B&Q (home improvement store) with Tobey Duncan, Head of Planning, Uncommon, London

Welcome to On Strategy Showcase. This is Fergus in Chicago. As always, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. And for those who don't know, you can not only listen to the episodes on the podcast platforms, but also on the website on strategyshowcase.com. And the advantage of listening on the website is that you can also see the creative work, as it's posted there for all of the episodes. And you can also leave a question or a comment if you want to do that. And today I talk with Toby Duncan. He's had a planning that on Common London. And we recorded this episode a few months ago. It just took a while to get it posted here. But we talk about the launch of the new B&Q campaign. B&Q is the leading hardware store in the UK. Not unlike Home Depot is here in the US. On Common's new brand platform for B&Q is build a life. It's the idea that you don't just buy a life. In other words, pay someone else to do it for you. But you can build one yourself. It's the whole idea of encouraging increased use of DIY among homeowners. It's the belief that anybody can change their home to make it better, and to make life better. Now here in the US, Home Depot had a similar platform for years. And it evolved over time. We all remember you can do it. We can help. But what's sort of unique about On Common's work is really the execution of that idea, particularly in film. By focusing in on how doing it ourselves can make us feel, not practically, but emotionally, it makes it all seem more possible and more important. And by the way, I love the line that closes the film. It is what a day it was. The day you found out you can do it. So here's my talk with Toby, and here's the lunch spot. Enjoy. If walls could talk, what would they say? They're wonderful decor on the bed of walls, they'll. They tell you. And out of focus photo and the mantle. Can warm this place up. That fairy tales. Common tens. And it really doesn't matter what you make. These walls would say, "Changes and scary when you're holding a hammer." And with a scuff, a splinter, they remind you, you don't buy a life. You just start out. You build one. You have one. What a day it was. Good afternoon, Toby. Thank you for joining from Uncommon London, my second show from Uncommon. Thanks for being here. And you know, you originally. I reached out to you originally, trying to. because I love the ITV work and you were kind enough to connect me with Lucy. So for those who would like to hear the ITV episode, which is the work was phenomenal. You can also listen to that show. But today we're talking about being Q, which is what we call in the States. It's the hardware store. I don't know where it sits, Toby. Is it the leader or how would you describe where it sits competitively? Yeah, it's the market leader. I think the thing has been going on, there are more brands doing DIY these days. So how do you define the leader? It's maybe a bit more in flux than it's been before. So being Q, there's homebays and wicks, which we call those the Sheds. So they're all ginormous warehouses with everything you need under one roof. And then there's more people trying to chip away at this. So Amazon, you mentioned, eBay, even IKEA kind of plays a little bit in those spaces. And then we're seeing this kind of emerging class of really aggressive online players who typically just take one aspect of DIY or home improvements, say plans or radiators or something like that. And that's their focus. And they focus on kind of delivering that directly to you. How are homebays and wicks competing against being Q? How are they positioned? Homebays positioning is all about home beautification. So making your home beautiful, that's kind of their territory. Wicks is more about being efficient and fast. So getting these DIY tasks done very quickly and cheaply. Take us back to the work. The work just launched for this campaign has gotten a rave reviews. It's smart. It's simple. And I'm just curious where it all started from. Tell us about the first connection, the first time you were involved. Was it a picture? Was it just a conversation? Yeah, no, we pitched the business end of last year. So November last year, they kind of reached out to us in a few other agencies at this kind of moment of big change for them. They had a CEO who was about two years in that position, a CMO who was about, you know, between around about nine months of that stage in new position. And they both kind of agree that the brand needs to get its mojo back. So they were really eager to kind of re-chlorify what the brands should stand for in culture and then for a quarter pitch. And so what was what was their concern based upon or based on? I think it's probably mixer things. I think they had definitely seen what they were calling the brand's vitals declines, things like awareness and consideration and some of the other metrics that they measure. I think they also intuitively knew the value of brand and had realized that being to you had a really fun place in hearts and minds in this country, but they hadn't invested in it for a number of years. So I think it was this pivotal moment that they recognized that this brand needed to kind of reassert itself in the UK. So how would you describe the way B&Q has been positioned in the