands and the markets they’re in. People with different skills, ideas and experience of a wide range of brands and markets, who bring a restless curiously to whatever they look at. By scrutinising the company and the world it operates in from the outside.... we can spotlight the key issues, identify the hard question and, just as important, use our creative skills to ask it in the right way.”
Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves an odd impression. It’s as though you sat down in a bar with a knowledgeable acquaintance who told you all about the real Mad Men of the advertising word, but at the end wanted you to pay for the drinks and a contract for next year’s marketing for your firm.
Tom Otley Written by Mark Artus, CEO at creative branding agency 1HQ (which also stands for One Hard Question), this book is a cross between a selective and quite lightweight history of advertising and branding, and a self-promotion for agencies in general, and his own agency in particular.
Artus sets himself the challenge of attempting to “explain how great brands came into being and how companies and individuals can produce great brands today”. For Artus it comes down to making sure that the company in question asks itself One Hard Question, by which he means, the right one, to get the right answer. (This is “The secret behind the world’s biggest brands”)
He doesn’t make any claim that this is original, even quoting Einstein to the effect that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution, but in a sense, the Einstein quotation applies to the book as a whole. The majority of it is a look at successful and unsuccessful brand campaigns, with only the final few pages summing it up in “Brand Strategy: 1HQs Ten Top Tips.” It’s an enjoyable read, and if you don’t know the stories, a reasonably entertaining one, but revelatory insights aren’t its strong point.
Many of the anecdotes (they definitely aren’t case studies) recounted in the main body of the book are familiar to us – everything from Saatchi’s “Labour isn’t working” to David Ogilvy’s campaign for Rolls Royce (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.”) If there’s one problem with the whistle stop tour of advertising and branding in the US and the UK over the last 50 years (other than the absence of any notes, bibliography or attribution), it’s that many of the stories are in the first place familiar, and in the second seem tangential to the book’s stated purpose.
For instance, Artus has a few pages on IBM’s reinvention, which along with General Motors is probably one the most discussed turnaround case studies in business books of the last 20 years. He summarises the arc of IBM’s fortunes, and how CEO Lou Gerstner effected a turnaround. To Artus this came about because IBM asked itself the hard question: “How do we survive in a market that has changed beyond recognition?”
Well that’s one way of putting it, but you could also say he did a SWOT analysis, or PEST (or PESTEL as it now seems to be more commonly termed), or perhaps Gerstner used Mintzberg’s Five Ps for Strategy, or Porter’s Five Competitive Forces analysis, or, since he was ex-McKinsey, probably he had some other method. The danger with trying to boil everything down to one question is that it simplifies the process of getting to the question, then all the strategy that comes after it. And execution is all.
In addition, the connection here with branding is tenuous. Artus says that as a result of the new focus “IBM was able to reinvent itself and communicate the truth about its proposition in a credible way to the marketplace.” That’s undoubtedly true, but it wasn’t marketing that was at the root of IBM’s problems, and it wasn’t marketing that solved them. To be fair, Artus doesn’t claim it was, but once he leaves marketing and advertising behind and moves to strategy, he is competing with some formidable authors and texts.
The tips at the end of the book are worth considering, though inevitably, they aren’t exactly earth-shattering (“No.5 Wherever possible, take a distinctive stance in your market. No.10 When times are tough and budgets tight, focus is essential). In addition, by the time they arrive the book has turned into a direct sell for HQ1.
“What’s needed is a different way of thinking and looking at brands and the markets they’re in. People with different skills, ideas and experience of a wide range of brands and markets, who bring a restless curiously to whatever they look at. By scrutinising the company and the world it operates in from the outside.... we can spotlight the key issues, identify the hard question and, just as important, use our creative skills to ask it in the right way.”
Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves an odd impression. It’s as though you sat down in a bar with a knowledgeable acquaintance who told you all about the real Mad Men of the advertising word, but at the end wanted you to pay for the drinks and a contract for next year’s marketing for your firm.
Tom Otley 
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