An inside job.

There still walk among us ‘branding professionals’ who believe that the consumer will think, feel and do exactly what they’re told, no matter how pointless. This kind of totalitarian arrogance, you’d think, would mostly travel in herds up and down Madison Avenue. Only an overpaid, mojito-soaked, Chuck Taylor-wearing spawn of Don Draper could have the temerity to spend decades and millions teaching one thing to consumers, only to spend millions more changing it in a fit of whimsy worthy of Kim Jong Il. But no. Ad people, at the very least, are accustomed to listening to the marketplace, even if only in the hope of praise. They usually prefer to avoid making trouble unless there’s the possibility of a Cannes Lion involved. No, the last bastion of mid-20th century shut-up-and-listen marketing is the branding consultancy, and one of them has just pulled off the crime of the century.

I’m speaking here, of course, about the announcement this week that Brink’s Home Security will be rebranding itself as Broadview Security. Perhaps you’ve heard of Brink’s? It’s a 150 year-old company in the security business, and one whose brand is practically onomatopoeic in its promise of iron-clad protection. At the end of last year, Brink’s completed the spin-off of its home security business, and though none of the rebranding publicity I’ve found explicitly says so, we can assume that this is why they thought they needed a new name. And scrounged up a reported $120 million to buy one.

And what did all that loot get them? Well, as near as I can tell, it got them a seriously cavalier attitude toward brand equity. I’m not so sure they had to give up the Brink’s name but, if they did, you’d think they would a) Have built a more obvious narrative bridge from the old one to the new one, and b) Have chosen a new one that had the same clanky solidity about it. This brand is, among other things, supposed to be intimidating. As a fellow Twitter citizen @jeff_allgood succinctly put it, “I prefer a sign in my front yard with a name I know. That means the baddies know the name too.” Instead, the new name and logo are opaque, utterly unfamiliar, and self-consciously modern and sophisticated. It’s as if the sheriff has shown up for work in capris.

And the solution to clearing up all this ambiguity? Well, they’re going to advertise, of course. With liberal references – including in their slogan – to the Brink’s name. In other words, they’ll just tell people. That should do it.

It just seems kind of arrogant. And it seems like a terrible missed opportunity.

Why do I care? Well, because I actually think this branding stuff matters. I think there’s more to doing it well than just putting new labels on companies as if brands were ‘Hi, I’m…’ stickers at a speed dating convention. And I think that doing it with integrity is an important pillar holding up the free market. So it’s a setback, a big one, when famous companies toss a brand’s hard-earned goodwill for reasons that seem from here to be arbitrary and cosmetic. Branding ‘experts’ have to remember that most of the value in a brand lies in a consumer’s autonomous willingness to understand, trust and remember it. Treat that as worthless, and one day it will be.

Then, there’ll be nothing left to steal.

Rust never sleeps.

Dear Facebook,

I’ve tried. I really have.

I’ve tried to understand your new thing. I’ve even tried to like it. I’ve tried to consider your titanic social media stature and the wisdom that it implies, and told myself that it must be me who doesn’t get it. That there is some inherent brilliance in your feature-bloated interpretation of Twitter I am just not seeing. But I can’t. And I’m not alone. Everybody I know shakes their heads sadly about the new Facebook, speaking of you in the same wistful tones they do about hot in-flight meals. I think, just possibly, you have blown it.

Because I care – and I do – I’d like to tell you a story. Stop me if you’ve heard this:

Once upon a time – the ‘70s, say - in a land called Detroit, the powerful brands who invented the auto industry were fighting a pestilence. They called this pestilence ‘the imports’, and its incursion would not stand. After conferring about the problem, they decided that the answer was to beat ‘the imports’ at their own game. “This,” said the brands, “must be what the people want. So we will give it to them, too. It will be awesome.”

And so they did. Mind you, they did not change their way of thinking. They did not change the way that they made their cars or how they worked. They did not adapt their business models to lower margin products. And, worst of all, they did not ask the people what they really wanted that they could not already have. They continued making cars as they had always done. They just made them smaller, and they called them ‘import fighters’.

And, lo, darkness descended upon the land: The people who wanted imports just kept buying imports. The people who wanted cars as they had always been felt abandoned. And neither of them was ever shown a third, cooler alternative. Nobody was happy. And the eventual decay of this industry the powerful brands invented began.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

I think this little parable has four lessons for you Facebook guys:

1. Disaster stalks a brand that doesn’t see its value from its customer’s point of view. You thought you had invented a machine that would let people who care about each other stay close. But you didn’t realize that Facebook’s slight asychnrony was part of its appeal. Opening up your Facebook account was like going home. It was a bit pastoral, a bit static. More like a newspaper than like radio. And we liked that. You should have asked.

