As any ardent F1 fan will tell you, there’s a lot you can find out just by looking at the way a driver’s hands steer an F1 car. Is the car easy to drive? Is he clocking scorching lap times? Is the car headed for a breakdown?
As any ardent F1 fan will tell you, there’s a lot you can find out just by looking at the way a driver’s hands steer an F1 car. Is the car easy to drive? Is he clocking scorching lap times? Is the car headed for a breakdown?
And what you can find out is probably contrary to expectations – especially of novice viewers. Drivers who overdrive the car – by steering the wheel too vigorously – might look spectacular. But chances are that the excessive input the driver is providing is leading to (and probably even the cause of) a lot of slipping and sliding. Which invariably means slower lap times.
The really fast cars – and drivers – usually tend to be very frugal with their steering inputs. A little nudge here and a little nudge there usually do the trick. And when they do need to feed in a lot of input – while taking a turn for example – the hands guide the car in one smooth motion than many jerky left-right inputs.
A lot of this has to do with the handling of the car. F1 cars suffer from two sorts of handling problems. Understeer, where they don’t turn as much as the driver wants them to. And oversteer, where the car turns much more than the input received from the driver, which then results in the rear end of the car slipping out and leading to a spin.
Mohammed Iqbal
So, when driving a less than perfect car, drivers need to compensate for the car’s idiosyncrasies. This is manifested in the amount of continual input – jerky and vigorous left-right turning of the steering wheel – that the driver has to feed in. Cars that handle perfectly move on the road as if they were on rails and the driver gets by with providing the minimal input required, resulting in a smooth motion of the hands.
What does all this have to do with advertising and brand management? Nothing at all. Or so I thought until a couple of weeks ago.
As I was following the current adrenalin filled season, it occurred to me that the same principles of deduction apply to brands and communication. By merely observing how much and how often they advertise and how much and how often ‘course correction’ is happening, we can deduce quite a bit about their market-share lap times.
Just like the Formula 1 cars we talked about, brands too have their own handling characteristics. And broadly speaking, brands also understeer or oversteer in relation to the input they receive – the communication we create for them. Leading to the characteristic jerky left-right motion of the steering – the frequent wiggle of different communication messages around the same brand.
In an F1 car, understeer and oversteer result from the aerodynamic configuration of the car, the camber angles, the ride height, tyre traction, tyre pressure and the car’s centre of gravity, among other things. When engineers and mechanics get the total configuration perfectly right (for a particular circuit; different circuits require cars that handle differently), you have a car that has almost no oversteer or understeer – one that can be driven to the limit.
Correspondingly, a brand’s handling characteristics are determined by its positioning, its tone and voice, the market it is operating in, the baggage it carries – of its previous positionings, communication – among other things. As custodians of the brand, we are the mechanics and engineers of the brand, studying its handling on the test track and in the wind tunnel and making adjustments until all the elements fall into place.
And as with F1 cars, there are important reasons why it is necessary for us to strive and get the handling of our brand right. While with bad handling of F1 cars, one loses lap times, with bad handling of a brand, one loses not just market share, but also money. Because every little turn in the wiggle is precious money spent in communication, and then spent again to correct the wiggle. Ad infinitum.
And the second reason why is even more crucial. In F1 cars, badly handled cars are rarely driven to the limit and are merely filling in the positions from the middle to the end of the grid. A badly handled brand is not only losing a company energy and money, it’s also moving backwards steadily in a race to the finishing line.
The work in the pit garage done, it is time to sit at our monitors and leave it to the drivers – the guys who create the communication that our target audience sees. And while we have our telemetry data – market share figures, research data, channel feedback, etc. – we should also know that observers
and probably our own consumers are ascertaining as much, if not more, just by looking at how much the driver’s hands are ‘wiggling’ at the steering wheel.
(The writer is a creative planner with Ogilvy & Mather, Bengaluru. You can read more of his thoughts at his blog, MisEntropy (http://blaiq.typepad.com/misentropy) or email him at blaiq@yahoo.com.)
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