Both sides now.

You can probably tell by my long silence that it’s been a busy winter. That excuse, of course, is the blogger equivalent of the dog eating your homework, but it’s really true this time. Sure, I’ve had lots of work to do, just like you probably have. But these past few months, I’ve had an extra handicap. You see, I’ve got myself involved in the startup of a new business (it’s pretty cool, but I can’t say much about it yet). So, versus my usual role as smug advisor speaking truth to power and billing by the hour, I’ve been operating from the opposite point of view. I’ve been… how to put this, exactly… um, a client. Or imminently, anyway. I’m taking care of a brand from the inside, and I’m poking around to see who might be able to help bring it to market one of these days.

Well. Let’s just say that my desk hasn’t been the scene of so many facepalms since that whole Gap logo thing. Seen from without, the marketing communication business these days sometimes resembles nothing so much as a pack of five year olds chasing a soccer ball, at least if their own marketing tells us anything. But look, it’s not too late. I don’t have to make any hard decisions this week. There’s still time to change. If I were you, here’s where I’d start:

First of all, stop saying you can do all the things. I’ve prowled web site after web site until I was bleary with existential misery, trying to figure out what the hell everybody does. You remember positioning, right? Well, you might find it an easier concept to sell to clients if you commit to it yourself. Just, you know, tell me what you’re good at. But, no. Instead, everyone from graphic designers to digital shops to ad agencies to PR firms to transmission repair specialists would like me to believe that they can do ALL THE BRANDING THINGS. All of them. Strategy whatnot all the way to, you know, TV commercials and stuff. I need shop nowhere else. And, just to keep it simple, half of them use almost identical language to say so. If I were from another planet trying to figure this business out, I’d conclude that branding must be easy, since practitioners are lining the sidewalks like bubble tea cafes. If you’re wondering where your margins went, start with the illusion of oversupply.

Second, act like you want to do business. Pretend, if you must (I do remember the conflicted, sinking feeling of getting a new assignment when you’re already slammed. I’m not made of stone). But at least for this first contact, I’d like to feel like maybe you’re going to be an enthusiastic partner. You would be surprised at how rare this is. An astonishing number of marcom companies don’t even monitor their ‘contact us’ email accounts. One, a vaunted social media shop – I mean seriously vaunted, like Fast Company vaunted – met with silence two separate attempts to contact them through their own digital channels. When I finally called their San Francisco office in exasperation, it rang through to their New York one. WTF, as the kids say. Another estimable vendor's web site actually specified a minimum budget if I expected my message returned with any vigor. It had more zeroes in it than you might guess. Part of me admired the frankness. Part of me made a note to find their office and egg their cars, which I assume are exotic. It lacked, at the very least, grace. 

No, this job is going to be harder than it looks, that’s clear. The last time I was a client, you just had to hire an agency. They’d send Darrin Stephens over – the Dick York one - and we’d be shooting a commercial before you could say “pass the swordfish.” Now, branding is more like building a rocket ship than it is like writing an ad. It’s just so strange to hear the marketplace saying, “anybody can do it, and we’re all too busy.” Wish me luck. 

Pwned.

Sweetie has a charming way of describing the feeling you get when someone is about to make a terrible mistake and you can’t stop them: She says it’s like being in the audience at a play in which we see a clown poised with a cream pie on one side of a door, and an unwitting victim reaching for the knob on the other. I’m feeling a bit like that about branding these days. And the consumer, in case you were wondering, is that clown. To wit:

In the marketing world, we’re trained that the secret to prosperity is to follow popular culture. Stay as close as you can to the front of the zeitgeist – without getting ahead of it – and the cash register will ring. It’s usually a pretty safe policy. In fact, in Consumer Republic, I exhort consumers themselves to understand their role in this dynamic and use it to influence the path of capitalism. Regardless of the fevered conspiracy fantasies of the No-Logoists, that’s the dirty secret of branded marketing. It follows. Only very, very rarely does it get away with leading, and even then not for very long.

But every once in a great while, the zeitgeist will make a sudden turn, without even signaling. One minute the marketplace is trundling along, digesting fashion like a big, happy python, and the next, boom! You’ve got a warehouse full of unsold Hammer pants. It happens. And I think it’s about to happen again, especially to brands who might be putting too much stock in social media as a proxy for that zeitgeist.

