M&C Saatchi

Kate Bristow, Chief Strategy Officer, M&C Saatchi

http://www.mcsaatchi.com/

Kate Bristow, Chief Strategy Officer at M&C Saatchi, spoke to the MHB class about developing successful marketing campaigns on Friday, February 4^th. The title of her talk was “Brutally Simple Advertising.” Bristow broke down the phases of her work into four questions: Where are we?, Where do we want to be?, How do we get there?, and Are we getting there?.  She stressed that one should explore these questions in a circular, rather than linear pattern, constantly testing the water and returning to a given phase as need be.

While Bristow has worked on campaigns for a range of products and places, she holds fast to the belief that simple branding statements are most effective as they are absorbed faster and retained longer than more complicated ones. To this end, the complex combination of a product’s physical features, perceived benefits, and intangible traits should be distilled down into a simple idea. When working on a marketing campaign for New Zealand for example, Bristow and team merged a series of qualities previous advertising had used to describe New Zealand – including scenic, natural, friendly, vital, raw, and pristine - into one straight-forward concept: “pure”. With the debut of M&C Saatchi’s New Zealand ads -which featured the tagline, “100% pure” - New Zealand climbed from 36 to 8 on World Tourism Rankings’ most visited countries, even before Lord of the Rings was released.

Finally, Bristow emphasized the importance of obtaining insight into both a product and target customer, as well as conducting well-rounded research that examines a wide variety of sources’  – including competitors and “haters” - opinions about a product or service in order to find a fitting brand identity.

Kimberly Goswiller