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.

The thought that counts.

Once, a long time ago, someone gave me a nose hair trimmer. I didn’t think this was a particular problem of mine, but it was German, came in a very nice box, and bristled with elaborate engineering that promised to ease the burden of the task. These are qualities I admire, so I accepted it without rancor. The next time this sort of grooming was necessary, I looked forward to executing it with elegance while saving valuable seconds in the process. I was, of course, disappointed. You probably saw that coming. The diabolical little appliance, with all of its arrogant whirring and snipping, was as useful as socks on a rooster. It only took one attempt before I reverted to the artisanal method. It sits in my medicine cabinet still, sullen in its over-engineered ignominy. I can’t even show it off.

In fact, I’d almost forgotten I had it until this week, when Klout, the social media influence measurement people, breathlessly informed me that it had identified me as an expert in cats, earthquakes, lacrosse and the Republican party. This happy news lifted my spirits, which I needed after being bullyragged for months by Facebook ads offering to expunge my criminal record. Even the banner promoting custom-made yarmulkes served up alongside ads for used snowmobiles hadn’t distracted me from my paranoia. Either I have a secret (and interesting, in the David Lynch sense of the word) alterego, or the internet isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. I’m hoping it’s the latter. Which brings me back to my German nose hair trimmer.

There is a lot to admire about the application of math to the problem of giving people what they want. Not only does it promise to revolutionize marketing, it also has the potential to take some of the dysfunction out of the way people relate to the corporations they buy things from. But, while we’re congratulating ourselves on all this algorithmic reform, we shouldn’t forget what’s motivating it. From the first pre-millennial dotcom business plans scrawled on napkins to the present day, the algorithmizing of marketing was about making it easier. More efficient, yes. More effective, yes. But the dream, the real dream, of all this was to automate the process. To have a server chugging away in the corner doing our thinking for us, and silently printing money. We have made amazing progress, but even the most hardcore lacrosse-playing, cat-loving, snowmobiling rabbi ex-con has to admit we have a long way to go. Or so I imagine.

Not every job gets better by getting easier. Not every signal is unmistakable. Marketing is still a soft science. It’s been a source of endless frustration to marketers that the last ten yards of any really effective strategy is cloaked in mystery. They’ve been complaining about this since the 19th century retail pioneer John Wanamaker confessed he didn’t know which half of his advertising budget he was wasting. But there it is. Even as we try to make marketing more efficient and accountable, and even as we try to waste less of the consumer’s attention in the process of selling them things, we cannot forget that the artisanal method still has its place. We still have to understand how they feel as well as we monitor what they do. We still have to leave room for the possibility of surprising them utterly. We still have to spend at least some of our time a step or two ahead of them rather than contenting ourselves to be their shadows. Math can make a marketer better, but it should never make her obsolete. We still have to be willing, now and then, to say, “what if?”

As for the person who gave me the nose hair trimmer, well, we don’t talk anymore. It wasn’t the trimmer that ended things, mind you. That was more of a symptom of the problem. It’s hard to build a lasting relationship with someone who doesn’t seem to know you at all, and isn't willing to make the effort.

PS. You’ll find a very interesting take on the perils of a ‘filtered’ internet here.
PPS. My snowmobile is still for sale.

Burning down the house.

Once, at a cocktail party, I challenged a group of people with the following question: Your house is on fire, I said. Your family and pets are safely on the front lawn watching the conflagration, and you have time to save five of your possessions. What do you grab as you bolt for the door? It was an experiment designed to reveal something about how we relate to our possessions (and it failed, because I think they all fibbed. They claimed they’d grab sentimental stuff like photographs; nobody admitted they’d save their Rolex, or their Eames chair, or their 25 year-old Macallan), but it came rushing back to me this week in another context altogether as I meditated on the flight home from a client meeting. This client’s house is not on fire, mind you. But the dilemma of what to take and what to leave behind is every bit as urgent and real, and honesty every bit as important.

This organization, you see, is quite possibly about to lose its name. As a result of its pending acquisition by another company in a related business, it appears likely that the label and livery that have made them familiar to their customers and communities will change. Some people think that means a brand will be lost. That’s understandable. But as I watch the way they’re going about dealing with this, I become more and more convinced that it’s not necessarily true. Because, you see, the specter of this ‘loss’ has produced heroic introspection. People are talking earnestly about culture, about their relationships with customers, about the experience of doing business with them, about their values as an organization and a team. They’re passionate, engaged, and verbal. They’re writing things down. Testifying. United. Imagining they’ve been stripped of their name, they’re getting to the heart of what really made them such a great brand in the first place. If Descartes had been a branding guru, he might have said, “I care, therefore I am.” Like a kid suddenly realizing his bike is staying up without training wheels, these people are finally confronting the reality that it was they, not their flag, who created all that value.

Too often in this game, branding is a strategic crutch for organizations. Or, worse, sometimes even a distraction behind which an organization’s true nature can be concealed. But a brand is supposed to be the product of leadership and purpose, not a substitute for them. The last thing, not the first thing. In all the years I’ve been doing this, it never occurred to me to ask a corporation, what would you save if your brand’s house were on fire? It’s a helluva question. I bet it would save a lot of companies days worth of offsite flip-charting, and result in more than a few consultants going hungry. Standing there in your bathrobe on your metaphoric front lawn watching your identity go up in hypothetical flames, whatever you grabbed on the way out, that’s who you are. That’s your real brand.

Which I guess means I’d better make sure to save my squeegee so I can still make a living. That and the Macallan, natch.

Uneasy lies the head.