past? I think the two founders and you see this really often had a really clear sense of what the brand knew to be and this is amazing story about the two guys who started it, which, you know, it was, I said 50 years, it's about 51 years ago that they started. At that time, you know, a regular person in the Vina regular house couldn't go out and buy DIY equipment. You know, the only people who could buy that stuff were trades people and they would buy through trades channels. So the idea that you open a store and you start selling the stuff direct to the public was quite a radical idea at the time. And not long after that, the tagline which said, "Sillbock, today you can do it kind of immersion." And I think, you know, 50 years ago, the brand was really clear on what I believe, which was that everyone had the capacity for home improvement and everything that can offer a life. I just think over time they didn't feel the need to kind of as clearly state that and maybe kind of, it got a bit varied alongside the price points and the offers and everything else that businesses of this size need to worry about. So what was the client brief? I had a brilliant one line brief from the CEO which was Help Being Queue gets Mojo back. I love it. So it's generic. It's a generic statement. It's not very specific, but it's obviously a cry for help. Well, there's a lot built into it. I think the operative word is back. You know, I think it was a sense that Being Queue was a category leader that people used to talk about fondly. The people see this on their kind of sub and see the business and their suburbs. But they don't really have the same connection with it. The CMO, Patty, was much clearer on what that meant from a metric point of view. So he had kind of seen all the kind of vitals in decline and knew that this was more than just a vanity brief that this was actually kind of really harming at the moment that a long history of only investing in retail and price point advertising had meant that they had well and truly lost their Mojo and that was hurting their bottom line. And so who do you think they were losing share to? A mixture of people, I think Amazon has really been the biggest competitor. Those two Sheds I was talking about before home based on Wix, you know, in any given year, one of them kind of seems to beat the other and chip a little bit away at the share. I think there's just more and more people trying to take a little bit of this segment. So Amazon, like I said, there's a really big chunk, but then these specialist players and these local suppliers are all kind of taking a small percentage that really adds up to something quite significant. So tell us about the, tell us about the what you interpreted as being the challenge. You get this brief, get the brands Mojo back. What do you guys then do specifically from a planning perspective? To understand what the Mojo issue is. Yeah, what we interpret that as the brand doesn't have a clear positioning internally or out. And so that's one of the exact questions we pitch. You know, I think on common, we always talk about kind of brand strategy and brand positioning in a specific way, which is we rarely just look at what makes this kind of brand different or incrementally better than it's competitive and always try and push through and articulate what the brand's role in culture more broadly might be. And that kind of became our navigation point and really was the thing we went and searched for during the pitch process. And so tell me specifically what you guys do because the planner at the planners here, so it's like give me some granular stuff that you guys do. What as a planning group, what did you do? Did you go spend time in homes? Did you? Because this was this is pre pandemic. Yeah. Yeah. The first thing we needed was a bit of our hypothesis for what DOI and home could mean. And I think you know, we did that thing that every kind of brand doesn't begin the process, which is just look for our hypothesis that might start to ground all that stuff that you end up doing in a pitch like speaking to consumers and so on. For me, I found the most illuminating thing reading about English homes. So I'm not from England, but there's a lot of kind of great writing on English homes both historically. But also from an ethnographic point of view. And it was really interesting to kind of spend some time with these riders who kind of unlocked the power of home. And we contrasted that with the advertising of the category. And they're just going to be this massive disconnect. We were talking about some of the most emotional subject matter that you could possibly get your hands on in people's home. Then we were looking at the category advertising and saying when it came to improving those homes or fixing things up at those homes, the category really hadn't found the same emotional vocabulary. The thing that struck me really early on actually was, you know, again, doing the thing that everyone would do during a pitch, but a competitive review is the way the competitors would talk about DIY and home improvement in this whole subject matter. So the most part, it was a category of chores. So you would see advertising that played back this sense that, you know, your homes are against you and conspiring against you and they're falling down around you and you just