Account Planning the Energizer Bunny

The Energizer Bunny is an inveterate flaneur. The pink icon has become a cultural touchstone and a metaphor in its own right, with an association connoting long lasting energy. For example, Bob Dole wanted to be the Energizer Bunny of politics.

According to the Associated Press (2008, p 1), the bunny is still going strong after 20 years. AdAge (2005, p 1) reports there is contested parentage over this appealing product demo on rabbit feet. DDB Needham Worldwide used a pink bunny in a commercial for Eveready in the 1988.

In 1989, the battery account was then given to Chiat/Day the noted account planning agency who had done the Macintosh Superbowl Ad (see Goldman, 1995, p 2). Chiat/Day kept the pink bunny but infused it with the rolling might of account planning. They still have the account.


Account Planning
Duncan (see Duncan, 2005, pp 285-6) defines Account Planning as:

“Using research and brand insights to bring a strong customer focus to the planning of marketing communications.”

I worked with Microsoft sales account teams, which have six supporting roles reporting to the Account Manager: 1.) Program Mgmt; 2.) Product Mgmt; 3.) Developer; 4.) Tester; 5.) User Education; and 6). Logistics. The Product Management role was very similar to Account Planner with a responsibility for customer research and for maintaining customer focus by all other roles. The team could then respond to the customer in terms of solutions and not just product.

This is something I think is critical – IMC no longer sells customers magazine ad space at discount, and Microsoft does not sell software products for that matter. We are judged on results so we must have a clear vision for successful solutions. Account Planning is the liaison between the creative power an agency offers and the customer (see Dreniany and Jewler, p 115). Microsoft used different elicitation methods to get the truth out of the consumer than marketing communications, which uses “surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, observation, and projective techniques….”

Account Planning Process
The client is involved up front and in all stages not just as a later stage sounding board (see Goldman, 1995, p 4). The account planner must understand long term goals, policy and business strategies of the client; understand the target market for brand; understand the brand image and reputation with the client’s customers. They must elicit unique insight about client, market or client customers as a basis for the big idea so they can iteratively create the desired future relationship between brand and customer (ibid, p 5) and prepare selling strategy (Duncan, 2005, pp 286-289). They “pollinate across departments” to formulate the big idea from the insights (Goldman, 1995, p 8 and Duncan, 2005, p 291). They coordinate tactical guidelines for the creative and operational groups.

Energizer Bunny Brand Values and Matching Creative Strategy.
The Eveready vice president of marketing tells us the brand values, for the battery product line, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2008, p 1).

"We wanted to focus on what the brand is about, the idea of keep going, never quit, never stop, and the bunny is the ultimate symbol of that perseverance ….”

The Post-Dispatch article goes on about the creative idea behind the ad campaign by TBWA\Chiat\Day

"We used iconic images of everyday people you instantly know have to keep going on and on," Bianchi said. "We want to be the sponsor of those people with that attitude and zest for life and associate that with Energizer," says Carisa Bianchi, account planner.

How Does a Pink Bunny Help?
AdChat (n.d., p 2) lists the symbolism of animals that can be useful for advertisers. They say that the bunny connotes longevity, and good fortune. Longevity is one of the brand values and good fortune is a collateral bennie.

Bear (2009, p 2) tells us about the meaning of the color pink. Pink is charming and used to express playfulness. Additionally, pink is a warm color and they energize us, but being on the lighter side of the warm palette, do not over-rev us. Reinforcing buttresses to complement the energy and longevity from the bunny.

Chiat/Day is the true originator of the Energizer Bunny. They took a physically uninteresting but perfectly adequate symbol from DDB and turned it into the sensitive misfit it has become.

References
AdAge (2005). THE ENERGIZER BUNNY. Retrieved on January 24, 2009 from http://adage.com/century/icon05.html

AdChat (n.d.) Symbolism of Animals. Retrieved on January 24, 2009 from http://www.adchat.net/AnimalSymbolism.htm

AP (11/29/2008). Still going and going: Energizer Bunny enters his 20th year. Retrieved on January 24, 2009 from http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2008-11-29-energizer-bunny_n.htm

Bear, JC (2009). Color Meanings. Retrieved on January 24, 2009 from http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm

Drewniany, B and J Jewler (2008). Creative Strategy in Advertising. Wadsworth

Duncan, T (2005). Principles of Advertising & IMC. McGrawHill/Irwin.