Last month, a continent apart in both geographical and ideological terms, two organizations lost their leaders. Steve Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of Apple Computer – that one resonated everywhere – and Jack Layton, only recently anointed Canada’s social conscience incarnate, passed away leaving his party and a few million pro tem “ich bin ein socialist” Canadians bereft. The air was thick with punditry. And no theme received a rounder thrashing than that of succession: Who could ever truly pull the swords from those stones?

The question says a lot about leadership, at least in these post-post-modern times. We all like to think of great organizations as giant collaborations, well-intended creative peers collegially pulling together, sharing ideas and lifting each other ever higher in a cuddly utopian festival of self-actualization. And we like to think of leaders as managers, facilitators, coaches, motivators and enablers whose responsibility is to make that happen while making the numbers. But, truthfully, this is just a myth we perpetuate to keep everbody happy in the Matrix. It’s not really how most effective organizations work, most days. Most days, they are simply led. There’s an exchange between worker and leader that offers cooperation for vision, and assumes the person who makes the most money should be held to the highest standard. It’s not very fashionable to say so, but we all expect that the boss should be the best among us. In these moments, when we’re trying to figure out how to fill that void, it’s suddenly all so clear. You don’t hear employees and stakeholders clamoring to replace their fallen leader with a politburo. Not even the socialist ones. They want a warrior king.

A couple of posts back, I wrote, “branding and leadership are inseparable quantities in the modern corporation.” I really believe, especially in consumer facing organizations, that no leader can ever be above his or her brand, and no brand can ever be greater than the moral standard set by its leader. It’s not a coincidence that the best brands are the ones with the most vexing succession problems, while the weakest ones seem to be a revolving door for self-styled professional managers. We wring our hands over the loss of arrogant ideologues, while I doubt anyone is going to lose much sleep over the loss of, say, Carol Bartz. “Growth by 2012” just doesn’t have same ring to it as “love is better than anger” or “1984 won’t be like 1984.”

When Bloomberg.com interviewed Steve Wozniak about his co-founder’s resignation the day it happened, a reporter asked him what books Jobs liked to read when the two of them were imagining that enterprise in the 1970s. The only title Woz could remember was Atlas Shrugged. Great leaders with great brands are like that. Ideologues. Arrogant. Deaf to compromise. Pains in the ass. Irreplaceable. It turns out that leadership is more Shakespearean than Skinnerian, more myth than science. And great brands, often, in the end, might simply be the collateral effect of that, a signal to the rest of us that a company we might do business with is the real thing. That such reigns end is just the price we pay for that inestimable value.

Saying goodbye to a genuine leader is tough business, whether they were the greatest CEO in capitalist history, or a stumping lefty dreamer. But the harder job comes after. Because the job of leadership is too important to squander on merely protecting somebody’s legacy. As difficult as it is to face, the best we can hope for is more than that. The best we can hope for are new leaders, so good, so authentic, so burning with hope that we’re allowed to forget the predecessors upon whose shoulders they stand. The late Ted Rogers, a formidable leader himself, would always end his company addresses with the line, “The best is yet to come.” The day that stops being true for an organization, its story is over. A sword in a stone is just a monument, and monuments are only about what’s been lost.

There’s never going to be much profit in that. Or, for that matter, much future.

Field of memes.

I’m not usually one to whip out my curriculum vitae, but this is a special circumstance. Given that someone has decided there should be a ‘digital divide’, I feel compelled to clarify which side of the damned thing I’m on so that the following screed isn’t unduly dismissed. I get the web. I do. Here I am getting the web in 1994, before there was even a Netscape (apparently, the fact that consumers were going to be able to talk back to marketers was going to be a pretty big deal. Oh, and I think we gave up on the word “interactive” too soon). I’ve advised lots of startups in the space, including very big ones like a bank and an online travel retailer and the only online grocer who achieved an operating income during giddy Web 1.0. And small ones, even as we speak, little companies with great ideas and founders with that unblinking, glistening stare that only pre-VC entrepreneurs have. I’ve even been an investor, once placing a tidy sum behind a bulletproof plan that disputed the following truth, and losing every penny of it. I’m not some aggrieved creature of the mass media age, grumping about the new economy and the devil music those kids are listening to. I’m a dude, and, here’s my truth:

Most internet-enabled, technology-driven products are ridiculously over-developed and criminally under-marketed.

What triggered this eruption was watching people trying to cope with Google+, the answer to a problem most mainstream social media users didn’t know they had. This specific example may prove unfair in the end – only a fool dismisses Google - but there are a million more where it came from. Fantastically useful web-enabled services and apps nobody has ever heard of, brilliant utilities buried layers deep in ones that thought they knew, features so difficult to explain that their creators rarely try. Nor does the problem live only online. I could argue that benighted RiM would have done well to spend a little less time impressing engineers with its nuanced improvements over the iPad and a little more of it trying to create desire. This techno-centric faith that more is better and better will win perforce has dug a deep moat around the future. On one side of it are the novelty-addicted nerds trying endlessly to impress themselves, and on the other is the rest of the world who have no idea what they’re missing. Or are tired of feeling disempowered by it.

A developer is not a marketer. Differentiation only matters within a known frame of reference. You have to have prospects before you can have customers. Search only sells when people know what they’re looking for. Viruses run their course and then flame out. Marketing still needs scale to make money. And people will always, always, always learn when they are fascinated and never when they’re forced.

As Luddite as it may seem, I’m coming to believe that the most progressive thing the tech world could do right now is innovate a little less and market a little more. It really is time that we invited regular people to join the fun. I’d certainly settle for less awesomeness if it meant that more people were going get some. Just because we build the future doesn’t mean anybody’s going to come, but if we can get enough of them to come, you might be amazed at what they’d help us build.

Photo used with the kind permission of Dennis Crowley (@dens)