fixed them up kind of quickly and promptly. And I just had a real beef, I suppose, with the inference behind that, which is that people's homes are inadequate or kind of conspiring against them. So I think there was this real contrast with the way, you know, so many kind of smart minds had talked about English homes and what they meant. And then the category is advertising and the category's view of home. And that disconnect started to kind of prize open what we saw was a really interesting opportunity here, which was start to at least kind of connect with the power of home. And, you know, and I can go to get further as to what we did because I think what became really clear is that homes are powerful, but it's not enough of being cute to celebrate homes because they don't sell homes. They have a very specific relationship with homes and we needed to kind of work out how DIY could contribute or be a part of that romantic story around homes. And that's really what we kind of were scratching out early on in the process here. Yeah, I love it. I love it. You know, it's funny that you mentioned the the fact that there's much written about British homes. There's this book was actually a TV series. And I totally agree with you. It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal in terms of the the attention that is paid to issues of sociology, of lifestyle and of institution in the UK. I wish it was done more here in the US, but it's not. I mean, for example, there was a TV series back in you may be familiar with this from your work, but it was called a sign of the times, signs of the times. And it was a kind of a documentary series that was done on British television. It was done by the BBC. And what came out of that was a book called Sign of the Times. And it was basically a look at personal taste in a British personal taste in the home. And it's phenomenal. I mean, it's really fantastic. I have it here in my hand. And for people who want to check it out, I think it's just titled Sign of the Times. It's not pretty clear here. But it says signs of the times are signs of the times is the book about personal taste in the British home based on the BBC television series of surveys, contemporary perceptions of good and bad taste and explorers the extraordinary range of emotions that lie behind our household choices. And I wanted to ask you about this because I fascinated because you know, as planners, we many of us love to get inside the home and sort of understand how people reacted to it. Were you able to do any of that? And was there any sort of observations that came out of it? Yeah, absolutely. But you know, I'll reference another book, take boxes, watching the Ingrid. And I haven't read Sign of the Times for a while, so I'm brilliant. But you know, I don't know what you found in your practice, but I find you can gain so much from this kind of pretty mind to who spent off in a career or a decade thinking about these subjects that we were trying to get up to speed within a week or so. So we got to see the groups, but you know, trying to have this kind of hypothesis and this emerging thought before we even stepped into home. But we did, we did do some consumer research as well. You know, I think we had to make it cool early on in what kind of shape we were going to take there. We ended up saying that we don't want to do groups. And that's particularly because we want to just a lot of time with people. I think the thing with DIY and home improvement is there's a lot of stuff that I expected people to replay to us as soon as we started talking about this subject matter. And that's partly because it's true partly because I just think we're kind of conditioned to think about DIY and home improvement in a specific way, which is if you ask people why they might have chosen to do a project themselves rather than got someone in. You'll quickly get two answers. The first is that it's cheap up, which is true. And the other is that there's a sense of achievement or accomplishment when you do it yourself. And it doesn't matter if it's kind of imperfect. You do it yourself. And we knew we're going to hear those answers early on. And we wanted to scratch beyond that to kind of get to something a little bit more powerful. Like I said, we knew homes were powerful, but we didn't understand why DIY and home improvement could lay claim to that. So rather than do a focus group or get lots of people in a different space, we went and spent an hour in people's home. We thought like an hour would allow us enough time to get the really obvious stuff out of the way. People saying they did themselves because they didn't have any money at the time and so on. And just just kind of sit in that conversation a little bit longer and get beyond it. And actually those interviews ended up being kind of incredibly instrumental and powerful when our journey and coming up with the brand strategy. Because what we kind of found is when you get people talking about the stuff that they've done at home, these DIY projects or home improvement, more than they're not talking about whether we're trying to fix or what was wrong with the house at the time. They were talking about something that they wanted to change or create in their family life. So remember speaking to a family and their kids have just gone off to uni. And their