Brother, can you spare a 'digm?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wages of Fear.

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

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

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

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

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

Monkey Butt.

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

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

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

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

Pebbles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.