Growth happens when you get noticed

Nothing happens until people see your message. You won’t sell, you can’t influence anybody, and you won’t grow.

The Mini Legends advertising campaign for National Australia Bank, featuring junior lookalikes of players like Max Gawn has been hugely popular. PIC: Christopher Tovo

Something big happened to Australia recently. Our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, swept clear the French deal to build some submarines and replaced it with a new AUKUS alliance. There will be continuing debate about whether this was the right or wrong decision and whether the harm to our relationship with France was worth it. What is undeniable is that the world sat up and took notice.

By taking a position and changing the game, Australia has grown in the eyes of the world.

In business, as in politics, to get growth you first have to get noticed – and be brave to change the game. In creative businesses, this is a daily preoccupation. Nothing happens until people see your message. You won’t sell, you can’t influence anybody, and you won’t grow.

Jacqueline Witts is head of planning at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne

It’s natural for business and brand leaders to embrace the principles of classical economics to generate growth, particularly in this current environment. After all, these are the foundations of how most businesses are built and managed. But looking only at the rationale to work out what drives people gives you an incomplete picture.

These days, in such a busy and crazy world, you need both behavioural and economic understanding. People are inconvenient. They often don’t respond the way you expect them to. They say one thing and do another and you can’t always reach and motivate people with a sound, logical message. We are Australians, after all!

Using logical, rational information about a market and its customers, will often lead to strategic decisions based on the same information every competitor has. We often hear terms like “best practice” or “permission to play” as reasons to follow the category rules. The trouble is this leads to homogeneity.

Instead, we must take the time to talk to people, to observe their behaviour, ask them why they do things and listen as intently to what they’re not saying as what they are.

Getting noticed is hard when there’s so much in the modern world that demands our attention. You can buy as much media as you want but if your message is bland, it will be quickly forgotten.

Clever, creative ideas do the work to get a brand noticed.

The Mini Legends advertising campaign for National Australia Bank (NAB) is a good example.

The ad campaign we created for NAB features young kids playing the part of top AFL stars and has been hugely popular and widely noticed for the past five years. In the first year of Mini Legends, awareness shot up by 45 per cent, demonstrating the campaign got noticed, even beyond diehard footy fans.

It’s something you don’t expect to see from a bank. It sweeps away logical perceptions of what a bank is and changes the game.

The NAB Mini Legends has now become part of culture. Importantly, they belong to NAB – 90 per cent of people who had seen the campaign in 2020 were able to correctly brand it.

This wasn’t achieved by spending more or putting more logos on a sporting ground. It came from giving the advertising agency the freedom to do the unexpected. That’s how you get people to sit up and take notice.

As we head into 2022, the people you want to notice your advertising are going to have a fresh range of distractions. Maybe they’ll be considering a career change given the predictions of “The Great Resignation”, or perhaps they’ll be distracted by politics in an election year, still arguing the rights and wrongs of Australia’s submarine decision.

But with locked up customers released to spend their money and enjoy their lives, now is the time to look at the world differently, to change the game and make your brand one of the fortunate ones that gets noticed. And grows.

Jacqueline Witts is head of planning at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne and a member of the Clemenger BBDO Melbourne executive board.