How a tea drinking Englishman came up with 'America runs on Dunkin': PART 2 - The Revelation
Day 24.
Those two simple questions had proved not so simple after all.
And now there were only six days left before the client presentation, with the clock’s ticking verging on the deafening.
A sub-group had agreed to meet from noon that day at a local hotel, with an implicit understanding around its commission.
Until something happens in Jurys, it stays in Jurys.
Why were we finding this so hard?
We knew all we needed to about the brand.
And we were additionally armed with deep insights from a recent, and unconventional, piece of audience research.
In the study, Dunkin’ daily regulars had been asked to go every day for a week to Starbucks instead, and Starbucks’ devotees to go to Dunkin’.
(A research technique I’d been told as a trainee was called ‘Inundation and Deprivation’.)
These plucky volunteers were:
Interviewed beforehand about their expectations for their reverse visits
Given diaries to record their thoughts and feelings after each of these visits
Then invited back, once the week was over, to debrief the moderator on how the experiment had gone for them
Safe to say that none of them were considering changing their allegiance.
And it became clear that for the Dunkin’ regulars, their choice of venue wasn’t just a matter of habitual loyalty but of tribal identity: they ritually went to Dunkin’ to start their day because it reflected their core values and sense of self.
And we also learnt that many of the things we’d long feared might be brand weaknesses were often the very markers of that identity.
So, for the Dunkin’ tribe, the absence of comfy, inviting seats didn’t signify spartan conditions: it recognised that they did jobs where time was money, so they’d rarely be at leisure to sit and sip.
Similarly, they saw the practice of adding any requested sugar on the customer’s behalf not as a constraint on their individuality, but as a practical means of speeding them more efficiently on their way.
So we now understood the core user as well as the brand: yet the solution to the riddle remained elusive.
The stumbling block kept proving the central ‘are we a bakery or a coffee shop?’ tension - how could we give up either without losing too big a part of ourselves?
Looking back, I rack my brain to remember any possible prompts or primes that morning.
Did I stop for petrol on the drive into the city centre?
Did the radio programme I was listening to reference a third way?
Or did the necessity of not arriving at the meeting devoid of an idea once again prove the mother of invention?
But as I pulled into a space on the upper tier of the Clarendon Street lot, it suddenly hit me.
The reason we can’t make an either/or decision is because it isn’t an either/or question.
It’s a neither/nor situation.
Dunkin’ is neither a bakery nor a coffee shop - it’s a fuel stop.
It supplies all the sustenance hard-working Americans need to keep themselves running.
Once that stubborn knot had been loosened, the logic cascaded as I sat there at the wheel, car stationary but mind racing.
WHO IS DUNKIN’ FOR?
The everyday folk who keep America running.
WHAT IS DUNKIN’ FOR?
To help keep them running, every day.
It’s like America runs on Dunkin’.
AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN’…???
Well, it has a certain rhythm…
And it’s definitely ‘bold and declarative’, just how the client wanted their new line…
At a minimum, I knew I had a solid contribution to the meeting - so could at least now get out of the car.
On arrival at Jurys, I scribbled out four supporting legs to the idea on a piece of hotel notepaper, and it seemed to hold water.
So when the project lead asked, ‘anyone got any new ideas?’, I was excited as well as relieved to hold it up and talk it through.
‘Yeah - that’s it’.
The team got straight behind it, and we all got to have a weekend after all.
‘Yeah - that’s it’ was what Management said when they saw it too - and, most importantly, so did the Marketing Director and the Dunkin’ Brands CEO when we presented it to them with all due fanfare on Day 30.
The creative teams did incredible things to quickly convert a simple thought into an arresting, enduring design style and inspired launch campaign.
By March of 2006 we were all in Vegas to witness its five star launch to the assembled franchisees.
And by the following month, the campaign was on air, online, on cups.
‘America runs on Dunkin’ was live in America.
(TO BE CONCLUDED)