A story about an early, downloadable and portable device that fulfilled a specific task to make life a little easier. Think Different, in 1700.

A Pig’s Tale is one in a series of short films commissioned from the BA(Hons) Graphic Communication course at Bath Spa University. This film was made by William Chestnutt and Sam Downend.

On an iphone/ipad? Watch on vimeo here.

Stemming from his analysis of the IPA databank Peter Field gives Challengers 3 bits of advice for improving effectiveness through achieving ‘fame’.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Rob Poynton, co-founder of On Your Feet gives three bits of advice for generating ideas.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Pierre Schaeffer, former CMO of Kodak, give his 3 bits of advice on how Challengers should approach innovation.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Brian Lanahan from Align suggests three ways Marketers can learn from the world of storytelling.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Russell Taylor from Axe/Lynx gives us 3 Bits of Advice on marketing to young men.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Richard Hytner from the Manchester United Supporter’s Trust give us 3 bits of advice on taking on a giant.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Speaking after Eurostar’s move to St Pancras station Greg Nugent shares his 3 key learnings from the project.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

As the co-founder of digital marketing company The Viral Factory Ed Robinson knows plenty about the internet, here’s his 3 bits of advice on engaging your audience online.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Frances Allen shares her experience of working on Dunkin Donuts and gives some advice to anyone going after that big competitor (look out for more of this next month when we’ll be looking at the benefits of creating a Two Horse Race).

Watch on an iphone/ipad

3 Bits of Advice on talking to a Teen Audience from American Legacy Foundation‘s SVP of Marketing, Eric Asche.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

3 bits of advice on using crowdsourcing, from Idea Bounty founder Nic Ray.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

One from the archives – On an eatbigfish visit to Fruit Towers innocent’s Richard Reed gives us his 3 bits on starting a Challenger Brand.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Abi Moore, co- founder of the Pink Stinks campaign, gives her three bits of advice on how to get a campaign started and keep it going.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

A short but sweet 3 bits from Jim Hytner, ex Global Marketing Director of Barclays Bank.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Jaimie Fuller, CEO of Skins, gives us his 3 bits of advice for new Challengers.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

3 bits of advice from Kerri Martin (former ‘Guardian of Brand Soul’ at Mini US, now VP of Business at BBDO West) on managing a Challenger brand within a large organisation.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

Akala Daley, founder of The Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, gives us his three bits of advice on how to make the boring interesting.

Watch on an iphone/ipad

http://www.talkmeintoit.com/

Summer, and the Morgan family head off to the South of France for a holiday. We want some predictable heat.

We arrive at Nice airport at midday. We have booked a National hire car, and after clearing customs, we duly get in the queue for the National desk. After 20 minutes we come to the front of the desk, and wait politely while the male and female National assistants joke and flirt with each other, occasionally pushing pieces of paper across the desk for us to sign. They never look at us – we are something of a distraction, to be honest, from all the joking and flirting. But this is the South of France in the summer: if the sap can’t rise here, now, then frankly when can it ever? We collect our paperwork and benevolently push our trolley on to collect the car.

Which is where National up their game, and the service moves from the charmingly rude to the magnificently contemptuous.

It starts promisingly enough: when you get outside the terminal to the car pickup point, they have a very nice cool canopy, offering plenty of shade from the sun (which is now in the mid 90s). The canopy looks very inviting. Oasis-like, you think; how very thoughtful. And so encouragingly empty.

But there is a reason why it has only a handful of people underneath it, it turns out, and that reason is that National don’t want you to wait for your car in the shade. They want you to wait in the sun.

They want you to wait in a line, on the tarmac, in 90 plus degrees, queuing up to a gate in a chain link fence, where two National representatives on some old plastic chairs preside over the washed cars coming back into service, and hand them out. They don’t bother to explain anything. There are no signs. They have the canopy, but you aren’t allowed to wait underneath it. They want you to wait in the sun instead until they put some keys in your hand.

