brandcowboy

Monkey Butt.

2012-01-16T11:20:00.003-05:00

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.

2012-01-05T17:26:00.006-05:00

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...

2011-11-07T10:11:00.003-05:00

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.

2011-10-28T10:59:00.003-04:00

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.

2011-09-29T11:16:00.003-04:00

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.

2011-09-08T14:14:00.001-04:00

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.

2011-07-25T15:11:00.006-04:00

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)

Fit for a king.

2011-07-07T14:41:00.004-04:00

What you are about to read will probably revolutionize branding. You see, I’ve invented a new organizational role that will finally, once and for all, cement brands as constitutions for corporate behaviour, and integrate marketing communications with, um, cross-functional synergy and, ah… community engagement. Or search engine optimization. Something like that. Anyway, here’s where I got the idea:

For the past week, the dashing Prince William and his bride, the Duchess of Cambridge, have been touring this fair dominion, shaking hands, complimenting people on their fascinators, and engaging in feats of derring-do. Let me tell you, going bald apparently doesn’t amount to much of a social liability when you can land a helicopter on water. And as with all royal visits to our home and native land, this one has generated the usual ritual debate over the relevance of the monarchy. I’m not, myself, a monarchist per se, but I’m still kind of glad to have the Windsors on the payroll, and these winsome kids made me ask myself why. The answer, I concluded, was that the role of a constitutional monarchy – the kind we all agree to accept rather than the kind that’s imposed on us by men with guns – is to personify its nation’s defining values. Free of politics, free of the messy, pandering process of getting elected, free of the practical exigencies of getting things done, the ideal monarch’s only job is to conspicuously be what’s best about a people. So far, at least, that’s what everybody has decided Will and Kate are to be, and so far, at least, that’s what they are.

That’s what I think brands need. Royalty. That’s my big idea. For sure, some of the best brands already have their dukes and duchesses, people who are incidentally CEOs but are mostly spiritual leaders. But a lot of CEOs just aren’t up to the job, are they. Some of them are too distracted by the demands of shareholders, or franchisees, or head offices or some other high-leverage stakeholder who isn’t a customer. And some of them are journeymen, people who come to the job with personal agendas and timetables and never really unpack their carpetbags. Distracted people aren’t the sort you want setting a moral example for your corporation. Neither are transient, self-interested ones. Both tend to produce workforces who learn the same pathologies. Neither tends to produce a particularly valuable or coherent brand. That’s where monarchy kicks in. While the King of RiM may not have exactly the ring to it that we’re looking for, I think you can still see how it would be an improvement. Even a Baroness would help Bell, and a Marquis, we can all agree, is the very least Air Canada deserves.

It’s one of my favourite tubs to thump that branding and leadership are inseparable quantities in the modern corporation. Every good leader knows that accountability is the foundation of the job. But I think too many forget that as important as it is to be accountable to your constituencies, you also have to be accountable to the idea that gave life to your enterprise. Sometimes above all. In corporate life, at least, the line between a democracy and an unruly mob isn’t held by management. It’s held by inspiration.

And, occasionally, I guess, an axe.

Bandits.

2011-06-27T12:56:00.005-04:00

There are exceptions, of course. Some masked people do good things. Batman, say. The Lone Ranger. But, generally, when someone won’t show you his face, you won’t like what’s going to happen next. You know this, I know this, bank tellers know this, many dogs even know this. That’s why I was overcome with such a feeling of futility as we planted the protest sign at the end of our driveway. There were no logos on it.

Our house is on the Niagara Escarpment, one of the world’s ecological treasures. And like a lot of those treasures, the Escarpment is also host to some valuable natural resources. Around here, the two most vexing are wind and gravel. Most people we know are presently engaged in a fight against one or both of a multi-thousand acre quarry that will displace millions of liters of aquifer a day, and industrial wind farms that will render vast swaths of agricultural and natural space inhospitable to life. For a lot of people, these fights have been very personal, gone on for years, cost a fortune to wage, and remained inconclusive. And, for me, it’s hard to ignore why. In the case of the wind farms, the enemies are investment banks lapping up government subsidies and trading in carbon credits, what one New York Times writer called “the next bubble.” Behind the quarry is a Boston-based hedge fund. The corporations involved in these issues don’t sell things at the mall. None of them has a brand. Thus, they have no fear of public opinion and no motivation to listen and try to work something out. They just throw lawyers and procedural chicanes at the process and continue their work unobserved in the shadows of capitalism.

It doesn’t matter what you think about either of these conflicts, not for the purpose of this post, anyway. What matters is that the process of dealing with them has been so terribly lopsided. And that’s because the anonymity of the companies involved deprives ordinary people of democratic leverage. People like to say that the problem is simply that these corporations are rich. But Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s and Nike are pretty rich, too, yet they’re a lot more circumspect about messing with us. They’ve got skin in the game.

It’s all been an interesting reminder for me – as if I needed it – of how lucky we are to live in an economy that relies so heavily on branded marketing. A brand is like a commercial Second Amendment, turning consumers into citizen militias that make tyrants think twice. A bit like fresh water and arable land, we take them for granted, but we’d miss them mightily if they weren’t there. All those silly labels staring vapidly back at you from store shelves? That’s power, baby. You don’t need to have a bulldozer in your backyard to appreciate that.

But it sure helps.

Reflux redux.

2011-05-27T10:36:00.005-04:00

Growing up, I remember deciding this: I will know I’m old when I start making that little grunty noise when I sit down. But, like so many of the things we tell ourselves as adolescents, I was wrong about this. I will now know that I am old when I start making that little grunty noise when asked to discuss the integration of marketing communications.

That’s what I was doing yesterday, at a wonderful conference called mesh. Attended mostly by digerati of one stripe or another, it bills itself as ‘Canada’s Web Conference’, and so the question of integration was not surprisingly bent in a digital direction. The web marketing world has suddenly realized that it’s still sitting at the kids’ table when it comes to brand building and, while it may not be clear exactly who the grownups are anymore, they want in. Prepping his panel for the discussion, the moderator – with almost palpable exasperation – wanted us to think about why in the blue hell this cross-platform integration thing wasn’t working, how it could, and whose job it was to make that happen.

Well, welcome to the grownups’ table, kids. That’s been a preoccupation of the marketing world since Dallas was a prime-time juggernaut.

Back when we all had flowing beards and wore robes and sandals to work, this very question was already transformatively vexing the advertising industry. “Lo,” said Maurice and Charles Saatchi, “verily, our lunch is being eaten by companies that are not even advertising agencies. They are public relations companies, and promotion companies, and design companies, and – shudder – direct marketing companies. Since we do not like sharing our fatted calf thusly, we will buy them all. Go forth,” they intoned, “and integrate.” And so the multinational advertising conglomerate was born. And they started integrating, all right. But for too many of them, too often, that integration stopped at the balance sheet. Clients paid too much for one stop shopping while functionally siloed agency teams fought internally over budgets and bonus targets, and the closest too many of them ever came to integrating branded communications was when their production studios, wielding Pantone books like scripture, enforced graphic standards. Then as now, there was no answer. Just a lot of competing interests, a lot of rank, parochial ambition dressed up as principle.

The fact is, and always has been, that two conditions are necessary for ‘integration’ of a brand’s marketing activity: Engaged, culture-driven organizational leadership, and a really well defined and understood brand. Then, integration happens by itself, whether you’re talking about print ads or web banners or dancing monkeys. If you have to ask whether digital media changes the integration game, you’re doing it wrong. In fact, if you’re still using the word ‘digital’, it’s possible you’re not ready for the grownups’ table at all. What technology has done to media has changed a lot of things, but one of them isn’t human nature. Branding is like nation-building: you have to be willing to acknowledge there’s something bigger than you, no matter how awesome you are at your job, or you’re just part of the problem.

So, how has ‘the emergence of digital’ changed integrated marketing? It hasn’t. Not one bit. The problem is, as David Byrne might put it, the same as it ever was. There are people who want to help brands tell their stories, and there are people who want to show off what they know how to do. And as long as the latter outnumber the former in the marketing services community, the responsibility for integration is going to have to default to the marketer. Not the answer anyone in the room was hoping for, I suppose, but there it is.

Man, I need to sit down. My self-righteous indignation is killing me.

Wagging the dog.

2011-04-20T14:36:00.006-04:00

Rendered redundant following the 2011 federal election, campaign strategy gurus decide to form an ad agency. How hard can it be, they reason. If we can sell the Four Horsemen of the Whateverlypse, surely we can sell Tide. Let’s listen in as they make their first presentation…

“We recommend that you go negative right away. The polls… er, market research says that people are getting soft on Oxi-Clean. They see it as a real option. It’s important that we nip this in the bud. A preemptive strike.”

“I see. But, well, that’s not really how we do things here. We prefer to promote the benefits of Ti…”

“Sure, fine. You could go that way. If you want to be the Jimmy Carter of laundry detergents. But if you want to win, the gloves have to come off. Now, our research people have discovered that some of the people who make Oxi-Clean are vegans. We think we can leverage this against the silent meat majority. Vegetables grow in dirt. How can you credibly promise laundry detergent when you eat things that grow in dirt?”

“Well, I see where you’re going, here. But Tide gets clothes clean, as we like to say in Cincinnati. Check out these socks. Blood, mustard, grass… gone. No matter how violent your barbecues get, you’re going to look good on laundry day. That’s some differentiating benefits right there…”

“Oh, socks. That’s just great. That’s really going to rock the vote. What do you think this is, a Mickey Rooney movie? Look , if you don’t have the stomach for this…”

“No, no, fine. Carry on.”

“Thank you.” Heavy sigh. ”Now, on to the matter of personal branding. We think Tide should wear denim shirts and look concerned all the time. With the sleeves partly rolled up. Rurals and Sun readers love this stuff. It’s, like, all authentic and whatnot. And do you think it can drive a backhoe?”

“Look, this is really about getting stains out. Moms feel good about sending their kids to school in clean clothes. That’s what we…”

“Oh, listen to Norman Rockwell, here. Adorable. Really. Anyway, moving on to messaging. We want you to take your promise just a little further, give it some zing. Some above-the-fold magic. Instead of saying that Tide gets out blood, mustard and grass, you should say, ‘Tide will prevent crime, feed the hungry and cut your lawn.’”

“But that’s not actually true…”

“I feel like I’m talking to a wall. ‘True’? Really? True? Read my lips: It doesn’t matter. It just has to look true. For a week. Then, when we win and they do their first load of socks, we’ll say, ‘the previous laundry detergent left things in a worse mess than we feared and covered it up, the fascist bastards. This is going to take some time, patience and sacrifice. And public consultation. Maybe a study. Which we’d be happy to conduct for you. For a fee. And a senate seat. ”

Something to consider the next time you're worried marketing is becoming too cynical. Kind of makes you nostalgic for the Super Bowl. And branding consultants.

Heavy sigh…

Photo by Joe Hardy

High School Confidential.

2011-03-11T15:24:00.004-05:00

It began, as revolutions sometimes do, with a small army of people sporting bad haircuts, rumpled khakis and faded “Han Shot First” t-shirts, swearing at us from conference podiums about marketing’s coming age of conversation. Though they did their own credibility no favours by using social media to report on their breakfast menus and transient emotional states, and racking up social influence points on their own obtuse scoreboards, there was no question something was happening here. Every once in while, some airline would break a guitar or some far away people would riot for democracy, and the seeming banality of it all would be briefly eclipsed by portent. The corporate world divided itself along approximately those lines, in fact: Those with imperial feet of clay, and those who madly dove in without checking to see how deep the water was, kindly making our mistakes for us. I think consumers did the same, and have been divided about the same way.

I had always put myself in the “something’s happening here” camp, for sure. Especially where the relationship between consumers and brands is concerned, this sudden leveling of the playing field was bound to produce some kind of permanent, fundamental change. But I haven’t always been sure just what, or how soon, having witnessed the fates of lots of “the death of this and the new that” false idols over the years. Two stories that I came across in the last month made the picture a lot sharper for me.

The first was an item on Google’s blog, announcing some changes to its Social Search feature. In essence, Google said, they’re going to start giving preferential treatment to search results that are endorsed by people in your social network. In other words, the credibility of people who are demonstrably, provably like you is going to weigh more heavily than it has in the past, and the credibility of the world’s billions of strangers a little less so. And the other, just a few days ago, was an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about “sentiment analysis,” a nascent science whereby corporations can keep an eye on what we’re collectively saying about them online, in real time. A nascent science one pundit reckons will soon be a billion dollar business. Corporations are about to become as nervously obsessed with their social reputations as a bunch of high school kids. Which means those social reputations must matter.

I often get asked in interviews about Consumer Republic whether it can really be true that ordinary people have this much power. And I often get asked if it really all just boils down to social media. The answers, in order, are yes, without a doubt. And no, not ultimately. The enabling technologies of social media are something we should be glad of. But what’s really happening here is more basic than this. The corporations who sell things have seen a gradual, decades-long erosion of meaningful competitive advantage in the products they sell, and concomitant growth in the competitive advantage in their brands. In other words, when two toasters are more functionally alike than different, the brands they wear will decide who gets the money. Products are just things made in factories. Those brands, on the other hand, are reputations made in the street. Sanctioned and spread like rumors, by ordinary people and their friends.

And so, finally, here we are. Like those high school kids staring at each other across the gym on prom night, one side desperately hoping for approval and the other hoping not to be disappointed. It doesn’t feel so much like a revolution as it does the way things naturally ought to be. Of course people have this power. Of course they do. They always have, except for a few brief decades when mass media came awkwardly between us like a chaperone. And brands are realizing that if they want people to dance with them, they’re going to have to ask nicely, and then behave with decorum.

Because word gets around.

Bread and circuses.

2011-02-07T10:37:00.003-05:00

Allow me to quote the Roman satirical poet Juvenal, and thus leave you awed with the mistaken impression that I read poetry in Latin when I’m not flying jets and playing polo:

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

In other words, if you want to keep the rabble from becoming troublesome, it might be as simple as amusing them.

As I write this, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, and the chatter online feels almost equally anticipatory of the interstitial advertising festival as of the contest itself. For most of the time I spent in the ad game, I had mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it was wonderful to see what creative people could do with the handcuffs of money and cultural convention removed. The Super Bowl provided some epic moments for McLuhan’s “greatest art form of the twentieth century.” On the other, though, the whole ritual took on a sort of pagan quality, where for one day the marketing world cast off accountability and common sense and danced naked around the bonfire to see what they could get away with. In the grand scheme of things, though, I thought it was all fine. Everybody seemed happy, no harm done.

Writing Consumer Republic changed this a little for me. I’ve come to see advertising whose sole purpose is amusement as a bit of a waste at best, and subversive at worst. The idea that a brand can win us over by putting on a little puppet show rather than having a conversation with consumers somehow trivializes the democratic purpose of marketplaces. I still think this is fine when it’s confined to the circus; it would worry me a little, though, if it ended up somehow becoming a model for all dialogue between brands and the People. Liking this kind of thing too much could make us slaves by making us passive.

I really do hope everybody enjoyed the ads. We just have to remember what we were watching. This wasn’t marketing (even ad folk evade the ROI question when it comes to the Super Bowl). This was entertainment. Marketing’s job is to give us a right to vote and a reason to do it. Now that it’s Monday morning, that’s the game we have to go back to, all of us.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some verbs to conjugate. And a yacht race.

Cotton ninny.

2011-01-28T14:04:00.005-05:00

I’m not showing you the rest of this ad. What I want you to look at is this girl’s face. She is, if she’s real, a child. Or is meant to look like one. The company that commissioned this illustration and the ad in which it appears would like you to buy cotton underpants from them.

American Apparel was always a pretty interesting brand. Underpinned by a comparatively ethical business model, they neatly assumed the position pioneered – and then abandoned – by Gap in the early 1990s. Virtually unbranded, willing to put some money where their mouths are on garment industry labour practices, they became a campus darling brand around the world. In my own classroom, American Apparel often came up as an exemplary post-modern brand, a way to declare that the wearer was above marketing. Nobody discussed the naughty pictures. They were, I think people concluded, ironic. An edgy send-up of fashion advertising. Pop art. Like a lot of people, this Newsweek blogger, for example, I was on the fence. It didn’t seem to be more than people could handle. And there seemed to be a lot of goodness in their value proposition.

Then this.

Sex doesn’t really sell. Everybody likes to say it does, but mostly that’s because they don’t want to discourage marketers from decorating their ads with attractive, underdressed people. The truth is that sex makes people like ads. Personally, I’ve never seen much evidence that it actually sells anything other than itself and perhaps the odd condom. So marketers and consumers kind of wink at each other and accept a little borrowed carnal interest as all in fun, but neither side generally loses sight of the fact that an ad is still an ad, and something in it is actually for sale.

American Apparel is well outside that arrangement now. Watching Dov Charney cathart his high school dating issues, I waver between being insulted that he thinks this will work, and worried that he thinks this is okay. Neither accrues any particular value to the brand, and more’s the pity given that the company itself has an interesting story to tell. Or did. American Apparel has become kind of like a weird old uncle who plays a great game of golf. At a certain point, no matter how impressive his swing, we’ll do anything to avoid being stuck in the cart with him.

As a citizen consumer, you can formulate your own moral take on these latest ads. But if brands are your thing, trust me. This was a mistake. Playing some kind of arrogant game to see what they can get away with, American Apparel seems to be telling us that its value proposition never actually meant that much to them. In the process, they’ll risk becoming an embarrassment to their customers rather than a choice they feel ethically good about.

Such a waste.

P.S. American Apparel invites comment on their ads at their web site, which is laudable. I just couldn't bring myself to encourage them, but you may be a better person than I, in which case feel free.

PPS. I'm delighted to see that, whether it's cause or effect, American Apparel is not enjoying the approval of the marketplace right now. Interesting read here.

Garbage day.

2011-01-07T12:24:00.005-05:00

One snowy night over the holidays, Sweetie and I decided to curl up in front of the television and lose ourselves in a big, long movie. Somehow, that movie ended up being Australia . At 165 minutes, it certainly had girth going for it, and with growing ties to the antipodes both in my family and as a writer, I thought at the very least I might learn something. Well. The film is gorgeously shot, the kind of thing that makes you feel good about buying that big-screen TV. The cast has some bona fide stars in it, for sure, and a solid performance or two. The costumes and sets are beyond excellent. In fact, at a craft level, there is a lot of brilliant work here. And it is one of the most egregious steaming piles of cinematic compost I have ever endured. So bloated and predictable was it, so unable to get out of its own clichéd way, we gave up before the 2-hour mark.

While I nursed my bleeding eyes, Sweetie – a film buff – explained to me how a well-resourced project like this, populated with very competent people, could end up in such ruins. Film, she said, is the most collaborative art form there is. Every project temporarily gathers disparate independent talents who will work together for a few months and then scatter to the winds in search of their next gig. And the ability to collaborate effectively, it turns out, has nearly nothing to do with the talents or skills of the people involved. Sometimes, everyone gets the director’s vision instantly, shares it, follows his or her charismatic light, and makes it brighter. Then you get art. And sometimes, everybody just shows up for the paycheque and a chance to show off and burnish the ol’ resume. Then you get Australia.

Reflecting on this later, it occurred to me that the same dangerous turning point exists in the life of a brand. Brands aren’t movies, of course, but the risks are strikingly similar.

In the branding world, the potential for greatness is usually born in a hurricane of resistance. Someone has an idea and a vision, and they gamely fight to keep the thing alive until it can breathe on its own. From there, whether we’re talking about a brilliant brand or merely a brilliant ad campaign, it then seems to pass through three ages: a first, in which the leaders and creators are its stewards and protectors; a second, in which disciples of those people are handed the torch; and a third, when the journeymen show up. And it’s here, not at its glorious genesis, that its fate is determined. Sometimes, the journeymen want to use their skill to serve the idea that’s feeding them. And sometimes, like raccoons on garbage day, they just root around in it to see what they can use, and move on when they’re either sated or trapped, oblivious to the mess they’ve left behind.

