Can you hear me now?

A couple of weeks back, in my home province, a piece of legislation managed to make headlines despite not being stupid. The proposed new law is a set of rules designed to protect consumers from the marketing and billing practices of wireless service providers. It brought back a flood of memories for me. If I were to make a list of the most ethically challenging product categories I’d ever worked in, this one would certainly be on it somewhere. Though perhaps not for the reasons you think. From my experience, the industry wasn’t full of cheats and liars; it was just full of lousy stewards of the marketplace. If the wireless marketers of that era were running every consumer marketplace, we would by now be scrounging for nuts and berries and wearing raccoon pelts. It was an interesting laboratory for how what seems to be good business can turn out to be bad capitalism.

Nothing says failed marketplace like the law stepping in. If you’ve screwed up so badly that you can make politicians look like heroes, you may not have found your calling. Yet, in the words of the heretic John Bradford, “there, but for the grace of God…” There are cautions in this tale, temptations to which any marketer might succumb in a spasm of MBA cleverness. Fear them. They seem awesome in the moment, but are very likely to wind you up the same way Bradford did: burned at the stake.

Asymmetry. This is what happens when, by statute or by chicanery or even by marketing brilliance, an industry becomes so concentrated that consumer choice, in practical terms, disappears. Banks are like this. Airlines are like this. Cable companies are like this. A lot of the product categories people most hate doing business with are characterized by asymmetrical power relationships between the marketer and the consumer. When it happens, marketers don’t generally intend to become evil, but they do take consumers for granted, investing a lot more time in operational efficiency, government relations and other back room stuff. People feel neglected, as if they know your business will be fine whether they like you or not. They seethe. And by seething, they soak your customer service infrastructure as much as they can. And then, one day, a choice comes along, and they flock to it. Just to teach you a lesson. No, even if a category is asymmetrical by nature, a smart brand pretends otherwise and acts as if its life depended on an empowered consumer. RIM is reaping this whirlwind before our eyes. Apple might want to give it a think now, while love is still in the air.

Displaced value. One of the major features of the new law I mentioned earlier is a significant reduction in the cost of getting out of a contract with your wireless provider. But here’s the thing: Those contracts are the only reason your carrier could afford to sell you that snazzy new smart phone for $99; the other $300 it cost to build it is baked into those 36 months of payments you signed on for. Under the new rules, your phone could be a liability for the carrier. If you were the CEO, would you let it ride? Probably not. You’d increase your rates, or you’d charge more for the phones. That will make people mad, because they’d never understood in the first place what that phone was really worth. Angry consumers destabilize businesses and, eventually, cost money. Imagine if the industry had marketed itself by putting its pricing where its costs were: We’d buy phones less often, and we’d be paying less for our airtime. Earth and bank account would both be sustainably happier. Something to think about the next time you’re railing at the price of razor blades. In the long run, we're all better off if we know what things are really worth.

Taxing the gormless. There is, believe it or not, a business out there that will look at your wireless bills and figure out which plan you should really be on to pay the least. You pay them by diverting the first few months of your savings to them. This shouldn’t even be possible, right? I mean, there is no way that providing wireless services is so complicated and so user-specific that it needs so many ‘plans’ or that it should be possible to so expensively pick the wrong one. Yet we do. Some people shop like predators, and they get to pay less. That means that we, the gormless, must end up paying too much for long distance or wireless services or plane tickets or mortgages and chequing accounts, or we put premium in our gas tanks without knowing for sure if our particular car needs it. We – and I’m the worst for this – end up being taxed for being too trusting. This doesn’t end well. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes a consumer more wildly angry than being made to feel stupid. Someday, Mr. Bank/Airline/Wireless/Gas Station Chain, someone will come along and stand up for we, the gormless, and all you’ll be left with are the mercenaries who learned how to game your system. There is, you’ll learn, no profit in them.

Maybe I spend too much time around farmers, but I’ve come to believe that stewardship is how we should run marketplaces. If a marketer focuses on extracting value without regard to the consequences, he’s just strip mining. Eventually, all he’s got left is an ugly hole where the money used to be. But if we treat the marketplace with some respect, it will keep happily producing for a thousand years. Here in this new, low-growth world, I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t want that. We corporations, we shareholders, we consumers. I can’t imagine.

