Mohammed Iqbal, Senior Planning Partner @ Ogilvy & Mather in Bangalore, wrote a white paper titled "The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication," where he nails the concept of multi-message branding. If you haven't read it, check out the manifesto version here. Even won him a top award from WPP, kudos! Also, I have to thank the guys and gals over at InfluxInsights for bring the doc to my attention.

The distilled message is:

"One conundrum facing contemporary advertising practitioners is: can simplicity in communication yield complexity of brand character in perception? Trying to communicate a complex message is a task that involves great risk and great expense. Great risk because the message may not reach the audience at all. Or even if it does, it might not be understood. Expensive because a complex message requires more media bandwidth—and many many more repetitions to get across.

A better model to communicate complexity is to let the consumers assemble it for themselves at their end. Just ensure that they have all the essential ingredients—a long tail of diverse yet simple and easy to communicate brand messages—and they will eventually put together a complex, layered and nuanced understanding of the brand.

One of the most surprising and desirable side effects of long tail brand communication is that by merely contemplating more than one message at the same time, your consumer is assembling the complexity you sought to communicate, [emphasis mine] but wisely didn’t. "

Advertising has evolved from an OR based world to an AND based world.

A brand can now stand for A and B and C. Let me explain.

To maintain a level of consistency there needs to be a common thread between the messages at a very high level. Underneath this idea, you have various communities that are self-selecting and self-filtering; meaning that the people who are active members of the community are there to connect with other passionistas and if they don't fit in or are inauthentic the community will filter them out. Following on that assumption you can target Message A to a community of car buffs, Message B to mothers with babies, and Message C to coffee lovers. How can you do this without diluting the message? Lets consider various scenarios:

1. Single Message: Mary is a car buff and receives Message A which resonates with her and she becomes interested in the product.

2. Multiple Compounding Messages: Mary resides in all three communities so she sits at the middle of the ven diagram above and is hit with all 3 messages. Is Mary confused? Certainly not, the messages will compound as she is passionate about all three communities and each message hits home in a different manner. In this case 3 messages are hugely more powerful than one.

3. Multiple Overriding Messages:Mary is a coffee lover and receives Message A, which again resonates with her, but this time she also stumbles upon a coffee lovers website and is exposed to Message C. Again, she is not confused and is on her way, with Message A still resonating. Why? Because of the impact differential, Message A was targeted to hit her passion point so made a big impact, where as Message C had very little impact and thus, Message A overrides Message C.

The key here is that the consumer is aware that different messages are being communicated, and it is not a single hybrid message build upon various long tail attributes as is suggested in the white paper.

This is an idea I have been developing for quite a while and I have received varying degrees of push back from people entrenched in the ad industry, but remember you can never predict the future based on the past, especially in disruptive times. Thus, what worked in the past rarely works when applied to a new, different environment. I highly recommend Nassim Nicholas Talebs's Fooled by Randomness for a new way of thinking about information induction and how to get out of one's own way when thinking about the future.

Finally, a quick thank you to Russell Davies for the pic at the top of the post.