Begging to differ.

After a week of forehead-smackingly circular debates, I would like to propose that we ban differentiation. I’d like to suggest that all brands immediately refrain from this dangerous and archaic practice, and that there be some sort of penalty for failing to do so. I’m thinking something like, say, being exclusively distributed by Walmart. Just spitballing , here. We can discuss this detail another time, but the issue is, I have suddenly realized, pressing.

Like most evil things, it started out innocently enough. The idea that a brand has to be distinct from its competitors is hard to dispute, and it’s so deeply embedded in the DNA of marketing orthodoxy that a sane person would question it no more than they would gravity. Trout and Ries, the great sages of positioning, would nod solemnly at this from whatever Olympian sanctum they now inhabit. Free marketeers would add piously that the quest for differentiation is an incentive for continuous improvement of the things we buy, and that it preserves the sacred artifact of consumer choice. There is hardly a phrase less likely to invite argument in a boardroom than, “we have to stand out from the clutter.”

But differentiation, it turns out, is like a Pop Tart. Excellent as part of a balanced diet, but probably fatal if it’s all you eat.

For one thing, I am increasingly doubtful that differentiation, in isolation, even has commercial value anymore. In the marketing world, we tend to visualize our brands as being lined up on a metaphysical store shelf alongside their competitors like a bunch of hookers in a red light district. When you look at it that way, it makes sense that you have to stand out first if you’re going to do any business. Except that I’m not sure that’s the metaphysical space most brands compete in anymore. I think brands more often are nodes on an infinite grid of what people want and who can give it to them. In a searchable world, it seems to me that ‘different’ is well on the way to becoming quaint, as is the idea of clutter.

Meanwhile, the monomania for differentiation, for those marketers so afflicted, is turning brands into narcissists. By definition, they become self-obsessed and inward looking, oblivious to the world. In clinical terms, narcissism has a couple of cautionary aspects worth thinking about here: One is that it’s a short walk from there to sociopathy, and a brand without a conscience would be a scary thing. And the other is that narcissism is sure sign of controlling parents. If you don’t cut your brand some slack and let it out to play, nobody will like it and it will never develop its own character. Which, at the end of the day, is about the only kind of differentiation worth having.

Now ask yourself: Do I really want my brand to be a sociopathic hooker with unresolved parent issues? No, I think you do not.

So, until I can convince the government to make differentiation illegal (which I acknowledge may take some time), I’m going to boycott it myself. From now on, if someone wants me to help them make their brand awesome, I’m only going to help them make it relevant. I will refuse to talk about how their brand is different; I’m only going to talk about whose life it intends to make better.

Join me. There’s still time to stop this scourge.

Faith.

Throughout the twitchy world of modern marketing, social media is, of course, the new black. And by black, I mean overcrowded lifeboat. Marketers are falling all over themselves firing up Facebook fan pages, pimping themselves out to build Twitter followings, and uploading those bacterial video thingies to YouTube. It’s an orgy of ingratiation that smacks a bit of somebody’s tax auditor dad rocking a Hollister hoodie.

And then someone comes along to show us the way. Someone German, arrogantly elitist, and resolutely stuck in the past. Someone named Porsche.

Let me set this up for you:

Porsche, iconic maker of iconic sports cars, believes it must launch a luxury sedan to stay alive. This sedan will be called the Panamera, and it’s meant to compete with the likes of Mercedes Benz. It’s tried this sort of thing once before, when it introduced an SUV, the Cayenne. From this experience, it learned some things. On one hand, it learned that there are people out there who are willing to pay for this brand, but don’t want a sports car. That’s good. But on the other hand, it learned that great marketing is not always great branding. The Cayenne was seen by the Faithful as a sign of spiritual rot for Porsche. Opportunism. Proof that passion was being displaced by greed as the company’s primary motivation. And Porsche needs the Faithful, maybe more than any other car company. The Faithful are guardians of the mythology, and without the mythology, it’s hard to get away with charging a hundred grand plus for what is, objectively, a strangely engineered, Spartan little freak of a sports car like the 911. Without the myth, there is no brand. And without the Faithful, there is no myth.