So we do. For 30 minutes. A queue of pale skinned English families standing in the midday Mediterranean sun, waiting. We stand and redden, and look at the people under the canopy and wonder what the canopy was for, if one is a car rental company and it isn’t for waiting for your car.

And as I stand and wait, I sequence naturally through the cycle of Four Useless Sins that is so familiar to anyone in this situation:

Vengeance: Predictable forswearing of giving any future Morgan business to National. Even if they were the last car rental company left on a remarkably well paved desert island.
Neurosis: Mentally book consultation with skin specialist on return home. Skin cancer inevitable. But reflect that even a successful class action suit a poor recompense for a promising challenger career cut brutally short.
Lust: Canvas possibility of ice cream truck nearby. Believe me, it feels like lust after 25 minutes at 90 degrees
Enlightenment:You know what? This is the exact sodding opposite of an iPhone App.

I didn’t really mean an iPhone App, of course, though that was my headline at the time. I meant the opposite of Startlingly Useful.

Because here’s the thing. We live in an age, surely, where Startingly Useful is fast becoming the new Cool. Having for years been told that The Brand Is The Thing, where we carefully build brands by brilliant marketing over time, we are now seeing a parallel world emerging where brand building as such is not, apparently, important. Accelerating by us in the overtaking lane are a convoy of Supertools, usually free Supertools, that make our lives easier in ways we often hadn’t imagined possible. Supertools called Google (or Google Alerts, or Google Maps, or Google-just-about-anything), or Wikipedia, or Flickr, or Skype, or Spotify, or Dopplr, or Mumsnet. Supertools that it make it really easy for us to do something we want, and because they are free, come with an air of generosity that makes us not just excited by the tool, but grateful to the giver. And perhaps proud to be an early adopter, if we get there on time. And thus become brand builders by an entirely different model.

What does this all have to do with National? The point is, we don’t make exceptions for categories any more. We don’t think ‘Well, this is really hot and unpleasant and they seem to not care about me at all….but, well, car rental’s different’. We judge one category and how it treats us by the standards of our favourite brands in another. So as we see the growth of Startlingly Useful all around us, it is going to throw down challenges in every category. Not to develop apps necessarily (in fact this is exactly the wrong way to think about it) but certainly to develop real utility and integrate that into our brand offer, rather than duct tape it round the edges. And this experience with National, this was the opposite of Startlingly Useful. It was inconvenient, it was entirely on their terms and it was all for their benefit rather than mine. It was time intensive, and stress-inducing rather than stress-removing. It was the very opposite of generous. It was selfish. A master lesson in incompetence and how to drive your customers screaming in the opposite direction.

Newton’s Third Law of Motion (my favourite) states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, propelled by a violent and visceral reaction to National Car Rental, let’s sit down and take a long hard look at how we can we as challengers build generous utility into the very core of our offer. Beyond the fundamental product or service that we offer, how can we build an experience and value around that which is in itself startlingly useful?

Because if maybe, just maybe, Utility is the new Marketing.

Adam is the founder of eatbigfish

This month, inspired by an inconvenient, unhelpful and stress-inducing car rental experience, Adam suggested we spend some time exploring usefulness – not just plain usefulness as opposed to uselessness but understanding and appreciating the surprising and generous spirit of the ‘Startlingly Useful’. So we start with rant from Adam that turns into a very reasonable and really rather interesting perspective on competitive usefulness in the modern world and then we have an example of a startlingly useful innovation from the beauty business and a story about the surprising usefulness of a pig in the 18th century.

And then above and beyond this, we are going to try to be extra useful too. This month our takeaway is going to be a little different. Of course we hope the Challenger Project has in its short life proved to be interesting, inspiring and even useful. At least sometimes. But this month Adam has decided to over-commit. Every other day there’ll be a new interview up in the Take Away section that will offer Three Bits of Advice on a particular aspect of brand and/or business life. We are hoping you’ll find these additional thought pieces useful or that you’ll know someone that will. So although we’ve now given away the ‘surprise’ element of the plan we hope you’ll still find this month useful, maybe even startlingly so.