JB Hi-Fi, Home Timber & Hardware and the case for staying the creative course

Brand creative often falls into one of two categories. It’s either a constant source of joy or frustration. 

The bulletproof comms platform that the punters love or the revolving door of meh that doesn’t resonate with customers costs you confidence on the inside or both, depending on your setup across internal stakeholders and external partners. 

Once you get on that hamster wheel, jumping off can feel impossible.

The answer is usually a new hamster wheel – new CMO, new agency, new start. The potential customer is forced to start again with you. And they really can’t be stuffed.

We all know a distinctive set of salient, ownable assets that work over the long haul is the game here. It just rarely happens. Marketing Professor Mark Ritson has written about it and he puts it in far more learned terms than I ever could. But the big conclusion from that and the System1 report he cites is that flip-flopping creative over time is seriously, empirically damaging for brand success.

I’ll take a slightly different tack and offer a couple of odes to consistency.

The first is one of the most consistent in Australia, which also happens to be one of the least creative. JB Hi-Fi. Their creative is remarkably focused – yellow and black, smashing windows to denote smashing prices. Annoying man half yelling everything. The end. It’s painful, verging on boring but it’s ruthlessly unchanging and repetitious. Still, they have the media budget to be boring. I’m guessing you don’t.

So let’s talk about a more entertaining one – Home Timber & Hardware. Late ’90s or so they deployed a couple of epic brand assets – the Dogalogues, and the lovable canine rogues, Rusty & Sandy. They stuck with them for more than 10 years. Most brands would be happy with those assets alone but when you do have them, you then seek deeper meaning for the message. 

Home needed to relaunch. Bunnings was being Bunnings and the dogs became the weapon of choice. The positioning ‘The proper hardware store’ was born. I’m sure there was initial resistance to the word ‘proper’. “It’s not an advertising word”. This is precisely why it worked. 

You don’t just sell a platform to the marketing department – it needs network buy-in. Convincing hardware people that their store was ‘the proper hardware store’ would have been a complete no-brainer. It makes their people heroes and takes on the big guy all at once. The platform ran for many years with a cheeky challenger mentality led by the dogs that delivered sustained business success. The sum of parts brought home the bacon, entertainingly and with conviction.

Then along came a new CMO. Cue the new agency. The positioning was dropped. The dogs were dropped. The Dogalogues got the boot and you’ve never heard from them again. Funny that.

Consistency is not hard. But only in theory. In practice, it takes a village that starts with the conviction of the marketing team and, consequently, the most collaboration you’ll ever encounter. 

Don’t wear your customers’ patience thin chopping and changing. As Ritson says, aim for excellence. Then aim not to change it.

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