I’m not talking, here, about social media’s uneven record for predicting market behaviors (it’s sometimes been spectacularly wrong, about everything from election outcomes to the iPhone 5), or even its still-elusive value as bellwether for consumer sentiment. I’m talking about something more basic, about how we are there. In a year of highs and lows, humanity as we observe it on Twitter and Facebook seemed to reveal itself as quick to anger, shameless in its rhetoric, irredeemably cynical, and having the attention span of a hummingbird. In stark contrast to social media’s giddy dawn, humanity in 2012 seemed strident, sarcastic, hopeless and nihilistic, and unable to turn off its caps lock key.

Woe betide the marketer that thinks this is an insight to build a brand on. It’s questionable whether humanity’s online voice ever really spoke for everybody. But even if it did, I think in about ten minutes humanity is going to get sick of what it’s seeing in Facebook’s mirror and either smash it to pieces or make changes. And if those of us trying to sell small appliances or snow tires or packaged vacations or microwavable pizza pockets decide that the way to connect with people is to share in their nihilism, we’re going to get the biggest almighty pie in the face marketing has seen since Gloria Steinem.

So, just this once, I think we marketers should ignore the meme of the human condition, and focus instead on the real thing. I think we should operate as if consumers – people – are generally good and intelligent, and that they prefer to be hopeful. Those things haven't really changed, regardless of how it seems in your Twitter stream. They’re just vulnerable right now, and that’s put brands in the improbable position of deciding whether to be part of the problem or part of the solution. I think we should pick door number two. Just in case that clown gets there first. 

The beautiful flaw.

Recently, I had the chance to spend time with some people who market a product I admire and, frankly, lust for. The things they make are widely regarded as the best of their kind, famous around the world for no-compromise awesomeness. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to get so close to the flame. I just somehow romantically assumed these guys would be their brand incarnate. You can probably sense that things wouldn't work out the way I'd hoped. You're right, they didn't. These folks weren't one bit like the product they sold, at least in the ways that matter. I didn't enjoy my visit at all, and I doubt we'll cross paths again. Apparently, when a product is so good it practically sells itself, you don't have to be.

But it got me thinking about what we become if we don't have to try. About whether perfection, for a marketer, is ultimately a curse. Consider, for the sake of argument, the concept in Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which has to do with accepting that things are transient and imperfect, and that these are essential qualities of beauty. I wonder if maybe they aren't also marks of a great brand, or at least of the culture that drives it. I wonder if maybe the flaw in a product, the imperfection that's the consequence of pragmatic compromise, doesn't protect a brand from complacency. And even define it.

Examples as proof are almost too easy: Consider Apple, whose history was written by the struggle to overcome its own tiny walled software garden. Or Porsche, whose determination to deny the essential flaw of a rear mounted engine produced both its culture and its cult. Or ING Direct, whose lack of branches and, for a long time, even of payment accounts, produced an exuberant customer service culture. Or Southwest Airlines, whose pay-for-peanuts policy merely reassured people they were getting the lowest possible fare. Or Buckley's, the Canadian cough syrup brand whose horrible taste was elevated to being a point of pride, becoming synonymous with efficacy. Or, much more subtly, Toyota, whose determinedly dull product aesthetic whispers reassuringly to owners every day, "you can count on me."

It's inarguably true that our flaws shape us more than our gifts do, if only because we're more invested in them. Gifts are dumb luck (and thus often squandered), whereas flaws build character. I think that might be true of brands, too. I think that if you look hard enough at a brand you love, or the one you work for, you'll find that its very best qualities trace eventually back to some quirk, some shortfall, some flaw, the overcoming of which made it what it is today. Writing this, I realize how often in my own strategic work, I find myself starting with a flaw and finding the virtue in it. How often that's where the soul is.

A former competitor of mine in the agency business used to say that he preferred to do business with number two brands because they had something to prove. I think he was on to something. If you want to make a difference, avoid people who resist change. If you want to help somebody, avoid organizations that think they're perfect. Every great thing you ever do will start with a problem. Not screwing up is just a job. Making virtues out of flaws, well, that's a beautiful way to spend your days, no matter what business you're in.

Liked.