Conjuring up examples proved distressingly easy. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and experienced it more times than I care to. I’ve even hired the occasional raccoon myself (they always seem adorable at first, with their little masks and their prehensile paws). It’s the most innocuous-looking peril a brand will face, and the most dangerous. And where it hasn’t happened – where a great idea has had a chance to grow and thrive and make a difference – ultimate credit almost always goes to leadership. A brand’s story might have a great script, but it’s the director who makes it into a great experience. When it comes to a corporation’s brand, the CEO really is where the buck stops, and if they phone in their performance, so will everybody else. Just ask Tony Hayward.

If your brand is lucky enough to be led by its own Griffith, Coppola, Hitchcock or Allen, you might want to stop by and say thanks and maybe bring them a nice muffin. But if it isn’t, let me know. We can have them over for movie night. I’m almost positive that Australia DVD will be there if we need to rent it again.

Straight up, with a twist.

2010-12-21T11:29:00.005-05:00

If you have a big enough martini, the universe will eventually speak to you.

Or so it seemed, anyway, when I whisked Sweetie and me to a very lovely Caribbean resort last week to celebrate the end of a careening year of changes for us both. You see, you can’t keep a good cowboy down, especially the brand kind. A gin-addled escapist I may have been, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. Our little sojourn under the swaying palms was not without its anthropological treats.

For one thing, iPads were everywhere. At one point, it wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say that every other poolside lounge chair featured one right where the latest edition of InStyle would have perched were we in a different century. Granted, the resort made this kind of thing easy by providing wi-fi everywhere on the property. But it was still notable that it wasn’t laptop computers or netbooks we were seeing, or even iPhones. And what was really striking was the naturalness of it. Unlike a lot of mobile devices, an iPad user isn’t declaring to the world what she’s doing just by firing it up. She might be reading emails, or a magazine. She might be writing a book, or she might be assembling a puzzle picture of the girl with the pearl earring. That’s a sea change. ‘Connectedness’, the grail for which little computers and big smart phones have quested since the 1990s, is finally won. Carrying a mobile device is no longer like having a pinless grenade hanging from your belt. Everybody gets to decide what it means now, mediated only a little – relatively speaking - by Apple.

Logos, by contrast, were hardly anywhere. The particular resort where we stayed works hard at cloistering you from the real world, and a collateral effect of this is that the only brands they display (besides their own now and then) are on liquor bottles. Otherwise, all the brands you see are on the golf bags and t-shirts of the guests. That was pretty interesting to me. For one thing, these displays were voluntary. We weren’t talking, here, about discreet little lizards embroidered on the breasts of shirts. We were talking about big, honkin’ logozillas, entirely avoidable by the buyers of the products that wore them, and entirely brazen. And for another, they were deliberate declarations. I refrained from conducting a focus group on this, and the respondents would probably have lied through their teeth anyway if I had. But in the absence of any ambient branding, it was almost always obvious what drove a consumer’s choice to display one of his own: “I belong here.” “I don’t belong here.” I take my golf seriously.” “This isn’t the only fancy resort I’ve been to.” “I’m a lot more interesting than you think.” “I have my own airplane.” (Ironically, the phalanxes of iPads didn’t make this kind of statement. The fact that there were so many, combined with their dour little black cases, gave an impression not unlike the one you get driving through a Mennonite town). It turns out that an assertion I make in Consumer Republic might be true: Brands carry social meaning, and that social meaning is useful to people.

And then there was the kindness. I can’t say what alloy of local culture and brilliant leadership caused it, but the people who worked at this resort were unfailingly, warmly, genuinely kind all the time about everything. I hadn’t said ‘thank you’ so often in the course of a day since our wedding (I married up). I bet nobody else had, either. And that’s really what got my attention. It wasn’t just that the people were kind to the customers, but that the relentlessness of this kindness eventually ended up making the customers behave the same way. A brilliant young professor I interviewed for Consumer Republic argues that social consensus is arrived at through the application of pride and shame. Here, all the pride was attached not to power or advantage, but to being sweet. It almost became a competitive sport. And it started with, of all things, somebody’s corporate culture.

Looking at my notes this week, once again pale, sober and dressed in layers, the observations seemed to stand: Connectedness has come of age. Consumers give brands their meaning. And brands have the power to make positive change. The words of the prophets may indeed be written on subway walls but, like all good content, they’ve apparently been syndicated. I got mine at the beach.

A whisper to a scream.

2010-11-12T11:27:00.004-05:00

Last month’s dustup between Malcolm Gladwell and everybody on the internet is over and mostly forgotten. The chalk lines on the pavement are almost washed away, the police tape is fluttering in the wind, and the pundits have moved on to the next streetfight. For those who missed it, here’s the digest version: Malcolm, waving his erudition around like a rapier, asserts that social media cannot be instrumental in social change. The internet gang, ably represented by the likes of Mathew Ingram and brandishing its recent history like so many broken beer bottles and switchblades, parries back that this is not so. Even Biz Stone is moved to hold forth. But détente eludes them all. Nobody is persuaded. Everybody moves on.

The debate kind of got under my skin, though. And not just because it ended at the kind of binary side-choosing that ruins so much political discourse these days. It also seemed to me that not chasing the debate to a conclusion caused a lot of people – Mr. Gladwell most especially – to miss the real point of what social media are doing to that discourse, and to all discourse. Maybe with politics it’s just too hard to see any truth in the middle, but I can assure you that in marketplaces it isn’t, and maybe that can teach us something.

Once upon a time, marketplaces really did seem to be binary systems. People bought products or they didn’t. This made marketing and consuming alike into a sort of gambling, with brands being the only way to really mitigate risk and blind experimentation the only way to figure out what people wanted. This, I think, is what the social web has really changed. Now, we can see spectrum. We can see shades of sentiment, and degrees of engagement and commitment. By lowering the barriers to self-expression, we can see revolutions at their nascent moments. We can see the size of the formerly silent majority, whether it’s on its way to activism or not, and how soon it will matriculate. Whether the vocal few are the tip of some kind of iceberg, or merely outliers. We can see the state of the world drawn in infinite detail in what was once the space between the empty threat of a focus group and the hard reality of a ringing cash register. Or, if you like, between the empty threat of polling data and the hard reality of tear gas. The world has always been a dangerous place when only radicals get to talk. Sentiment – whether in marketplaces or among electorates – is more like the weather than it is like a switch. And now we can see it coming.

What Gladwell ignored in his evocation of the civil rights movement is this: A few people who do something radical to make social change are just terrorists if everybody else isn’t ready for that change. In the past, in societies and marketplaces alike, the only way you could identify a bellwether was in the rearview mirror. As a citizen, as a marketer and as a consumer, I like this new world better. It may be messier and feel less certain, and it may be full of people who are undecided or more willing to talk than act. But, by not being so black and white, it is a lot more inclusive, and a lot more true.

Simply red.

2010-10-21T14:32:00.003-04:00

One of my deepest, darkest secrets is that I’ve been a closeted motorhead since I was five years old. These days, I don’t get to indulge this weakness much, the times and the burdens of adulthood being what they are. But I do still have a well-used little sports car I’m rather fond of, and twice a year I gather up my chequebook and my trepidation and take the aging hussy to its mechanic for some attention. That’s where I was yesterday morning and, waiting in the showroom, that intemperate red beast in the cell phone pic above is pretty much the only thing I could see. I stared at it, sat in it (don’t tell anybody), and generally wallowed in gauzy nostalgia until my bill came. Oh, man.

It’s called a Ferrari F40, and I had a model of one of these things in my office for many years. Not just because it’s cool, either, which it patently is, but because it was a symbol of something sacred about a marketer’s duty to a brand, and about what a brand is really for. Here’s why.

At the end of the 1980s, Ferrari was not the motorsport powerhouse it is today. It was struggling in Formula 1, tough medicine for a company that seemed to sell cars so it could race rather than the other way around. And its road cars were no longer necessarily the uncontested ultimate in performance or prestige. Most galling had been Porsche’s recent introduction of the 959, an all-wheel-drive technological tour de force that was so sophisticated even an ordinary driver could make it fly. The Germans had thrown down a gauntlet they probably didn’t really believe Ferrari would pick up. In a sense, it wouldn’t. Enzo Ferrari, the man behind the company and its cars, was by then 90 years old, but he was not about to stand down from this one last fight, nor delegate it to a marketing department, nor let the competition make the rules. The F40 was to be his final statement.

At this point in the story, if we were talking about minivans or shampoo or e-commerce web sites, the word “better” would probably rear its sanctimonious head. Teams of clever and determined professional marketers would deconstruct the fearsome Porsche, and figure out how to exceed it in every objective way. A little like the tablet computer dustup we’re seeing today, ego and technocracy would guide the competitive response. Enzo’s F40 was no such thing. In stark contrast to the cool, competent, innovative 959, the F40 was simply an animal. It was ferociously powerful and light, and yet didn’t even have traction control. It was astonishingly expensive, and yet you had to pull the doors closed with plastic covered ropes. The interior had no grand touring pretensions like the Porsche’s, and made no effort to conceal the brutal plumbing that made it go. In the hands of truly talented drivers, it was the fastest production car in the world from 1987 to 1989. In the hands of anything less, it was merely lethal.

It was, in no sense and by no comparison, “better”. And in Enzo’s parting statement to the world, the marque ended up reborn.

That’s why it was such an inspiration to the young brandcowboy. Ferrari’s way of coping with being on the defensive was to remain stubbornly true to itself, to not let the enemy dictate the terms of battle, and to be willing to exclude customers if doing so meant preserving the integrity of its brand. In the end, this is the only way any marketer can earn passionate loyalty, the only way it can be irreplaceable to its customers. And it’s pretty hard to succeed at growing any business if those two conditions aren’t in place first, no matter what you ‘re selling.

What a lesson, still.

QED

2010-10-15T13:40:00.003-04:00

A South African fellow of my acquaintance has an expression for this: “smelling your own socks.” Vivid image, that. But I suppose this is what I was doing the other day when I picked up a copy of The Orange Code and skimmed through it for the first time in a long while.

It’s been exactly two years this month since our book about the story of ING Direct launched, which would not ordinarily be an interesting piece of information. Not unless it was this particular two years. Remember the fall of 2008? The Lehman collapse, and the looming sense of apocalypse in the aftermath? Remember that uneasy holiday season, and then, finally, the crapstorm itself at the dawn of 2009? Bank failures, government bailouts, foreclosure signs on lawns across America… it was pretty sketchy for a while there, and some experts suggested that we’d all come closer to the abyss than anyone wanted to admit. And in the wake of it, a consumer who had both lost confidence in banks (according to Gallup, fully 38% of Americans had “very little confidence” in the country’s financial institutions even as recently as last month) and was flat out angry at them. Of all the ‘toxic assets’ in the system, customer faith was surely the most so.

Things have settled down a little now, but the relationship between banks and their customers has probably changed forever, for the banks left standing, that is. And for me, The Orange Code is born anew. You see, when we wrote this book, it was a story about a successful brand. There have been lots of those. But rarely in the history of business writing has anybody described a successful branding model and then –with the ink on the page barely dry – had that model tested on so biblical a scale. Today, après le deluge, ING Direct is still trucking along, still enjoying passionately loyal customers and a healthy business. All that stuff my co-author said about principled leadership and the paramount importance of a customer-focused mission, it turned out to be true. It turned out to have built an enterprise that was more seaworthy than anyone could have predicted it would need to be. Suddenly, thanks to the intervention of history, The Orange Code is a lot less theoretical.

I think that’s why it’s worth a read now more than ever, if you haven’t yet. Yeah, I know, I’m just promoting our book. But just because it’s marketing doesn’t mean it’s not true. Or that it stinks.

Plus ça change.

2010-10-08T11:35:00.004-04:00

What a delightful poopstorm the new Gap logo has been. I’m not sure what’s more howlingly funny: the brilliant Twitter feed of @gaplogo (the irritable, vaguely sociopathic anthropomorphized logo drunkenly lashing out at its critics), or Gap’s own lame retreat from the redesign on its Facebook page (“We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas…) and in the CEO’s HuffPo blog (apparently, the imperative to design a new logo has something to do with “new black pants”).

The substance of the criticism thus far has focused on the design. Lay people say they hate it and question the need for change, and design geeks are still in paroxysms over the use of Helvetica and the strange blue box hovering in the background. But if this were a giant focus group, I wouldn’t be buying a word these people are saying. The words sound logical enough, but there’s nothing evident to explain all the emotional heat behind them. Helvetica doesn’t have the power to enrage all by itself, not unless it’s on a parking ticket. Something else is going on here.

There are certain things a brand does that should be refreshed all the time. That’s how people know you’re still alive, and you’re still aware that they are, too. Things like advertising are part of the marketplace conversation, and they need to flow. But there are other things that should almost never change, especially without an obvious motive (black pants notwithstanding). Consumers need to know that you are authentic, that you’re sure of the values you claim to have as a brand, that you have some self-respect and a vision of your own. A logo is on that list. For a brand, new ads are like new clothes, but a new logo is like going into the witness protection program. It’s unsettling, and it’s risky.

But it’s not the riskiness that’s got people exercised about this. It’s that Gap doesn’t seem to appreciate that risk. They made the change, they didn’t explain it respectfully, and to ice the cake, the change didn’t carry any semiotic freight that people could connect with. They just did it. As if they weren’t afraid of the consumer at all. That’s arrogant. And that’s what’s bugging people, whether they realize it or not. It’s amplified by the fact that Gap had really started to acquire some gravity as a brand, and by the fact that it’s a fashion brand and thus a mediator and curator of value rather than a creator of it. But mostly it was just the arrogance. They acted like a big oil company, changing their identity because they damned well pleased, and blithely assuming we’d relearn it because they said so. If you want to reproduce this phenomenon, try rearranging the furniture while your spouse is at work.

I think the great yet-unlearned lesson of our age for marketers is that they don’t have sole dominion over their brands anymore. In the parliament of the marketplace, brands are negotiated with their consumers. The new Gap logo could have been a thing of transcendent beauty, and it still would have got under people’s skin for a while. Consumers don’t really care that much about logos. But they hate it when they see even the slightest sign you’re willing to take them for granted.

The serpent.

2010-09-17T13:23:00.004-04:00

Ever since the first feisty, breathless utterings of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the digital disciples of marketing’s Age of Aquarius have been certain that the internet would level the playing field between the consumer and the corporation once and for all. Marketplaces, they intone, will become conversations, and we, the consumer, will get what we want rather than what corporations are trying to sell. When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, the malls of the world will glitter with brands that are accountable, transparent and authentic. Meanwhile, for marketers, consumer behavior will finally be objectively measurable at practically the atomic level. Everybody will win. It will be paradise.

Well, it could be. But it isn’t. Not yet, anyway.

This was my bleak conclusion as I sat with a former student of mine earlier this week and listened as he explained how people use technology to inflate their Twitter follower numbers. I’d always wondered how it could be that obscure “social media consultants” could have bigger follower numbers than, say, the Ford Motor Company. I’d put it down to some kind of early adopter dividend, but it turns out that it’s just some kind of game for them. Nor are they alone in seeing the digital marketplace the way a pickpocket sees a crowded boulevard. When I interviewed Wired’s founding editor John Battelle for Consumer Republic, he described certain elements of the corporate and media worlds “fiercely gaming the system” to improve their search ranks, while Google fights to stay ahead of them – and essential to them - by constantly updating their algorithm. And this chicanery is not so new. I remember how in the web’s very earliest days, site owners would sell their traffic numbers to the uninitiated by reporting “hits”, conveniently leaving out the detail that one page view can produce dozens of hits depending on how many elements are on it.

There was lots wrong with the old way of doing commercial media. They were fat oligopolies, and they depended on an undemocratic marketplace to prosper. Still, if you bought a commercial spot in a prime time television show, the audience size got measured by a third party (usually Nielsen, for television), and the price you paid turned on their verdict. Print circulation numbers were audited, at least for the paid publications. There was some accountability there. The one question you generally never had to ask was whether you were getting the reach you paid for. It was a regulated commodity. Past that, a brand won or lost on its persuasive merits. That particular baby would be a shame to toss out along with the wasteful bathwater of 20th century media.

Every new frontier attracts its share of carpetbaggers, every paradise its dubious fruit vendors. But what’s made this one especially fragile is that the tools for cheating are so accessible to the producers, and so opaque to the rest of us. It’s so easy to cheat, and so hard to get called on it, and that adds up to overwhelming temptation. While the average consumer may never figure out exactly why she can’t trust what she sees online, her instincts will ultimately be, as they have always been, unerring. And if it comes to that, I don’t know where marketing would go next. If consumer choice came to equal risk rather than power, it would simply be game over for the whole damned system before its rennaissance ever really had a chance to get off the ground.

Measureable doesn’t mean honest. Data doesn’t mean truth. I think digital marketing ethics are the next thing we need to talk about here in the garden of branding, while we still can. There sure hasn’t been much conversation about it up to now.

I know. I Googled it.

Counting crows.

2010-08-20T15:08:00.005-04:00

If there is one thing that unites marketers and consumers into a single strident, stubborn voice, it’s the firm belief that the social meaning of brands is an irrelevant mirage. Marketers resist it because there’s nothing to count, it’s hard to win at, and it makes for lousy PowerPoint presentations. Consumers resist it because they fear it makes them look vain and shallow, and foolish with their money. And this congruence is matched, if at all, only by the fact that both are egregiously and abjectly wrong about that.

Branding is all about social meaning. Over the last century, one by one, all the practical reasons for brands to exist have fallen away – branding has decoupled itself from manufacturing, from functional superiority and lately even from status – and yet the firmament of brands is more filled with glittering specimens than it has ever been before. And the reason: Social meaning has value to consumers. Brands are a vivid palette we can use to create avatars of ourselves, and we’re willing to pay good money and to humour marketers to keep ‘em coming.

Still, it’s a contention that’s likely to get you that dogs-watching-TV look from people when you float the idea in a boardroom, or a focus group, or at a splendid dinner party. So imagine my delight at stumbling on this little dialectical silver bullet today: Gamers who play immersive virtual reality games are willing to pay more for branded virtual products, and sales of same are growing like gangbusters.

The white paper is worth a read, though it focuses more on the tactical marketing opportunity in the phenomenon. The real story, for me, though, lay in the vast, unintended branding experiment. It was as if someone had created a giant laboratory Pleasantville for consumers in which there were brands to choose from, but it was absolutely impossible to make a bad product choice. The logical outcome of an experiment like that would seem to be commoditization. People would stop caring about which toaster they bought, and the category would rapidly devolve into being like pork bellies and soybeans. But that didn’t happen. People still engaged in choice-making, and they still parted with more money than they needed to in order to make those choices observable.

Fantastic.

It’s not for marketers to convince consumers to admit to this need, though I’m going to take a good run at it in Consumer Republic. But it is something marketers need to worry more about. It’s inescapable that the social meaning of a brand is going to grow and grow as a component of attraction. It’s inarguable that more and more consumer contact with brands is going to occur in a social context, online or otherwise. So it seems to me inevitable that marketing will continue to evolve from being about value… to being about meaning.

Soon, for a lot of brands, that’s all there will be left to sell. The only thing that really counts.

Gather the horses.

2010-07-22T09:34:00.002-04:00

It’s the name of a song by a musician called Charlie Mars. It’s about battles that must be won. I was turned on to the singer by Lance Armstrong, who mentioned him on Twitter a few months ago. Lance Armstrong doesn’t know me from a lamppost, but I follow him anyway. A sometime cyclist myself, I was stirred by the heroic image of Armstrong suiting up to race, set to Charlie Mars singing “there’s fighting here to be done.” It’s on my iPod. Because you never know.

In ten weeks, I will walk out of the firm I co-founded 14 years ago for the last time as its CEO. I’ll remain a shareholder, for the moment at least. And there are clients with whom my relationship is something more than remunerative, and for whom I hope I can still be a useful advisor. But make no mistake, I am gathering the horses. There are times in your life when comfortable is the most uncomfortable thing you can possibly be. If you think that brands are important work, then right here, right now is one of them.

