A true north needs a due south: Why creativity needs a nemesis
Most brands are keen to tell us all what they stand for, but how many are willing to stand up for it?
Alex Myers, founder and CEO of Manifest Group asks why aren’t more brands showing up to tackle real problems?
Back when I started Manifest in 2009, everybody wanted to be ‘disruptive’. Then it was ‘purpose-driven’. Now ‘culturally relevant’. The clichés change but the meaning doesn’t. There is a tacit understanding that in order to build a brand, you have to matter. And like it or not, mattering — in cultural terms — is measured in change.
It’s surprising then, that so few brands actually challenge cultural norms or measure the change they inspire. It’s not enough to know what you’re creating, you have to know what to destroy to achieve it. If your brand follows a ‘true north’, it only matters because it’s moving away from a ‘due south’.
A lighthouse is only a lighthouse because there are rocks.
Create to destroy
“The problem with change,” says adland legend Dave Trott, “is it requires change”.
As an agency built to help brands bring about change, it never ceases to amaze me how many people say they want it, but aren’t willing to do anything to make it happen. Forging change doesn’t come from standing for something, it comes from standing up for it. You don’t need to be an activist, but you do need to take action.
When we developed The Boob Life for Tommee Tippee, mums across the globe had told us stigma affected their confidence when it came to breastfeeding. We didn’t make a flag or hold a protest. We didn’t shout ‘stick it to stigma’.
We created content that showed what a world without stigma looks like. Celebrating real breastfeeding experiences. And then we piped it directly to the place where social stigma isn’t just amplified, but codified, on social media, TV and advertising. Immediately banned by algorithms, the reaction from parents the world-over meant that we didn’t just challenge the idea that breastfeeding is ‘sexualised content’, we blew it up.
As big tech wound back their censorship, mums and expectant parents could see a real representation of breastfeeding without a systemic filter informed by everyday stigma. That is a measurable cultural impact. And yes, the brand built global equity and experienced record sales as a result.
From successful, to significant
It’s far too easy to forget that by definition you can’t campaign about something, you have to campaign for it. It’s a definition I return to with creative teams, and with clients all the time.
Significant brands are the ones that measure their success by the positive impact they have on the lives of their customers. And marketing has an opportunity to not just communicate that impact, but to augment it. To extend and enhance those changes. And that is the creative opportunity we miss out on if we forget what stands in the way.
Casting EVs as an alternative to petrol vehicles is an example of being all message and no meaning, culturally. EV brands have to be seen as the replacement. The upgrade. The misinformation around EVs needs to be tackled, but the best way to do so is to shine a light on the challenges of petrol cars — we’re just so used to them culturally we’ve forgotten how crap they are.
Too often, brand strategy works like urban planning — mapping out neat territories of tone, visual identity and values. But culture is a living ecosystem. Your due south is not the opposite of your brand purpose — rather it’s the pole that defines the tension between what you’re trying to build, and why nobody else has already done it. If your north star is some form of empowerment, what disempowers? If it’s connection, what isolates? If it’s excitement, where does the mundanity hang out?
Without that contrast, creativity is just decor. You’re sparking a match, but not setting fire to anything.
Alex Myers
From purpose to progress
Australia, though, seems bolder than many of the markets we’re in. There are a growing number of Australian brands leaning into change, and willing to bring down cultural systems that stand in their way. Modibodi doesn’t just talk about body positivity — it takes on the stigma, silence and shame around menstruation and incontinence. Thankyou doesn’t just question consumerism — it provides a new model for it. And Telstra, in its Cannes-winning “Better on a Better Network” work, doesn’t just tell us it connects people — it shows us how connection is more significant when its cast in the context of remoteness. Emotional and physical.
This is creativity, because it’s creating things. In some cases new benefits, in others new ideas. These brands understand that a campaign isn’t something you see, it’s something you join.
That’s why Manifest seems to have found a natural home here in Australia. In that freedom to go and do things, that perhaps the rest of the world feels too under the microscope to do. In a generation of brands that understand change isn’t some Newtonian apple that falls of its own accord. You have to shake the tree.
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