This fall, if you don’t care about cars, you might see some ads on television and in print for this Porsche Panamera contraption, and that’s all. The news will fly right past you. But if you’re a car nut, and in this particular snack bracket, these ads are just the tip of a very large iceberg. You’re going to sense buzz around the Panamera. You’re going to feel like this car is ‘important’. You’re going to want to see one, get one, and brag about it to your neighbours. And why? Because, unbeknownst to you, Porsche has for months now been turning the Faithful into an army of endorsers at least, and evangelists at best. When you ask around about the Panamera, you are going to hear good things. And that was by design.

Consider, for example, a web site they built called ’The Family Tree’, and then previewed to members of the Porsche Club of America (an enormously powerful lobby group in the Porsche world). Members were invited by its President to contribute their own personal stories about the cars they drive (“I dreamed of having one of these ever since I was a kid…”). The stories, presented graphically as a chronological tree, did three things things: They recast Porsche’s narrative as bigger than the 911, they flushed out the emotional relationship people have with their Porsches rather than the rational product experience, and they aggregated themselves into a very nice narrative context for the next chapter, the Panamera. In which the new sedan suddenly doesn’t seem like such a betrayal.

Or consider the simple little YouTube video they produced called ‘Family Gathering’ in which a bunch of famous old Porsches welcome the Panamera to ‘The Family’, released, again, just ahead of the public launch. To an ordinary person, those old cars are just a bunch of noisy, irrelevant antiques. To the Faithful, they are the Arc of the Covenant, raising the hairs on the backs of their necks and reminding them of the story they’re part of. To an ordinary person, the video is pure cornball. To the Faithful, it’s porn. ‘Family Gathering’ got fantastic pass-around on Porsche message boards. (And before you snort at the 13,000 view count, remember the size of the family: Porsche sells less than 200,000 cars a year, worldwide. As with all social media, it’s about the quality, not the quantity, of a community).

Or the audacious production of a 30 minute documentary called “Welcome to the Family”, which airs tonight. Or the dealers across North America who hosted cocktail parties to introduce Porsche owners to the new machine in the flesh, before it was available for sale. And so on, and so on. The campaign is still unfolding, and I hope they yet have some tricks up their sleeves. But, to me, the genius part is already done. The Faithful, if not all bought into the Panamera, have at least forgiven Porsche because the brand has proven it still knows who it is.

And the fact that all this got done while the company was getting bought by Volkswagen in the wake of a spectacularly hubristic effort to do the opposite is nothing short of miraculous. As for those of us who can’t afford Panameras, I think these snooty Swabians still have something to offer in the form of a pretty good example for social branding in the twitchy future.

They started inside the community they already had. Instead of advertising the car as if their current tribe of owners didn’t read or watch television, they tried to mobilize them to help out, with a message only they would really get. It was respectful, and it was smart.

They saw their brand as a narrative rather than as a fact. A brand that’s an unfolding story, an unending campaign for election, is engaging and magnetic. A brand that’s merely a proposition? Well, that’s what Google is for, isn’t it.

And they turned the campaign itself into a story informed by a single idea, patiently rolling out each chapter in sequence, giving it time to sink in, building on it, and not treating ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as discrete universes. This, instead of the customary multi-media blitzkrieg that was the ‘launch’ paradigm in the previous century.

Yeah, I know, this is a long post. And it’s less entertaining to admire a brand than it is to be snarky about it. But this one deserved shouting out. It reminded me of what a brand can do, if you have a good one and you let it off the leash. For that, there really is no substitute.

Speak no evil.

I am driving a dreary, abused little rental car today. And my lawn is deep enough to conceal ocelots.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been disappointed by a couple of very famous brands in which I’d invested both faith and cash. And I’m not just whining, here, about a lousy customer service experience or some random product quality deficiency. I’m talking about products that failed on precisely the terms in which their brands defined them (Land Rovers aren’t supposed to strand you in the middle of nowhere – routinely - whatever other quirks they may have. And John Deere tractors cost a little more specifically because they don’t just quit without warning, and Deere dealers know that crops don’t wait for parts). These things happen to all of us, I realize. And I will do what I can to exercise my consumer franchise. For my more rugged transportation needs, I have been driven straight into the arms of Toyota. And as for John Deere, word of mouth is actually still a powerful thing in a rural area like this. My neighbour has already bought a Cub Cadet.