2. Comparison is surrender. The minute you reveal that you’re trying to outgun somebody else’s standard, you’re anointing that standard. You made Twitter look like The Next Thing, when all you needed to do was be clear that Facebook is a different thing.

3. Imitation commoditizes. Someday, someone will have to make some money at this stuff. It will not help your cause if you create a situation where consumers can choose between you and your competitor and not risk losing much either way. Besides which, there isn’t much margin in commodities.

4. Marketing is still a skill. There are too many 21st century Masters of the Universe out there who think that writing kickass code is the new everything. But believe me, the big money is still in relevance. Fire an engineer, hire a marketer. Even just one.

Give it some thought, Mr. Zuckerberg. Remember, if we’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s that nobody is too big to fail.

Not even MySpace.

Consider the source.

So, there’s another ferryman on the internet’s River Styx : Bing. Microsoft’s new entry into what some people are surprised to learn is a competitive category, search. Yes, yes, I know. The propeller-heads in the audience will point out that there’s a pantload of search engines out there and always has been. They will point out that Bing isn’t even the only piece of major news in this ‘category’ right now, and will solemnly gesture to the impenetrable Wolfram Alpha as proof.

But, the fact is, for millions upon millions of people who use the internet with the same level of engagement as they do their kitchen faucets, Google is search. The hydro company delivers electricity, the municipality delivers water, the phone company delivers maternal guilt, and Google delivers answers. For all those people, Google is the public utility for finding things online. We believe, because we need to believe, that they’re almost like a government: a bit too powerful, but omniscient and commercially agnostic.

What makes this new brand interesting to me is that I think there are about 17 people in the world who could call themselves connoisseurs of search. I think the rest of us operate on the naively hopeful assumption that the answers are the answers. Our relationship with this product is based on faith. And faith is based on imputed motive. In other words, we’ll judge a new brand like Bing summarily on the basis of what we think it’s really up to.

On this score, I think Bing has some challenges, and they all have to do with the assumption that we wanted choice – and thus brands - in search. They have a lush, designery interface. They have a slogan. They have an advertising budget, and it’s twice the size of their main competitors’. And most of all, the parent of this brand is not a mythic duo of Stanford University nerds on a mission to save humanity, but rather one of the world’s largest and frankly wealthiest corporations. A corporation for whom search is but one of many profit centers. Where Google has always felt like a library, Bing feels like a mall.

I think they’re in for a rough ride. I’m not sure most of us really wanted to have to choose a default search engine. And if we did, I’m not sure Microsoft’s is the one we’d choose. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it’s any good or not. It has to do with our natural suspicion of any brand that grandiosely promises to solve a problem we didn’t know we had.

Especially when they’ve done it before. Those of us with a little grey hair will remember the launch of Windows 95. There, at the moment when most computer users were desperately hoping the whole operating system thing would settle down so we could get on with the future, Microsoft wheeled out the Rolling Stones. And Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. And Wheezer. And lit up the Empire State Building and the CN Tower. They came across as arrogant and rich. And three years later, they were in court on anti-trust charges. Proof, possibly, that of all the things you should never assume about your brand, benefit of the doubt is perhaps the most perilous.

Bing won’t turn out quite like Windows 95, I’m sure. And, partly, that’s because we aren’t quite like we were in 1995, either. But if I were Microsoft, I’d give some thought to humility. And empathy. And to listening a little harder to what people need instead of assuming they’ll buy whatever you can invent.

Apples’ already got that market cornered.

Rehab.

Everybody, I’d like you to say hello to General Motors. This is their first time here, and we should make them feel welcome. General, you can go and sit over there beside Bank of America. No… not there. Please don’t sit with Chrysler. They’ve been disruptive ever since they started hanging around with those Europeans.

Bear Sterns, you can just stop snickering right now, or leave. Don’t make me call your parole officer.

Now, then. Before we begin, let’s all stand and with hand on heart recite our creed:

“We can’t do business if everybody in the world is mad at us.”

(Capital One, that’s not where your heart is. How many times have we been through this?)

Today, for the benefit of the newcomers in the group, I’d like to review the 12 steps we’ve each committed ourselves to on the path towards a new life as a sustainable business. If each of you does these things, your brand has a chance at a happy, prosperous future. And if you don't, then your paths shall be to the same ignominy as the ShamWow guy. Now, can someone lend General Motors a pen? Okay, here we go...

1. Admit there is a problem. Nobody is going to believe it’s business as usual if you keep stumbling home late at night stinking of taxpayer’s money. Confession is good for the soul.

