Ad Agency New Republique Launches Book On Selling

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Creative ad agency New Republique’s Robert Hutchison and Nima Yassini are set to release a book that shares their take on modern marketing, GRiP: How To Sell More Through The Rules Of Interpersonal Attraction.

The book introduces their unique advertising model to a business world still tethered to traditional marketing principles “out of touch with the modern consumer who changed fundamentally seven years ago,”said Yassini, CEO of New Republique.

“The impact of the GFC made consumers extremely value conscious,” he explained. “On top of that, the introduction of the smartphone allowed people to become more informed, socially connected and digitally liberated. This type of customer is no longer impacted by traditional marketing tools like ‘Zag’ or ‘Behaviour Change’. GRiP flips these models on their head, creating a new way to engage and attract this new kind of buyer.”

GRIP

The book’s thesis is simple: Stop trying to change consumer behaviour and instead draw them naturally and irresistibly towards your brand. Increasing the buyabilty of the brand’s products will result in increased sales.

How? By ensuring it adheres to the rules of interpersonal attraction – the psychology that dictates why people like other people. “It’s clear that brands have human-like qualities and we sometimes consider brands and their products in much the same manner as we consider other people,” says Hutchison, strategy director at New Republique. “Sometimes we judge their values, we shine in their orbit or we ‘save’ the world together.”

By distilling these rules into three easily measured variables, Hutchison and Yassini have provided brands a checklist that gives a specific read on what areas they need to focus on to increase their attraction to consumers. It is these variables – generosity, responsiveness and proximity – that gives GRiP not just its acronym, but its very own holy trinity for products to appeal to.

Generosity measures how much a company gives over and above the simple product offering.

Responsiveness tells us how well the company understands the needs and desires of its consumers and offers products and experiences that respond to these needs.

Proximity is a measure of how close a product is to consumers through its presence and importance in their personal, social and wider life.

Having found success through GRiPs application onto their own company and clients, Hutchison and Yassini have expanded the theory to everything else they felt needed to ‘get a GRiP’, so to speak. The book features a case study using the GRiP approach on the Australian PM Tony Abbott.

“Thanks to some of his most recent decisions, his generosity and responsiveness scores are quite low,” Hutchison says. “His proximity though, is too high. Perhaps Abbott could improve his score by keeping quiet.”

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