Watching the detectives: The best fictional detectives never follow the establishment rules

Crime and detective fiction is one of the most popular genres that there is. Fans demand a strict adherence to a story arc, which for most of them runs as follows:

• Crime committed (how bloodthirsty depending on personal taste of author and reader).
• Rules-based investigation gets nowhere.
• Detective goes rogue, maybe even has to hand back his badge and gun if he or she is employed by the official police, or if he or she is private then they’ll get warned off by the cops.  
• Rule breaking gets the detective to the bad guy.
• Ends with bad guy getting their just desserts and the detective striding off broodingly into the sunset.
• Detective reluctantly carries on solving crimes, driven by delivering justice, never one of the pack, rarely rewarded beyond the great outcomes of justice being done.

Vera Stanhope always arrests the criminal, never gets promoted because she won’t follow directives, and always walks alone. Columbo, scruffy genius of LAPD, never rises above Lieutenant.  James Bond is suspended from duty. Cormoran Strike (JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, the grumpy detective never plays by the book). Jack Logan, or Robert Hoon (for fans of Scottish Noir) operating even though they were suspended. Philip Marlowe, Jim Rockford, Sam Spade, Adrian Monk. I could go on. Let’s face it, Batman wouldn’t have got anywhere if he’d followed the NYPD rules instead of being a caped crusader.  

There are plenty of rules in our industry. The rules of growth, rules of branding, rules of short-term and long-term outcomes. And most of the time it is the right thing to follow them in order to deliver the objective. The role of the strategist, however, is to consider how and when those rules should be broken, stretched, even ignored.

At a time when media is changing faster than ever, Catherine Kehoe, CCO at Nationwide, this year’s chair of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, called in her speech for an acknowledgment that the business of effectiveness needs new scrutiny, saying: “much of our thinking has been honed from the age of ‘air power’ that saw carpet bombing and surgical strikes managed from a central command post… this is going into reverse… we are increasingly entering in a world of brands being built on the ground by armies of influencers, by brand partnerships and collaborations, and by in-feed and in-game activations. Hand-to-hand marketing is replacing fire-and-forget.” It is because of this truth that it is incumbent on every strategist to consider breaking the rules set in a time when advertising was perhaps simpler, and norms were more homogeneous.  

The winner of the Glass Lion Grand Prix in Cannes this year did just that. First, as the entry acknowledged, the agency answered the brief with a suggestion for new product development. Then the product itself, the Vaseline Transition Body Lotion, was co-created with the community for which it was intended over a period of years. And finally, promoted not only with advertising, but with the influencers in that community. This wasn’t a stunt, it wasn’t intended just to surf an immediate trend, and it was distributed in a major chain in Thailand, and for its impact both on the trans community and the image of the brand, it was impossible to overlook for the judges (of whom I was one).

I’ve never really warmed to the pirates versus navy analogy. No-one in our industry wears a uniform (unless you count beards, jeans, and trainers sported by a number of UK CSOs!), and however much you seek to paint pirates in a positive light, they’re pretty irredeemable in real life.  

Rogue detectives, though troubled and solitary, are truth seekers. Often with a real trusted team around them (the solitary bit is more social than professional).  Truth seekers, even if it means breaking the rules of the game. You don’t have to be more pirate (though their innate acceptance of diversity and dedication to a collective outcome is worth consideration – see our new book A Year of Creativity which references Adam Morgan’s Pirate Inside). Go rogue. In pursuit of the truth. Just like the best detectives. Just like the best strategists.