Goldman, D (1995). Origin of the Species. Adweek Western Edition. IMC 615 Week 3 Readings.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Aug 28, 2004). Energizer Bunny wants a charge from $68 million advertising campaign. Retrieved on January 24, 2009 from EBSCOHOST.

Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament

Siegfried Kracauer’s book The Mass Ornament has essays with his observations and analysis of Weimar Germany in the 20s but it also seems relevant to America today. Kracauer is like an Amoriam sage in his narrative analysis, which is not the linear, sequential layout of an argument customary in the U.S. Instead, nuggets of information are dispersed throughout his exposition to be discovered, interpreted and formed together into a relational whole through reflection. In further observance of this tradition, he uses symbolism. The term mass ornament is an example. I apply my own definitions to these symbols in this interpretation of his essay The Mass Ornament from the book of essays by the same name.

In architecture, an ornament is a decorative detail that embellishes a space, and over time it becomes an archaeological marker for a culture. Kracauer extends the concept to embellished social spectacles or enactments and uses these to understand a culture as revealed in its current events. He holds that everyday social ornaments represent aspects of a culture without mediation and are better evidence for understanding its essence than its own pronouncements.

The mass ornament is the term he applies to such capitalist spectacles, capitalism derived as it is from mass industrial production, mass consumption, highly synchronized, interchangeable processes and parts. The outcome of its Ratio, the logic behind its processes, is efficient production, consumption, finance and war.

Kracauer sees a regressive/progressive struggle between nature and reason. Myths represent past reason and the understanding of cultures that have failed, but their myths nevertheless offer insights into how real people should relate to nature. Capitalist Ratio is the logic of our current system of mass production and how it deals with nature.

Although it has been far more successful in some regards than earlier organized interaction with nature, Kracauer maintains it does not satisfy our humanity. Its consideration ends with production. Unlike the other liberal thought leaders of the 20s, Kracauer sees the failing of this Ratio as not enough analysis or reason rather than too much. It does not fully include the humanity of mankind into its reckoning, only efficiency of production and consumption.

According to Kracauer, the mass ornament in modern capitalist culture is “muted nature.” It has no foundation to build a true knowledge base (edification complex) about nature. As such, along with the basic inhumanity of its overwhelming focus on efficient operations, mankind is unfulfilled by capitalist Ratio. To compensate they turn to pop practices, rhythmic gymnastics in his day, yoga or martial arts in ours. These pop practices advance into the void, each with its own mythology.

Reason is not pursued as the true link between man and nature because of these retreats into pop mythologies. The result is “irreality.” Additionally, the cultures conjured by these mythologies have, by and large, already succumbed to Ratio thereby leaving the mute nature of mass ornamentation even more prominent and influential. These pop myths already discredited by Ratio only serve to highlight its pre-eminence.

Ratio is an iron beast that breaks all before it into pieces and grinds the residue into dust. Its only weakness is its feet of clay, its foundation based on an endless race to the bottom, the cheapest, the most exploitative and the most risky practices. Unseemly risk, whether credit default swaps today or some future scandal, and its inhuman foundation will prove its undoing.

Culture and Personality

A Canadian anthropologist, Anthony F.C. Wallace published a great book in 1963, Culture and Personality. He was largely forgotten and is now obscure, but he developed a theory of culture change that anticipated the very problems encountered by organization theory and marketing. He used historical studies of large social groups to warrant his conclusions but one of his application areas was in advertising. The process is the same in advertising as it is with a culture, a donor group introduce a change or innovation to a recipient group. Culture change.

He proposed a solution that is the heart of modern integrated marketing communications, to establish connections to publics for building long-term relationships. He suggested a variety of segmentation strategies based on modal personalities in these publics (we might say personas). A communication will have different levels of influence and effect on different modal personality types. He developed an influence scale as a guideline to improve the likelihood of group acceptance of the new ideas.

His criticism of advertising then (50’s and 60’s) was that it was too severe in its attempts to influence independent consumers, pegging it at the threat level on his scale. He notes (p 135)

“[Threat] is the device frequently used by commercial advertisers attempting to induce a target group to accept its product, non-buyers are threatened with loss of friends, job, health and sexual satisfaction if they fail to buy …”

His recommendation: move several steps down the ladder to peaceful negotiation. Here a mutually beneficial relationship is developed where the interests and motives of both parties “are well satisfied on a long-term basis.”