project, they had just completed, was putting a big patio outside the back of their house. And the reason why they had done that wasn't because the old patio was broken and wasn't simply because the neighbors had done it and they wanted to kind of keep up with that appearance. It was actually this really lovely thing which was the reason why they wanted a patio is so they had kind of recognized that their daughters' friends were all six foot four and they were like, they don't fit in the house. And if we don't have a patio, then we're never going to see our kids again because they're never going to be able to bring their friends around. And it was interesting that family would also talk about, you know, 10 years earlier when they had their teenage daughters kind of paint their rooms like a horrendous black or horrendous purple. Again, it wasn't about fixing up the paint in the room at the time. It was about kind of signaling to them that their adults are kind of entering this new chapter, that they're kind of owners of this house as well. And it was those stories and those kind of interactions and kind of spending a little bit more time with people and really then just kind of talk and talk about these projects. They kind of reveal that actually home improvement is never about fixing stuff. It's always about kind of creating things and changing things. And we thought that was kind of incredibly powerful. And that's actually where the strategy ended up landing. I love that. Actually, because there's a part of this book that I just mentioned, I wanted to read you out of paragraph here. That kind of goes indirectly sort of to that same idea. And I'll quote it here. It says, the landmarks in the evolution of an individual's taste are provided by certain life stages, such as marriage, the arrival of children, their later departure, divorce, if it applies, and retirement. Each of these stages provides an opportunity for a reevaluation of one's tastes and adjustments generally follow. That's kind of interesting that it kind of leads to the idea of life. And it's true. Life stage, whether you're a single person in an apartment trying to, and if it's a man or a woman, your tastes dramatically change as you connect with your partner as you go through various life stages. I love that idea of life stage dictating change in what you want to surround yourself with. Yeah, completely. And actually, we did. So once we started to kind of recognize this kind of shift from talking about DOI as this thing that fixes things to the stuff that brings about change, we did get really seduced with the big moments, which are, as you just kind of mentioned, these big life stages where you tend to kind of mark a moment of change. But actually, we also kind of saw it happening on a much smaller level. Actually, I remember speaking to this one woman who was in her early 20s had just moved into her own flat, so it had taken out a mortgage. And she was talking about painting the flat. And you could see in painting the flat, her big, the kind of reason why she did that wasn't simply just to change the color of the walls. And in fact, she kind of admitted that the walls had really changed at all. It's because in her mind, the idea of having a mortgage was petrifying. It was super, super scary. It was this kind of crazy adult lifelong commitment. But she also knew that painting your own apartment was this adult step. And in doing that, if she could paint her apartment, well, then she could start to see herself as an adult. And we just love this kind of sense of these little things that we do around the house, often about bringing around this kind of change that we kind of design our life. So it definitely happens at these big iconic moments, but it also happens at the kind of far smaller levels as well. We just thought that was kind of a really kind of powerful inside of something we hadn't really seen seen before. So at the end of the, at the end of the planning work when you go in and you do the interviews and you edit that footage down and you shared a little bit of it with me. What do you then report back to creative? I mean, in simple, in like in a simple terms or a simple sentence, you go back to the creative department and what's your briefing to them? We're lucky and that we have a really kind of small studio where we're kind of between, you know, around 60 people. I think it is at the moment, it's about the time that we're pitching as well. And so these, you know, the process and the planning process is one moving really quickly, but also happening across the tables and the people who are going to be working on this. And so I think the brand idea can equestualise in one meeting where we're just kind of working through our thoughts and things that we learn from the journey really. And I think in that meeting we're alive to the expression build a life, which has ended up being a piece of language that enter the campaign and it's kind of become our brand idea and our holding thoughts. I think, yeah, our process, so it's not particularly neat answer for the podcast, but our process is pretty messy and collaborative. And I remember the meeting pretty distinctly, but I wasn't labeled at Creative Briefing per se. It's just one of these meetings that you have about five days into the pitch, knowing that you need to get into kind