"Christopher Owens" - AP Conference Post

The first breakout session I attended on Monday was "Planning for Conversations: Let's Get People Talking" by Christopher Owens of The Richards Group.

Conversation is "intimate, real, brings you in like a part of the family." When people start to talk, they share. The definition of a conversation is "a workable balance of contribution from the partners in a conversation." Give them as much as listen to them (an exchange of social currency).

People aren't just sitting there waiting for our message. In fact, they are completely wired to the point of saturation - it's difficult to fit much more in to their lives. But people trust people, so word of mouth can break through.

A conversation can be started through points of comfort or points of tension. People talk about points of comfort because they are familiar, but points of tension cause a spark of debate. Tension will be more engaging but it can be more polarizing. Owens suggested not to run from tension, but to use it and shape it.

At what levels can a conversation be started? All levels - company, product, campaign. The brand ideas need to be a part of the actual product, and if they aren't there then work on getting them into the product. Some products are inherently conversational such as Dyson where design breaks them away from the rest of the vacuum category.

Guide the conversation about a company or product to an endpoint. Sometimes an idea of what to talk about materializes but you don't know where the conversation will go. It's important to have an idea of what you want to get out of the conversation instead of just starting one.

Some examples: Freytag Sub-Zero

• The idea was to take the current conversation of ego preservation to a conversation and message of food preservation for the brand - the brand had become too flashy and without purpose
• Owens was able to brief the designers of the product to make changes at the base level and also briefed cartoonists at The New Yorker to help utilize an entirely new medium - the changes had to come at every level
• The attributes of the product were designed with the conversation in mind to create a product that had inherent talkability
• A research method to determine what the product should include, from a consumer standpoint, involved having women stock their refrigerator - interact with it, use it - and then place red and green lights on product attributes that they would remove/dislike or would keep/like, respectively. The points of tension came out when results showed that a certain area of the fridge received many red and green lights - some people liked the attribute, others hated it
• One example of a polarizing attribute was the refrigerator door - it was too shallow to fit a gallon of milk. This attribute was specifically designed in that way because the door is the least fresh place to put the milk and so Freytag doesn't allow it. Consumers learned something about the brand and something about freshness while Freytag was willing to confront consumers' perceptions and communicate that to the very deepest level they believe in the values of their brand to the extent that the product mirrors that image

Patron

• Quick quote - "Patron flows like water down here in Miami." ;
• Patron competes as an ultra-premium spirit instead of just a tequila. Tequila is something that slams you, you don't sip and enjoy it, but by positioning it as a spirit it disrupts the category. This is an inherently conversational category so the work that was created had to be conversational
• The research - Went to bars to figure out what the current conversations were - what was polarizing? Talked to magazine editors to see what a specific edition was about - were there any debates?
• The work - "Some perfection is debatable, Patron is simply perfect" Patron is the one constant while two boxes represent two opposing sides of an argument. For example, Gas/Charcoal, Football/Futbol, Pacific/Atlantic. Some of the power of the campaign is to let people come up with a third option or an entire debate. The idea is to get them talking about it
• A nod to conversation is even in the background noise to their website: http://www.patronspirits.com/en.phtml

Planners help catalyze these conversations and the idea is that conversation should be driving all areas. Listen to current conversations in bars, airplanes, restaurants, twitter feeds and ask why they are talking about that and how it can be used. Incorporating conversation into advertising requires agility and speed in getting executions out the door quickly but can certainly cause immediate buzz.

As part of the Q+A, this thought emerged: "We should be consumer-informed, not consumer-led." Planners make recommendations based on the information we gather. Sometimes consumer info helps validate what we thought and sometimes it makes us think differently.

I enjoyed this session immensely and thought that these were some actionable recommendations on how to start conversations.