Prof. Dr. Joachim Bongard, Professor at the University of Applied Sciences of Design and Communication, Hamburg, Germany, founder of Caliber 53.5 Brand Strategy and Design, Germany, has worked as a brand strategy planning director and brand communication consultant for several international advertising agencies in Düsseldorf, Hannover and Hamburg, and has served bp, Suzuki, Yamaha, Mercedes Benz, Audi, McKenzie and other brands.
Q: We understand that you went to the United States to study in the early years. In your opinion, what are the similarities and differences between German students, Chinese students and American students?
Bongard: I was impressed by the pleasant group life during my study in the US. Then my role changed and I became a teacher and found that Germany was different from Chinese students, and it took me some time to settle in after coming to China.
The biggest challenge for students is the difference between the two countries in various aspects. There are many differences between Germany and China, which are not only reflected in the behavior of the people, but also in the university teaching system, which is closely related to the students.
Q: You have a lot of experience in the workplace, can you share with us one thing you find most interesting?
Bongard: In over 15 years as an ad man, I have many interesting stories to share with my students. I am happy to share my life as an ad man and my understanding, strategies and ideas about advertising. One of the most impressive experiences in my career was when I was a strategy executive in Hanover a few years ago, our team once designed a campaign for a baby product brand. Although the merchandise was for babies, I not only had to understand babies comprehensively, but I also had to engage with their parents. I couldn't think about what babies needed from my perspective, but rather from the perspective of the young parents and what they needed. As an advertising person, you have to deeply understand the client and think about the difficulties they have to face and the duties they should fulfill.
Q: We all know that market research data can help advertisers better understand their clients. However, after listening to your narrative, I think it is a little bit different from a simple market research. For this case, can you analyze in more detail how an advertiser should fully understand young parents?
Bongard: Consumer insight is richer than market research, it goes beyond the lagging nature of market research and is forward-looking, and will keep you from being limited to your personal eyes or the requirements of your customers. To get better at thinking from the perspective of others, I think the most important thing is still communication. You need to be diligent in communicating with your clients and sharing their lives and experiences. Going back to my case of designing a campaign for a baby brand, I approached many young parents and pregnant women about their "pain points" in order to get the project right and really understand the difficulties the client was facing. How can we reduce their burden? How can we use our products to meet their expectations? These are the questions we should be thinking about. The average advertiser rarely discusses the parents, only the baby itself, but if you want to do a great job, you have to connect the baby to their parents.
Q: I can imagine that this project must have been very successful in the end.
Bongard: There is no denying that on that occasion we analyzed a combination of possibilities and everyone was very focused on solving the problems that allowed the brand to stand out and achieve great success in the huge German baby market.
Q: That's an interesting case. Are there any other events in that career that are worth sharing?
Bongard: The kind of advertising you can make is largely determined by your own personal factors. In fact, when it comes to advertising, we're all trapped in a giant bubble, and your ideas will be limited to your own experiences and eyesight. But if you want to make more creative ads, you have to burst that bubble, and the best way to burst that bubble is to study abroad - you'll learn about a different way of life and a whole new culture, and you'll see things differently, and your eyes will be opened up.
In Germany, many designers still live in their own bubble, they think only from their own point of view, not from the client's, and this is the main difference between creative and mediocre advertisers. In this way, it is difficult for their work to reach the desired level, because it does not relate to the client and to the target. On this point, I have another story to share.
A few years ago, I met a 24 year old strategic planner. He called himself a senior strategic planner because he started taking up high school education content when he was 6 years old, and it was clear that he had complete confidence in his business skills.
At that time, our team was doing strategic brand development for the Ford Mercury. As a family car, it was sportier and a bit smaller than the Ford Galaxy, and its primary customer group was two-child families. When we started working on the pricing strategy, the 24-year-old strategic planner "had a brainstorm" - like he was thinking about his life 12 years later - and created the fictional character of John, a 36-year-old unmarried creative director with two kids.
In the strategic planner's imagination, one day John took his two children, ages 6 and 8, to soccer camp. While the kids' game was in full swing, their father, John, pulled out the motorcycle he kept in the trunk of his Ford Mercury and ran off to play racing with his friends.
However, through various sources of research, I found in a sample of fictional fathers with children of similar age that none of the fathers had anything like the idea of putting a motorcycle in the trunk of a car and racing it while their children were playing in a soccer game. Every father chose to watch and cheer on his children carefully.
This strategic planner, is a classic case of being limited by the fantasy bubble he created. He wrongly positioned the family car as a car offered to lovers of surfing, mountain biking or parachuting and other similar outdoor activities. When he thought in his own perspective, that is, trapped in the bubble, he could not correctly predict the car purchase intention of his target group. When put on the market, his positioning for the Mercosur car was just plain wrong, which would have been a huge failure. This is attributed to the inability of the ad positioning to connect with the main consumer group and to use consumer empathy to make the customer empathize and thus spend.
Q: I guess your friends must be very busy because you often ask them some customer questions, right? Generally speaking, do you make small talk from the perspective of a friend, or do you ask from the perspective of someone doing market research?
Bongard: Many times you must do some market research from your friends because you need to know something about market research anyway. You need different sources, and friends are always the best source. I just talk to them in a normal way, like a friend coming to visit. Sometimes, I just spend a weekend with them to get some material.
Q: So we can conclude that young advertisers need to "open their eyes to the world" and make friends, but also think from the client's point of view, right?
Bongard: Absolutely. If you're going to be an advertising person, or be a designer, you have to have that quality - to think from the client's point of view. You have to see the world through the eyes of the client, you have to become your client and feel the client's life, and that's the most important point I think. I emphasize this to both Chinese and German students, but to a large extent, these ideas are not well conveyed to them in the classroom, they can only be experienced and thus better understood by them.
Photography: Binghui Qu
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