of creative work quite quickly. And we kind of shared all the stuff that I've kind of talked to you a little bit about, our issues with the category, our aspirations for the brand to mean something bigger. And then just this kind of insight that we thought was super interesting around the sense of self-authorship that comes from DIY, the sense of the fact that you're never fixing something, you're creating something, you're changing something. And we kind of had the expression build a life in that meeting, which anchored everything from here and there. So what is meant by build a life? What do you want it to mean? I think by build a life, it's a useful piece of language for our internal processes. It turns up occasionally as part of the innovative line that might ideally, if we're so lucky, get people thinking, what it primarily means when we talk about internally as our kind of focal point to be, is the sense that home improvement isn't around fixing things, it's around creating things that you know the stuff we do at our home creates change at home. And so therefore it's just kind of powerful tool for helping us create the lives that we want and aspire to. Tell us about once you had had that sort of kickoff creative, like kickoff creative moment. Now, tell us about some of the ideas that came back to you. We know where you ended up, but were there versions that you can share with us that at the time seemed right, but ultimately didn't make it to the client? Well, I think the first thing we do when we start to have a brand idea, and particularly when it only exists in the strategic line or strategic idea at the stage, is just a trying and view of some meaning. So we just run it in lots of different ways. So starting to write into it manifesto is mood, attitude, reference and all that kind of stuff. So we spend our first little bit of time just trying to expand the idea and get really concrete on what it means and how we want to feel and how we want to visually turn up. And we built that out really early on and started to kind of capture some language and a point of view and some reference and confedings that we were really excited by. And in the end, we couldn't really see another, whether this is our lack of imagination or a lack of time or whatever it might be. But when it came to the pitch, we really only had the one brand idea for being cute, which was all around building life. And that was quite singular. We did have a few ways that it could be brought to life. It's hard to now say whether they would distinctly different campaigns. Sometimes they could have been imagined as very distinct campaigns. I think in the pitch we presented them is iterations that might run year on year. But I think the point was that we had a really singular view on what the brand could be. And we weren't just talking the pitch around what it should turn up in advertising. We're talking about how it should turn up in store. How it should turn up in your interactions with staff. What it might mean internally, how we might launch it within the being of your business. And so I think we had lots of stuff on the table and lots of kind of executions, plenty of which have proven to be wildly incorrect and not useful in some that we're kind of doing. If the question is, can we get the Mojo back? I think it was about paying the world as to what that mojo should be and should look like and should feel like. So I think lots of the work was really just to help us kind of bring the world to life and a new vision for this brand really. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's definitely an energy to this. And I think in terms of columns, you guys picked out of home. I think as your primary channel, why that in the pandemic I'm curious. Yeah. So that we have just launched, you know, and actually the shape of the launch had the chains. We were going to launch three pandemic in and, you know, I'm sure it once been through their own kind of processes and clients and everything though that's changed. But when we moved out, launch had actually forced a bit of a rethink. It was actually a new grief. So we did have a launch campaign ready to go that we then had to re-calibrate. Tell us about this great spot that you guys produced. Tell us what went into developing that. And was that happening? Was that developed pre-pandemic? So the execution wasn't. We said early on that we had this kind of production idea that we'll kind of really now and then partly because the brands 50 years old, partly because it's a truly kind of national brand. We like the idea of the production maybe having a story to it or an angle to it that would make it a bit more cultural importance than just a regular TV show. So we had the idea that in telling these kind of stories about a brand that helps you build a life that we wouldn't just go out and film scenarios and scenes that that's served us. The one we actually do is go visit or partner with a family in each of the 69 cities in the UK and get them to share their family archives or video archives with us and would use those hours of footage as a raw material for the campaign for the next year or 18 months or how the one we might stick with it. So after the pitch, we kind of set about kind of creating that library and we had used that library to create the garden spot that I just mentioned