Three orange lab coats. SEK 900.
That’s what we spent on our outfits for Medicinteknikdagarna, a medical technology conference in Örebro, Sweden, in October. We were there to talk about how companies can get noticed, stand out and be remembered. So we figured we should probably practise what we preach.
Orange lab coats it was. And they worked.
Almost three weeks later, people are still talking about them. Meetings are being booked with people we met at the conference, and the orange lab coats keep coming up in conversations, usually accompanied by a smile.
It’s too early to calculate any kind of return on investment. And the lab coats were hardly our only investment. There was preparation, travel, a booth and a rather unusual scientific poster presentation. But as conversation starters, those SEK 900 lab coats have done a pretty good job.
Which brings us to an interesting question: Should we wear them again?
At the next trade show? And the one after that? Could the orange lab coats become a Phosworks thing?
Because having a thing is, well, a thing.
The value of having a thing
Think about brands or people you recognise instantly. Sometimes it’s a colour, a sound, a phrase or something they always do. You don’t need to see a logo or hear a name. You already know who it is.
It’s a shortcut to recognition. And over time, that recognition can become quite valuable. The idea itself doesn’t have to be particularly complicated.
Take Graham Norton’s Big Red Chair. At the end of his talk show, audience members tell a story while sitting in a red chair. If Graham or his guests lose interest, someone pulls a lever and the unfortunate storyteller tips backwards. If the story is good enough, they’re allowed to walk away.
Simple, slightly cruel and very funny.
Over the years, the Red Chair has become one of the show’s most recognisable features. It even got its own TV special. The chair has little to do with interviewing celebrities, but it’s become part of what makes The Graham Norton Show the Graham Norton Show.
Will it blend?
In 2006, someone at American blender manufacturer Blendtec had an idea: film the company’s founder, Tom Dickson, testing blenders by putting things in them that probably shouldn’t be blended.
With an initial budget of just $50 for props, they created videos featuring Dickson in a white lab coat, blending golf balls, marbles and even pieces of a garden rake.
The result was Will It Blend?, a series whose first five videos attracted six million views in six days. Not bad for $50.
But the videos weren’t just entertaining. They demonstrated exactly what Blendtec wanted customers to understand about its products.
You could spend a lot of time explaining how powerful your blender is. Or you could show it destroying things most people wouldn’t dream of putting into one. Which would you remember?
And once again, there was a lab coat. We’re beginning to see a pattern here 😉
So, have we found our thing?
Of course, wearing orange lab coats doesn’t automatically make Phosworks a better agency. But they do something useful. They get us noticed, give people a reason to approach us and make it easier to start a conversation.
After that, we still need to give people a reason to listen. We need to show that we understand their business, that we can make complex science and technology easier to understand, and that we have the ideas and skills to make their brands more memorable. That’s what we were at the conference to talk about in the first place.
But should we keep wearing the lab coats?
We’re a creative agency, after all. Coming up with something different every time is tempting. But there’s also a good argument for repetition.
Jenni Romaniuk, research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, has spent years studying distinctive brand assets. Things like colours, sounds or characters that people associate with a particular brand, even without seeing its name.
The important part isn’t just being different or getting noticed. It’s getting people to associate that difference with you. And that takes time and consistency. Three orange lab coats worn at one trade show are hardly a distinctive brand asset. Not yet, anyway.
Graham Norton kept coming back to his Red Chair. Blendtec kept asking the same question: Will it blend? They found something that worked and kept doing it.
And perhaps that’s something we creative people occasionally forget. We’re so busy looking for the next idea that we don’t always give the previous one enough time to become recognisable.
We haven’t decided what to do at our next trade show. Maybe we’ll wear the lab coats again. Maybe we’ll come up with something completely different.
But almost three weeks after Medicinteknikdagarna, people are still remembering three orange lab coats.
For SEK 900, that’s not bad.
Perhaps we’ve accidentally found our thing?
