Getting to an idea worth fighting for rarely begins from an obvious starting point. Inspired by former Wieden+Kennedy Creative Director Jason Bagley, this series uses provocative questions to mine the Big Ideas That Work Engines for repeatable creative tactics that can help answer them.
This time, we’re asking:
Where does the value we want already feel unquestionable?
Here are five campaigns that probably weren't thought of by asking this question and a few others, but they could have been...
- Borrow Prestige From Fashion
- Enter an Institution That Confers Cultural Value
- Use an Expert World as a Quality Standard
- Borrow Entertainment's Power to Create Desire
- Steal the Codes of a More Craveable Category
1. Borrow Prestige From Fashion
Take something judged mainly for its usefulness and place it inside a world where design, desirability and collectability are assumed.
Palessi — Payless, DCX Growth Accelerator, 2018
Payless had a familiar value problem. Its shoes were affordable, but the brand name encouraged people to interpret affordability as evidence of inferior design. Asking customers to reconsider would have left the original prejudice firmly in control.
Instead, Payless removed the label.
The company took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica and transformed it into Palessi, an apparently new luxury footwear boutique. Fashion influencers were invited to the opening, where they praised ordinary Payless shoes and offered hundreds of dollars for products normally sold for between $19.99 and $39.99.
Nothing about the shoes had changed. The surrounding value system had.
The store, name, presentation and invitation told visitors they were encountering luxury fashion. Once placed inside that world, the shoes were judged through its assumptions. The eventual reveal did more than generate embarrassment. It exposed how much of perceived value had been supplied by context.
Payless did not claim that inexpensive shoes could look desirable. It created a situation in which fashion authorities had already declared them desirable before knowing the price.
The question that could have produced it:
Which higher-status world would judge our product differently if nobody saw the label first?
The creative move: Borrow Status From a More Prestigious World, from the Strategy Engine → Salient Anchoring