and then it's also been the source material for the brand spot that we ended up launching with at the time. Tell me about the significance of the 69 cities. Was that a very deliberate thing? Why did you need to include 69 cities? I think we just wanted some of the major production and additional little bit more audacious. We didn't just want nice footage. We also plan to do some more stuff for that footage. So it not just be a resource for the advertising material, but it could also be something of kind of cultural importance if we get it right. So we'll look at how we might kind of package that up and turn it into something that's a bit more like a documentary. We think if there's one brand that's got a position to talk about home life and what that means to this country, it's being to you. So we thought that why not make our production a little bit more ambitious in just a TV production. So is there a lot of paid media behind this or in terms of digital display ads and social or is it primarily a traditional out of home? Because I mean, it's everything that I've seen about it has been more in the out of home environment. Yeah, so we've got two of the channels, which is TV and out of home. And there is social stuff running alongside that, but TV in our phone. The two reasons really, one there at the, like I said, an national brand. It's a really efficient way for us to be kind of reach everyone. The other thing that we were talking about when we were designing this large moment is the importance of body language. But if this is going to feel like a re-law and align the sand, the re-assertion of what being Q is about and should stand for, then needs to have a proud body language to it. So that's why we have longer format TV than being Q is historically running in terms of the 60. That's why we're on 48 sheets and 96 sheets rather than just six sheets and small print placements. We wanted something that had a certain confidence to it and really felt like a brand that was trying to say we've got a mojo back. I love that. So that was a conscious decision that scale projected confidence and confidence spills sense of mojo and distinctiveness. Exactly. So is the, I read it as an orange color. Has that always been a being Q color? Yeah. So being Q colors famously origin and they have a different times in their history kind of shied away from that. And they've had actually been shying away from it for the last couple of years. We just thought it was kind of a brilliant asset. You know, I probably shouldn't mention this earlier. There was some assets to this brand that we felt were really under utilized. One being the orange and the second being the line you can do it, which is probably one of the top five kind of recognized end lines in this country. And we kind of felt those lines and assets were really being under utilized. You know, they weren't the idea obviously. But then in our presentation of an idea, they should absolutely be kind of, you know, captured not only because they're super recognizable, but we're going to be proudly being Q, then we need to kind of connect whatever we're saying today with what people strongly associate with the brand. So it doesn't feel like a complete fantasy or kind of makeup version of what this brand is all about. As I look at, as I look at the line, you can do it, which is, which is a, it's a very familiar line here within, within hardware in the US. And it's sort of, it's one that, that, and it's, it's a tone that's been played up for years by Home Depot. And it's a great line. They say, you can do it. We can help. And they changed it to more savings, more doing. And then in 2019, they changed it to how doers get more done. And it kind of tracks this idea of, of, of the economic cycle. And in 2009, we're coming out of the recession, the great recession. So now it's about, it's about sort of higher unemployment. People want to save money, but they still want to do things because doing it yourself is obviously saving money yourself. And then it went to this value message of how doers get more done. I'm curious with, with you guys, were you, were you conscious of the recession? Was that on your mind? And was that, was that idea of value? Something that you debated needed to be inserted into this message? Or was it simply the encouragement of, of, of you can do it? Um, yeah, it's interesting. We were developing all this end of last year, kind of naively, a time when people were talking about recession the same way they are now. That's true. Wasn't as big a You know, there seems to be, you know, I hear what you're saying with those reference points, which are super interesting. For us, the interesting DIY is in just correlated to finance and economics and this sense of either I'm doing it or I can pay someone to do it. I think the other thing is really attached to how much time people are spending at home. So that seems to be one of the bigger drivers of interest in this category. In terms of our conversations around you can do it, we were really hesitant to get rid of it because it was just so incredibly well-known, but we also recognised that no one had really clarified what it meant for many years. It's been just kind of throw away call to action. So we said you can do it, but the question was, well, what can you do? And I think the answer that people