Steve Hatch & Jim Taylor 
Rigorous Magic 
Communication Ideas and their Application

In the marketing world, communication ideas are revered for their
magical ability to affect how consumers behave towards brands.
Despite this, they are poorly understood. How many types are there?
What are their characteristics? How should you use them? And what
makes a good one? Most marketers simply cannot answer these
questions.

Rigorous Magic answers these questions, bringing
science to the art of ideas. Jim Taylor and Steve Hatch dispel the
myths around communication ideas and create a practical ‘road
map’ for marketers to select which types are best for their
brand to compete. Only through a rigorous process of cataloguing
and evaluation can ideas truly be understood – and the right ones
selected to change consumer behaviour in today’s global,
multi-channel marketing world.

Table of Content

FOREWORD.

PREFACE.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

1 THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAGIC.

3 WITH AN EYE TO EXECUTION.

4 WITH AN EYE ON THE CONTEXTUAL.

5 WITH AN EYE TO STRATEGY.

6 BEYOND STRATEGIC VS EXECUTIONAL.

7 INVENTING A BRAND: THE ‘KR BAR’.

8 COMMUNICATION COMBINATIONS.

9 KNOWING YOUR ‘HOCOS’.

10 GENERATING IDEAS.

11 JUDGING BRAND IDEAS: TROUT OR TROLLEY?

EPILOGUE THE ERA OF RIGOROUS MAGIC.

APPENDIX SUMMARY: DEFINITIONS OF THE TYPES OF IDEAS.

REFERENCES.

INDEX.

About the author

One of the most beautiful buildings in the American Mid-west is the
Milwaukee Art Museum. It is a fantastic piece of modern
architecture, and from a distance with its winged roof, it looks
like a great bird perching on the shores of Lake Michigan. Inside
it’s no less impressive. Walking around it you get the
distinct feeling that you’re entering into another world, a
world combining both rigour and magic. The picture of the corridor
shown on the front cover, taken inside this amazing museum by
photographer Kieran Negoda, brings this to life.

But to Steve and Jim the picture is more than just a visual
metaphor for the name of the book. It’s also a place in which
they’ve experienced a lot of the issues that are dealt within
this book as it’s here that they’ve run several idea
workshops for SABMiller – the global brewer that has its
North American headquarters in Milwaukee. And in many ways, the
building represents the business of creating ideas –
inspirational, visionary and yet, at times, utterly
frustrating.

Steve and Jim both have both spent their careers
working separately – Steve at BMP and PHD, Jim at Mc Cann,
Ogilvy and Nota Bene – but they have now both have found a
natural home for themselves at the WPP media agency, Mediaedge:cia
– Steve as joint Managing Director of Mediaedge:cia in the
UK, and Jim as Global Director of Communications Planning and also
Regional Director of Retail for Europe Middle East and Africa. They
have increasingly overlapped in their careers on the SABMiller
business; a business which has taken them all over the world. This
journey hasn’t been one of sterile airports and hotel rooms,
rather it’s been one in which they’ve really
experienced the different markets…from working at the Praha
hotel in Prague, a bastion to communism designed to be the place
for ‘the last stand’ (with the tanks on the lawn) when
capitalism came rolling into town, to going to saunas in the
Russian countryside in -30 degree conditions, to talking to hostel
dwellers in the townships of Johannesburg to arguing with
unscrupulous cabbies at 2am in Bucharest. Most importantly, it has
afforded them some of the most interesting planning work that you
can imagine and given them a huge experience in the world of ideas.
As a result, they’ve become fervent believers in the role
that communication ideas play at the heart of modern marketing.