When we founded the firm in 1996, I was deeply convinced that the advertising agency was badly in need of reinvention. You could see media proliferating. You could see the internet coming. You could see the fractured narratives that brands were turning into. And you could see how advertising agencies were both the best qualified to guide them, and the least interested in doing so. It seemed like a vein of gold. Important work, valuable work, which nobody was stepping up to do with any real conviction. We made some progress, and so did a few others like us. But there is a very long way to go. It seems as though, as an industry, advertising only gathered up the courage to look into the abyss in the last couple of years. I think, now, it will figure things out. So will its clients. And I’m not sure there’s much I can do to help. In any case, an even bigger battle looms.

I think brands are important work. For all the criticism that’s been heaped on the way companies sell things, it remains indisputable that a world with brands is a world in which the consumer is in control. Brands mean choice, and choice means power to the people. And brands, however tenuously, make corporations accountable. Without this little feature of capitalism, ordinary citizens lose their ability to influence the system. In an era in which everything seems to be up for grabs and everybody – from environmentalists to web marketers – seems to have a point of view on how marketing should be reborn, this has become very interesting to me. This is the battle I’m itching to join. However we reimagine the way business gets done in the future, we need to make sure it has a conscience. In the right hands, a brand can be that.

My upcoming book, Consumer Republic, is kind of a manifesto for this, though it nails its theses to the consumer’s door rather than the corporation’s. I hope it starts a lot of conversations. I hope a lot of people want to hear me talk about it, and then argue with me. I want to invest more time, too, in training and teaching people about this ‘ethical’ way of thinking about branding, and how to do it. And I truly want to get my hands dirty again, consulting to people who want to build that kind of brand. However I end up filling my days and putting food on my table, though, the battle that must be won now isn’t about a formula for marketing anymore. It’s about a purpose.

Wish me luck.

The name of the beast.

2010-06-18T10:43:00.003-04:00

Far be it from me to jump on the BP dogpile. If punditry were Pampers, that hole would have been plugged weeks ago. I have nothing to add to the discussion about whether BP’s brand – or its business - is going to be a casualty of this mess, or even whether they’re handling it intelligently. There’s a colloquialism for this, of which the first two syllables are “cluster,” and the only unfolding media story that’s getting anywhere close to this attention and analysis right now involves grown men kicking a ball (a ball made, ironically, mostly of petroleum products. Leather, even more ironically, apparently tends to hold too much moisture).

But, if you’re in the branding business, it’s hard not to reflect on it anyway. It’s hard not to wonder if there are any lessons here, even if our business isn’t poking holes in the planet to see if there’s anything gooey inside. And it’s hard not to conclude that there are at least two, and that they apply no matter what you sell. Even if what you sell is you.

The first is that to have a brand is to be accountable. There is simply no way to avoid the natural law that if you want the marketing power a famous brand gives you, you have to accept that being a lightning rod for accountability comes with the deal. It is, in fact, second only to choice, the main reason consumers tolerate branding at all. In the case of the Gulf disaster, it was stunning how quickly BP became that lightning rod. Without disputing that they are the biggest actor in the story, it was amazing how quickly the other two oil exploration companies leasing the Deepwater Horizon fell off the media radar. It was amazing how quickly Halliburton and Transocean disappeared from the coverage and from our minds. And why? Because BP is famous. In 2009, BP was one of the 100 most valuable global brands on the planet, according to Interbrand. They pump 22 billion gallons a year into gas tanks in America alone, through 10,000 BP-branded filling stations there. Their fame made them a target, and it gave we, the people, leverage that we just don’t have against a company like Halliburton. Even the marketing-savvy White House recognized this, and early, too: Less than two weeks after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the White House blog had given it a name – The Deepwater BP Oil Spill – complete with its own logo, just like the cable news networks do. Even with its terrible cost, this disaster is a reminder that, in the branding game as in the superhero game, great power comes with great responsibility.

The second is that a brand is not a logo, and a rebranding is not a design project. In 2000, BP embarked on a ‘rebranding’. They hired fancy people to do it, and paid them $7 million. For this, they received a very attractive logo, I would imagine a lovely and thuddingly dense rationale document, and the audacious claim that an oil company can be a friend of the planet. After that, we can assume that the creators of this brand hopped into their arrogant little Audis, being careful to first hang their Prada jackets in the back, and zoomed off to the next transformation. As for BP, we don’t need to assume. The CEO at the time, John Browne, told the press, “It’s all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail site.” And, with arrogance and foolishness that were supreme in equal measure, his organization believed that a pretty green flower was going to help get that job done. It’s not a ludicrous stretch to imagine that some of the seeds of disaster were planted then, especially if the people who work for BP experienced any dissonance between the message sent by their new ‘brand’ and the realities of working there. That kind of thing only promotes cynicism and disengagement in an organization. What I suspect BP did not realize, and what far, far too many corporations today still don’t realize, is that a brand is not a marketing imperative. It’s an organizational imperative. A company does not have a brand. A company is a brand.

As consumers, we can start to redeem this mess by thinking about how we all face the problem of oil dependency. We know what we need to do, and to say. But perhaps less obvious is that there’s a chance to redeem this mess as corporations, too, whatever we happen to sell. If all of this serves to remind corporate leadership that brands mean accountability, and that corporations have to live their brands rather than just wearing them, it will surely be some small progress against this kind of history repeating itself. It is, in any case, if you ask me, the essence of the job. The weight of that responsibility is not something from which a leader can ever get their “life back,” Mr. Hayward. It is their life.

Hope floats.

2010-05-21T13:37:00.002-04:00

Spare a thought for the mightiest beast from the Age of the Great Lizards, the seminal 20th century marketer Procter & Gamble. Against any sensible bet, P&G is lumbering away from the mass media tar pit it helped to create, and apparently into a future that is every bit as bright as its past. I read this piece yesterday about their e-commerce play, and for about the sixth time this year found myself marveling at their dogged capacity to evolve.

P&G doesn’t just exemplify old school branding, they invented the game. So you’d think they’d have the deepest commitment to that old status quo, and a culture so hidebound that they’d perish sooner than betray themselves by changing. You’d think they wouldn’t have much more to teach us as we merrily skip our way into the giddy, crowdsourced, there-are-no-bad-ideas future. But I’m starting to think that you’d be wrong about that.

A long time ago, I did a tour of duty on a couple of P&G brands, Ivory and Olay. In those days, working on P&G really was like compulsory military service: a lot of character-building menial tasks, a rigid hierarchy, strict rituals, and a certain amount of public humiliation. But it made you stronger, and it was a great credential if you wanted a career in strategy. Still, it took some time to realize that what made them so maddening to work with is also what makes them so formidable, and maybe even as good a model for 21st century branding as they ever were the 20th century kind. Here are some examples of what I mean:

They were devout custodians of the past. Long before we used terms like ‘storytelling’ to make sense of branding, no P&G brand manager was ever far from his brand’s historical reel. Whatever advertising or promotion a brand did had to make sense in the context of what had gone before.

They were not interested in your opinions. They were contemptuous, of them, in fact. What they were interested in was the product of your analysis. The fact that you were in the room did not entitle you to speak. Only the fact that you knew what you were talking about, from the ground up and over time, could do that. And lost credibility took time to recover. A lot of it, sometimes.

They took the same unsentimental view of advertising as a farmer takes of his livestock. Cute only incidentally, but mostly just there to do a job. Thus, no commercial got produced until it had objectively proven in testing that it could outperform whatever it was meant to replace, regardless of how long it had been running. Different wasn’t enough; different, in fact, was regressive. It had to be better, or it didn’t get shot regardless of how many agency creative directors wet their pants laughing at the storyboard.

Advertising ideas had to be predicated on the product they were selling. The story in an ad had to be impossible without it, in fact. The practice of amusing viewers and hoping to be rewarded with a transaction was not on the menu in Cincinnati, and advertising awareness was among the least interesting metrics they collected. It was all well and good that the audience heard the shot, but it didn’t matter unless it hit the target.

They were deeply suspicious of innovation. They were allergic to the Hail Mary, to the unfettered creativity, to the idea that their own orthodoxy was an obstacle. They preferred to be who they know they are, preferred their brands to stay in character, because they know that works. There is a reason why Warren Buffett was and remains a P&G shareholder.

And there were no soloists. You just never saw a careerist using a P&G brand to make himself famous, something that happens sometimes even at P&G’s closest rival, Unilever. The steward of a brand was bound to it and to the system that created it, and the way to succeed was to objectively build its business, while leaving the brand at least as healthy as she found it for whoever succeeded her.

When just about anybody can anoint themselves a genius, maven or (shudder) jedi of branding and there’s an unlimited supply of shiny new paradigms mocking the past, it’s reassuring to see that there might be some kind of connection between being disciplined and accountable, and being successful. Continuity is badly undervalued in branding these days, despite mounting evidence that it’s the only thing consumers still trust.

Slow down. Trust facts. Do what works until it doesn’t. It’s not glamorous, but it turns out that this might just be the best age defying formula ever to come out of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Out on a limb.

2010-04-28T12:53:00.005-04:00

One of the first things they tell you in strategy wonk school is, “Correlation is not the same as causation.” It’s great advice, heeded too seldom in our business and rarely if at all in the popular media. We all know, for example, that peanut butter and jelly are frequently found together, but only an over-caffeinated headline writer would make the leap to “Peanut butter results in jelly outbreak!”

But that’s not to say that correlations should be ignored. Where there is smoke, fire isn’t usually far away, and here’s an example I thought was pretty interesting.

Far away in organized, sober Switzerland, there is a research company called Covalence. Their business is to rate the ethical performance of corporations around the world. They do this with apparent discipline, reporting quarterly on scores that combine measures of everything from environmental stewardship to labour relations to human rights records. They rank 581 companies in 18 sectors of the global economy. I mentioned this list in my No Logo piece back in January, and it’s interesting reading. And for those of us who think that brands are possibly not the work of the devil, there are two correlations that are tough to dismiss.

The first is obvious from just looking at the list, and it was the point of my January 28 post: The closer you get to the top, the more likely it seems to be that the corporation is or has consumer-facing brands. And the closer to the bottom of the list you get, the more likely it seems to be that the corporation drills for oil, or makes chemicals, or mines for minerals, or does something else that is pretty much invisible to those of us who wander the mall. Every one of the top 10 in the latest report, in fact, is a name you can find on products you might have in your own house. The correlation: Fame and/or a dependence on consumer preference seem to be peanut butter to the jelly of corporate accountability.

The second involves an unrelated list (and the flouting of yet another statistical convention), this one Interbrand’s annual ranking of 100 Best Global Brands, a list that ranks brands on the basis of their cash value. Put those two lists together, and to your delight you will find that fully a third of the 100 most ethical companies rated by Covalence are also on Interbrand’s list of 100 most valuable brands, despite the fact that Covalence’s list includes corporations that would never be considered for the Interbrand study.

What’s it mean? Well, I guess if you want to get all orthodox on me, we can’t say we know for sure. But taking these two observations together, I think you could make a pretty good case that branded corporations are likely to behave better as corporate citizens than unbranded ones, and that the reason for this is those brands are too valuable to gamble on being naughty. I’ve seen guys taken away in handcuffs on CSI Miami with less to go on than this.

And now that I’m drunk on speculation, here’s a bonus fun fact: Of the 39 holdings reported by Berkshire Hathaway at the end of last year – you know, the world’s most successful investor, captained by the Oracle of Omaha himself, Warren Buffett – 28 had consumer facing brands. 17 of them, by the way, also appeared on at least one of those other two lists. So, apparently, if fame begets accountability, it’s just possible that the two together produce wealth.

(This is when, were I David Caruso, I would take my sunglasses off and say something trenchant).

So I guess you could say that brands are good business and leave it at that, sparing yourself the expense of buying my upcoming book. But I think the real message is much, much bigger and worth some Swiss-style sober thought. I think it demonstrates the colossal power of the consumer so long as there is choice in the marketplace, and the good that power is capable of doing. Those people may have, as it turns out, something more than the power of life and death over a business and its brand. Those people may, in fact, be its conscience.

Oaky, with a hint of WTF.

2010-03-26T09:13:00.000-04:00

It was one of those hyperlink ambushes that happens to us all from time to time. You start off innocently enough, searching for information on, oh, say, the correct way to spell ‘Walmart’. One thing leads to another, click begets click, and minutes melt away as you fall down, down, down into a digital rabbit hole. At the bottom of which is Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you don’t know the name of this cherubic, potty-mouthed social media phenomenon, you may have avoided Twitter just a little too long. But if you do, you probably know that he’s a big deal out there. From gonzo wine video blogger to New York Times bestseller in three years, a messiah to the wide-eyed soldiers of the social economy, a branding consultant therein, and a sought after keynote speaker on how to make your hustling dreams come true. And it was in his latter capacity that, this day, my fall down the rabbit hole was broken by the frozen evangelical glare of Gary Vee. Someone had re-re-reposted a link to his recent talk at SXSW, the annual film/music/interactive happening in Austin, TX. All the cool kids had been buzzing about it. And so, resignedly, I hit ‘play’.

His official theme and the most common takeaway based on the chatter in the aftermath, was that anyone who sells anything is or soon will be in the customer service business. Not the widget business, or the integrated, end-to-end source-optimized thus-and-so solution business, but the customer service business. Which manifestly makes sense in an age of fleeting and microscopic competitive advantage. But buried in the talk was a theme I thought was more fundamental than that: “Caring,” he spat, “is massively underrated.”

This week, I will quietly mark the end of my third decade in the branding business. A cowboy can’t help but reflect in moments like that. And I think the ‘Social Media Sommelier’ may have hit the nail of what has mattered, squarely on its flat little head. Every high moment, every piece of work that made a difference, every person that left a mark on me, every great product, every inspiration all had in common that single ingredient: Somebody, to use Gary’s vernacular, gave a f*ck. I have never had a proud or memorable moment in the company of a coolly professional, brilliantly calculating and detached marketing whiz. Whereas I’ve had more than I can count in the company of the opposite kind of animal. Passionate, unreasonable, certain that if they figured out how to make someone’s life better, the money would follow. I’ve had mentors like that. I’ve had clients like that. I’ve met legends in the industry who, to my complete delight, were still like that, unburnished by the years. I’ve had employees like that. And students like that, more than you might imagine. Caring people make caring brands; calculating people make calculating brands.

If I had to start over again, this is the only kind of brand – or human - I would allow within a hundred feet of me. And the best part is, things seem to turn out pretty well for them, which is more than I can say for the clever whizzes. I think, in fact, that caring is how you keep going.

Thanks for the heads-up, Gary. I kind of feel like celebrating.

Maybe I’ll even open a bottle of f*cking wine.

Bad Romance.

2010-03-05T10:06:00.006-05:00

The travails of Toyota in the last few weeks have been like something out of The Crucible. It seemed like only yesterday that General Motors had sashayed into D.C. on a corporate jet to ask for a bailout when their four-decade quest to destroy shareholder value, American jobs and brand equity had finally succeeded, and here we were again. This time, instead of getting bags of money, the world’s largest and most successful car company was being subjected to a McCarthyesque inquisition and threatened with the FBI. The unreasonableness of this notwithstanding, it was a tough round for any brand. Considering our taste these days for watching the mighty fall, you had to wonder if this was going to be an epic turning point for the folks from Nagoya.

Except it wasn’t. Despite the best efforts of competitors, the media and the politicians, grassroots support for Toyota was extraordinary. Venture beyond commercial news outlets to places where every crisis doesn’t get its own logo, and you’d see a lot of people were being pretty evenhanded about the whole thing. Defensive, even. In online forums, many owners were dismissing the disaster as nothing more than a promise that Toyotas were going to get even better, given the corporate pride at stake. And at the end of February, when the whole witch hunt had reached its most fevered pitch, a Gallup poll showed that a majority of Americans still had confidence in Toyota and thought its cars were safe. Owners were even more confident, with three quarters still having faith in their cars and more than 80% believing them to be safe, numbers that in my experience aren’t a quantum deviation from business as usual.

Why was Toyota so resilient? The answer, quite simply, is that consumers are accomplished pattern recognizers, and brands are understood as narratives. Toyota has rarely tried to dazzle and amaze us, whereas it has maintained its dull, plodding quest to avoid embarrassment for a long, long time. The Toyota of today hardly looks a jot different than the one I worked with twenty years ago. Sure, this isn’t over yet. Much depends on what Toyota does next. But the point is that, for now, people assume it will be good because history says that’s their nature. Whatever we may read about the company’s hubris, this brand is hardly what you could call narcissistic. Toyota’s brand bled less than it might have in this particular war because it sweated so much during the long peace that preceded it.

In a sane world, you would think that CEOs and marketing bosses would look at this stunning case and realize that whatever continuity they have in the hearts and minds of consumers is pure gold. Leadership edicts would be handed down. Iconic brands would stay religiously in character. Loved brands would redouble their efforts to remain lovable. Unloved brands would reach out to consumers to reassure them that they matter. Pointless change would be understood as retrograde. Brands would evolve, but they would evolve as stories rather than being variety shows with too many costume changes. You would think.

But we don’t live in a sane world, do we.

Or at least that’s how it’s been feeling the last little while. One after another, in fits of ambition-fueled caprice, certain marketers have chosen this moment – now, when awareness has become ludicrously expensive; now, when consumer confidence is precious and fragile – to kick time-tested icons to the curb. You have Oscar Mayer saying that people shouldn’t be singing that wiener song anymore, and that they would like their luncheon meat to be taken more seriously please. You have BMW ditching the brilliant slogan that built its North American franchise by grounding the brand in the cool competence of its machines. You have Cadillac firing ad agency and key marketing execs from the only successful brand GM has. And Heinz announcing changes to its ketchup recipe to make it a ‘healthier’ condiment for those fries. And AFLAC saying, enough with the duck.

Individually, I’m sure the perpetrators can spin convincing boardroom tales about why change is necessary. But taken together, it just seems like a pattern of reckless marketing. We live in a time when brands don’t have a lot of solid cultural ground to stand on. And consumers, believe it or not, like solid ground. They don’t understand or care that marketers get bored, or desperate, or, worst of all, ambitious. They just know that something they thought they thought was real turns out to be ephemera. People don’t have much of a memory for details when these things happen, it’s true. But they remember the feeling of disruption, and their memory for feelings is unerring and eternal. For them, a brand that remains essentially true to its story is understood to be authentic.

Whereas a brand that changes its clothes every time it wants attention is understood to be Lady Gaga.

The assault on choice.

2010-01-28T14:30:00.007-05:00

This year, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Naomi Klein’s cannonball into the shallow end of capitalism’s swimming pool, I decided to reread No Logo. A decade later, it still amazes me.

It’s deceptively unsurprising that I wouldn’t be a fan of a book that opposes the existence of brands. But the reason might surprise you a little. You see, I share her outrage at some of the conduct corporations have perpetrated in the name of profit, since the Industrial Revolution, frankly. My problem is not the observation of those things or the imperative to make them right. My problem is that No Logo – its central conceit, even – was simply dishonest.

When you read it critically, as I estimate about 10% of the people who own a copy actually did, you quickly realize that Klein’s masterpiece is not an incitement to war against marketing, or even against corporations. It’s an incitement to class struggle. The dishonestly lies in its packaging, which would be hilariously ironic if it were not so chillingly calculated. And I don’t just mean the physical book, which itself is a marketing triumph, given its Bruce Mau-designed logo, shrewdly manipulated agitprop images and blizzard of journalistic-looking citations and references. I mean the rhetorical package. Klein wants us to be outraged about the world’s unfair distribution of wealth and abuse of power – and we should be - but she knows that only the converted will listen to that polemic. So, instead, she gives it a name everybody can identify with: brands. Brilliantly, she hijacks the labels on the stuff we wear and drive and eat and makes them stand for something awful, while conveniently giving us someone else to blame so that we don’t disengage. So that we can be swept along by her impassioned but spindly argument, propped up by out of context data, ludicrous assumptions about the evil genius of marketing, and inflamed political rhetoric that would make a military dictator blush. In a piece for Canadian Business, Klein’s friend Andrew Potter – meaning it as a compliment – called her ‘The Marketer of the Decade”. Without buying into the rest of his fan letter, I wholeheartedly agree.

