Open Disciplines
Open Disciplines proposes the ability of any discipline using any medium to achieve any business objective. Open disciplines therefore upsets the current assumptions about what marketing communications disciplines can and cannot do. Heuristics are designed to reduce choice in a complex world, and this is incredibly useful. But the point of getting creative people involved is to innovate, not follow rules of thumb. If you ask creative people what they can do, the answer is: they can do almost anything.
Furthermore, current concepts of the disciplines that tie them to particular media, for example the rule of advertising belonging to paid-for media, are clearly nonsense, yet they are taught in most business schools around the world. Advertising, like all of the other disciplines, is a media-independent way of approaching communication that can be translated into almost any medium. An analogy to the current heuristic would be telling a painter that she is only painting when using canvas or paper and not when using wood or glass.
Similarly, media turn out to be much more flexible than the established rules of thumb. Most of the textbook descriptions of what media do as opposed to what they are represent biased thinking. For example, mail media have physical characteristics while TV ads use animated vision with sound. However, within these fixed frames there is an extraordinary and proven range of potential.
Examples
- Boots found, when launching a new product, that they could achieve 27% more awareness by direct mail than by TV at 64% of the cost.
- Marmite, Benetton and Budweiser created more PR from the TV ads that the press releases.
- For Nestle, supermarkets are proving to be a powerful advertising medium.
- British Telecom mailed an innovative research questionnaire that generated considerable business and satisfaction improvements.
- Guidant is teaching coaching to sales and marketing managers to increase channel effectiveness
- Reebok 'Sofa': do something with your life - Reebok made ads real with sofas on the street and a multi-sport event
- SEEBOARD Energy - the need for a mail pack drives product development
- Virgin provided ice-cream with their in-flight movie: a superb on-brand, good-time message