In the world of marketing communications, the descriptor “brave” is often used by creative teams to describe something they’ve created that the client will almost certainly not want to run. As in “this is brilliant, but the client won’t be brave enough to buy it”.
As a result, “brave” has become something of a catch-all term, used in relation to many different approaches. But look more closely, and there are really only two types of brave campaigns. Good Brave and Bad Brave.
Good Brave is doing something of outstanding originality. Something category busting. Unconventional. Unexpected. Something which makes the organisation behind the campaign feel nervous, simply because they’ve never done anything like this before – and none of their competitors have either. Good Brave only gets made with a strong client to steer the ship. Good Brave comes under intense internal scrutiny and often has to survive multiple rounds of research.
Good Brave is a gorilla playing the drums. Good Brave is a highway full of clown cars. Good Brave is hiding a Big Mac in every Burger King ad shot in 2019.
So what’s Bad Brave? Well, Bad Brave is the lazy way to getting noticed: deliberately smearing the brand with negative associations. Bad Brave is a broken down car in an automotive campaign, a wheezing, dying patient in a healthcare ad, or a shop full of gum chewing, rude assistants in a retail commercial. Buried somewhere underneath all this, there’s a positive underlying message for the consumer to decode. But our brains are just too lazy (and too busy) to store this message in place of the negative brand smears.
This applies to all categories, but it’s particularly important for food and drink advertising, because our brains are hard wired to avoid anything which might poison us. Which brings us back to Burger King’s latest stunt. In a month’s time, how many people outside the advertising industry will remember this as a campaign about the beauty of no artificial preservatives? And how many will say it was about a mouldy burger?