No bunny.

When I visit Sony's HQ in Bangkok I might be looking at colourful posters of bunnies, but I'm asked to sit at an empty desk and to talk on a cheap office phone to a hollow foreign voice from a dusty storeroom somewhere possibly on the same compound. (This is just the second step in a multi-step process and it's obviously a fairly standard procedure I gather by the way no one bats an eyelid.) 

The point is that the experience leaves a far sharper imprint on my mind than any of Sony's ads. The two and a half hours I spend there increases my total life interface with the brand by about 700% – and now my overall experience with the brand is suddenly really not very good. The 12 minutes 27 seconds (over 33 years) I had spent being persuaded by their carefully crafted copy and impressed by their flash lifestyle layouts is all wasted. They are constantly begging me to listen to what they've got to say and when I finally turn up, they're not interested in having a conversation. They had a big chance to impress me and they blew it.

Every single interface that consumers (participants, citizens or whatever you want to call your target audience) have with the brand ought to be part of the 'product'. We should be in the business of unearthing authentic, unique and resonant insights and dramatizing our discoveries in terms of product and service (working with the client to make the very nature of what they do intrinsically more relevant) – so when the client spends millions of dollars (or baht) promising the world with brand communications, the brand experience lives up to the claims.