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Groundhog Day

by David Heitman

Today is February 2nd—Groundhog Day—the perfect time to consider the role that repetition, along with its opposite, novelty, play in marketing, culture and our daily lives.

The agonizing time-looping experience of Phil Connors, the self-absorbed TV weatherman played by Bill Murray in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, has become idiomatic for any endlessly repeated experience. (Even those in the military refer to a repeated tour of duty as “Groundhog Day.”)

There is something within us that recoils from the thought of reliving the same things over and over and over again. We’re wired to embrace that which is new. In her fascinating book NEW: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, Winifred Gallagher writes that we “are biologically as well as psychologically primed to engage novelty.”

For marketing professionals, the idea of offering something new is so central to their work, that I think it almost goes by undetected—a baked-in assumption that anything worth promoting must be new.

New = Better, right? You’ve never heard of “Old and Improved.” It is axiomatic in the packaged consumer products business that merely adding the word “NEW” on a product label increases sales.

Any hint that a product—from software to soft soap—is a retread of an earlier idea is a curse. Politicians accuse each other of trotting out “old tired ideas.” The phrase “been there, done that” is the epitaph of many a poorly-conceived marketing effort.

In creative contexts like design, music or architecture, we often refer to a particular effort as being “derivative” of previous work. This is almost always a pejorative term as folks in creative fields are supposed to constantly be coming up with new, never-before-seen ideas.

But in reality, creative progress usually takes place along a pattern that looks something like this:

A radically new idea comes along … followed by multiple riffs (or rip-offs) of the idea … the new idea stops looking so new, so another innovator comes along and ups the ante with something totally new, is heralded as a visionary, and the process repeats itself…

In other words, the creative ecosystem is largely evolutionary and iterative, yet periodically thrives on fresh infusions of creative ideas: quantum leaps that can truly be described as new.

In the course of history, we see scientists, artists and philosophers who were the quantum leapers of their times: Copernicus, Mozart, Gandhi, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josephine Baker, Jim Henson, Steve Jobs. It should be noted that these innovators had paid their dues and mastered the disciplines of their craft long before introducing massive novelty. They stood on the shoulders of the generations before them. But then, the big synapse occurred, and they took things in a new direction, and to a whole new level.

Today in business, few organizations can afford to take these quantum leaps. The obvious exception—Apple—can take big risks, like introducing the initially maligned iPad. Apple could do this because: a) they had the money; b) they foresaw a new market where none had previously existed; and c) they were … well … Apple. A track record of successful Jobsian innovations opened the door for a new something new.

But for most marketers today—both agency folks and in-house creatives—the challenge comes in finding the right proportion of novelty and familiarity in the day-to-day work of marketing communications. That’s because you have to communicate with real consumers and businesspeople, and get them to open their wallets. Art for art’s sake can take more risks. But creative marketing, while still an art form, works under different constraints. Someone is paying for—or more accurately, investing in—the marketing effort and wants to see an ROI.

So for nearly all marketing efforts, there needs to be a perfect blend between novelty and familiarity. Enough novelty to get noticed. Enough familiarity to be relevant.

Avoiding Groundhog Day Syndrome (or GDS) requires taking time to think about how far your audience can be drawn away from oft-repeated marketing norms in order to embrace something new.

This balanced, innovative approach to marketing often means exploring counterintuitive solutions. Infusing things with just enough unexpectedness to hook an audience. Its like an unforeseen plot twist in a movie. It rivets the audience’s attention.

New can also involve a fresh, reimagined interpretation of something from an earlier era. AMC’s Mad Men or the new Sherlock Holmes movies are good examples. O Brother Where Art Thou? was a re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey

We live in a world where there is a lot of “new” but very few surprises. Google feeds back exactly what we asked it for. News feeds and Twitter give us news, but not much that is new. Talk radio—pick your flavor—has enabled the creation of Groundhog Day-like echo chambers where pundits and their followers hear nothing but their own voices.

Thus, to offer something truly new may be a public service as well as a smart marketing move.