Fortunately, though the book was a commercial success, its manifesto was not. Well, that’s probably not completely fair. It certainly scared a few corporations straight during its bestselling time in the limelight. That’s a good thing. But in as much as it seemed to want to make brands a thing of the past, it was a pretty comprehensive failure. The last decade has seen anything but the waning of their health.

And that, I would argue, is a very good thing. The fact is – yes, fact. I really don’t see how this is debatable – brands democratize marketplaces. As long as there are brands, there is choice, and choice keeps power in the hands of consumers. And as long as there are brands, there is at least some corporate accountability, because shame needs a name in order for the fear of it to be motivating. As is very much true of the state of democracy itself, the fact of its malpractice and abuses doesn’t alter the fact that it’s the best idea we’ve had so far, and very much worth saving. I may hate a running shoe company for its business practices, but that does not mean that I want my sneakers supplied by the Ministry of Footwear. Windows is bad enough.

So it was in this state of dudgeon that I came upon the Huffington Post piece on the 12 Least Ethical Companies in the World this morning, and felt just the tiniest bit vindicated. Because eight of them are corporations that don’t compete as consumer brands at all. Another, Philip Morris, doesn’t sell anything with that name on it, and another, Chevron, could barely be considered to ‘compete’ for our business, and another is a broadcaster founded by the Prime Minister of Italy. In fact, the only true branded marketer on the list was Ryanair, and the accountability bar in that industry is already damnably low. In other words, there seems to be at least a correlation between a corporation’s ethical behavior and the likelihood of a commercially meaningful public shaming. Were the reverse true, Ms. Klein would call that a smoking gun; not being a professional journalist, I’ll stop at correlation, and call it a sign of hope.

Anyway, happy anniversary, Naomi. There’s no doubt you’ve set an example for me to strive for. It’s just that the example is as “The Marketer of the Decade.” Which really is ironic.

If you ever decide to use your powers for good, give me a call.

Redemption Road.

2009-12-29T19:57:00.005-05:00

The little town where I spend part of my time is home to only about 1300 people. But today, for reasons best known to the mandarins of the organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the Olympic torch paid a visit. If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll see it, held bravely aloft by 79 year-old Gertie Gowan, who walked it half the length of our main street grinning like a schoolgirl. It was a curiously reassuring end to a long, strange year.

By any rational measure, 2009 has been a tough year for anybody who depends on the belief of others to sustain themselves, and brands surely answer to that description. 2009 was the Year of the Lie, perhaps even the final year of the decade of the same name. From Balloon Boy to Tiger to Berlusconi’s assault to Al Gore’s investment portfolio to General Motors’ house of cards, things in which we’d invested some faith of one kind or another inevitably seemed to dissolve before our eyes, in ceaseless succession, into sordid, embarrassing vessels for our naïveté. It was just a little bit depressing, especially for someone who sustains himself preaching the power of authenticity to corporations like I do. If we all become conditioned to believe that nothing is ever as it seems, then I don’t know how anybody is going to build a brand anymore, much less lead a nation, say.

Like a lot of people, I’m not really a fan of the Olympic circus, even as I am one of the Olympic ideal. My wife dragged me into the village kicking and screaming to see this spectacle. But standing there on Mill Street, I surprised myself. All around me, hundreds of bundled and be-toqued people were shaking hands and hugging, cops were smiling, the village’s resident clown was making balloon animals and playing arena rock anthems on her boom box while local kids played shinny on a side street, and the village’s poet laureate and official bagpiper stood bare-legged in his kilt in the crackling -12 cold, belting out The Maple Leaf Forever. And I realized (in a moment that was altogether too reminiscent of the climactic scene from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, if I’m honest) that there is still one more thing to believe in: us. We’re tough little mammals. We’re not stupid, and yet we hope. We’ve got stamina, and yet we have a sense of humor. And we invite spectacle into our lives now and then not because we’re weak, but because we like sharing a good story and an excuse to get together. This is still our town, this world, and not even an army of philandering golfers and conniving attention whores can change that.

Thanks for dragging me along, Sweetie. And Happy New Year, everybody.

All your base.

2009-12-17T13:55:00.005-05:00

This was written as a guest blog for a fascinating web project called 5brand, which was created by some very switched-on branding people in Brazil. You should visit them and see if you can answer their provocative question: Could you define yourself with only 5 brands?

To me, 5brand was irresistible. I couldn’t wait to answer the question, and I did it with ease. But then, like most of the people who joined the 5brand party early, I am in the branding business. What reaction, I wondered, will this experiment get from a more typical mall-cruising consumer? Could they even perform the task?

I’ve spent the last several months working on a new book that deals extensively with the social meaning of brands. The book will contend that, in the difficult times we face both economically and environmentally, people should not turn their backs on branded marketing so as to punish corporations. Far from it. They should, in fact, engage deeply in that system of commerce. Brands, I believe, put power into the hands of consumers in the same way as democracy puts political power in the hands of citizens. Because we can choose, we control the destiny of marketplaces, whether we like it or not. And from the perspective this project has given me, I think the answers to these two questions are different.

What reaction will the 5brand experiment get from a ‘typical’ consumer, especially in North America? Tentative at best, I’ll bet. Ironic, maybe. Subversive even. And probably most commonly, they will simply decline the invitation. Consumers in this culture are uncomfortable with the fact of branding. They see brands as a shallow vanity. They worry that brands exist to manipulate them, and they don’t want to be seen as fooled so easily. And they’re more than willing to blame what’s wrong with the world today on the companies behind the brands they buy. A typical North American consumer sees himself as above brands, and as a profoundly rational creature. Not the sort of person who could summarize the essence of their character by naming their favourite computer, sneaker, cell phone, beverage or musical instrument.

Given that, if so forced, could the average consumer still perform the task? Yes, in fact. With ease. Whether people want to confess it or not, brands are a language in which we are all stunningly fluent. Assuming the brands involved are all familiar, I think that it would be a rare consumer who would look at another respondent’s answers and not feel that they knew them better afterward. I think it would be a rare consumer who could not name five brands that would provide a similarly revealing mosaic about themselves. And what makes this more interesting is the reason why. It’s not, as we might suspect, because marketing has taught these meanings to people the way your 10th grade Latin teacher conjugated verbs. It’s because it was consumers who actually wrote the language. It’s native to us. Marketers can give a brand its functional meaning, and they can try to charm us into granting them permission to make it mean more. But, in the end, the social meaning of a brand is entirely in the hands of ‘we, the people’. If a 5brander chooses to include Apple (as many did), it will not be because Apple claimed to be awesome. It will be because people like us anointed them so, and because, with our money, we fed this value judgment back into the system from which brands come.

The interesting and passionate people who built this experiment have their own motives, and they’ll learn from it what they seek to learn. But, daydreaming here in my frosty corner of the world, there is one revelation that I would love 5brand to deliver unto everybody who buys things, everywhere: Brands are whatever consumers say they are. And the fact that we ultimately control their meaning is our best hope that we might ultimately control their conduct, and the world that conduct creates.

Begging to differ.

2009-11-20T17:51:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-10-15T13:12:00.017-04:00

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.

2009-09-18T12:48:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-08-27T16:25:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-07-30T21:45:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-07-03T10:27:00.007-04:00

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.

2009-06-29T16:40:00.003-04:00

Dear Facebook,

I’ve tried. I really have.

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see where I’m going with this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not even MySpace.

Consider the source.

2009-06-10T16:50:00.010-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apples’ already got that market cornered.

Rehab.

2009-05-22T12:39:00.008-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right here, right now.

2009-05-19T18:30:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you thought irony was dead.

License to shill.

2009-04-10T14:05:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The peasants are revolting.

2009-03-20T13:04:00.003-04:00

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

“But they’re so small!”

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

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

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

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

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

Synchrony for the Devil.

2009-02-27T14:45:00.002-05:00

I am not a fan of Walmart. To be frank, I think that the fundaments of this company – universal entitlement to a limitless supply of cheap stuff, and the ruthless, monopolistic driving of costs out of their suppliers’ business models – have, in the long run, done a lot more harm than good to the economy and to the planet. So it’s a bit galling to see them luck out the way they did with their mid-2008 ‘rebranding’. Apparently, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The story goes like this: In the middle of last year, Walmart treated itself to a new logo. The logo was friendlier and mellower than their previous, chunky Ministry of Greed livery. The new look also gave fresh life to a slogan change they’d made in the fall of the previous year, an admonition to the throngs: “Save money. Live better.” Design wonks were predictably critical. But hardly anybody else paid much attention.

And the Dow was above 11,000.

But it’s not above 11,000 any more, is it, kids. And suddenly, context has utterly changed the meaning of this ‘rebranding’ and made it accidentally brilliant. You see, in a time of rampant consumption and groundless optimism, preaching bargain hunting is an inherently differentiated thing to do. Of course, Walmart was never unique in this, but they certainly became the dominant and defining voice for tightwad consumerism. But in a matter of a few harrowing months, the need for frugality has ceased to be a choice for a lot of us. And so, not being a matter of choice, it thereby loses its value as a basis for branding.

And in the very nick of time, in what seems like a stroke of sheer, dumb luck, Walmart reframed bargain hunting from being a competitive sport for greedy people, to being a way of living well despite the troubles. Had they not done so, their “Always low prices” message would have become a dreary reminder to consumers of the hard times; having done so, the brand now seems to be cheering them on.

Of course, a slogan is not a brand, and I doubt it’s in Walmart’s nature to invest a lot in giving this one meaning. But the whole affair is a potent reminder that no brand exists in a vacuum.

And that fate has a funny sense of humor.

A little bird told me.

2009-02-13T11:54:00.007-05:00

From the Things I Thought I’d Never Say department, this: If you want to know what the future of branding looks like, try asking a geek.

Unless you’ve been locked in your basement watching Bewitched reruns, you’ll know that the flavour of the past couple of years in marketing circles has been ‘social media’ , that bucket of online environments comprising brands like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (about which more in a moment). For sure, it feels like this phenomenon has finally ‘tipped’, to put it Gladwellianly. A perfect storm of critical mass, plus the epoch making election campaign of Barack Obama, plus the legions of newly unemployed and insecurely employed suddenly networking their brains out to cope with the anxiety, has made doing this stuff seem suddenly very, very normal.

Now, you’re thinking, “Yawn. Hey, cowboy, 2006 called, and they’d like their blogging topic back.” But it’s not the fact of social media that interests me. To which you might reply, “Don’t tell me you want to write about how to monetize these spaces with ad models?!” Please. As much as I’m enjoying this imaginary conversation, don’t insult my intelligence. I think the only people who are going to directly monetize social media will be the clever ducks that build the sites and then sell them to desperate 20th century media companies like Florida real estate.

No. What’s fascinating about this environment is that you can watch how a brand really happens, in accelerated real time. It’s like one of those stop action films that depicts a hibiscus growing from seed to blossom in 60 seconds. And nowhere is the lesson more acutely delivered than on Twitter.

Live there for awhile, and you’ll see what I mean. Scan someone’s update page. What do they talk about? Well, if all their posts have to do with the mood they’re in, then you’ll write them off as narcissists. If too much of their posting is self-promotion, you’ll stop following them. If they post exclusively for the benefit of their little clique, likewise. If they’re all business, then you wont relate to them; if they’re all simply amusing, then you’ll cull them mercilessly. And you’ll judge them. For the ratio of following to followers. For the quality of their followers. For the frequency of their tweeting, and for their artfulness with 140 characters, and for the frequency with which they’re honoured with the coveted re-tweet.

But the best ones, the real Twitter geeks, have a genius for it. Read over their update histories, and you see deftly rendered mosaics: Information, amusement, heartfelt opinion, trivial personal insight, friendly support, impassioned debate, all narratively constructed as painstakingly as if they were writing code. They don’t say the same things over and over. They say everything in careful proportions, in the process creating either an authentic portrait of themselves, or a brilliantly synthetic one. Believe it or not, there are even corporate Twitterers out there for whom the same formula seems to work, and the results are just as engaging.

Put simply, in the Twitterverse, your personal brand is not a stated claim; it’s the aggregate effect of every observable thing you say and the company you keep. It is the perfect, perfect metaphor for how commercial brands happen in the post-mass media era, no matter what they told you at Cannes.

Geeks, despite the wedgies they may have had to endure in the schoolyard, might just be ascendant in the world of branding.

I really hope smart-asses are next.

And they're off!

2009-01-30T14:22:00.007-05:00

Super Bowl Sunday is almost upon us, and NBC has reportedly managed to sell out its ad minutes, despite the economy, at as much as $300,000 a second. Madison Avenue rejoices, this being the best news since Wall Street’s meltdown freed up all that parking in lower Manhattan.

I get tiresomely cranky with the dinosaurs-at-the-tarpit condition of the advertising business these days, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love advertising. I do. I love it when it connects consumers to brands. I love it passionately when it actually adds value to those brands. But I don’t love it when it just amuses people. That’s what Janet Jackson is for.

No, I think there are two sober messages in all this: First, the reason NBC can get $300,000 a second for air time on this program is that big television audiences are a rare commodity. The nearly two thirds of high-earning households in America that use DVRs can skip the ads on 30 Rock, but they have to watch the Super Bowl live. And second, the ads have become part of the show in more ways than one. They are now consensually understood to be entertainment. It’s no more logical that this leads automatically to persuasion than that watching the game makes you want to buy the Steelers. Faddishness aside, this might be one reason why so many of this year's advertisers are using their spots to drive viewers to the web. (Here’s an interesting piece on this).

Enjoy the game. Enjoy the show. And enjoy the ads. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that all this creativity is a positive sign for the business. The Super Bowl no more signals the healthy future of advertising than the Kentucky Derby does the healthy future of horses as a commuting option. For most people, obstinate poop producers are only entertaining once a year or so, and only then at a safe distance.

And even then only as long as they’re not lame.

The Revolution Will Be Televised After All.

2009-01-21T22:45:00.003-05:00

Cynicism was hauled out into the town square yesterday and shot. (Its dimwitted cousin, irony, was spared execution and exiled to France). And as I watched the whole thing unfold on CNN from a barstool at Philadelphia International Airport, every break to commercial felt like a pie in the face. All of a sudden, the detached, puerile slacker humor that advertising has used to cover its embarrassment for the last decade or so looks ridiculous. Looking around at the upturned faces in the bar, I had the very strong feeling that American self-esteem was recovering very quickly indeed, and one casualty might just be their tolerance for being treated like greedy morons by the people who are trying to sell them things.

Hey, a guy can hope.

Authors@Google hosts The Orange Code.

2009-01-13T10:17:00.003-05:00

Arkadi Kuhlmann and I were invited to speak at an Authors@Google talk in New York last November, and the video was posted yesterday. Authors@Google is kind of like a lunch 'n learn, except lunch gets prepared by, oh, say, Mario Bartali. And the guest speaker is, oh, say, Barack Obama.

Or us.

And lunch really was delicious.

The Road to Perdition.

2008-12-30T12:46:00.007-05:00

What’s lost if a brand dies?

I’ve been asking myself this question as I watch the North American auto industry mismanage itself this time not just into dire straits, but perhaps into oblivion. From the moment those dimbulbs stepped off their private jets with their hands out last month, I have had a terrible feeling this wasn’t going to end well.

So hot is this issue, and so high-stakes, that I feel like I need to stipulate a couple of things before I launch this polemic: First, as a former card-carrying member of the UAW in my student days, and later as a marketing partner to two big Japanese auto makers, let me assure you that I understand this situation is not simple. And there is plenty of blame to go around, from head offices to the shop floors to the showrooms to the consumer’s driveways. Second, I am not unaware that the consequences of this industry failing are inestimable. In this sense, the car companies really do have a lot in common with the financial institutions that got us into this mess: they brought it on themselves and the rest of us, but we probably can’t afford to punish them.

But this is a blog about brands, and of all the casualties that might pile up in the months ahead, I’m not sure anybody else is going to shout this one out. So let me add a couple of things to the list of what’s at risk, here.

Consider the Ford Motor Company. At its birth, this enterprise was practically the Apple Computer of its time. Henry Ford saw a business in the idea of mobility as a universal entitlement. “I will build a car for the great multitude,” he proclaimed. His vision of a car in every driveway was linked to a technological breakthrough for making it possible (that would be the assembly line) and a simplified product offering (one model, one colour), and to the notion that the workers themselves should be able to share in both the fact and the fruit of that vision. Brilliant. Inspiring. Gone. Today, Ford has some nice products, I guess, but no real sense of why it should exist. Or for whom.

Or General Motors. Under Alfred Sloan, the concept of positioning was essentially invented there, decades before Trout and Ries coined the term. He built GM as a portfolio of brands that were not meant to compete with each other at all. Instead, they broadened GM’s market coverage, while giving the consumer a lingua franca with which to express himself through his choice of cars. And a social ladder to climb while doing it. Like it or not, it was brilliant. Inspiring. And now, though the husk of the company remains, gone. Today, GM is a big, fat, inefficient pile of marketing redundancies, built by cynical badge engineering and dealer pandering.

These, it seems to me, were two very good ideas: The democratization of personal transportation, a portfolio of microbrands aimed at affinities rather than functional needs. Maybe even better ideas now than they were then. The problem, it seems to me, is that the people who now run the companies that had those ideas aren’t believers. They’re just managers.

(As for Chrysler? Well, Chrysler never really had a vision, did it. No sense of purpose. It’s been in the fashion business since the 1920s, a market opportunist chasing the zeitgeist with engineering and design, but no mission. A car company shouldn’t be more famous for a building than it is for its products. And so it’s somehow not surprising that this isn’t Chrysler’s first time at the public trough. Or second. Or third.)

It’s hard not to notice that the same short-sighted marketing that destroyed these brands, destroyed these businesses. Coincidence? Maybe. But I’ll tell you this much: If a company stops believing in its brand, it cannot expect its customers to continue to do so for long.

And that’s what’s really going to be lost, here. After we’ve absorbed the initial economic consequences of whatever happens to these guys, we’re going to ask ourselves why we needed them at all. Sure, we all know why we need the factories and the dealerships and the jobs and the credit facilities. But do we know why we needed the cars? The answers to that question were encoded in the brands those cars wore. If the brands meant nothing, then neither did the cars (you can get cars anywhere, if that’s all you want). And if the cars meant nothing, then neither did the industry that built them.

Legitimate profit, my jet-setting Detroit friends, is the consumer’s way of telling you how much he cares.

A lesson we all might want to pay close attention to on the road ahead.

PS You've got to read the consumer comments about a bailout 'thank you' ad from Chrysler, featured in their corporate blog. In case you've ever wondered just how far a corporation can have it's head up its, um, self-interest.

The Dearth of the Cool.

2008-11-28T13:45:00.005-05:00

It felt like getting picked first for basketball: My co-author and I were invited to speak at Google this past week as part of their Authors@Google series (YouTube link to come). The coolest cool kids in the universe wanted to hear about our little book and what we think makes it important. This would mightily reduce my degrees of separation from Nobel winners and recently elected Presidents. So, needless to say, I packed my pundit pants, grabbed Sweetie and was New York-bound before you could say, “Hendrick's martini, dry, straight up with a twist.”

It was going to be cool.

This trip, though, instead of staying at our preferred underlit, sullen and contemptuous boutique hostelry, we decided to give the recently renovated W on Lexington a go. It’s a brand that’s always interested me because of its improbable triumph over modest Starwood roots. W Hotels are, I had been assured, also pretty cool. Cool enough for the likes of me, anyway.