My uncle's got a barn. Let's put on a brand!

“Wharton crowdsources its branding message.” To be honest, I was already apoplectic just reading the headline. The rest of the article sort of faded in and out of a red mist. There was a lot of WTF-ing, some wisely aborted tweets, and a futile attempt to enlist the cat in my outrage. A legendary Ivy League business school, one of my least favourite 21st century verbs, and the word “branding” all in the same sentence. I briefly considered driving down there and occupying something.

With dawn came sober second thought. Now I just want to yell stuff in their general direction. These three things seem like a good start:

First, branding is a marketing discipline, not a creative game. It’s not a vanity, or some kind of pretty ribbon we put on a product, nor is it – shudder – a slogan. A brand is the strategic bridge between positioning and the marketplace, and by positioning I mean in the real, original, technical sense of the word. The sense that specifically interacts with a business model. Branding isn’t the fun part of marketing. It’s the test of whether you have a real business or not. To believe otherwise betrays a shockingly Industrial Age culture. It seems like these guys looked at it the way I might look at picking a tie. The way Justice Potter Stewart looked at pornography (“I know it when I see it”). It’s no wonder that the branding business is becoming such a magnet for amateurs and adventurists.

Second, branding and leadership are inseparable concepts. To debate who “owns” a brand is ridiculous. In the first instance, a brand is owned by the organization that wears it; its reputation simply reflects that. But more fundamentally, a brand is owned by whoever is ultimately responsible for the promise it’s making. To turn custody of it over to the workforce is to invite a solution that is both less challenging and less distinctive, by definition. Brands aren’t canvasses on which “communications directors” get to make their marks, nor should they amount to whatever everybody could agree on. They’re organizational standards that are supposed to be challenging and exclusionary. So much so that they actually shape culture. Leadership that delegates this is either avoiding responsibility or declaring its disinterest in customers. In a competitive marketplace, these should be hanging offences.

Finally, branding takes guts. There were no guts in evidence here. “Knowledge” for a university? (There are six other variations besides the “… for action” master tagline, so even this tiny edge was forsaken). So, did someone think that knowledge was the one thing that Wharton offered that nobody else did? Did the august team there determine that business’ need for knowledge was the one profound insight upon which the school could uniquely connect with the world? I don’t mean to sound pedantic – I realize there are already enough branding pedants to go around – but come on. This kind of thing is supposed to scare an organization a little. Be a bit difficult to live up to. Make competitors shake their heads in wonder. Even if I believed a tagline was a brand, I would have started with something like “Stupid people will destroy capitalism and only we can stop them,” and worked back from there. The quixotic idea of trying to make people happy with a soft drink or set them free with a computer, these are branded promises, stronger for their audacity. The idea that you can get actionable knowledge at a business school is not.

In the end, consumers look to a brand for signals about what a corporation values. If you get it right, it will attract people who share those values. This creates a sort of infinite feedback loop that makes a business sustainable and gives commerce a conscience. That’s what drove me so crackers about the Wharton story. It’s not just that the bar was set so low, but by whom. This kind of thinking teaches everybody – marketers, consumers, the press - to be left-brained and cynical about brands. That never ends well, and I can’t imagine a worse time in our history to be proposing it as a mission for tomorrow’s corporate leaders. It was a terrible example to set. And the worst part is, it will pass unnoticed. Unlike poor Gap, say, or Tropicana, Wharton will escape the public mocking it so richly deserves.

Which, I guess, means that it was never really a brand in the first place. Okay, wow. Good thing I slept on it.

Brother, can you spare a 'digm?

This weekend, I had one of those steering wheel-pounding “Yes!” moments while out running errands. I was going to the hardware store to get hooks for hanging garden tools in the garage. The mission was a success. The validation was just a bonus, and a nice reminder that there is still a place in the world for serendipity, even if it’s only on public radio.