are filling in for themselves is fix up your home. But like I said right at the beginning, we always said that we need to be clear on what people are doing when they're fixing up their home. What's that thing we're trying to say? And we did say, is you can do it about saving money or is you can do it about a sense of satisfaction. And like I said, we kind of pushed beyond that and kind of got to this territory of saying, well, you can do it about creating a life. You can kind of create the home life that you want. That is within your personal power and you have the capacity to do it. So having a land on this territory of building a life that allowed us to, you know, in our, at least attempt to kind of bring a new life into you can do it and really clarify what it can meant. And we're trying to reclaim what that expression means throughout this campaign. The pandemic obviously comes along and kind of screws with everything. But one thing that it does is it centers people in the home and the role of the home and life changes. Are you guys thinking through the implications of that for for DIY? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I'm sure everyone worked here at different agencies and studios. You have a handful of clients that sit on your desk and when COVID hit, there's a real question mark as to which ones is going to really challenge and what brands and categories are going to accelerate. I do think everyone's time at home, whether it's simply just being more familiar with those, you know, or face-to-face, I could say, with the task that we've put off for a long time, or simply just spending more time at home and imagining kind of new futures there. DIY has absolutely kind of boomed at this time. So being too kind of done particularly well. In terms of what that might mean for the brand in the future, look, I think we're kind of superware, something in this country that people are going to be spending more time at home. But therefore that kind of just latent interest in the category in DIY is going to be, you know, accelerating the increase. But for us, it just kind of multiplies all the challenges that the brand has historically faced and continues to face, you know, the challenges of kind of, you know, traditional competition, but also the Amazon's and people all around. You know, as we close out here, tell me, tell me sort of in retrospect, what did you learn about human behavior that surprised you as you went through this? Because every time I've ever done the project like this where there's a lot of in-home work and you're studying a category, there's always seems to be a surprising thing that either takes you by complete surprise or even just a small little nugget where you like shit. That is sort of this common thread. Did you did you find as a planner that you you were the team learned anything that surprised you? Yeah, so we kind of, you know, we touched on a little bit. I think going into this, we expected there to be some sort of macro factor that makes sense of the category. Like, is it economic surprises? Is there a certain, you know, economic bracket that relies on DIY and use it? Or is it an age thing or an experience thing? We kind of expected something big like that to kind of cut across and make sense of the DIY improvement or at least maybe reveal an opportunity for the brand. I think that struck me though, it was just how personal DIY can be and the crazy stuff we attach for these little moments. So whether it's putting a painting up on a wall, whether it's putting a photo on a land of these, whether it's painting a room, whether it's letting a kid paint a room, putting a patio or putting in a new kitchen. The way people talk about that at a very individual level and the stuff that they attach to it and what they expect their life to, how they expect their life to change after that happen, it's just really quite incredible. And so that was the thing that really struck me is if you just simply, you know, were an alien to this planet and you looked at the DIY categories advertising, you would say, God, this is a category that humans hate. They've got absolutely no insects in this and the only way to be a good brand in this category is to remove the task and make this simple and easy as possible, which is partly why there's such a big vacuum there for the lives of Amazon to come in and do that because few brands make stuff as painless as they can. But if you sit down, you speak to people and you get them to talk to you about why they change the kitchen and what's happening after the kitchen or what it meant to put up a photo of a grandparent in their kids nursery or what it meant to be the day they kind of put in a chest of drawers or study desk in their kids thing and everything they were trying to say to another person or themselves in action, it's quite crazy really and I was just kind of going by the power of DIY really. And at that point, it's to the important thing for all planners and for all of us in the industry to to learn a lesson from, which is, and I'm wondering if it's if it was deliberate with you guys, we have to be we have to be super conscious of the question we ask. So obviously to get to some of these these observations, you had to ask questions in a certain way. Do you have a way of asking questions? Was there a deliberate way to to