And that’s how it seemed, at first. They almost had me with the buzzy lobby bar and the Wallpaper-esque décor. Enough so that I nearly overlooked the promotional ‘Acura Experience’ desk outside the elevator, hawking free rides to anybody who might like to buy a sporty sedan while they’re in town for the econolypse. The illusion remained more or less intact until I got to the bathroom in our cloyingly hip little suite...

Remember ‘jump the shark’? It was one of my favourite turn-of-the-century colloquialisms. I didn’t only like it for its pop culture savvyness, either, efficiently encapsulating as it did the notion of a popular entertainment property self-destructing by trying too hard. I also liked it for the cringe-inducing reference film itself: It wasn’t just that someone jumped a shark. It was that Fonzie jumped a shark. In his leather jacket. Rather than fade away, the character of Fonzie flamed out in a spectacle of self-debasement that, once and for all, atomized his moral authority as an arbiter of cool.

That’s kind of the effect this sticker on the mirror of our bathroom at the W had. Fonzie in his swim trunks and leather jacket. A reminder for those who need it that the minute you say you’re cool, you’re not.

Google was. Cool. The W Hotel, not so much. Checking out the next day, I felt like I was getting off the Hipster Doofus ride at Disney World. If I’d wanted to see what not-really-all-that-cool looks like, the mirror would have done the job quite nicely without the sticker.

The iPres.

2008-11-07T15:26:00.003-05:00

I wasn’t going to talk about the election. I really wasn’t.

It’s not as if there hasn’t been plenty of punditry about what marketers can learn from this bit of history. And I think that part of my reluctance to add to the din has been the enervating familiarity of it all. The glib pronouncements about what Brand Obama got tactically right sound like the same sort of analytical chaff that followed, say, the introduction of the iPhone. Humans who wear suits insist on trying to reduce the behavior of their species to some kind of mechanical stimulus/response model, and fiercely deny the thing that most makes us human: We have souls. We are gloriously flawed, emotional creatures who exist in a perpetual zero-sum game of hope versus fear.

So here’s your answer: At the heart of Obama’s victory was not his brand, but America’s. What he did so brilliantly was not to say, “America is broken and I will fix it.” He said, “The idea of America is great, and we must return to it.” He didn’t only dazzle with clever marketing and deft tactics; he went back to the fundamentals and to the 232-year-old rhetoric of Brand America, and used it to remind the nation of its awesomeness.

H.L. Mencken, a notorious cynic about democracy, once said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He has never been more satisfyingly wrong, in my opinion, and regardless of one’s politics. Certainly that thumbs-up fella and his moose-hunting sidekick did. No, I think the truth is that, from 1776 until last Tuesday night at least, nobody has ever gone broke overestimating the human appetite for self-respect and a sense of possibility.

Can marketers learn something from that?

Yes we can.

All you need is love. And cable.

2008-10-24T14:25:00.004-04:00

Would it be okay if I jumped on an old-news bandwagon just this once?

Because I want to give a shout-out to, of all things, a television commercial. Specifically, I wish to heap praise upon the gobsmackingly charming Discovery Channel spot called “I Love The World”, quite possibly the most redemptive bit of television advertising since British Airways' "Global".

But Cowboy, you’re thinking, does this mean you’ve gone back to the dark side? Can swilling crantinis and blogging from Cannes be far behind? Don’t get your chaps in a bunch, cupcake. I’m not dusting off the black turtleneck just yet. It’s true that I think this is a great piece of advertising, but that’s not why I think it’s worth talking about. There has already been a pundit-a-thon about that. No, I think it’s actually a shining beacon of hope. To whit:

It’s first a lesson in what a brand should be about. Someone over there at Discovery Channel, having recovered from the whole Bloodhound Gang thing, had a flash of clarity: Content is not what defines a media outlet in this era. A point of view is. This is a particularly acute lesson here in the squillion-channel universe if you’re in the media business, but it’s essentially true of almost everything. Very, very few marketers can claim a sustainable rational advantage for their products. From beer to sneakers, it’s a brand’s point of view that attracts affinity and puts a product in some kind of emotional context. I want to take every marketer who wishes his brand would get out of the way so people can see the product, and every ad wonk who thinks that entertainment is the antidote to poor differentiation, and lock them together in a room to watch this spot for a few hours. No sushi until you see the light, kids.

But more than this, it’s a fragrant bloom poked into the gun barrel of public cynicism, a commodity in such abundance right now that we should be glad it’s not publicly traded. Somebody out there wrote this earnest, sincere thing. And somebody out there bought it. And then millions of people took it at face value and thought it was just lovely, and said so. Go see it on You Tube. Look at the view count. Look at the comments. Very little “They’re just trying to sell you something,” and quite a bit of, “I just love it.” While we in our ivory towers imagine that consumers are roaming the streets in torch and pitchfork-wielding mobs right now, along comes this proof that consumers are still human beings and would still prefer to be happy, given the choice.

Even for sixty seconds.

Karmic Tuesday.

2008-09-19T17:01:00.007-04:00

There’s a bar in my neighborhood that’s an interesting little cultural mashup. At first glance, it seems to be an Irish pub. Confusingly, though, it’s run by dour Eastern Europeans. And most perversely of all, it serves just one kind of food: Hamburgers. 35 kinds of them. Times 7 kinds of meat. And 3 kinds of fries (I recommend the yam fries). It’s a simple menu with mind-boggling choice. There is no cheap option, and there is no bottom-of-the-page $35 surf-and-turf selection to impress your date with. Everyone there can afford a hamburger, everyone pays within a buck or two of the same price, and everyone there is having the one they like the best. It was there, last week, that I sat munching my Papa Giorgio burger on bison (with the aforementioned yam fries), watching the financial world implode on cable television.

When you get right down to it, this whole economic mess we’re in right now was caused by people feeling entitled to more and better stuff than they had yet to earn. A toxic stew of entitlement, optimism and selective blindness has driven the world’s economies straight over a cliff. Now we find ourselves watching CNN in horror as capitalism’s sacred shrines fall one after the other, and dazed looking investment bankers stumble up Wall Street carrying cardboard boxes full of their World’s Worst Golfer mugs and photos of the family basset hound. We borrowed and borrowed, and Tuesday finally came.

I blame hip hop.

Okay, not really. But kind of. You see, no cultural force has more potently expressed the American urge to flatten status hierarchies than that one has. Its chosen battleground: Consumption. You can take what you want, the movement seems to argue to those of us who probably don’t really understand it; in fact, you have a social duty to crush elitism by wearing its totems with the maximum possible insouciance. The media directs its digital fire hose at us, spewing images of putative street kids guzzling cognac, wearing couture and driving Bentleys. Serve those highly branded pictures to a society where roughly a third of the population believes they will be rich in their lifetimes anyway, season to taste with the indelible 2001 image of George Bush telling us that shopping is patriotic, et voila: the end of days.

Are brands somehow complicit in any of this? By their existence, I don’t think so. But I do think the people who manage them sometimes are. The paucity of marketing imagination has turned a lot of branded marketing into a process of exploitation dressed up as ‘selling the consumer what he wants’, when in fact the whole idea behind modern branding was supposed to be personal affinity. Offering the consumer what fits. When the discipline of positioning withered with the 1980s, what was left for branding in a lot of categories was a heartlessly binary schema: you, Mr. Consumer, can have the best, or you can settle. Well, that’s an easy choice. Especially when there is no end of easy credit available to fund it. They’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for an Escalade today.

I miss positioning. I miss when a guy could feel pretty good about driving a Buick after graduating from his Chevy, while he waited until he could manage the Caddy. I miss the middle. I miss all the middles that made being Main Street okay instead of a penance. I think the world will be a lot better off when consumers can choose what they like from 35 kinds of good instead of having to publicly declare where they are on the food chain.

And pay for it today.

Ich bin ein commodity.

2008-09-05T20:22:00.004-04:00

Well, they tell me that our book – the one I’m shamelessly promoting just to the right of this column – has shipped to the printer. No more changes or revisions or additions or whatever other urges might awaken my co-author or me from a sound sleep with a night terror-inducing realization about the permanence of ink on paper. The missiles have left the silos.

And it’s a real book, too. This wasn’t some bootstrap vanity project we financed with our retirement money, or from the tills of our respective employers, or with the generosity of some charitable foundation for wayward bankers and branding consultants with literary pretensions. “The Orange Code” was bid upon by big, fancy publishers who publish famous books by famous people and make money at it. It is a product, already for sale at places like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart and Target, right there alongside the kitty litter, shower massages and bestselling novels. Me, a guy who has made a career out of helping companies market things is now, himself, being marketed.

Except that I – tragically - am not famous. And this, in a supreme twist of irony worthy of an Aesop fable, makes me a product without a brand.

So let me just say this about that: If you ever find yourself questioning the real value of a brand in the noble cause of marketing, just walk a mile in these generic shoes. In the publishing world, if your name isn’t Dan Brown or J. K. Rowling, the product (that would be you and your tome) is doomed to assert, defend and explain itself all the way from the publisher’s swishy lobby to the airport bookstore where it will vie with “Who Moved My Cheese?” to redeem some poor bastard’s unplanned layover in Pittsburg. For a writer, life without a brand is a Sisyphean struggle for credibility that ends only when Oprah says it does.

Harsh. And it’s no different for real products, either. Take that last sentence and replace “writer” with, oh, say, “boxer shorts” and “Oprah” with “Wal-Mart”, and you have every brand manager’s worst nightmare.

Anyway, with editing and the summer now fading memories, it’s good to be back in the groove. And my evangelical fire is lit anew. For I have been brandless. And it’s even worse than I thought.

Overplayed.

2008-06-27T18:52:00.006-04:00

Marketing pundits and consumers alike were shocked and bewildered this week at the news that Nike has sold its swoosh. The iconic logo device has belonged to the Oregon-based athletic shoe and apparel manufacturer since it was created by Carolyn Davidson in 1971, and has found homes in popular culture everywhere from the golf course to inner-city ghettos. The swoosh was sold to an exultant Reebok for an undisclosed amount. Reebok said that it will debut its newly acquired swoosh at the upcoming Olympic games.

Did I have you for a second there? And if I did, surely your reaction was, “That is possibly the most futile and ridiculous branding decision since, like, ever!” Well, of course it was. Nike selling its swoosh would be just stupid, unless it really needed the money to make rent. And buying it would be stupid squared because, for at least a very long time, everybody that saw it would think of Nike. Even Sweetie’s cat could figure that out.

So, if you’re as smart as me and our barfy cat, you must have been shaking your head at the dustup earlier this month over ‘The Hockey Theme’, the mysteriously titled music that plays while the opening credits roll for Hockey Night in Canada (my American friends can substitute Wide World of Sports for an approximation of the cultural significance of this program). After decades of association with the enormously popular weekly sports broadcast, the rights holder to the song – octogenarian and former ad babe Dolores Claman – didn’t like CBC’s offer to renew the license for it, and she sold it instead to competing network CTV. Who, lacking a clear plan for how to get a return on what some speculate was a seven-figure investment, appear to have bought it just to irritate the CBC.

And so the brilliance of my opening feint is revealed. Yes, CTV is the Reebok in this story, and ‘The Hockey Theme’ is nothing more than a logo you listen to. I won’t judge CBC for drawing the line on the dollar value of this music. And I won’t judge Dolores Claman for wanting millions for it (I also want millions, yet have no song to offer in exchange). But I do judge CTV for what seems to be nothing more than macho nose-thumbing with no evident commercial value. I mean, guys, seriously… did you think that people watched Hockey Night in Canada for the song? Did you think that hockey fans were such dolts that you might, in the future, be able to fool them into thinking it was on CTV now? Or were you just rubbing your hands in glee, Grinch-like, because your efforts, while producing no benefit for you, had discomfited the enemy?

Well, I hope whoever signed that cheque to Dolores has already had their performance review, because I’ve got some unfortunate news that could affect their bonus:

First, you are not heroes, CTV, for buying and saving this piece of ‘Canadiana’. We don’t thank you. We just think you have too much money.

Second, Canadians will get over this and keep watching Hockey Night in Canada. We got over Labatt and Molson being bought by foreigners. We got over the whole Tim Horton thing. We got over Gretzky going to LA. Hockey bags across the nation were just as stinky the day after Bauer sold to Nike as they were the day before. Nobody is sad. I think they already forgot, actually.

And finally, you are going to look foolish when you hit the play button on ‘The Hockey Theme’ for the first time. Viewers who are already a few beers ahead of the game will just think they’re on the wrong channel. And the sober ones will be lost in reverie, fondly remembering the Saturday nights of their youth rather than paying attention to whatever you’re going to try to sell them during the commercial break.

Meanwhile, down at the CBC, I think they’re probably going to get over it, too. They’re having a contest inviting Canadians to write a new song for the show. They’ve got Stompin’ Tom Connors' offer of ‘The Hockey Song’ as a backup. And the optics of all this were masterfully handled: Canada’s public broadcaster drew the line, refusing to squander the taxpayer’s money (apparently $2.5 to $3 million). By the time the puck drops this fall, the whole thing will be a memory as distant as dollar-a-liter gas.

And if you miss Dolores’ ditty, a little-reported angle to this story is that Warner Music still seems to own the digital rights to the epic composition. You can listen to it all day long, free, here.

You can even make it your wireless ring tone. Heck, CBC could just download it to Don Cherry’s cell phone and then call him during Coach’s Corner. That would irritate CTV no end.

And for a lot less than $3 million bucks.

A flying leap.

2008-05-05T14:02:00.003-04:00

The most interesting things happen to me on airplanes.

Let me pause here and provide some background for my friends abroad: The topic of this post is an airline called WestJet. WestJet is a plucky little upstart carrier cut from the same cloth as Southwest Airlines in the USA, but with a clearer sense of purpose. Namely, that sense of purpose is to harass and undermine one reviled competitor: Canada’s flag carrier, Air Canada, an enterprise whose crown corporation roots live on in a culture of disinterested arrogance of the likes seldom seen since the court of Louis XIV. WestJet barnstormed its way into our hearts with low fares and charming, denim-clad ground and in-flight personnel who would do things like board passengers by sock colour. We like WestJet. They’re funny, they’re on our side, and they give Air Canada apoplexy. They are so popular, in fact, that when WestJet executives were busted for rooting through Air Canada’s garbage looking for confidential competitive information a while back, public opinion shrugged it off the way they would an errant teenager’s breaking curfew to play ball hockey.

Get the idea?

Okay, so a few weeks back, Sweetie, the kids and I are on a WestJet flight leaving Calgary for Toronto. As we’re buckling up, a nattily-attired fellow strides onto the airplane like he owns the place, and helps himself to the public address system. He is, as it turns out, the President of the airline, Sean Durfy, and he’ll be riding east with us. A frisson of excitement ripples through the plane… maybe something wonderful will happen, or at least something funny. This is WestJet, after all. Well, nothing of either sort transpires, but Mr. Durfy does introduce himself and politely thank the passengers for their custom. Sounds okay, right? I mean, it’s not very WestJet of him, but at least it’s presidential, right?

Maybe not when I add some texture to the story.

See, Mr. Durfy swaggered on to his jet carrying a Starbucks cup. Not itself a crime, of course, but wait: What he thanked us for was making them “… the most profitable airline in the world for the last two quarters.” And our reward for this support was that he was able to order a bunch of new airplanes, each of which costs, he said, $45 million. When he finished his speech, the audience - er, passengers - could only muster a polite golf clap, with the same vaguely shocked and confused tentativeness that might have followed had he just turned his eyelids inside out. He sat down, the plane got airborne, and we were served up free airline coffee and pop, along with $3 headphones so we could use the ‘free’ in-flight entertainment system.

I imagine Sean Durfy is a good guy and wants the best for the airline and its passengers. But when he seized that microphone, he became part of the WestJet brand experience for us passengers. And his unspoken message was, “I hate the coffee we serve on board. My main concern is our shareholders, not you lot. And these planes are getting old.”

To which our unspoken reply was, “Who do you think you are with your fancy Starbucks cup? Your own coffee not good enough for you? And for the rest of us, Bucko, a quarter is something you put in a payphone. And by the way, what’s wrong with the airplanes you’ve got, one of which is about to hurtle us skyward at 450 mph?” Okay, harsh, but you get the point. For an airline that has passionately preached about its customer-centric culture, this particular ‘brand experience’ felt like an uncomfortable glimpse behind the curtain. A misleading one, we hope, a moment of insensitivity rather than a flash of truth, but uncomfortable all the same.

To me, this underscores an inescapable reality for brands in the post-modern world: Leaders are the brand managers. It’s organizational behavior, not advertising, that makes a brand what it is, and organizational behavior is a leadership responsibility. So when the leader himself stands up to speak, he had better radiate what his brand stands for, and do so from the heart. Or he should just sit down and be quiet. The best kind of brand to have is one that is authentically an advocate for its customers; the second best kind to have is one that simply stands in front of a well-run company. But to have people believe that a brand is the champion of the people and then be faced, even for a minute or two, with evidence that it’s really just out for itself? That’s just not going to fly.

I forgive you this time, Mr. Durfy. I’m sure most of the folks on that plane did. Flight 798 was probably nothing worse than a missed opportunity for you. But let this be a warning: Customer-centricity is a glass house. And airport security doesn’t screen for stones.

What's in your wallet?

2008-03-14T15:32:00.001-04:00

Geez, I take one month off blogging, and the world goes to hell in a handcart. Bad enough that my dream of finally getting that Dyson vacuum cleaner must now be postponed so I can afford to put gas in the Brandcowboymobile. Now, we’ve got world financial markets in turmoil, governments desperately propping up their currencies and fending off recession, financial institutions teetering on the verge of collapse and the very future of our monetary system in question, all because of the irresponsible marketing practices of lending institutions. Apparently, the apocalypse is nigh because Biff and Muffy just had to have that patio furniture right now.

I want to help. I really do. So, as a service to misunderstood credit card marketers everywhere, I’ve done a little ‘best practices’ audit of a similar product category to see if they’re really as bad as the media are making them out to be. It didn’t take long to identify a model to study, either. Let’s see… a product you can carry in your pocket, that’s useful in certain specific circumstances but that not everybody should be trusted with, and which, if abused, can be life-alteringly dangerous. Bingo: Guns! The perfect analog. Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum and that credit card offer that was in your mailbox this morning are not really all that different, other than that with the former you could hold up a gas station, whereas the reverse is more likely with the latter.

To facilitate this analysis, I have carefully selected two brands: Capital One (esteemed purveyor of unsecured credit) and Smith & Wesson (esteemed purveyor of the aforementioned peacemaker). At first, I fear the experiment will fail because the similarities are so striking.

For example, both brands are a bit circumlocutory about what business they’re in. Capital One says, “Our business is helping customers, so what's important to them is important to us. Our commitment to our customers motivates us to stay in close touch with their financial needs and concerns,” before they mention the ‘C’ word. Smith & Wesson says, “Smith & Wesson is one of the world's most recognizable brands, and for good reason. Since we first opened our doors, we have focused on designing and manufacturing innovative solutions that are unparalleled in the field of personal safety and protection.” Hmmm…

Also, both brands are similarly eager to help you match their products to your personal needs. Completing the handy questionnaires on both web sites, I learn that my life would be improved by a Platinum Cash Back MasterCard and an M&P.40 with 15 rounds in the clip and one in the chamber.

Eventually, though, moral leadership emerges and one brand sets an example: Smith & Wesson, in addition to selling gun vaults and protective equipment, would like you to be trained in the use of their product. It’s right there on the home page. Go to the training site, and you will see serious-looking people with glasses and earmuffs, shooting at things with both hands. It doesn’t get any safer than that, kids. Meanwhile, I click on the ‘How Credit Works’ button over at Capital One, hoping that it says something like, ‘try not to spend money you don’t really have, or you will destroy our way of life.’ Instead, it says, “Credit is convenient and offers benefits cash doesn’t.”

Sigh.