Back in 2007, weeks after Apple launched the iPhone, I wrote a cranky post about RIM, the makers of Blackberry. Permit me an immodest moment: I think it was kind of prophetic. My thesis was that they were headed for pain for the simple reason that they’d let their users define their brand, while they themselves had never seriously stooped to the fundamental act of marketing to Main Street. RIM considered their customers to be the wireless carriers, and most of our contact with the brand consisted of reading about what Jim Balsillie was going to buy next. This was long before the infamous service outages, the disastrous Torch and Playbook, the firing of its CEOs and the embarrassing delay of its new OS. Blackberry seemed to be doing fine, at the time. It just bugged me that they thought themselves above marketing, and I wanted to believe they would one day pay.

This all came rushing back in the past week or so, as Facebook announced its billionth user, and the company made an ad to celebrate. And what an ad. It’s the kind of branded communications I used to love, back in the age of mass media, and still miss sometimes. It’s epic, serious, sentimental, a little morally overreaching, the kind of thing that made brands like Nike great, back in the day. And not coincidentally, it was created by my one of my favourite agencies in the world, Wieden + Kennedy. Unlike a lot of recent attempts to rediscover sentiment in advertising, this one is pretty successful. Note for note, pretty great. And it’s built on the time-honoured proposition that if we can ladder a product’s benefits out far enough, we’ll discover how it makes the world a better place.

And yet it made me cringe. I’m not completely sure why, or whether it will end up having been a fair reaction, but two themes shot me back to those RIM days. I couldn’t quite reconcile the nobility of social networking as the ad portrayed it with the reality of life on Facebook, a parallel universe that is more often about narcissism and pettiness than it is about elevating humanity. And I couldn’t quite reconcile it with the company’s CEO, a character at least as publicly charmless as Balsillie ever was, the difference being that we used to read about the latter wanting to buy a hockey team, while we now read about the former shooting his own food. Wieden + Kennedy’s ad portrays the noble purpose of a company I don’t recognize, but wish existed.

I want to dismiss it in a hail of sarcasm. After all, that’s what sells these days, and it’s not like Zuck and Facebook don’t deserve it. But – speaking as a guy who’s trying to make a career out of rehabilitating branded marketing – I think that would make me part of the problem. Watching it again and remembering just how powerful a cultural force a brand can be, I think what I really want them to do is keep going. Make five more ads just like it, and then ten more. Create a hurricane of righteous rhetoric so relentless that Facebook won’t have any choice but to live up to it. And Mark the smugly reluctant capitalist won’t have any choice but to become Mark the principled leader. So, yeah, Facebook. Great work, well done. I can’t wait to see what you do next. RIM’s story is over, but you’ve still got time. To do the right thing. To make us feel good about being customers rather than coerced into it. To make us actually like you.

Heart of glass.

I’m such a doofus sometimes.

Believe it or not, it still surprises me when branded marketers behave badly. And not only for moral reasons, although those mainly. It’s also because it’s usually a threat to their own economic sustainability. Branded marketers can’t survive for long without goodwill, and that’s the currency they pay with every time they get caught lying, cheating or stealing. I can never quite get my head around willful self-destruction. You probably think that’s ridiculous, given stories like this one, in which a beloved and trusted brand like McDonald’s turns out to be (allegedly) collecting personal data from children online. It’s fashionable these days to roll our eyes and pronounce this kind of thing as “typical,” smug in the moral safety of our cynicism. But I wonder how much we really want to live in a world like we complain this one is. And I wonder if that smugness is part of the problem.

You no doubt recall the story of the ‘Broken Windows Theory’, which essentially holds that adapting to incivility gradually turns it into a social norm. Taking some liberty in interpreting this, it seems to tell me that presuming a civil world in how we conduct ourselves helps ensure that’s the kind we get. That’s how I look at bad corporate behavior. As a broken window that needs fixing, rather than as proof of some sanctimonious anti-capitalist bias. However bad a name capitalism may have these days, in actual practice, nothing else we’ve tried so far has managed to produce more social justice in the course of human history. That means it’s a neighbourhood worth trying to save from delinquents, and cynicism is just going to make it more dangerous. Dangerous because it licenses bad behavior. Dangerous because it makes good behavior seem futile and naive. Dangerous because it ultimately takes the risk of shame out of the culture altogether, which never ends well.

