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Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive, Vodafone Group.
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Sir Richard Branson, President, Virgin Atlantic

The Power of Monsters - Marketing Article 

Adam Morgan

There is much that we have forgotten from English lessons (what is the difference between a gerund and a gerundive, exactly?). But among the things we do remember, of course, are the basic constructs of a good story: the need for a hero, conflict and, more often than not, a monster.

Monsters have a number of important values in stories. They raise the stakes; they create drama, emotion, and conflict. They throw up a hero. They give the hero a very visible adversary and clearly position the hero as being on the side of right. They highlight what his or her virtues are—there is nothing like a little darkness to give definition to light. And, perhaps most important from our point of view, monsters unite the community against them. This is one of the important differences between a monster and an enemy: An enemy is a threat to you, but a monster is a threat to the larger community. This is what brings the community together: however disparate, divided, or simply indolent the community had been up to that point, the presence of a monster brings them together in unity against it. And in fighting the monster, the hero is thus fighting not just for themselves, but as the champion of the community as a whole. In modern storytelling and popular film, the nature of the monster ranges from real monsters (Jaws, Cloverfield) to conceptual monsters like big business and large corporations (much of John Grisham’s oeuvre) to particular people (Dodgeball). And one of the key narrative arcs in such stories, of course, is the hero’s struggle to communicate the threat to the community and to get them to take it seriously so that they can respond and defeat it.


While we see the classic challenger stance as ‘underdog vs. giant’,  it is often importantly different to this– it is often in fact a narrative about ‘a small, human brand’ fighting a ‘large and faceless monster’ on our behalf. Some challengers have over the years been very explicit about creating monsters that they then oppose. Dove is not the first to successfully challenge the beauty industry—Anita Roddick in the 1980s had actually described the beauty business as “a monster selling unobtainable dreams, one that lies, cheats and exploits women.”  Around the same time, the legendary Apple “1984” spot from Chiat/Day is, in fact, as explicit a monster narrative as it is possible to be: a large monster (the dehumanized authority figure on the screen) has the community in slavish thrall, and it takes a hero in white with a single magical weapon to escape her pursuit and defeat it, thereby liberating the community. And when did Apple and Chiat/Day show this commercial? During the Super Bowl—the one time in the year when all of America sits down and watches TV together as a community. That is to say, Apple and its ad agency looked to unite the community of America against the “monster” through the media plan as much through as the spot itself. And in many ways Richard Branson’s brilliance has been to convince us that his personal business enemies (such as BA) are in fact monsters , working against the interests of us all, and he our champion, fighting them on our behalf.


Fast forward twenty years; what makes this strategy much more interesting and powerful for a challenger today, though, is the ability we now have to mobilize these communities against our chosen monsters. This kind of mobilization takes place in both grassroots marketing, and within social networks. method, which also launched in the UK this year, has in the US in effect created a monster called Toxicity. method goes to a city, sets up in a pop up store, and invites people to detox their lives - come and exchange all their toxic products for method’s environmentally friendly ones. People come, exchange, and then method asks the local toxic waste disposal services to put on their Hazchem suits and take them away. All of this is of course publicized, and the community engaged and mobilized, through blog and press – particularly when one state refused to come and remove some of these toxic products on the grounds that they were too hazardous (remember that these were all simply other brands of packaged goods available in your local Wal-Mart).

And if one takes Jiri Engestrom’s view that what drives social networks is not the network but the social object it has at its heart, then perhaps a challenger has only three kinds of social object to consider as its currency: a common passion, a commonly valuable utility, or a common monster.  Meaning, perhaps, that in future one of the most powerful roles the challenger can take within its chosen community may be less about taking the position of David, and much more about taking that of St George: not a toppler of adversaries, but a slayer of dragons. And draw on the rich potential of the sociodigital world to enlist the community to help slay it with them.
 
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