I’m pretty libertarian about most things branding. But I have to say, I think there are some businesses where the marketer simply can’t sit back and pretend that they bear no responsibility for how their products affect the lives of the people who buy them. Brands still have some authority, even if it’s sometimes convenient to pretend otherwise, and this is nowhere truer than with financial institutions. If a bank says I’m good for the money, I feel like they are speaking from their experience with these things. I think their judgment might even be better than mine. If they say I can handle it, maybe I can. If they don’t say credit is dangerous if abused, then maybe it isn’t. If they seem happy enough to give me more when I use up what I’ve got, then maybe I deserve it. Everywhere else in marketing, dangerous products are sold as such, from cigarettes to motorcycles to Harry’s piece. But credit seems to be sold by many financial institutions with the same level of corporate conscience you might find in a crack dealer.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” But it doesn’t really matter, does it. Fifteen in the clip and one in the chamber, baby.

P.S. Apologies for the especially long hiatus between posts, and I wish I could say it won’t happen again. But, you see, Brand Cowboy is working on his first book, and you wouldn’t believe how many words you need for one of those. It’s about an awesome brand, and will be in bookstores across North America this fall. All I can say for now, but stay tuned.

The Crying Game.

2008-01-16T10:42:00.002-05:00

You just couldn’t escape it, for a day or two there. Played over and over on the television screen, Hillary Clinton in a New Hampshire coffee shop, on the edge of tears as she proclaimed how personally important this campaign was to her. For hours afterwards, though you can find scant evidence of it now, political ‘experts’ pronounced this a fatal error on her part, a show of weakness that no American could brook in a Chief Executive. Certainly, that’s how it went the last time a candidate wept during a New Hampshire primary; those same experts will tell you that a similar moment sunk Ed Muskie’s campaign in 1972. And Hillary was already in a bit of a hole after a narrow loss in Iowa.

And then she won New Hampshire.

The same experts jumped back into their pundit pants and caught the first bus back to CNN to claim that it was women who had carried the day for Hillary, which should win some kind of award for facile sexism. The more liberal press coolly characterized the teary moment as “humanizing.” Closer. But the prize goes to hubby Bill, who said simply of the people of New Hampshire, “People saw who she was.”

Indeed.

I think that voters in that moment had a choice, and it was a choice of interpretation: Hillary got choked up because she’s weak. Or, Hillary got choked up because she’s authentic. And what delighted me about the outcome were two things: One, that they picked door number two, and two, that the pundits were so fantastically wrong.

So it was ironic and interesting that, on that very same day at another coffee joint on the other side of the country, a kind of similar (work with me, here) drama was unfolding that had something to do with authenticity: The return of Howard Schultz to the CEO job at Starbucks. You don’t have to dig too deeply in his open letter to all of Starbucks employees to see that Howard is saying, ‘we screwed up’. Furthermore, you have to be struck by the fact that his prescription for fixing the problem isn’t some kind of Chainsaw Al, shoot-the-wounded, cut-our-way-to-success restructuring. Rather, he reckons, he needs to “transform the Starbucks experience.” He’s less concerned about the overexpansion of the chain and more concerned that it’s lost its soul in the process. And, as with Hillary, Howard claims it’s personal: “Twenty-five years ago, I walked into Starbucks' first store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and from that day forward we have taken the road less traveled, “ he begins his missive.

And then their stock price, which had halved over the previous year, rose by 9% in overnight trading.

It remains to be seen whether Starbucks will find its soul again and, with it, prosperity. It remains to be seen whether the oddly pierced, tattooed and dissociative dolts at my local Starbucks, despite my ordering the same thing every morning for the last three years, will deign to say hello to me, offer me my usual, or even look me in the eye, now that Howard has returned like Arthur to Camelot. And it remains to be seen whether Hillary’s verklempt moment is even remembered in the days and months ahead, never mind decisive. But I like the idea of living in a world where being real has more commercial value than being clever or aggressive does. Where a brand has to figure out what it stands for more urgently than it does its next tactic. Where we get to see who it really is.

I think Hillary really was choked up. I’m not sure about Howard. There is a faint whiff of crocodile tears in the way that emotional opening about Pike Place ends the selfsame paragraph with a bunch of chest thumping statistics about how big they’ve become. Muskie possibly lost New Hampshire in ’72 not because he wept, but because he denied it, claiming the tears were “melted snowflakes”. In the branding game, insincerity is much more dangerous than vulnerability.

Man, these pundit pants are getting a bit tight. Maybe I should switch to non-fat. I wonder if they’ll notice…

A blog about nothing.

2007-12-07T16:08:00.000-05:00

There was a Gary Larsen cartoon that was a favourite of mine back when I was younger and pretending to be twisted and nihilistic. It posed this existential question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no-one’s around and it hits a mime, does anybody care?”

I hereby claim this charmingly collegiate sentiment for my own allegorical purposes as I present to you the most pointless rebranding exercise that I have ever beheld: The New York taxicab.

Here's what it used to look like:

And here is the stunning transformation:

What in the name of Judd Hirsch do you suppose they were thinking, here? Let’s consider all of the magical things a brand can do, and then ask ourselves if a taxi in the Big Apple requires a single blessed one of them. You new kids might want to grab your notebooks.

Okay, why don't we start with recognition. Some companies like to have a fancy new logo so that people will identify their products and pay attention to them. Geez, I don’t know, but I think getting attention is not a problem that a New York taxi has. Give a typical New Yorker the choice between an empty cab and, oh, I don’t know, eternal life, say, and they’ll take the taxi. Salvation is like a subway. You miss one chance, another one will come along soon. But an empty cab? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Then there’s differentiation. Some companies like fancy logos because they make their products look more special than other people’s products. Could this be it? Well, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. BECAUSE THEY’RE ALL YELLOW. They are supposed to be anonymously interchangeable. The only exceptions to this are the gypsy cabs at the airport which if patronized, we are led to believe by the ironically named TLC, will leave you dismembered in Ziplock bags scattered along the BQE. And maybe the occasional rebel who duct-tapes dingle-balls along the top of his windshield and plays zither music on the radio while he mutters into his cell phone. But that’s it. Otherwise, they’re all supposed to be the same.

Okay, how about making money. Some companies like to make their logos fancy so that they can charge more for their products because of an enhanced image. Buzzer noise! Fares are fixed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Only two things can jack up the price: a tip, or a revolver. Nope, no added image value here.

All things considered, I’d say we’ve found the perfect vacuum of reason for ‘rebranding’. Fortunately, while the new NYC Taxi logo – um, brand – lacks the insouciant bluntness of the original, it’s every bit as unattractive. There is no risk that anyone will interpret this as the commercializing of New York’s unofficial public transit system. Rather, we are left with the impression that this was nothing more than a spasm of vanity from deep in the bowels of the city’s bureaucracy. Moreover, the TLC didn’t even pay for the design work. It was donated.

So, they didn’t need it. It won’t have any effect. It’s no improvement on what it replaces. And it was free.

Good, then.

Kind of leaves you speechless.

A knife to a gunfight.

2007-10-26T23:20:00.000-04:00

Before:

And after:

I believe religiously in the power of design to shape perception in the branding game. What I’ve never understood, though, is why it so often becomes the last resort of scoundrels. Whether it’s Robert Milton a few years back, giving Air Canada’s fleet a snazzy new paint job in the wake of a government bailout, or the freshly reconstituted AT&T, there seems to be a breed of executive who believes that all will be forgiven if you just buy your brand something new and frilly to wear.

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a monumental mismatch between a PR problem and a design solution as the recently unveiled new visual identity for Blackwater USA.

Blackwater, of course, is the private security contractor that has had so much negative press lately, in particular around America’s Iraq adventure. Whether for their alleged shenanigans in-country, or for the enormous cost and ethical concerns of employing them in a war zone, or just for their swaggering macho image, this firm is perhaps second only to Halliburton among corporations to which the Iraq war has attracted unwanted attention. And at the very apogee of all this controversy, the press circling them with First Amendment rights locked and loaded, the boys from Blackwater unholstered… a new logo.

Not that it didn’t need work, mind you. Their old logo looked like a sweater patch for the varsity homicide team. The new one is definitely friendlier and more corporate. Now they just look like a phone company that kills people.

But the timing. Whoever advised them on this move should be made to do quite a lot of pushups. Nothing a brand does is judged in a vacuum. It’s always about context. And when you’re talking about something as supposedly sacrosanct as a logo, that judgment is about imputed motive. Logos are symbolic by definition, so when one gets changed the first question is, why? Or, at least, why now? In this case, intended or not, context and imputed motive combined to send an unfortunate message. Design geeks are having a heyday with it. The press, meanwhile, is just shaking its head and wondering how stupid Blackwater thinks they are. And the rest of us, thankfully having no reason to encounter a Blackwater brand experience for ourselves, will form our impressions solely on the press’ reaction.

A tactical blunder for sure.

In fact, I’d say it was a branding disaster if I thought that Blackwater’s customers paid any attention to the press…

Fallen.

2007-10-19T16:31:00.000-04:00

Is Apple getting too big for its britches?

I’m a fan. Always have been. Besides loving most of what they make, I also think that Apple is the post-modern proto-brand. When that lady threw the sledgehammer at the giant video screen during the 1984 Super Bowl, it was branding’s Sarajevo: the single shot after which nothing would be the same. From that day on, the best brands, the ones that really mattered, were advocates and not salesmen.

My first inkling that the honeymoon might be over happened last year. I’d used the Apple brand to demonstrate a point to a class I was teaching and, to my horror, was met with rolling eyes. Some wag even referred to Apple as the Evil Empire, for pete’s sake. I let this blasphemy pass, figuring that, hey, it’s an arts university. They’re forced to use Macs. Undergrads are like that. If you forced them to drink beer, it would end campus alcohol abuse overnight.

But it didn’t end there.

There’s since been all this squirming about the cable company-esque monopolistic behavior of iTunes. There was the pouting and foot-stamping about the exclusive deal that they gave AT&T to distribute the iPhone (a deal which, in fact, had a perfectly logical explanation: they were the only carrier whose network could support it). And then pouting and stamping Part Deux, when Apple had the temerity to lower the iPhone’s price and rebate money to the people who bought the first ones. The press has jumped on the dogpile, too. Check out the October 22 Business Week. On page 81, you’ll find the headline “A Bruise or Two On Apple’s Reputation,” accompanied by a photo of a grim mom and sulking child clutching their ailing iMac. The story is about service problems, but if that’s of no interest you can flip back to page 30 in the same issue and read about plucky Universal planning to take on giant iTunes, “… the Jobs Juggernaut”.

Apple? The Jobs Juggernaut?! What we have here, kids, is a sudden deficit of benefit of the doubt. And that’s as fatal to a brand as ice cubes are to single malt scotch.

There is, of course, no end of punditry on this subject out there on the internets. Words like ‘arrogant’ get hurled about. Theories about a backlash against its Mac vs. Windows television campaign are smugly invoked. The ubiquity of the iPod is causing brand fatigue, some opine. Might be something to all of it, but here’s what I think:

You’ve heard the term ‘adoption curve’? Well, it comes from a concept called Diffusion Theory (liberally plundered by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point’). Among its principles is the idea that as something new gets adopted by more and more of the population over time, each successive wave of adopters has its own unique motivations and biases. So, if you were the first on your block to get a DVD player, you probably paid too much, loved the novelty and social status, and were very patient with its technological teething problems. Whereas, if you bought your first DVD player last Tuesday, you paid about $49, don’t give a fig about novelty and social status, resent being forced to ditch your VCR, and expect the thing to work as reliably as your Electrolux. Get the idea?

So I think maybe this is Apple’s, um, core problem. For two decades, this brand was a counterculture darling and the pet of the creative class. It subsisted on its alternativeness and the endless patience of early adopters. But now, everybody’s got an Apple somethingorother. And ‘everybody’ is price sensitive, less interested in tech-status and just wants stuff to work like their Electroluxes and somebody to blame if it doesn’t. Today’s Apple isn’t doing business with the sledgehammer lady. It’s doing business with the slack-jawed drones she was trying to liberate. They don’t think Apple is a religion. They just think it’s a brand.

Tough beans for Apple. It’s hard to be an iconoclast when you’re the icon. But, hey, Steve, keep the faith. Even Microsoft went through tough times. Look at Bill now. On the cover of Time with Bono.

Britches don’t get any bigger than that.

RIM shot.

2007-09-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

27D is still poking away at his Blackberry. We’re climbing out of LaGuardia in air traffic so thick you need more than one hand to count the planes you can see out the window, and this post-modern Willy Loman is peering with porcine intensity into the little glowing screen, typing with the unmistakable cadence of someone who is being answered. We suspect he still has the transmitter turned on, but cannot prove it without a confrontation. I even give the ol’ cut-eye to the flight attendant, but she seems uninterested in asking Willy if he has something he’d like to share with the rest of the class.

The tension this generates is only finally broken by a slightly panicked announcement from the cockpit begging whomever is using a Blackberry to turn it off because it’s generating “some confusing messages from the plane’s TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System)”. You know, the thing that keeps planes from hitting each other. Especially here in the most crowded airspace on the planet, as the senior flight attendant tersely points out to Willy before he emits a bored sigh and – with leisurely deliberation that seems to belie his otherwise apparent indispensability to the world – shuts the damned thing down and pockets it. And here’s the word that flashes through my mind:

Typical.

Some of my best friends use Blackberries, and no user I know personally would ever do anything this biblically stupid. Yet this stereotype sticks so naturally to the brand. And so, with no bar service to lighten the mood, I’m left to contemplate why this might be. I suppose one obvious contributor is the cultural history of the device. Like cellular phones fifteen or twenty years back, Blackberries were first badged by the Type-As that first adopted them (I still smirk recalling the participant in an early 90s focus group who observed that “cell phones are how you identify jerks in restaurants”). It’s hard to give much benefit of the doubt to a brand that you first saw strapped to a stockbroker’s alligator belt just before the tech crash.

But I don’t think that totally explains it. The ‘berry is almost nine years old. By the time cell phones were that age, they were being marketed as Christmas gifts for the family. No, I think that the real reason why we are so willing to use this brand against its users lies not in anything that Research In Motion has done, but in what they have not done. Think about it: Can you remember ever hearing this brand’s voice? Remember one thing that it has ever said to its customers and prospects, on its own behalf or theirs?

No. You read about RIM being sued. You read about RIM suing someone else. You read about how much money Jim Balsillie makes. You read that RIM is a great place to work. You read about its stock price. But you never see this company stooping to the fundamental and respectful act of simply selling their product to us and, thus, acknowledging that we matter to them. They just take us for granted. And into this vacuum of purpose rushes the only assumption we could possibly make about the Blackberry brand: that the company behind it is arrogant and self-absorbed, just like 27D.

It’s a useful reminder that brands are the proceeds of observation. You can’t force people to see you a certain way just by advertising to them. But neither can you decide simply to not have a brand because you don’t have any serious competition and therefore don’t need one. If you have a name, if your conduct in the marketplace is observable, even through the behavior of your customers, you’re gonna get a brand. And the first time consumers find themselves in a position of real choice, it might just bite you, hard. Ask the phone companies.

Meanwhile, back on Flight 713, we’re taxiing to the gate in Toronto. Everyone’s turning on their communications devices and, what with the charming little boot-up tunes and the glowing displays, it is as if the plane is suddenly filled with magical fairies. Willy joins in, but it appears that he hasn’t received any messages since nearly killing us all in the skies over Queens. It seems the world carried on just fine for 45 minutes without him.

Typical.

A Convenient Truth.

2007-08-17T19:44:00.000-04:00

Hello, my name is BrandCowboy, and I didn’t used to be the next President of the United States.

Okay, kidding. That was an important film and Al Gore is an important guy. But you could forgive us regular folks for feeling wearily powerless against the various apocalypses (apocalpysi?) so ardently marketed by the media these days. You could forgive us for raptly watching Paris Hilton emerge from jail instead because, although we’re equally powerless to affect that, at least it doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, the Greek chorus of No-Logoists and their equally smug neo-environmentalist cousins intone that it’s all the fault of corporations. We, but hapless pawns, are being danced to our doom by vast, evil empires whom, we are to suppose, are bent on destroying the marketplace that sustains them.

Then, just as we’re about to give up all hope, along comes Elmo.

Not the Tickle Me one. The little plastic one. The one recalled by Mattel last week because it had too much lead in its paint. That Elmo. And while everyone fretted about the problems of producing products in poorly regulated foreign markets and television news programs aired tape of wailing children having their toys confiscated, I cheered right up. Why? Because I realized the truth that’s been staring at you and me and Al all along:

Brands could save the world.

Let me frame this up: A dangerous product was made by a manufacturer with no strict capitalist imperative and no brand of its own (see where this is going?). It was prevented from doing any harm, though, because the product was to be sold by a company that DOES have a brand. And why? Is it because they’re good and decent people with a deep sense of social responsibility? Maybe. I couldn’t say for sure because I don’t know them. But I know this: They fear us. They’ve got far too much to lose by selling toys that make people sick.

And that’s the key. You see, Al, unlike the election you lost, branding is a democratic concept. We get to vote every time we buy. Brands mean we have the power to make corporations behave more or less the way we want them to, if we want to bother. Though there’s no absolute guarantee that all those corporations will toe the line, disassociating ourselves from their brands certainly won’t help. It’s like spoiling your ballot at election time: You’re rejecting a flawed system in favour of no system at all. And anarchy, in case you don’t watch TV, doesn’t bring out the best in people.

The other thing Al would like about branding is that it stands as a bastion against crap. If we buy crap, it eventually disappoints us and we throw it away, wasting both the resources it took to make it and the landfill it will end up in. A brand certainly doesn’t guarantee quality, but the absence of it removes any inhibition a company might have against making crap. Here’s a case in point: A couple of weeks back, the Globe and Mail reported on a study comparing the total life cycle energy requirements of 100 makes of cars and trucks. Guess what the biggest factor in lifetime energy consumption was. Size? Nope. The type or quantity of fuel used? Nope again. The major contributor to the impact a car has on this planet is, in most cases, how long that car stays on the road. The longer a car lasts before it has to be replaced, the less environmental impact it ultimately has, because building it and disposing of it can do more damage than driving it does. Extend this principle to our computers, running shoes, home appliances, golf clubs and sponge mops, you start to see how the same consumers who got us into this pickle (that would be us) might have the power to get us out, if they just keep their standards high enough.

It was just about a year ago that I used this same rhetorical Nerf bat to try to beat some sense into Neil Boorman, whose ”Bonfire of the Brands”’ is due to be published any day now. A year on, I feel like vindication is nigh. We’re seeing daily in the news what happens when products are made by people who are not accountable to the consumer. It may scare us, but I promise you that it scares marketers more. It must be pretty obvious by now that brands aren’t really the problem, here. And it will hopefully soon be just as obvious that if we consumers exercise our franchise and buy with a conscience, they might actually be part of the solution.

You know, Al, I rock at PowerPoint. Maybe you and I should take this show on the road. As long as you don’t mind if we use my Mac.

Oh, and I’ll drive.

Eurotrashed.

2007-08-10T10:28:00.000-04:00

Well, I’m back in the saddle after a brief sojourn on the Continent with Sweetie. There’s nothing like a wine-soaked meditation in branding’s Garden of Eden to give a cowboy some perspective. Take, for instance, these revelations scribbled on the back of a boarding pass…

Overheard at the airport in Milan at 6A – freakin’ – M over the clip-clop of little Crocs: “Mommy! They’ve got Minute Maid!” Now, how can you say globalization is a bad thing? At least, as long as ‘global brand’ really means ‘American stuff you can get anywhere’, it sure seems to keep the kids happy.

Can someone explain Paul and Shark to me? I saw this brand worn by lots of briefcase-toting businessmen in mufti. It appears to be like Dockers for rich people. You know, so you’ve got more money, but still no imagination.

Okay, and here’s a handy travel hint: In Europe, Martini is a brand, not a magical healing potion. I ordered one in a very fine establishment, and it confusingly arrived on the rocks.

Worst. Martini. Ever.