2. Admit there is a power greater than yourself. And that power is the marketplace. No customers means no business, bucko, no matter who your tailor is.

3. Make a decision to turn your brand around. You don’t want to restore things to the way they were, and you never can. Decide to be better than that.

4. Take inventory of yourselves, honestly and fearlessly. Your license to compete in this marketplace depends on the truth of who you are, not on whatever fiction your ad agency and PR consultants create.

5. Admit to yourself and your stakeholders the exact nature of your wrongs. If your customers know that you see what they’ve seen all along, you have common ground and a chance at a fresh start.

6. Be willing to change. Whosoever is attached to the past or the status quo, cast them out. There are plenty of squeegees to go around.

7. Humbly ask the CEO to remove your shortcomings. Even if one of them is the CEO. Change can only come from the top.

8. Make a list of all whom you have harmed, and make amends. If someone is still a customer after all you’ve done, they aren’t fools. They’re precious gifts. Don’t take them for granted.

9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible. The loyal customer you reward will have greater and more enduring value to you than the prospect you buy in desperation.

10. Continue to take inventory of your character, and when you’re wrong promptly admit it. The conversation you have to start with your marketplace now can never end. A return to silence will be judged harshly.

11. Seek through meditation and listening to improve your contact with the Supreme Being. That being the tribe of consumers who pay your bills.

12. Having had this spiritual awakening, carry this message to other lost brands and their leadership. Set an example. Such conversations may be the only truly noble reason to play golf.

Alrighty, then. I think that’s just about all the time we have for tonight. There’s lemonade at the back if you’d care for a refreshment, and AIG has baked us all some lovely muffins.

By the way, there's a jet in the parking lot with its lights left on. Let me know if you need to borrow my jumper cables.

Right here, right now.

I wrote this piece for the May 18 edition of Marketing Magazine, and it is reproduced here with their kind permission.

I came to the whole Mad Men thing late, I’ll confess. I have a snotty aversion to anything the cool kids do, and tend to sit sullenly in the bleachers until the mania has passed. But as soon as everybody stopped telling me I just had to watch this series, I rented the first season and got myself caught up. And for all the series’ craft and cultural punch, one brief scene left a particular impression on me: The snarky – and vaguely uneasy - mocking of a Volkswagen ad by the good men of Sterling Cooper. It happens in Episode 3, it doesn’t take very long, and it doesn’t even seem to end up being very important to the plot.

I’m not sure what the “Lemon” scene meant to the average viewer, but I imagine it had something to do with the great iceberg of modernity looming ahead of these guys. For me, though, and probably for any student of our business, it recalled the moment in advertising’s history when everything was about to become awesome. Advertising would become a full participant in popular culture, with all the glory and duty that implies. The consumer would be acknowledged as intelligent and powerful and worth the trouble of understanding. What we do would matter, and the best imaginable time to be in this business was about to begin: The Creative Revolution. In those exuberant few years, the business we’ve all grown up in was invented, made up on the fly by people with the guts to be excited by the sound of conventions being shattered rather than fearing it.

On the surface, I guess the contrast between that moment and this one seems pretty extreme. With the econolypse spreading like a plague, anxiety seems more sensible than excitement does. Something seems to be about to expire here, and it would be easy to argue that the ad biz is a candidate. Our track record as an industry doesn’t offer much encouragement: The last time we faced a serious recession, agencies cut costs by, as Hugo Powell famously put it at the time, “firing the handlers”. They downsized themselves by delayering, forgetting that the whole system had been built on apprenticeship. The predictable result was a meager crop of well-trained, well-mentored people a few years later, and a devastating loss of credibility. So, no, we don’t always deal with crisis wisely.

But look around. Just as in 1960, new distribution technologies are exploding the business of media. Channels to the consumer are opening up faster than we can count them, to the point where countless millions of dollars are being invested in them without even knowing how they’ll be monetized. The power of consumers and the need and means to understand them, in the meantime, have taken a quantum leap. Brand building has gone from something we did to consumers, to something we did for them, to something they’re complicit in. And a society reeling from the consequences of mindless consumption is asking itself how to be more principled about the way it buys things. At this moment, there is infinite possibility for us, and there are no rules. Everything could be about to become awesome again.

So will it? The answer, it seems to me, is tied to a more basic question: What’s our purpose? If it’s to make ads, then no. Strap on your lifejacket and brace for that iceberg. YouTube will not save you. But if it’s to keep this great conversation between consumers and commerce going, if it’s to keep the meaning and value in brands by whatever means necessary, then hell yes. It obviously won’t be easy. We’ll have to fearlessly throw anything overboard that’s not useful, even if that means our structures, our processes, our definitions of ‘great’, as well as our parochialism and the cynics who are just along for the ride. But whatever price we’re asked to pay, it will seem pretty paltry in hindsight if we can say that we did it again. Reinvented what we do and made it matter. Started another revolution.