But it got me thinking.

I can punish a brand that doesn’t mean what it says by depriving it of my own future business, yes. But let’s be honest: That can be, in this short horizon business world of ours, kind of an abstract threat. How can I make them blush with shame? How do I make them try a little harder for the next guy, even if it’s only to prove me wrong? Where is the soapbox on which I can stand for a minute and say, “The big green tractors might be awesome, but the little green tractors might be just badge engineered boat anchors”? How is it that some guy in Flemington, WV, selling a used lawn mower on eBay bears more public accountability for keeping his promises than the biggest heavy equipment manufacturers on the planet?

I think this is a gaping hole in an otherwise brilliant system of commerce. You see, a brand’s commercial value lies fundamentally in its reputation. Whatever other arcane nuances make branding interesting and get consultants all lathered up, the foundation on which a brand stands is its putative community of happy customers. When we see a big company, we assume that it got that way by succeeding more often than it fails. When we see fame in a brand, we assume that this is because a lot of people have said glowing things about it in the past. Success, whether we’re conscious of it or not, is supposed to be a cue of competence. But these assumptions only make sense if the opposite outcomes are also possible. They’re really only valid if a company can’t get big by having its mistakes go unnoticed. Can’t get famous simply because the people it let down were mute.

We’re entering an era in which the influence of advertising is receding like the polar ice caps, and with it the power to buy reputation. In its place, we’re promised a glorious future of consumer information empowerment, enabled by the internet. But we also live in an era when lots of the things we buy aren’t even built by the company whose names they bear. Brands are curating and mediating more often than they’re actually building things. That means that the provenance of a product is becoming more important than the product itself. And while there are lots of scraps and crumbs of user feedback online for those willing to slog through it to try to form an impression of that provenance, there is no repository of feedback on the companies behind those products.

In a speech last fall, Eric “Don’t be evil” Schmidt said of the web, “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool [of false information online].” I fervently believe this. But if brands are going to be our beacons of credibility in the information age, somebody’s got to keep them honest. That somebody is us, of course. The question is how.

Cyberspace teems with geniuses who write code that rates eBay sellers, predicts what songs and books we might like, and ruthlessly assigns blog authority. Someday, one of them – maybe even one who works for Mr. Schmidt - will do the same for the authority of brands. Some late night, one of them, buzzing with idealism and Red Bull, will figure out how we can collectively, objectively keep score.

That would change everything.

WOM in sheep's clothing.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a speech at a conference in Colorado Springs. My hosts graciously invited me to join the delegates at dinner the night before my keynote, and I – believing ardently that the words ‘sushi’ and ‘buffet’ are poetry together – gratefully accepted. It was a lovely evening, and I met lots of interesting, smart people. Including one patrician fellow who firmly gripped my hand, looked me straight in the eye like a gunslinger, and said, “So, what are you here to sell us?”

On the plane for home, I thought up all sorts of witty answers. None, however, were forthcoming at the moment the question was asked. I just sort of stammered something about ideas and wished that lady with the cabernet sauvignon bottle would do another lap.

But however badly my Wilde-ian reflexes might have failed me that night, there was a kind of simple genius in the question: Before this guy was willing to listen to what I had to say, he needed to know if I had an agenda, and he needed to know what that agenda was. Armed with that information, he could filter and modulate whatever I said and make his own conclusions. Without it, he would be deafened by his own suspicion.

I wish there was a way to firmly grip the internet and ask it the same question.

In the last week or two, there has been a bit of a spike in the chatter online about the commercialization of social media. Lots of furrowed brows and hand- wringing on Twitter about sponsored tweets and the like. Meanwhile, the self-styled mavens of this parallel universe are hanging out shingles and promising marketers, whose budgets and nerves have been shattered by the recession, that the future lies not on CSI Miami, but at the end of a hashtag.

Which is probably true.

But in the midst of that same chatter, you hear people conniving to bury selling messages and product exposure inside Trojan Horse content. You hear it said that marketing’s way forward is to spend more money on ‘Word Of Mouth’ advertising. I have even heard with my own ears, from an estimable ‘online agency,’ the phrase, “non-branded bait tactic.” In certain quarters, at least, web marketing’s default to deception has been so blindingly fast as to make Don Draper look like an ingenue.