That’s because it was vermouth. Ironic, don’t you think?

Here’s how much Europeans love brands, unlike the Puritanically ambivalent relationship we have with them here in the colonies: Sweetie marches up to a street vendor selling designer sunglasses and demands to know their provenance. The vendor looks to the left and then to the right like Lefty the Salesman on Sesame Street and then says, “Mafia.” Because there, you see, ‘stolen’ is more socially acceptable than ‘fake’.

Can I just say, I love Samsonite Black Label? Yes, it turns out they sell it here in the Great White North, online at least. But there, they have actual stores, complete with dreamy ambient lounge music and obliviously hip staff. What a wonderfully exuberant, brave and all too rare example of a brand extending itself UPwards. While a procession of the world’s great brands are slouching towards Bentonville in an effort to trade margin for volume, here’s workaday Samsonite asking itself not, “How can we make this cheaper,” but rather, “How can we make this cooler?” There should be a medal for this.

… and then there were some Byzantine exchange rate calculations on the stuff we bought, a tomato sauce stain, and an incoherent scrawl on the subject of why nobody can afford business class anymore.

It’s good to be home.

P.S. In case you thought that branding’s rich pageant had halted for the summer, here are two stories from this week that need no sarcastic illumination from me:

Can a brand be used as punishment? Ask misbehaving Thai police officers…

A placebo can make a headache go away. And, apparently, a brand can make a French fry taste better. Behold its terrifying power…

The Glory of O.

2007-07-13T15:51:00.001-04:00

Somebody said once that when information is free, the only thing that will have any value will be a point of view. Though the fact that nobody seems to want to claim authorship of this quote may ironically suggest otherwise, I think there is real truth in it. And Exhibit A must surely be Oprah Winfrey. This woman’s success has got to be the most encouraging proof that brands have a future since the swoosh hat Tiger Woods wore at last year’s Masters. With no pedigree, no credential, no tangible product or service to offer, Oprah was the answer to a question nobody had yet asked, and that answer built her a personal fortune estimated by Forbes to be $1.3 billion dollars. She has elevated her brand to pure essence. An adjective free of any noun. A trademarked existential state. It has made people happy, apparently, and her rich.

And now she’s opening a store.

Construction started last month in Chicago, not far from her studio.

On the face of it, this is a big yawn. You could look at this little enterprise, fairly conclude that it’s nothing more than a souvenir shop, and flip to the next blog (which, last time I checked, is a site debunking online degrees. There goes that dream). But what I think is so fascinating is that it could just as easily be the seed of a national chain, spreading like a virus across the land until it’s become the Starbucks of self-actualization. And what could it sell? Well, her online boutique gives us clues. Coffee mugs, beach totes, stretchy pants and lounge socks. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t you think she could sell pretty much anything she wants? Radishes? Deodorant? Hedge clippers? It’s easier, in fact, and more telling to come up with a list of what she couldn’t sell.

Automatic weapons, for example. Probably not those.

Domesticated ferrets, hard liquor, Tom Cruise posters. There would be limits. But they would be authenticating limits, because those things would so obviously clash with what we understand to be her values. Otherwise, if those values can make any sense out of a product, I reckon she could flog it.

This makes me happy. You see, I think that to represent a point of view is a brand’s highest calling, and that there are lots of them out there prospering as such. You can’t tell me that Nike ever just sold shoes, or that McDonald’s ever just sold burgers or that Disneyland was ever just a theme park. Platoons of MBAs, mind you, in their unending quest for tangibility, will argue that those brands are constructed value propositions. But we know better. And Oprah has proven it for us. Because all she makes is people to see life her way.

As for the store itself, I can really only see one flaw in the business model: I’m hardly going to drive all the way to the mall if I can get that Zulu Telephone Wire Basket just by thinking positively. I mean, gas alone is going to be, like, five bucks. And they’ll probably be out of stock anyway.

Wait, that’s not very positive. Maybe I do need to go to the mall…

Webbed feat.

2007-06-15T15:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, I’m pro-brand. A ‘Yes Logo’ kind of guy. But it’s not just because brands pay the dry cleaning bills for all my black turtlenecks. I actually think that brands are the last bastion of accountability between society and corporations. Kind of a thin blue line, on one side of which exists at least the possibility that we can use our wallets to force companies to behave, and on the other side of which lies a kind of marketing anarchy in which we’re deluged with cheap battery-operated mantel clocks made of nuclear waste and mine slag. But let me tell you, it’s lonely work. Nobody wants to hear that brands are to marketing what democracy is to governance. Marketers clap their hands on their ears and make that Jerry Lewis ‘la la la’ noise, while consumers buy copies of Naomi Klein’s book and solemnly park them on a conspicuous shelf so much as to say, “These sneakers aren’t my fault. Nike made me do it.”

Anyway, so I almost flipped past Allan Sloan’s story in the June 4 Newsweek (The Cruncher) when the duck stopped me in my tracks. Aflac’s famous spokes-quacker featured prominently in the picture at the top of the article, entitled “Aflac Ducks a Punch Over Executive Pay”. Huh? Ad ducks? Executive pay? Whaasssuup?

The story in brief: Aflac was to become a target for shareholder activists for how much its executive team is paid, part of the ‘say-on-pay’ movement that’s been sweeping the country in this post-Enron era. Rather than fight about it and cause a big, embarrassing mess, Aflac proactively volunteered to offer its shareholders a say on pay going forward. Nolo contendere. Good for them, but so what, right? Well, so this: It was the writer’s opinion that Aflac capitulated because they didn’t want to risk their famous, well-loved brand. The article begins with the assertion, “When the public face of your company is a duck, you can’t afford to foul up your reputation.” Notwithstanding the Churchillian turn of phrase, I gotta say hell, yeah. He even goes so far as to back his claim up with one of those Newsweeky data boxes, telling us three things: How many years they’ve used the duck in their ad campaign (7), what their brand awareness is (90%), and Aflac’s market cap ($25B).

See, Naomi? Imagine how this would have gone if there had been no brand at stake. Gulfstreams and Centurion Cards for everybody! A Bentley in every parking spot! Solid gold putters and foie gras with your lobster! And, of course, atrophied 401ks for the little guy. But no. Aflac had to do the right thing and, without prejudice to whether they’re actually good folks or not, their brand made them do it.

Sometimes, I want to get all the marketers and all the consumers together and give them big noogies. If companies live up to their brands, people will trust them. And if people insist on brands with integrity, that’s the only kind there will be. And look, Naomi, it didn’t even take me 490 pages to say it.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, the world will awaken tomorrow morning secure in the knowledge that at least one more corporate giant has seen the light. Asked by Newsweek how the duck will vote on the say-on-pay motion at the next shareholders’ meeting, Chairman Don Amos said, “The duck’s the cheapest guy we’ve got working for us – and the most valuable. He’ll just say, ‘Vote yes.’”

Man, I bet Conrad Black wishes he had a duck.

And I think I know why I don’t have that book deal locked up yet.

Put up a parking lot.

2007-05-18T12:04:00.001-04:00

In his 2004 book, “A Short History of Progress,” Ronald Wright wagged his finger at mankind for failing to learn from its mistakes. It’s a compelling read, relying heavily on the lessons of extinct civilizations to make its case. Among these, maybe the most jaw-dropping is the story of Easter Island, a barren rock in the South Pacific that once teemed with arboreal life until it was deforested by its resident humans, utterly. He evoked the moment when that very last tree came down, wondering at how whoever was wielding the axe must have been so blinded by their immediate agenda that they couldn’t notice that there wasn’t any more shade.

It was the image of this imbecile, axe in hand, proudly surveying his handiwork, which came to mind as I read about yesterday’s CRTC ruling in favour of increasing commercial content in television’s prime time.

For non-Canadians and anybody else with other things on their minds besides the demise of commercial television, here’s the headline: The CRTC, Canada’s broadcast regulator, has approved a request by the country’s beleaguered television broadcasters to increase the number of minutes of commercials it can show during prime time to 14 per hour, then to 15 for all time periods a year from now. And then, finally, in September, 2008, there will be no limit at all. The networks can sell as much advertising time as they like. Or can.

Well, I suppose they’re turning cartwheels around the foosball tables at the nation’s ad agencies today. More ads to sell means more ads to make. First, the Bessie Awards and McHappy Day fell on the same date this year, and now this. Good times.

But when the cool kids are done dancing around this latest fallen log, they might want to spare a thought for what this really means to our little branding island.

For one thing, let’s remember that television networks weren’t in trouble because they couldn’t sell enough ads. They were in trouble because they couldn’t scrape together enough audiences. In the U.S., network television just had what Associated Press called “it’s worst spring in recent memory,” with 2.5 million fewer viewers of its programming than in the previous year, and it’s only an acceleration of a trend that’s been around since the dawn of cable. Audience shares of top rated programming have been halving every twenty years since the 50s. Today, here in Canada, a program with an audience share of as little as 6% can make it to the top ten. First, cable sliced audiences more and more thinly, and then the internet stole them away altogether. You might be making more ads for the next little while, kids, but you’ll be making them for a lot fewer people to watch. And eventually that math is going to catch up with you: Your clients and their brands will have a harder and harder time justifying the cost of producing television advertising (especially if it just reaches the same 17 trailer park-dwelling recluses, over and over and over again). Being excited about this is like a beef farmer being excited about McDonald’s lowering the price of its hamburgers.

And then there’s this pesky moral thing. Advertising was always a value exchange. Ads funded the creation of wonderful things to watch. More ads is going to lead to less wonderfulness, changing the value equation and slowly but surely reducing its appeal until it has none at all. And that’s going to be a huge pity. You see, while I’m skeptical of all the self-congratulatory ceremony around advertising and its rather parochial view of branding, I am still a believer. Used respectfully, television commercials are among the very few remaining ways you can stimulate the interest of a passive consumer. You know, make them want something. The internet is lovely if you know what you’re looking for, but the best way of making a consumer want to look in the first place is probably still going to be some kind of ad. But bombard people with them, hold their programming hostage for another few minutes an hour, and eventually advertising will get a bad name. No, seriously.

No, this is not good news. Not good news at all. Canada’s broadcasters are joining the ranks of marketing’s damned, the people who’d rather sell more of less. Keep it up, keep running more and more ads, more and more cheaply, to smaller and smaller audiences, and before you know it, you’ll have invented YouTube.

Except we already have one of those.

Don’t it always seem to go…

American idolatry.

2007-04-23T13:37:00.000-04:00

I just hate jumping on bandwagons, but this one was irresistible.

If brands and their hijinks amuse you even a little, then there is no way you’ve avoided the Jesus-drinking-a-Coke kerfuffle that erupted earlier this month. The story goes like this: An Italian film called “7 Kilometers From Jerusalem” was to have its debut on Easter weekend. In this film, a modern-day Jesus is shown drinking a Coke given to him by the film’s protagonist, a disenfranchised ad guy. (Excuse me while I reset my irony meter). The Coca Cola Company takes umbrage at this, and parachutes a battalion of lawyers into Italy to threaten tort mayhem if the film is shown with the scene intact. They succeed in terrifying the producers, the film is withdrawn and, last I heard, will be edited to eliminate the scene. And here, from a Coke spokesperson, is the statement that got my Irish up:

“We are not interested in this kind of product placement.”

Product placement!? Who in the blue blazes do these people think they are? Sorry, Hoss, but that’s not product placement. That’s a movie. Art. It’s none of your business.

There are three things wrong with this, it seems to me. First, it’s arrogant bullying. You want to control who in the public realm, fictionally or otherwise, is seen drinking your product? Geez, I’m glad you weren’t in the neighbourhood for my wedding. I’m sure there were a few Coke drinkers there you wouldn’t have approved of. And no, you can’t see the pictures.

Second, it’s rank hypocrisy. For 115 years, this brand has done everything it could think of to insinuate itself into American and then global culture so that it’s as comfortably familiar and ubiquitous as air. That humanity bought your pitch and made you its own means you have to tolerate what they do with it as long as there isn’t any misrepresentation involved. It’s not just yours anymore. It’s also ours. You can’t stuff that genie back into your shape-trademarked bottle, sport.

Finally, I’m left scratching my head over what all this tells us about Coke’s values as a brand. I mean, they let Bill Gates drink it publicly, in a commercial no less. And they let Simon Cowell drink it publicly. And they allowed the Bushmen of the Kalahari to cavort with the bottle, at least, in that movie. A bottle, it should be noted, that started off as litter before it wrought havoc in the tribe, eventually getting hurled off the edge of the world because it was an “evil thing”. This, you were fine with. But a movie Jesus? Um, no, sorry. That’s going too far, no matter what the Vatican thinks.

I can’t figure it out. But I do know three things: I know that the line between benevolent megabrand and evil empire is razor thin. Mr. Gates could have told you that, Coke. I know that the Second Commandment got broken, here. (I'm just not sure whose).

And I know that you’re going to be kicking yourself if Jesus switches to Pepsi.

Brands? We don't need no stinkin' brands.

2007-03-30T19:18:00.000-04:00

A few years back, I found myself in Miami shooting a television commercial. As is usually the case with location shooting, we had hired local cops to control traffic and keep gawkers at a respectful distance, and among our contingent of Miami’s finest was one particularly memorable specimen. He was a strapping fellow, obviously spent a lot of time in the gym, and equally obviously did not wear a standard issue uniform. His appeared to have been bespoke tailored out of some kind of shiny, stretchy material, chosen to show off the product of all that gym time. It was impressive, in a vaguely Village People kind of way, but also a bit unsettling. It sent odd signals about what motivated this particular public servant, signals more about vanity than responsibility. I understand the value of looking intimidating to the difficult job of policing; I was less clear about the value of looking like you're ready for your closeup. I just kind of thought that if I was being rescued from bad guys or dragged from a burning wreck, I’d want my savior to be completely unconcerned about the crease in his trousers or whether his badge was interrupting the line of his pectoral muscle.

This is what came to mind last week as I beheld the new livery of the Toronto Police Service’s patrol cars, which again demonstrated that the inherent vanity in branding might not be suited to absolutely every purpose. Okay, the new cruisers aren’t as disturbing as a black spandex uniform, but they still feel a bit… I dunno… brand-y. Where the old ones had all the personality of a tax form, the new ones seem to be saying, “Introducing All-New Police Ultra! Now 20% more law enforcier!” If I was being transported to the hoosegow in one of these things, I would feel more like I was in a movie than in trouble.

I wish there were brand cops. Whoever sold the police service this bill of goods would be brought up on charges. Some kind of recklessness or negligence thing. Everybody knows that a brand is not the sum of what it looks like, it’s the sum of what it does. Everything sends a signal, and the signal a police car should send is, “Don’t worry, we’re here.” Or maybe, “You are so busted and screwed beyond belief.” It shouldn’t send a signal that says, “I am snazzy. Admire me.” I mean, geez, you need look no further than the major military conflict of the last century to see the truth in this. Who had the coolest uniforms and the flashiest stuff? The facists. The bad guys. The guys that lost. They wore Hugo Boss.

Moral authority doesn’t go shopping.

Fortunately, the rest of the Toronto Police Service brand experience is pretty much intact. The earnest blue uniforms, the handcuffs, billy clubs, mace, Glocks, flashing red lights, all that will still get my attention and respect after I sail through my next radar trap. Despite the fancy new package, the product inside is the same as it ever was, and this is one of those rare occasions when I think that’s about as it should be.

The tangled web we weave.

2007-03-16T23:11:00.000-04:00

With great power comes great responsibility, so said Spiderman. But apparently certain craven elements of the marketing community were watching Goldmember that year, because the idea of responsibility in this game seems to be disappearing like the polar ice caps. This week, three more examples landed on my desk with a damp thud, leaving me in a mood to rant.

It began with a story in Ad Age about how Jeep is going to oh-so-cleverly delegate the creation of its next ad campaign to consumers, just the latest in a string of brands resorting to this bit of marketing seppuku. Inspired by Time, who sweetly informed us that we were all the Person of the Year, Ad Age followed suit, breathlessly making the consumer the Agency of the Year. Then, brand by brand, marketing people, glassy-eyed from watching too much YouTube, decided that if the vox populi was really that smart, maybe it should do its own damn ads. Well, that’s just a super idea. Why don’t we confirm their suspicion that advertising is hokum, and so devoid of meaning that anyone can do it. Why don’t we silence the voices of our own brands and surrender advertising to the compost heap of pop culture. It’s bad enough that ad people believe that if consumers are laughing at our brands they’ll buy our products. Now, we’re going to invite them to laugh at each other. Ask Star Wars Kid how that worked out for him.

Next came a piece in the New York Times about how the Association of National Advertisers was going to demand that broadcasters develop ratings for individual television commercials, the way they do for programming. Because, you see, if people don’t watch the ads, the advertisers don’t want to pay as much for running them. Um, okay. I always thought it was the job of the ads’ creators to make commercials worth watching. But I guess if the consumer is making the ads, maybe not... it’s all so confusing. Anyway, I also thought we already had ratings for commercials. If memory serves, they were called ‘business results’.

World weary sigh.

And finally, speaking of YouTube, how about all that Taco Bell/KFC New York rats hysteria (if you missed it, here’s an example). This story is a couple of weeks old, but it came to mind as I was pondering this question of brands being responsible for themselves, and here’s the line that got me: In an interview with a local NBC television affiliate, a spokesperson for the parent company, Yum Brands (no, seriously) said, “The franchisee is actively addressing the problem.” As they say on the internets, WTF!?

Look, Yum dudes, let me give you some free advice:

Fire the franchisee. Terminate them with extreme prejudice. Swoop down on Greenwich Village like an avenging angel and tear your logos from the front of that building. Say you’re sorry for the lapse in judgment trusting these people with your precious brand and secret chicken recipe and start over down the street. “Actively addressing the problem”!? People came into that restaurant because your brand promised them a consistent experience and a level of accountability that exceeded that of a pretzel vendor. If all you’re going to do now is punt to the franchisee, then I’ll have mine with mustard. At least the pretzel guy will look me in the eye.

There. Somebody had to say it, and it was me. As Spidey put it, “This is my gift. My curse. Who am I?”

Just your friendly neighbourhood Brand Cowboy, baby.

Oops, they did it again.

2007-02-23T21:41:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, an ad campaign can save a brand. But sometimes, the effort is so late, so desperate and so embarrassing to witness that it’s like walking into your parents ‘vicars & tarts’ party: An unseemly masquerade in which it’s hoped by all involved that, by dressing up as precisely the thing you are not, you can distract everyone from the hard truths of cellulite and chin wattles.

This was the lurid simile I finally settled on when Chrysler – sorry, DaimlerChrysler – broke its Dr. Z ad campaign some time back. The conceit of the campaign amounted to a signed confession by the folks in Auburn Hills that they just couldn’t build and sell cars on their own anymore. Look, it exulted, the joint’s being run by Germans now! They know how to build a car, by gum. And here’s the Head German, Dieter Zetsche, who even has (quoting the campaign web site, here) an “awesome moustache”! So now, our cars are going to be almost like, you know, Mercedes. Mercedeses. Mercediae. Whatever…

Anyway, they must have been convinced this was going to save the company once and for all, because it was a full court press. The company’s name had been changed, of course. And there was a series of mildly amusing television commercials in which a laconic Dr. Z demonstrated the virtues of dual sliding minivan doors and the like. And the aforementioned web site, featuring actual questions from actual consumers, each one inviting yet another revelation about the Teutons’ contribution to Chrysler’s rebirth. Actual questions like, oh, “What is so important about German Engineering in American cars?” Or, “Hey, Doc, I’m looking to see all of the current vehicle incentives. Can you send me in the right direction?” Man, if incentives don’t prove an ad campaign is working, I don’t know what does.

Well, whatev’, as the young people say. I cursed the chucklehead ad people who dreamed up this little festival of disingenuousness and got on with my life, no more inclined to buy a Chrysler and slightly less so to drive a Mercedes (whose brand was beginning to look like K-Fed to Chrysler’s Britney).

