Interview with Stan Richards

The Dallas Business Journal interviews Stan Richards, founder and principal of The Richards Group in Dallas. Find out some of what goes on behind the scenes there, from the no-email policy to stairwell meetings. Or read on to check out some excerpts.

DBJ: Is coming up with great advertising a "magic"-type thing, or is there a formula you follow?

RICHARDS: It's a highly disciplined process -- up to the point where a writer and an art director sit down to create a campaign. At that point there is very little discipline involved, and it's just a bright idea that comes between two people working together to create an idea. The disciplined part is fully understanding what the mission is for any particular piece of communication, and defining it in a way that is actionable for us and is comfortable for the client.

For everything we do, we go through a process called "spherical branding." It's called spherical because no matter how you look at a sphere, from whichever angle, it will always look the same. And a brand should be considered in the same way. At every point of contact the brand should look, feel and behave the same. Otherwise it's not going to be a powerful brand.

DBJ: What do you mean exactly when you say "brand"?

RICHARDS: A brand is very simply a promise. Think about any brand you're familiar with, and that brand contains a promise: that I'm going to do certain things, I'm going to behave in a certain way, I'm going to interact with my customers in a certain way.

So, with our spherical branding process, we look at the brand and define it in some pretty simple, but highly effective ways. We go through the process of developing a three-part positioning statement: Who is the target audience? Who are our clients' competitors? And what is the single benefit that is going to be meaningful to the brand's constituents -- its customers, its employees, its stakeholders?

We develop these things in a workshop including our people and the client. We usually sit together for a day and go through this process. After we've done the positioning, we then do the "personality;" we'll find five or six words that define the personality of the client's business. And really, we'll define the advertising that's going to follow.

After personality we do something called "affiliation," which most branding models don't involve, and that involves asking: What "club" do you join when you embrace a brand? Think about the automotive category, for example: The car you drive says something about you to your neighbors and friends. You don't often talk about what brand of toothpaste you use, but anytime you drive your car out of your garage, you are making a statement about yourself.

The last part of our spherical branding process is the brand vision. And that is the statement of the "highest calling." Disney, for example, decided that its highest calling, or brand vision, was, "Keeping alive the magic of childhood." Why does every person come to work at Disney? It's to fulfill that guarantee. Our agency did a brand vision for the Salvation Army nationally. It's a very simple, straightforward phrase: "Doing the most good." But it tells every person who is part of the Salvation Army why they are there.

Out of this highly disciplined process comes the "creative brief" that also is highly disciplined, because it sets up the guidelines for what the advertising needs to be.

DBJ: Is that the hardest part?

RICHARDS: It's all hard. I very carefully make sure that every writer and art director here understands to execute against the creative brief. Then I tell them, set the brief aside and work against your own instincts. You may come up with something that is so exceptional in execution that it may be more important than solving the issues that are set up in the brief. If that execution is so charming and persuasive that it overshadows (the brief concept), then fine. We'll go to the client and say, "Take a look at this. This is magic."

DBJ: Do you have an example of that happening?

RICHARDS: Yes, the Chick-fil-A campaign.

DBJ: That's the long-running campaign for the chicken-restaurant chain that's centered around the "spotted cows" that can't spell. How did it come about?

RICHARDS: An art director was sitting at his cube one day, doodling on a design for an outdoor board. I happened to walk by and stopped and asked him how he was doing. He showed me this little thumbnail sketch that was about yea big. And I said, "That is a killer idea," and that's how that whole thing came about. It was originally going in another direction.

DBJ: What was the original idea?

RICHARDS: The "brief" agreement was, "Chick-fil-A invented the chicken sandwich and, therefore, they should be better at chicken sandwiches than anybody else." Which is a perfectly sound idea, but it wasn't going to lead you to cows.

DBJ: Whose idea was it to have the cows be poor spellers?

RICHARDS: That was a collective idea. And it's a big part of where the charm comes from.

So you see, I encourage our people to take risks, to step outside the normal constraints in the way they think. But to be really effective in this business, you have to engage the clients, too. You have to ask them to do things that are outside their safe area. Because if you stay in that safe area, their advertising is going to wind up looking like everyone else's advertising in the category. You don't want that to happen.

DBJ: I imagine that might be hard sometimes. Do you just plug away until you overcome the resistance?

RICHARDS: Yes. And sometimes you don't overcome it. Sometimes it requires going through multiple research steps to prove out an idea before it ever becomes advertising. And that's OK, but sometimes it leads to too much caution.

DBJ: Do you have a "for instance"?

RICHARDS: Yes. I'd go back to the first advertisement that we did 20 years ago for Motel 6. There were two important risks the client took that had nothing to do with the creative content. One was to concentrate the budget in a single region to see how the advertising would perform. That was risky.

DBJ: Why did you do that?

RICHARDS: It was a way to make sure everything was going to work -- or wasn't going to work.

The other risk was to put the entire budget into radio. Nobody in the lodging category had used radio; it was all television and print. And we said, our guess is that Motel 6 guests make their lodging decisions through the windshield. They are not arriving by air; for the most part they're driving, and we would like to reach them in their cars. So we put the entire budget into radio.

I should mention one other thing we did with that relationship that advertisers don't normally do. That is, we told Motel 6, "Don't advertise!" That was because the product was deficient. At that time they didn't even have phones in the rooms; you had to go down the hall to use the telephone. So we said, "Let's don't advertise until we can satisfy people."

DBJ: Did they follow your advice?

RICHARDS: Yes, at great expense.

DBJ: Where did the idea for the folksy Motel 6 spokesman, Tom Bodett, come from?

RICHARDS: We got to Tom Bodett out of our research at the very beginning of the relationship, when we sat behind the glass and had a dozen people in a focus-group room who we knew were Motel 6 users.

We asked the focus-group participants where they stayed when they were on the road, and they went around the room and didn't mention Motel 6. It was very clear that they didn't want to be perceived by the other people in the room as being cheap or poor.

When they ran out of brands to mention, someone in the room said, "When it's late at night and I'm on the road, I'll stop at a Motel 6. I can save enough money to buy a tank of gas."

And then someone else would say the same thing: "I saved enough to take something home to the grandkids."

The room changed. It changed from embarrassment to enormous pride in this frugality-- frugality as a virtue. "If my eyes are closed and I'm asleep, I don't need fancy stuff in my hotel room. I just need a clean comfortable place to stay."

Out of that came the way we were going to write this. The way we wrote it had to do with frugality as a virtue, and we turned that into a 60-second radio spot.

A couple of years earlier we had heard this guy, Tom Bodett, occasionally doing an essay on National Public Radio. We thought he had a terrific voice and a nice style. He was working as a carpenter in Alaska when we hired him, and he's been the Motel 6 spokesperson for the last 20 years, and he's done a good job for us.

DBJ: To be successful, does advertising have to either inform or entertain?

RICHARDS: It has to inform in some way. In addition, every piece of communications we do must in some way be endearing. For us it's exactly as if you were selling in a retail environment. You have a sales job in a car dealership and a customer walks in. One of the first things you want to accomplish is to have that person like you. Because if they like you, there is a much better chance for you to make the sale.

That's exactly the way we think advertising works. We want people to like the advertising. If they like the advertising they will like the client, and they will be more likely to do business with them.