It was some sort of smartypants current affairs show, and the topic of discussion was LinkedIn and the new realities of job hunting. They’d found an expert (imagine that), and she was explaining why people often don’t get any kind of response from prospective employers when they declare their candidacy for a job opening. The problem with it being so easy to submit resumes, now, she said, is that people submit a lot more of them. Without the burdensome steps of printing, addressing and stamping envelopes and finding a mailbox, people are scattering their CVs around like autumn leaves. As is often the way with these things, that has spawned a secondary industry, namely one that offers electronic screening of those resumes. Keyword-based electronic screening. In other words, no matter how what sort of skydiving gourmet/blogger/secular humanist/renaissance-person you may be, no matter how natively talented and self-actualized, if your resume does not contain the words ‘experienced transmission repair specialist’, you’re not going to get called back for that job. It’s like that.

And so is branding (this is the part where I pound the steering wheel). As breathlessly modern as the world has become, certain things endure. Fire. The wheel. William Shatner. And positioning. In the branding business, positioning is still the minimum condition for viability, despite its bell-bottomed origins. Before you can engage a consumer in anything resembling a branded transaction, holds the theory, they have to be able to clearly discern whom your brand is for, what it’s one of, and that it’s somehow different. It’s the middle part that spells trouble for an aspiring transmission mechanic, or anybody else with something to sell. It was true before there was cable TV, and it’s infinitely more so now in a world where less and less is shoved down our throats or discovered by accident, and more and more is found by specifically looking for it.

And yet we resist. Personal branding experts promote describing oneself as absolutely unique. Marketers gag at the idea that you should navigate by the lights of passing competitors’ ships. Consultants bridle at limiting their potential by defining themselves too narrowly. Tech startups – by the score – get drunk on their newness and don’t bother thinking about the real-life problem they’re trying to solve (it is, from my experience, the single most reliable predictor of failure). But algorithms still need to know where to file you. If they have to fight their way through a vain thicket of slashes, it’s likely you’ll end up invisible. And consumers still need to know what they’re supposed to compare you to, and substitute you for. The human animal’s tendency to think paradigmatically has not been altered by the internet; in fact, it defines it.

Or, put another way, the transmission repair guy gets the gig. The windsurfer/haikuist /ferret breeder/jedi of motive power does not.

As carbon is to life, so positioning is to branding. Yes, ours is a business of glorious adjectives, but those don’t mean much without nouns to hang them from. That can be easy to forget. Except in my garage, of course. There, everything is right where I can find it. And while it’s true that I may miss the thrill of finding the garden weasel while I’m hunting for a rake, there is more joy in the certainty that no leaf will escape my attention.

The Wages of Fear.

It’s a French film, from 1953. Existentialist, if you’re into that kind of thing. Spoiler alert: In it, a bunch of misfits get hired for a suicide mission to transport nitroglycerine through treacherous jungle to extinguish an oil field fire. All of them die trying, save for one. He collects the money, then dies in a car accident on his way to celebrate at a local pub (man, those existentialists…). I wouldn’t bring it up except that it happened to me, too, kind of. The pub part. And the you-don’t-always-see-it-coming part.

When Consumer Republic was published last year, I worried about two things. First, I hoped that my industry would see it as a defense of the system and not as an incitement to consumer rebellion. Second, and to the point of this post, I worried about the press. I’m a marketing guy who’s written a book defending brands. Journalists as a breed tend to be a bit suspicious of both of those things. I was afraid I might get eaten alive. To my eternal delight, that didn’t happen. But for one violently bad review in New Zealand (!?), interviewers and reviewers were open minded, balanced, and surprisingly intrigued. As my media tour disappeared in the rear view mirror last spring, I figured I’d survived the fire. No critic is going to be tougher on such a capitalistic premise than, say, The Georgia Straight. And that’s when, at a local pub last week, a dinner companion turned to me and serenely observed, “all you do is make people buy things they don’t need.”

Well, first of all, I hope it’s obvious that I don’t possess this power. If I did, my snowmobile wouldn’t still be for sale after a year. Plus, it would be gold plated and powered by unicorns. Let’s dwell, instead, on this idea of “things they don’t need.”

There’s no doubt that marketing subsists partly on what Charles Kettering called the “creation of dissatisfaction,” and on people’s freedom to act upon it. But Kettering’s assertion that industry can create dissatisfaction at will was as arrogant as my dinner companion’s was naïve. Humans have been dissatisfied for a lot longer than there has been a Madison Avenue. Our restlessness as a species isn’t new, and it’s not even an affliction, necessarily. It’s a natural resource. Like water, it can be life-giving, or implacably destructive. Which is a matter of choice. In other words, the world we live in is shaped by what we want, not by what we say. And the only thing that would scare me more than the improbable specter of industry telling us what to want would be some higher moral authority doing the same thing. I like my chances against, say, Walmart more than I like my chances against whatever marketplace Taliban we’d have to invent to legislate our urges.