Me, I think this is an exhilarating time to be doing this work. Somewhere out there, new Bernbachs and Ogilvys and Lois’ and Allys are waiting to happen. There’s no other place I’d rather be. Yet, not so many months ago, I sat across from a senior staffer with my own firm at the time, while they petulantly declared that they “didn’t have time to learn the internet.” I can’t imagine that the next Creative Revolution is anything but terrifying to them. So, you see, it’s a choice. Right now, only two things are certain: That our current troubles will pass, and that the future will not be very much like the present. Beyond that, it’s up to us.

While you’re thinking it over, by the way, you might be amused to know that you can follow the characters of Mad Men on Twitter.

And you thought irony was dead.

License to shill.

I heard a terrible story from a colleague this week. It went like this:

A perfectly decent marketer I know of hired a ‘social media consultant’ to help them get the cool kids talking about their brand. A sensible move for them, since these particular cool kids like to hang out on the internets. And here is what this ‘social media consultant’ was going to do: They were going to troll internet forums posing as consumers, chatting up the marketer’s brand as if they had bought the product with their own money and been converted to evangelists by its unalloyed glory.

It almost made me nostalgic for advertising. With ads, no matter how outrageous the claim may be be, at least you know who’s doing the talking.

The growth of social media has, as they say on Wall Street, gone parabolic. The historic US presidential campaign of last fall mainstreamed this stuff almost overnight. And the economy’s troubles have produced a tidal wave of outreach and community building as people connect with each other for comfort, information, and work. It’s been a perfect storm. Unfortunately, though, that storm has washed some crap onto the beach. Whether it’s the kind of shilling I described above, or fake YouTube videos and Facebook fan pages, or the practice of hiring ghostwriters to ruminate as celebrities on Twitter, scoundrels and cynics have pounced on this opportunity in a way we haven’t seen since spammers learned to spell ‘Nigerian royalty’.

For brands, I think this is terrifying. Once upon a time, you see, brands used to be like little dictatorships. They made their own rules, and they relied on propaganda to sustain themselves. But now, brands are republics. They are engaged in ongoing conversations with their marketplaces, and they rely on dialogue, transparency and a point of view to get elected and stay in office. Authenticity has never mattered more than it does right now.

But authenticity is powerless in an environment where suspicion has become the default state. Somehow, we have to resist that. With mass media running for the lifeboats in a storm of their own, the ability to connect with consumers this way might just be branded marketing’s last, best hope.

As long, that is, as everybody knows who’s doing the talking.

The peasants are revolting.

The fifth chapter in “The Orange Code” begins with one of my favourite anecdotes about corporate arrogance. It happened years back, when I was working with one of Canada’s big 5 banks. As I’m setting up for a presentation, I overhear a conversation between the Chairman and Vice Chairman of this particular institution. The two oligarchs are gazing out the window of their 68th floor boardroom, and the Vice Chairman, looking at the street below, awkwardly jokes, “See all those people down there? Those are customers.” The Chairman, a charming wag with brilliant comic timing, squints imperially for a moment at the teeming street below and then says:

“But they’re so small!”

Sadly, I’ve been able to dine out on this story for years, and it came to mind again as I read this piece in Advertising Age this morning. It’s about how America’s biggest banks have chosen to deal with their current travails by remaining largely silent, and how this strategy is doing little to rebuild either confidence or forgiveness.

Gee, imagine that. A PR tactic time-tested by pros like Nero, Marie Antoinette and Jeffrey Skilling is failing to rebuild trust, or even to distract us. Quelle surprise.

Think about it. Silent spouse: Good news or bad news? Right. You’re sleeping on the couch tonight, sport. Silent teenager? Pray it was just a speeding ticket. Silent boss? Update the resume, hotshot. Or let’s say you’re on an airplane and there is suddenly quite a lot of turbulence. Would silence from the cockpit be reassuring? It would not.

If silence was ever a good PR strategy for a brand, it certainly isn’t one now. Maybe there was a time when we trusted institutions so much that we could believe no news was good news. But brands aren’t monarchies any more. They are republics. And silence in the midst of crisis is not reassuring. It’s frightening at first. And then it’s infuriating. Here, now, in 2009, even politicians know that.

The problem, gentlemen, with observing those tiny customers only from the serene altitude of an ivory tower is that you can’t always see the torches and pitchforks.