provoke this a sort of a distinctive or different response when you were having these discussions, these interviews? Yeah, I think that maybe stems from the way we talk about brands at the studio. We always, you know, when we're talking about brands this year, we, you know, at least and I talk a lot about brands don't need a position in the category they need a place in culture. And so it means, you know, rightly or wrongly when we're kind of doing our our stuff, we spend little time looking at, you know, what makes the brand unique and better or bigger than its competitors. And we spend a lot more time just looking at the culture and saying, well, what could a DIY brand be about? What should it be about? And I think that means we we move past a lot of stuff that, you know, I certainly in in previous lives would have spent a lot more time thinking with or kicking around and just trying to get to a much more media place for the brand to be a bit more additive in culture really if that makes sense. Yeah. And so, you know, one of the things that that was very unique about this, I mean, there is a, there are many brands that have talked about the home and about memories, nostalgia, etc. Which is, I think, is a part of your message to but the one thing that you guys did and nobody else that I'm aware I was ever done is you you talk about the truth of what happens when people live together. And I'm talking about the arguments, the tension because a lot of that spot talks about the things that we all know happen, but they're not necessarily have been they've not necessarily been fodder for marketing messaging in the past about the fact that there's shit disagreements between people and families and they shape the definition of family. It's not always warm and nostalgic. There's tension, there's issues with kids with each other, etc. Was was that was that difficult to sell to the client the fact that you've incorporated that reality into the spot? No, it wasn't. I think that's partly because we tend to be quite upfront with that stuff in our pitches. So, you know, the style of work that we think works and makes the biggest difference tends to incorporate that. You know, strategically we like brands that kind of tend to play on a friction or attention or kind of play in an uncomfortable place or say things that people are uncomfortable saying. And certainly from a credit point of view, the whole credit department plays with a much broader emotional footprint than maybe other agencies and other credit studios would be comfortable playing with. And that's just we think that is really important to get noticed that there needs to be a bit of friction. Eat if you want people to pay attention to the stuff that we're creating. And it's super important for us to be forced right with that when we're kind of meeting with clients and sharing work because that's not something you can really reveal at the end of the thousand. It pulls all sorts of disasters. But I'm just really interested in that you pick that up. We do try and bake that stuff in to our work. I suppose I suppose that goes back to that discussion that's been brewing and you know, for a number of years in marketing circles and planning circles, which is the importance of distinction versus differentiation. Right. So I think too many clients are looking for differentiation and God knows I have been in so many meetings where the question is, well, what makes us different than somebody else? They're already saying that. And that sort of a conversation can lead to mundane useless marketing. Where I think what you're saying is that distinctiveness, whether it's driven through tensions, whether it's driven through a connection to culture is more important than differentiation. The fact that you're different isn't enough. You got to go beyond that. Interesting distinction differentiation often used to frame up conversation, the band strategy. I think our strategy conversation will focus on meaning that what's going to make this brand matter? How can we argue that this brand and deserves to exist on this planet. What is the offer culture? When it comes to advertising, I think we're looking for fame. That's the kind of word that hangs out in the credit process. What's going to get this notice we're talking about? And that's why we might push the emotional footprint of the work a little bit. That's why we might be a little bit more adjunctive in the nature of the work. It might be why we try and turn our production into a bit more of a cultural project in going to 69 families. What's that thing that is deserving of the deserves to be talked about? That they could strike up the conversation. So differentiation and distinct from it, maybe we talk a little bit less about what we get to the execution and focus a lot more about what's going to make this famous what's going to make it worth talking about. Toby Duncan had a planning on Common London, a great shop, a great studio. I know you guys have a you think of yourselves as a creative studio, right? Yes. And once again, great talking with somebody from Common London. And I'm excited to see where the next phase of being Q goes. Thank you so much. Such a such a project you reach out and ask us about this project. It's very appreciated. Yeah, you're more than welcome. And we'll see everybody on the next episode.