All that would be bad enough for a consumer. It’s worse yet if you’re a practitioner of branded marketing. To me, that’s like having corrupt cops on top of urban decay. But I see it sometimes, the feeling that people who do this for a living are somehow above their work. Or, as someone put it to me recently about a strategic planner he knew, enduring their venal day jobs as a way to finance their careers in electronic music. I feel bad for them. No amount of hipster cred can overcome the embarrassment of doing a job you don’t believe in. Snap brim hat or no, that doesn’t make you much cooler than a sullen, pimply teenager serving McWhatevers at a suburban drive-thru.

So I actually work at being a doofus. Improbable as it may seem, I still greet every new client opportunity with the callowness of a cub scout. I still meet every new corporation as if it was on some kind of passionate mission to save the world, every new marketer as if they were pursuing the Freudian imperative of work that matters. I figure a brand should be something a company has to live up to, rather than being the commercial equivalent of wearing a stocking over your face. More often than you might think, companies like this. Figuratively – and sometimes literally - they sit up a little straighter and look you in the eye when they think you think they matter. I think branding is a bit like parenting in this regard. You get a lot more accomplished when you start from the assumption of inherent goodness. Being wrong the odd time is a pretty small price to pay for what faith can do, even in the boardroom.

You should give it a try, this doofus business. Head to the office next Monday morning as if you worked on Sesame Street. ‘Good Morning Starshine’ and all that. Cultivated naïveté, you may find, becomes your secret weapon. Yeah, it sucks that some companies do bad things. But it would suck a lot more if they all decided there was no profit in doing good ones. Better to fix the window than lose the neighbourhood. Better to be happy than smug.

Spare change.

The final straw came during bookkeeping chores this week. I was taking care of some billing through the web-based accounting service to which I’m a paid subscriber. It’s not a chore I enjoy, but there is no business without cashflow, so I endure it. On this day, instead of my familiar dashboard, up popped a cheery little window in front of my data, breathlessly hailing the arrival of a new user interface. Yay! A new thing to learn! A fresh scoop of awesomesauce to distract me from the job at hand and introduce procedural risk to a critical task. And the best part was, I didn’t really have much of a choice. These guys have the billing and payment records for my consulting business. Short of jumping off a bridge, I have to do pretty much what they tell me to. They can still call me a customer, but instead of one who relies contentedly on their brand to make my business work, I am a reluctant, coerced one. For the moment, at least, they’re like the phone company to me.

As I said, though, this was only the last straw. It was not the only one, nor the most egregious. I have these feelings every time I have to go looking for my lists on Twitter, a feature that used to be right up front where I could check it routinely. Or Timeline, a UI train wreck that served to do nothing other than remind me that Facebook is in it for Facebook. Or the average of 20 iPad apps a week that demand updating, with the same sort of disingenuous cheer and vague promises as my accounting service (never mind trying to find one on my device, after some bored Chief Awesomeness Officer decided it needed redesigning). Or my online bank, who forces me to watch animated advertising tricks on their home page before they let me log in. I could go on. If you’re a non-nerd living the digital lifestyle, you’re already nodding.

We live in what is trying to be The Great Epoch of the Product. In some quarters, marketing isn’t widely regarding as a high level skill anymore, and branding is dismissed by digital carpetbaggers as yesterday’s game. What matters, say the vanguard, are awesome products. If you build one, they will come. Money spent on dev adds value, where marketing is just an expense, they intone between sips of Red Bull. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had to stand in such a hurricane of twaddle in my life. There simply could not be a worse time to make the product king.

There was an Epoch of the Product, mind you. It took place largely in the first half of the 20th century, when the financial barriers to R&D and manufacturing were so high and patent laws so effective that a company really could win on the strength of what it made. This, I hope it’s obvious, is no longer the case. Even for laundry detergent and televisions, differentiation is incredibly difficult to accomplish and harder to discern. And when it comes to digital things, well, to be digital is to dance on the edge of commodification almost by definition. Add in the fact that the development tools are so accessible – this is a point of pride in digital culture – and it seems like a narcissistic delusion to imagine that any product can be so good as to protect its hegemony on functional merit alone.

