IABC Report: Dow Chemical’s stunning ‘Human Element’ misses the other human element.
28th June 2007 by Angelo Fernando
The Dow branding case study presented at IABC’s international conference in New Orleans had a lot of oohs! and ahs! and a few buts…
This Human Element campaign launched last June, was one of the most memorable branding campaigns in recent times. At least for me. So I had a lot of questions about the strategy behind it, and of course the execution. Was there more to it than the stunning video, and the faces attached to a periodic table?
The copy is powerful in a straightforward way. It’s about “Sodium bonding with chlorine, carbon bonding with oxygen…” The close ups of faces, the texture of waves, the energy of a waterfall. It’s what one might call the thoughtful bonding of words, images and ideas absent in corporate branding exercises.
As the presenter noted, proudly, not once was the Dow name spoken. Only a fleeting glimpse of the red diamond logo at the end. It takes a lot of courage not to force you ad agency to tweak things like that. (Remember that old line: “when a client moans and sighs, make his logo twice the size?”) I watched the video again on YouTube, and couldn’t help but notice the word ‘element’ (or ‘elemental’) occurs eight times, with the big picture painted in sweeping strokes, with hints of biology and lots of chemistry.
But branding is much more than stunning images and good copy. It’s a positioning statement that has to leap across every ’synapse’ (to borrow one a powerful reference from the ad) and connect with the other non linear communication channels. Sometimes these channels are ordinary non-marketing people in the organization. how could they carry that branding story forward, long after the agency has submitted its invoices?
We were told that Dow launched the campaign internally, bathing its building with those giant images of people, revamping its web site to reflect the campaign, providing employees with the background to the Human Element concept and philosophy. they were even encouraged them to set up their own periodic table with pictures of people they work with. Nice touch there.
It struck me as a campaign that could eventually run without mainstream media support: Employees creating their own human element posters, and uploading them to Flickr. Telling their own Human Element stories in podcasts, Voting for each others’ contributions on YouTube, or sayeyeVio in Japan. I bet those emlpoyee generated stories spread virally would be as powerful and sincere as anything its agency FCB could come up with. Wouldn’t that be the the proof of branding via the human element?
In summary: Don’t get me wrong. It is a terrific case study. But a global company telling a global story to a global audience just can’t afford to not engage it’s own people.
This was funny: The presenter asked us what came to our minds first when we watched the commercial. One person raised her hand and said, “It made me wonder what Dow had done wrong, and was trying to cover up.” Another said he was trying to calculate the cost of each of those marvelous segments of video!
On a related note: Paul Argenti, management guru and author who gave the keynote at the the IABC Foundation lunch, opened his remarks with a blistering analysis of why strategic communications is needed so badly. People are extremely cynical of communications, because of business communication failures from the likes of BP, KPMG, Tyco, Enron etc. “Transparency is a strategy and a condition,” he noted.
Translated: skip the tag lines, and bring back that human element!
June 30th, 2007 at 7:48 am
[...] Fernando looks at the elegance and impact of the Dow human element campaign, and suggests it would have been even better with the [...]
July 17th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Does anyone know how to get a copy of the presentation slides? I attended the session, but since the speaker was a last minute replacement with his own slides, the presentation in the handout book wasn’t the right one. Thank you.