It’s true what Jefferson said: the price of freedom really is eternal vigilance. Sometimes vigilance is as simple as knowing whom you’re eating with. Sometimes, it’s about our own wobbly convictions in the face of temptation. Either way, two things remain true: Our fate is in our own hands. And it’s always a mistake to let your guard down too soon.

Monkey Butt.

If you’ve remained alert during one of my recent speeches, you probably know that I consider pants to be the essential cultural bellwether. Here’s something you may not know, though: I have a thing for internet forums. To me, these primitive places are the real internet, where one ordinary person helps another ordinary person fix a toilet float, or convince her cat to eat dry kibble, or get chip dip stains out of a cummerbund. They’re the original social media, older than the web itself, the places where the communitarian voices of regular folks still rule. Whenever something new arrives at our house, the first thing I do is see if there’s a forum about it somewhere, and then lurk on it like an invisible tourist, soaking up the sounds and smells of a new place (I’m still a planner at heart). This year, it was a tractor that did it. And in my quest to unlock the mysteries of the three-point hitch on an agricultural equipment forum, I stumbled onto a thread entitled, “Which jeans do you use?” Irresistible. And not just because it involved pants. Irresistible because of the word “use.” The subject of pants was going to be argued by people who work with their hands, the culture that gave us blue jeans in the first place.

And that’s where I found the Duluth Trading Company. I’d never heard of it. Maybe you haven’t either, but I can tell you that there is a legion of people out there with dirt under their fingernails who, on this 11-page thread on this day, weighed in with conviction that they made the best pants for working in. Suddenly feeling like Cayce Pollard (except, you know, a guy. Bit older. Less neurotic. And real), I headed straight for their web site. And was charmed speechless.

Because here’s the thing: Yes, they have pants. Also shirts. Tool belts. Knee pads. And, um, t-shirts that cover your butt crack when you bend over. Pants that don’t squish your dangly bits when you crouch down (all the way up to 4XL). Non-chafing, odor-fighting underpants. Ointment for cracked hands. Sliver grippers. Powder to relieve monkey butt (don’t ask). And at about this point, it begins to dawn on you… the Duluth Trading Company doesn’t see itself in the business of making and selling things. It has picked a tribe of people with their own unique problems, and cheerfully gone looking for ways to solve every one of them. You look at what they sell, and you can see with absolute clarity the person whose life they want to make better (despite, rather brilliantly, a complete absence of photos of models, at least for the guy stuff). I might or might not get me some of those pants; to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve earned them. But it was a complete delight to see how lovable a brand can be when it defines itself by whom it serves. So I thought I’d share. I’m like that.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, the writer said that maybe this whole idea of following our passions was bunk and destined to leave us feeling disappointed and directionless. Instead, he said, find a problem to solve. That will give you purpose, and purpose is the real secret to happiness. It seemed like good advice for a kid making decisions about her future. I think it might be even better advice for brands.

Pebbles.

Ah, 2011. Strange days. What with all the populist revolutions and lost icons, you probably forgot this was your humble scribe’s first year alone in the branding wilderness. It was at the end of 2010 that I forsook the comforts of agency life and wandered monkishly off in search of marketing’s soul. Promoting Consumer Republic and building my consulting practice, I probably ended up hearing more new voices in the last twelve months than in the preceding 12 years. The bad, if unsurprising, news was that the marketing professions are in a pretty deep funk right now (according to Forbes, marketing jobs vie only with IT jobs as the most hated ways to make a living). But the good news was that there are some people out there who are actually finding meaning in this work, and who see our current travails as a turning point.

Reflecting on this over the holidays, I realized they have some things in common, those fortunate souls. We should be more like them. And this, in case you still haven’t got around to making your New Year’s resolutions, seems to be the recipe for doing that:

Be in the world. Marketing is still a people business, and the inside baseball attitude some of us have about it is alienating. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever said, “Hey, Pookie, I’m-a go interact with some content.” Hang around with real people as much as you can, and pay silent attention to how they live, think and speak, not just how they buy. Their opinion is the only one that matters, in the end.