That’s what marketing is for. And the most important thing about marketing is that it demands you put the consumer at the center of your process. You will not deserve to get rich by showing off your killer coding skills. But you might if you give a fig about the human at the other end of that code, the one who is trying to solve a problem. You might if you’re empathetic about the place you have in their lives, and what “better” might mean to them. You might if you remember that a sustainable business revolves around a happy sort of dependency, the kind built on trust rather than on gotchas. Nor does the aspiring digital entrepreneur have to look back a half century for inspiration. The two darlings of this age, Google and Apple, are brilliantly slow, sensitive and careful about what they change. Google’s landing page is famously sacrosanct. Apple rarely, rarely compels you to change anything fundamental about your computing life, unless out of sheer lust for a new thing. They understand both the theatre of confidence, and the fact that change has a cost and therefore must have an ROI. Better is not always better, especially if every improvement is a destabilizing moment in the customer relationship.

Anyway, I could rant about this all day, but I should probably sign off. Bouncing up and down on my dock is a little red Adobe logo, which is kind of distracting. Apparently, they think now would be a good time for an update to my PDF reader. Yeah, I’ll get right on that. I bet it’s awesome.

Phonies.

Sweetie’s cat knows it’s not allowed on our bed. Unless, of course, it sees me heading out the door with a suitcase in my hand. Then it’s there like a shot, curling up all pretty-like right where I’ll lay my allergic head when I return home. They say you can’t train a cat, but it’s not true. They can, in fact, train themselves. It’s just that they only learn things that are useful to them. The rest is mere noise. Where social media is concerned, I think the same might be true for more than a few brands these days, and it’s giving me the same sort of allergic reaction, if only metaphysically. Let me explain:

One of the things that social media’s first wave of experts understood very well is that they have to carefully manage their own narratives in forums like Twitter. They know that their streams become a record that reveals something about their personal brands, so they’re careful about what they say publicly. From early in the game, a lot of them, even while preaching the religion of engagement, wouldn’t even respond to people who had significantly fewer followers than they did for fear of bestowing the gift of their reflected influence too cheaply. Silence is the one thing Twitter doesn’t keep a record of, so it’s the tool they used to deal with dissenting views and social climbers. It still goes on, and the hypocrisy of it can be grating sometimes. Just this week, I tweeted a link to a piece of research to social media pioneer who shall remain nameless, a piece of research that conflicted with his point of view in a hashtag discussion (the study, ironically, showed that consumers were gravitating away from social influence and back to brands as guides for decision making). He waved it off with a single tweet and then simply stopped talking to me. Debate wasn’t going to make his stream look very authoritative. Okay, I get it. It’s not very brave, but it’s understandable.

The problem is that there are some brands out there who have been very quick to learn this trick, even if the rest of social media’s subtleties have eluded them. I’m a consumer just like the rest of us, but as you can imagine I also have a special interest in the democratizing power of social media in marketplaces. Or at least in its potential. So in the spirit of Consumer Republic’s broken toaster fable, I occasionally reach out to brands that way. Most of the ones that seem committed to public dialogue are. Some are crafty enough to take conflict offline so that all we can see on the public record is that they cared. But some are simply bloody-mindedly selective about whom they’ll engage with. In recent months, with brands as diverse as Air Canada, John Deere, Jawbone and the retailer Sporting Life, I’ve been on the short end of a few cases in point. Hi, there, famous brand. I have a problem. Can you help? Silence. Sure, maybe somebody had a bad day or was on a bathroom break, but it happens often enough that you know it’s as likely to be a tactic. Either way, I’m left to decide, before my overture vanishes from the browser window like a setting sun, whether I want to let it go or risk my reputation by fulminating about it to my own network. Nice. Not exactly the conversational utopia those Cluetrainers promised us.

In the long run, I think we’d all be better off if companies who don’t intend to honestly engage in these forums simply didn’t show up at all. In an ethical sense, it’s a pretty low thing to hang out your shingle on Facebook or Twitter, and then pantomime a fictional relationship with your marketplace. But, more practically, I think we need to remind ourselves – we stewards of brands – that consumer credulity is not an infinitely renewable resource. We’re operating in a world in which trust is the only real foundation for enterprise value anymore. I hate to think of what would happen if we fouled this nest, of what marketing would be like if we had to deal with a terminally cynical consumer. Sweetie’s cat enjoys the formidable protection of Sweetie, and an apparently unlimited number of second chances. We will not be so lucky. If we see the consumer heading out this door suitcase in hand, it may well be for the last time.