People of Earth: The difference between the internet and, say, television, is that any sort of deep exposure to what a brand has to say is 100% voluntary on the internet. Online, there’s very little risk that your content will be held hostage for four minutes while your brain is marinated in 99 cent cheeseburgers and geezer car insurance the way it was when you used to watch Hogan’s Heroes. Therefore, you can be transparent. You can let them understand - respectfully - what you’re there to sell because, in effect, they’ve asked. It is precisely illogical that a brand should feel it has to disguise itself in order to be heard online. It is precisely illogical that a brand has to hire shills, or create some kind of digital ventriloquist’s dummy to say things that it is somehow too embarrassed to. If you have to hide your intentions, then that must mean you believe your brand has nothing to offer people.

Meanwhile, if consumers end up learning that they should, by definition, distrust anything flattering they see about a brand on the internet, we’re all in for a world of hurt. No marketing, no brands. No brands, no choice. No choice, no economy. There is nothing after the web, kids. Brands have to make their stand, sustainably, here and now.

It’s not a crime to sell things. But it is a crime to try to fool people. And the only ‘WOM’ spending that matters is that which makes your brand experience so awesome that people can’t stop talking about it.

So, I guess that’s what I was there to sell, sir.

Well, that and some of these.

(Image courtesy of www.idiomsbykids.com)

Raiders of the Lost Art.

It’s a classic, the ageless cinematic equivalent of a whoopee cushion: Having escaped certain doom by the skin of his teeth, Indy and the girl find refuge in a cave/cellar/catacomb/flaming biplane, only to discover that they have leapt into the certain jaws of a worse fate. And that’s where the real adventure begins.

Thanks to a misspent youth, it’s this image rather than something more Homeric that popped into my head as I read Forbes’ piece last week on the explosion of spending in online media. It’s getting hard to argue that traditional advertising has seen its best days. By the estimate of the expert they interviewed, something like $65 billion will end up migrating from meatspace media to web media during marketing’s Black Swan of 2009. It’s a big number, and the gurus reckon that money’s never going to go back where it came from. Those Housewives might be about to learn the true meaning of Desperate.

The implications of this are pretty well understood, grimly in Madison Avenue bars and smugly on Twitter: Mass media are on the economic ropes. That’s bad. Online channels are growing by leaps and bounds. That’s good. Marketers are losing the ability to reach huge audiences efficiently. That’s bad. But their money is now being spent in a medium that is measurable, trackable, accountable and infinitely tweakable. That’s really, really, really good. There’s nothing a brand manager loves more than to present charts and graphs to his VP showing what a budget-optimizing little devil he is. Career-wise, you can’t do better than that. In data, there is safety.

Or is there.

I’m not so sure, but I can’t wait for this second act to get started. Because, mon corporate teamwear-clad brand manager ami, on the internets, measurement turns out to be a double-edged sword. The way I see it, all this ‘accountability’ is a pleasant collateral effect of something much bigger and hairier: $65 billion worth of marketing spending is being directed to a public bazaar in which the consumer can and will talk back. And I don’t mean Larry King-type talking back, with call screening and time delays and quaint rural accents. I mean real-time, frank, visceral reactions. From well-connected opinion leaders and inarticulate grumps alike. What marketers are measuring, everybody else is watching live. And the consumer – because her behavior is going to be so closely observed and adapted to – is about to become more powerful than she has ever been. Those people marketers are following around online will effectively be making their decisions for them, now, especially if they rely exclusively on their precious data rather than on their own imaginations.

In other words, no matter how empowering all those lovely analytics might seem, marketers might not have the whip hand anymore.

To them, I magnanimously offer two pieces of absolutely free advice: Don’t piss those people off, not if they don’t have to do business with you. But more than this, don’t bore them. You might be there to do business, but they’re there either for fun or for information. I imagine I don’t have to spell this out for you, what with you being trained professionals and all.

And as for you consumers? Well, you got what you wanted. The marketing world is paying $65 billion worth of very close attention to you, now. Make it count.

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.