Listen. Marketing isn’t a stimulus/response game, and data isn’t just a way to keep score. Data is your customers trying to talk to you in a language you can understand. The harder we listen, the harder we try to read the consumer’s tea leaves, the less learning by mistake there will be and, in the long run, the more efficient marketing will become. Not to mention ethical. B. F. Skinner probably had great Powerpoint presentations, but those don’t make you a marketer. Listening does.

Don’t forget about reach. We don’t search for what we don’t want. We don’t want what we haven’t had presented unbidden to us at some point in our lives. Desire is where the whole thing starts. Desire is the zygote of free market capitalism. It makes everything else work, and advertising is really good at creating it. Give your agency a hug.

Quit changing everything. Anyone with even a slight understanding of how an adoption curve works knows that only the leading edge thrives on novelty, and there aren’t many of them. The rest of us are waiting until you get it right. Believe it or not – I’m kind of looking at you, right now, Twitter – constant ‘innovation’ isn’t the shining path to growth. Past a certain point, it actually freaks people out. Remember your brand is a narrative. Be a story of confidence and vision, not a story of trial and error.

Have some respect. The accessibility of modern marketing tools is illusory. YouTube doesn’t make everybody a filmmaker. Facebook doesn’t make everybody a public relations expert. Wordpress doesn’t make everybody a writer or, for that matter, a web developer. Be demanding about the credentials of the people you work with, but then show respect for them. We may all use the same tools, now, but that only makes competence more critical and more differentiating. (Here’s an example of what I mean: A while back, I donated my time to a community group to help with their web site. A new site was built by some super smart people who put extra effort into SEO because the client needed traffic but had no money to buy it. After a year or so, I did a little analytics presentation for them, the highlight of which was how – based on a Google AdWords valuation of just a single relevant search query – they had already recovered five times their investment in traffic value. But some of them didn’t like how the site looked. So last year they paid a graphic designer to build a whole new one, including the addition of a charming landing page built in Flash. If you didn’t cringe a little at that last sentence, you are part of the problem).

Practice empathy. One of the collateral effects of modern marketing is that it’s pulled us away from our customers as human beings. Yes, @garyvee, even in social media, where we’re so petrified of getting into a bun fight with them that we’ve started talking like robots. But it’s as true as it ever was that the beating heart of an enterprise lies at the place where its brand and its customer have something in common. If there isn’t something you and your customers are equally passionate about, then you are essentially adversaries. And possibly doing the wrong thing for a living.

Feel lucky. If you get joy out of making money by making people happy, that’s going to come through in your brand. People will sense it, and it will make them like and trust you. Three quarters of branding is imputed motive. But more than this, remember that what we do is important work, a sacred trust. The future depends on the sustainable exchange of value between people who make things and people who buy them. Sustainable economically, environmentally, morally. We’re custodians of that. I can’t imagine a better reason to get up in the morning.

Thus, the fruits of my peregrinations. This and a renewed commitment to flossing, and I think we'd all find ourselves well on the road to self-actualization in 2012, Grasshopper. Master Po would be proud. As for making us better marketers besides, well, that's just karma...

If you read The Orange Code and enjoyed it, you may want to deplete your savings just a little more to invest in this new book by Arkadi Kuhlmann. Arkadi and I wrote The Orange Code together and, while we went into it meaning to explain how culture becomes a brand, it unavoidably took us to the topic of leadership. It's this, I've come to believe, on which all the rest of it depends. Leaders build teams. Teams build cultures. Cultures build brands. Brands build communities. It's fashionable to talk about the latter as where marketing is going, but the elephant in the room is always going to be the person in charge. Being that person is what this book is about.

At first, when we were writing The Orange Code, Arkadi resisted making it too personal. With this book, he's got over that. Rock Then Roll is full of hard-won wisdom for leaders, without a doubt. But it's also a fascinating and honest look into what makes this particular leader tick, made all the more so by the knowledge that the three years since The Orange Code launched have been the most challenging a bank CEO could ever face. If you're a leader, or if understanding leaders is important to what you do, it's worth your time. You can find it here.