Volume 186: Ideas Matter.

Ideas Matter. Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise.

tl;dr: Debunking one of the dumbest ideas in business.

First, an interlude.

I truly want to love the Jaguar rebrand, but it’s hard. Having so often expressed my disgust at the world of beige branding banality we’ve created; it’s refreshing to see something so bonkers, especially from a brand as uptight as Jaguar. Let’s be clear. For all its heritage, Jaguar is a commercial has-been; its cars have failed to excite for decades, and sales are in the toilet. Rather than continue to wither, owners Tata have instead decided to throw a Hail Mary pass from The Last Chance Saloon—a bold strategy designed to set the marque on a new course. I must admit, I love that idea much more than the agency fever dream of its execution. It’s a shame to see such a collision of advertising cliches under the guise of “originality.” Mark Ritson wrote a pretty balanced piece on it if you’re interested. However, one thing that truly grates is the idea of appealing to a “new affluent generation.” Due to life stages, this is highly unlikely: younger people are poorer people, which is why every single car brand, especially more expensive ones, serves an older customer.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with this thought: Let’s hope the new cars are utterly amazing, pull all this crazy together, and sell a boatload. If bonkers can revitalize a brand as beige as Jaguar, we’ll see much more of it. And the world could do with more bonkers branding amid a sea of beige.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Let’s talk ideas.

Human society is built atop brilliant ideas. Somebody had the idea for the wheel, pencil, printing press, internal combustion engine, telephone, TV, air conditioning, universal schooling, airplane, non-stick cookware, suspension bridge, smartphone, internet, and AI. I could go on.

But, how many times have you had to suffer the narrative that “ideas don’t matter, it’s all about execution,” or “ideas are easy, it’s the execution that’s hard,” or “ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s the execution that makes the difference” or some derivation of?

Well, let me go on record as stating that this is one of the single dumbest statements in the lexicon of business. And it’s not just dumb on its face; it’s dumb at multiple levels.

Conceptually, it’s dumb because it sets up a false equivalence. Ideas and execution aren’t two oppositional thoughts. We don’t live in a world where the better the idea, the less well it can be executed, and the worse the idea, the better it can be executed. We’re not constantly fighting to find the balance between the two. It’s not a trade-off. Unless the idea requires something very specific to be realized, they have literally no connection.

Second, it’s dumb because the math doesn’t add up. Why? Well, let’s do a little thought experiment:

A brilliant idea badly executed won’t be very good. A bad idea brilliantly executed won’t be very good. And a bad idea badly executed will be absolutely terrible.

While bad execution will almost always lead to a bad outcome, the flipside is also true: no matter how good the execution, the outcome won’t be very good if the idea is bad. Let me give you an example.

I worked with a US retail bank in Japan many years ago. In Japan, a portion of your retirement benefits are paid as a lump sum as you retire, so domestic banks compete intensely for these customers. To grab share, the US bank created a copycat me-too savings product, launched it without any differentiation, and was utterly shocked when it achieved a grand total of zero sales. That’s right; the response to this effort to grow share was zero.

From an execution standpoint, it was entirely respectable. The product was competitive, the bank put marketing resources behind it, the messaging was exactly comparable, and staff were well briefed on how to talk to customers about it. It was a perfect copy of a product the domestic banks had been selling for years. When I spoke to the exec responsible, he was utterly shocked by its lack of success. He expected they’d achieve their “fair share” and match their overall market share.

But there’s no such thing as “fair share” in business. In truth, this was a bad idea, no matter how well executed. To massively oversimplify the reason for failure, Japanese retirees weren’t willing to trust their retirement funds to a foreign bank that might not have a long-term commitment to the country. The reason the idea was bad isn’t so much that it failed but that finding out why wasn’t hard. Rather than being part of a very painful postmortem, this is the kind of information that could and should have been gathered before the fact.

More parochially, we’ve seen the quality of ideas across the marketing landscape follow a one-way slide toward mediocrity. Rather than execution, I’d argue that a major reason for the decline in the influence of advertising agencies (creative rather than media) has been a collapse in the quality of the ideas they produce rather than any dip in execution quality, especially since we can now execute advertising content to a much higher standard for much less money than in the past. (Famous directors even make cinema-quality movies using iPhones.)

This is also a big reason generative AI threatens ad agencies. It isn’t just that generative AI is cheaper and quicker at producing ads; if human-made ads are mediocre and AI-made ads are equally mediocre for a fraction of the cost, then it’s obvious which clients will pick.

Equally, identity design just spent 15 years plumbing the depths of minimal modernity before an abrupt about-face toward nostalgia-chic, demonstrating less a wholesale shift in consumer taste and more a generation of brand designer happier to follow the Pied Piper of faddism than design to a compelling and unique idea. (As an aside, it’s truly ironic that so many “branding experts” only feel comfortable hunting in packs and copying others when their primary job is to make their clients stand out uniquely.) This is why I stand by my perspective that in brand design, your ability to express conceptual ideas and your inherent sense of taste matter vastly more than your craft skills.

All this matters because it feels like the entire economy has become increasingly stuck in a feedback loop of execution-driven incrementalism and optimization rather than creating stand-out ideas that capture the imagination - product ideas, packaging ideas, advertising ideas, experience ideas, movie ideas, you name it. Just take the latest Tropicana redesign debacle, where they took the formerly distinctive bottle and re-designed it to be just as beige and bland as every other bottle in the fridge…and sales collapsed. (Mind you, this might also have something to do with making the bottles smaller; cough, shrinkflation, cough, cough, sigh. Yet another triumph of incrementalism over ideas.)

Here’s the thing that nobody will ever admit. If you look at the gamut of business, there are vastly more people who know how to execute stuff than there are people with brilliant ideas about what should be executed. That’s just a fact. And people who are good at executing things tend to rise to the top because there are more of them, and they get to point to their executional successes.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that such people will value execution vastly higher than ideas, even if this bias is only partially correct at best. Why? Because it’s what they’re good at.

At the extreme end of the execution spectrum, we have the startup founding team that claims differentiation, distinctiveness, etc, are all unnecessary because they intend to “out-execute” the competition. (Run, don’t walk, from such clients; they’ve already failed, they just don’t know it yet). More commonly, though, it rears its ugly head in the form of weaponized project management, which has become ultra common in tech firms, where the focus is rarely on the quality of the idea being executed, just that execution is happening and that it’s being monitored by a suitably vast array of KPIs, OKRs, and other associated acronyms. As an aside, Roger Martin recently pointed out that the success of Google is primarily due to a single brilliant idea (search) that drove the most profitable product in history. Google employees then bathed in its reflected glory, which is why none of its alums, even the most high profile, have been able to recreate Google’s success after leaving for pastures new.

However, at its worst, we see this thoughtless and idea-free execution from those charged with leading major corporations. For example, during the supply crunch of the pandemic, every automotive manufacturer in America decided it was a luxury truck brand. The only problem? There isn’t enough demand for six-figure trucks to meet the supply that’s now out there. Meanwhile, in the $30k-ish truck segment, Ford hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for the Maverick for years, with some consumers still paying a dealer markup to get one.

So beware of these false equivalencies. Sure, execution matters. We’d be daft to suggest otherwise. But we’d be equally daft to claim that ideas don’t matter. And it would be monumentally stupid to suggest, as many do, that ideas are so irrelevent that the only thing that matters is execution.