Then, while shaving one morning last week, I heard a familiar voice coming from the television. Could it be? I peeked out at the TV, and there it was: the Awesome Moustache! And it wasn’t being one bit laconic. The Head German was telling the folks in Auburn Hills that they were a financial sinkhole. They’d need to lose, oh, 13,000 or so souls from their payroll to make any financial sense. Oh, and layoffs or no, the folks in Stuttgart are seriously thinking about selling Chrysler anyway (possibly to these guys, it’s rumored), so fed up are they by the whole thing.

So, summarizing: Car company gets bought by famous German brand. Head German takes charge, and is appointed über-shill for its products. Head German ends up threatening to fire 16% of the company and sell the rest to the Chinese.

Well done.

Brand-wise, it’s just gotta be hard to recover your dignity after a rejection like that. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been wrong about there being no second acts in American life, but at this moment it seems like the only difference between Chrysler and Britney is that Britney’s hair will eventually grow back.

Who knows, maybe she'll even grow an awesome moustache.

Dead can dance.

2007-01-26T19:10:00.000-05:00

There is no more anguished proof that a brand is out of ideas than the plundering of its past. From “Hilltop” redux to Burger King’s creepy disinterring of The King to the zombified Orville Redenbacher (which is, like, mega-creepy), every time I see one of these acts of creative despair I think that the perpetrators should be banished to writing Johnson Boxes at the nearest junk mail sweatshop.

(Seriously, this Orville Redenbacher thing is macabre. Take a look. Then come back here.)

So the other day, I’m out for a stroll and a billboard for another brand resurrection catches my eye. As in, I literally did a double-take and reread it to see if I could find the inevitable stupidity. Nothing. The needle on my stupidity meter was almost motionless.

TaB is back. And might possibly be cool.

To be exact, it’s a newish product called TaB Energy, and its proposition is, “Fuel to be Fabulous.” And the Coke folks have pulled off a pretty neat positioning trick with it. To start with, they’ve actually found some white space in the insanely cluttered beverage category: an energy drink for women. And I don’t mean the “hear me roar” variety. This is aimed at the modern sort who, besides being emancipated and empowered corporate executives and rock-climbing marathon runners, also like to read trashy magazines, collect cheap sunglasses and look cute when the mood suits them. It's Red Bull for for the girl power crowd.

But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t TaB die ignominiously in the last century, a victim of its own obsolete pre-feminist positioning and possibly evil saccharine? In its final days, wasn’t it shorthand for antediluvian feminine vanity? Well, yeah. But, see, they’ve actually made that work for them. There’s an inviting sense of playful, pink irony about the whole thing that somehow seems to acknowledge that maybe, finally, we have come a long way, baby.

(TaB is, of course, no stranger to irony, or the subject of fabulousness for that matter. Consider this, taken with ruthless disregard for context, from Andy Warhol’s 'America': “You can see a billboard for TaB and think: Nancy Reagan drinks TaB , Gloria Vanderbilt drinks TaB . Jackie Onassis drinks TaB, and just think, you can drink TaB too. TaB is TaB and no matter how rich you are, you can’t get a better one than the homeless woman on the corner is drinking. All the TaBs are the same. And all the TaBs are good. Nancy Reagan knows it, Gloria Vanderbilt knows it, Jackie Onassis knows it, Katharine Hepburn knows it, the bag lady knows it, and you know it.” And it doesn’t get any cooler than Andy Warhol, right?)

If you snoop around their web site a bit, you’ll see that things kind of fall apart with the rather-too-perfect models in the photographs and the “Fabulous is…” philosophical stuff. Fabulousness needs neither explanation nor apologia, nor does it need some kind of presumptuous role model lecturing us on confidence to sanction it. Dove has that covered, thanks.

Even I, a mere oafish man, know that fabulousness is a state of mind and that earnestness is its kryptonite.

But out there in ad land, TaB Energy has got the thing just about dialed. I’m going to enjoy sitting back and watching this reincarnation.

And I guarantee you I won’t be eating popcorn while I’m doing it.

A New York minute.

2007-01-12T15:43:00.000-05:00

For no particular reason other than to breathe the fetid air of possibility, Sweetie and I went to New York a few weeks back. While she shopped for shoes (and against all imaginable odds found none), I wandered the streets of SoHo clutching a Starbucks cup and trying to look like I belonged, the Elmer Fudd of cool hunters. And believe it or not, the most interesting thing I discovered on this little safari was not an obscure micro-genre of lounge music or some new level of opacity for Helmut Lang ads. It was a hole in the wall on Wooster Street called the Wired Store.

Now, on the face of it, this place wasn’t as mind blowing as, say, the new Apple store on 5th Avenue. Imagine a Sharper Image, but without most of the strange massage appliances. It was populated sparsely on this December afternoon with glassy-eyed geeks passing time until their round-two financing came through, and the occasional startled looking tourist, alternately poking and caressing the latest shiny totems of modernity.

Yawn. And so?

So this: Wired is a magazine. It’s not supposed to be a store.

Yet there it was, and it seemed to make all the sense in the world. Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn inside, and as I tried on the solar-powered laptop-charging backpack, I meditated on what seem to be some emerging truths about what brands are about here in the 21st century.

Here’s one. A brand is an advocate. Some clever duck once said, “When information is free, the only thing that will have any value is a point of view.” Wired is a brand more than it’s just the name of a magazine because it has a coherent way of seeing the world. Its reason for being is not its ability to staple piles of colourful paper together and sell them, it’s its unbridled enthusiasm for the digital age. In my head, I knew all these toys they were selling were probably products of the magazine’s advertisers; in my heart, I felt like maybe all these products had passed a test to be there.

Or how about, a brand is understood through experience. And, in a sense, the capacity for experience is kind of how you know you have a brand. The Wired Store, to me, was impressive precisely because it wasn’t surprising. Of course this is what Wired would look like if it was a store. Of course this is who would be lurking therein. Of course this is where it would be. Of course.

And this: A brand’s consumers are a tribe of shared values, not shared demographics, and certainly not, heaven help us, a ‘target’. What’s more, the beautiful thing about a brand like this is that it can be for some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. It didn’t care who came through its doors. Although I thought it fell short in the execution, you could see the potential, here, for this place to be like a church of Wired-ness. Niketown, taken to the next level.

Yeah, so, I was pretty chuffed about all that. Madly making notes and congratulating myself later over a martini for observing this evolutionary moment, this brand ascendant. You can imagine how sulky I was, then, on learning that they’d packed up and left like gypsies in the night shortly after Christmas, leaving nothing but a ‘for rent’ sign in the window. I’d stumbled on a new trend, alright. It’s called a “pop-up store”, and they’re all the buzz-making rage in Manhattan right now. Nike had just done one, too, in fact. It was open for four days.

Wascally wabbits.

But I still kind of want that backpack.

Brand bites dog.

2006-12-25T14:45:00.000-05:00

Ad agency reviews can sometimes be pretty sketchy affairs. The lengths that some agency bosses will go to in order to land an account would make a defense contractor blush. I guess there might be less flat out corruption in the process than there once was, but it remains true today that nothing will make some agencies drop their ethical trousers like the prospect of winning a big, new client. Oh, the things I’ve seen… (cue the distant sound of helicopters)… the horror… the horror…

Anyway. So, a couple of weeks back, a senior vice president working for a famous brand got fired for getting too cozy with one particular agency during a review, the agency that ultimately won the business. The agency that was the object of the coziness also got the hook. After a suitable amount of huffing, a new review was called, and all the other agencies who lost the first time around got back into ‘my uncle’s got a barn, let’s put on a show’ mode to pitch it again. Fascinating stuff, huh?

No? But it was all over the news! Ad Age alone ran seven pieces on the story in their electronic addition the day it broke, and a bunch more as the week unfolded!

Oh, hang on, I forgot to mention: What made it news was brands.

You see, the marketer in question was Wal-Mart. That puritanical cult from Bentonville, an organization so sanctimoniously protective of its moral authority that it won’t even let prospective vendors pay for coffee. And the other brand was Aston Martin. Specifically, the Aston Martin of Howard Draft, boss of the aforementioned ad agency, who offered Wal-Mart’s Julie Roehm a ride in it after a sumptuous repast at a trendy Manhattan boite. The fact that she’d allegedly just sat in the car was just this side of Monica Lewinsky’s dry cleaning bill as prima facie evidence of, well, pretty much everybody’s guilt.

Yeah, I know Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world. And I know that Ms. Roehm came equipped with a reputation of her own (that Lingerie Bowl thing raised the hopes of a whole generation of testosterone-addled creative departments). And I know that a high priced sushi joint on Hudson Street is a long way from Bentonville, Arkansas in every imaginable cultural sense. All that made the story interesting.

But what gave it irony and a heapin’ helpin’ of schadenfreude, what got it on the front pages and made it into a scandal, was the awesome semiotic power of b-r-a-n-d-s. She wasn’t just a marketing boss, she was a fox in Wal-Mart’s henhouse. And he wasn’t just an agency boss; his ride made him an overpaid, arrogant smoothie. That right there is some serious cultural shorthand, kids. Tom Wolfe would have needed 200 pages to explain the motives of those characters. Brands made it happen in six syllables.

I mean, if Howard Draft had been pitching Aston Martin and had taken his prospective client to a nearby Wal-Mart, would we be having this conversation?

Thought not.

Hey, wait. I wonder if that would really work…

Hey, wasn't that Richard Branson?

2006-11-24T12:05:00.000-05:00

Sweetie and I went to see Casino Royale last night. With most movies, I’d wait for the DVD – movie theaters remind me of commercial air travel, except that you never go anywhere, nobody brings you anything, and the staff don’t seem old enough to drive – but this was different. This was James Bond, brothers and sisters. Another ripping tale of hot lookin’ people saving the world with sex, violence, power toys, nice clothes and cool brands. Another rendition of the timeless good-versus-evil story, in which evil exclusively buys no-name.

Few marketing tactics draw as much sneering cynicism from consumers as product placement does. It’s reached the point where just being able to recognize a brand in a movie or television show indicts its presence in the story. People think that paying to have your brand on screen is a bit cheap and desperate. The marketing equivalent of having to hire a date for the office Christmas party.

So how does the Bond franchise get away with it?

Well, for one thing, it’s open about it. Next to the choice of Daniel Craig as Bond, the most reported Casino Royale story was the $100 million dollars paid by Heineken, Ford, Smirnoff, Sony, Sony Ericsson and Omega to be in the movie. For another, the movie doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, artistically speaking, so nobody can bellow ‘sellout’. Especially not after 21 films. And for another, Bond knows its own brand. The stuff 007 uses is pretty much the stuff the real guy would use, with the possible exception of the jarring Casino Royale scene in which Craig desperately tries to use his own coolness to overcome the dorky Ford rental car they put him in when he arrives in the Bahamas. (So kryptonite-like was the effect of the blue oval on Bond’s charisma that Sweetie actually exclaimed right out loud, “Why’s he driving a Ford!?”)

Which brings me to the thing I love the best about Bond and his brands: They need him more than he needs them.

With a lot of product placement, paid and otherwise, brands get brought to the table at least partly because of their cultural meaning. Put a Mac on someone’s desk or have them drive a Volvo or peer at a Blackberry or order a Stoli, and you say something about the character. It’s a convenient silent language for the filmmaker to use to add information and dimension without adding time or words to the script. Having your brand in a Bond film feels different, more like an honour. You just have to believe that Omega hopes Craig will do for its Seamaster what Connery did for the Rolex Submariner. Or that the guys in Dearborn are praying Casino Royale will redeem their loony investment in the Premier Automotive Group brands (which include Aston Martin, Land Rover, Jaguar and Volvo).

This womanizing sociopath actually has the power to make brands cool.

Which makes him something more than a brand himself. It makes him a metabrand. And, in that sense, a model for the way we all hope we choose brands: To sometimes declare what we’re about, but never to make us who we are. And maybe every once in awhile to incite coolness ourselves by, as Vesper Lynd said of Bond’s tailored suit, wearing them “with disdain.”

Yup, brand-wise, it was a good night for cars, cell phones, computers, watches, booze and the edgy new Bond himself.

In fact, the only brand manager I wouldn’t want to be today is the guy who did the deal to supply wicker chairs. I bet he’s got some explaining to do.

Shades, jeans and automobiles.

2006-11-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

I'm not in the habit of writing codas to these little epistles, but this has been a pretty interesting week.

Of all the brands that I've slagged and celebrated in something over a year of doing this, three stand head and shoulders above the others in the volume of email I got afterward: Mini, Oakley and Cinch Jeans. It warms the cockles of my hard little heart to see people actually get passionate about a brand, even the ones that happen to work for it. (Take that, Naomi). But I think it also points the way to a future forseen by icons like Apple:

In a world where we don't need much and it's getting hard to find a really bad product anymore, brands don't win by trying to sell someTHING. They win by being for someBODY.

Now I'm feeling kind of inspired. If it lasts through lunch, my clients aren't going to know what hit them...

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be brand managers.

2006-11-04T08:40:00.000-05:00

This weekend, the Royal Winter Fair here in the Big Tomato has been rudely interrupted by, of all things, a rodeo. I am absolutely tickled at the thought of all those overbred Biffs and Muffys prancing about shopping for stretchy pants and shiny boots, having to rub shoulders with tobacco spitting, pickup truck driving manly men with belt buckles the size of manhole covers. For one glorious weekend, that stupid pet trick known as dressage will be displaced by the serious business of agricultural workers riding angry livestock.

Can I have a ‘hell, yeah.’

Well, if you happen to be attendant at this spectacle, or any like it, keep your eyes peeled for a little brand called Cinch Jeans. I am utterly charmed by these guys, and I think their story has a lot to teach us about how brands work.

Just ten years old, Cinch has managed to find its way into the hearts and onto the backsides of some people that take their traditions pretty seriously. In almost no time at all, brand wise, they’ve earned respect in cowboy culture, a milieu where even the 153 year-old Levis brand is regarded with some suspicion for being vainly obsessed with its fashion street cred. How they did it is like a manual for post modern branding.

Got a pen? Write this down.

First, advocate for somebody. Cinch’s slogan: “Made for the man who lives his life in denim.” (This is as distinct from Ralph Lauren’s jeans slogan, which I believe is “Made for the man who lives his life in denial.”). See? They’re for men. Not everybody. Men. And only men whose self-definition is symbolized by that plainspoken blue fabric that used to mean hard work and lack of pretension.

Then, make whatever matters to them, matter to you. Cinch sponsors two things: Rodeo cowboys and country music stars. That’s it. No Superbowl ads. No flash mobbing, no AdSense. And your sponsored content is that guy riding a bull over there. What about brand extensions? Okay, if you insist. How about shirts. And maybe knives and hats. Stuff that matters to the man who lives his life in denim. Instant authenticity, produced not by history but by saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Want to play a fun game? Toggle back and forth between Cinch’s web site and that of ‘authentic’ Levis. Now come on. Whose jeans would you rather slide into this Saturday morning? That’s what I thought.

And that’s why I’m the Brand Cowboy and not the Brand Pouty Supermodel.

Reality bites. No injuries reported.

2006-10-15T10:54:00.000-04:00

Brand wise, I have spent the week in an existential funk.

It started with the YouTube story. Those cunning little brats sold their company to Almighty Google for all the money in the world, and with it a brand that putatively stood for the shining, populist future of user generated, socially networked video content. Except that Google apparently failed to notice all those commercial videos that are crashing the YouTube party now, turning it into little more than a clunky on-demand television network that would make Philo T. Farnsworth spin in his grave. All this with the dust barely settled on the whole lonelygirl15 flimflam.

Seeking the comfort of honest commerce, I turned to Business Week, only to run smack into “The Organic Myth” cover story, wherein on page 52 there is a rundown of the corporate owners of America’s favourite organic food brands. Ben & Jerry & Unilever. Forgot about that one. And there’s no escape in my online news diet, either: When the hell did L’Oreal buy the Body Shop? How did I miss that? According to FT.com, the L’Oreal guy says, “ the operation of single-brand stores [is] just one form of brand management.” Brand management!? I get hoarse from ranting, but find no comfort in my Buckley’s Mixture. It’s owned by Swiss pharma giant Novartis. And I can seek no escape in my preferred wobbly pop, Creemore Springs. It’s owned by Molson Breweries, who are in turn owned by Coors (itself a formerly authentic micro brewer, making for a corporate mobius worthy of M. C. Escher). This quote kind of captures the spirit of the moment: “Consumers like boutique brands,” says the head of [General Mills’] organic unit. “There’s a feeling of authenticity.”

Organic unit.

Feeling of authenticity.

Sigh.

I guess this kind of thing really represents the collision of two inevitabilities in the realm of brands: One, that people are looking for authenticity wherever they can find it in life, including in yogurt, beer and lipgloss. And, two, that enterprise will seek profit wherever it may find it, and sometimes that means small, ethically defined ‘boutique brands’ that coincidentally boast big, fat margins. Cognitive dissonance all over the place.

But wherever you find cognitive dissonance, situational ethics are usually bounding cheerfully along right behind. And so it is with brands. Let’s face it: We don’t want the happy little myths we give to ourselves to be shattered by the truth of corporate ownership. So we deconstruct and redefine authenticity, bending and stretching it until either it fits or is rent asunder and beyond hope.

So that’s what I did. And my verdicts? YouTube is a sellout. So is Body Shop. The Land Rover LR3 I drove the other day just stinks of its Ford parentage, and must therefore be stripped of its bragging rights, too. As for Ben & Jerry, the whole ice cream business is fraudulent anyway. I mean, if Haagen-Dazs still has a franchise, the boys from Vermont certainly can. So they get off on a technicality. On the other hand, Buckley’s Mixture still tastes awful, and they’ve thoughtfully kept any clues to their ownership off the packaging. And Creemore Springs is still great beer, made in the same place with the same stuff, so why do I care where the profits go as long as it isn’t to some nuclear rogue state?

We are adaptable creatures, no doubt about it. When it comes to brands, it wasn’t that long ago that we judged their authenticity by their provenance, history and parochialism. But the world is becoming more corporate by the minute, in case you hadn’t heard. Even as brands seem to proliferate, the number of companies and nations actually making things seems to be shrinking. Very little is really real anymore. So we reconstitute authenticity to fit the new reality. Now, it’s less a question of where something is made, how long it’s been made there and how single-minded its makers are. Now, we’re content simply to reconcile those artifacts with the apparent motives of the corporation that now owns them. If they respect the brands they bought, then we will too. If they ‘leverage’ them until they become insulting caricatures of themselves, then we’ll toss them faster than a Pierre Cardin belt and move on to something we can believe in. As Forrest Gump’s mom might have put it, authentic is as authentic does.

There. I feel better already.

As for that General Mills guy, maybe he needs to spend just a little bit less time with his organic unit. I’ve heard that sort of thing can make you go blind.

V for Vituperation.

2006-09-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

Well, this is rich.

Awhile back, a high-minded British fellow named Neil Boorman decided to set an example for us all by living ‘brand free’. His blog lays out his polemic and, to his credit, confesses that he’s managed to sell a book about the whole enterprise. As I write this today, all his branded stuff has been reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes at Finsbury Square, London. Onlookers were treated to free bottles of unbranded water as they watched the spectacle.

But apparently, this stunt hasn’t all gone as planned for Mr. Boorman. In a piece in the Guardian this past week, he whined, “When I announced I was burning all my branded possessions, I expected support, not censure.” You read that right. Censure. People reacted to his book-selling stunt not by seeing him as some kind of messianic social reformer but as an irrelevant crank.

And rightly so.

The whole thing is so utterly intellectually bankrupt that I hardly know where to begin. So I’ll begin here: What the blazes do you plan to wear and eat, Mr. Boorman? Will you hunt for your food and wear the skins of your prey? Because it seems to me that, brand or no brand, your presence on this planet implies consumption of resources. The fact that you and I and six billion other souls infest this benighted orb is the reason that we consume it and make such a mess. Avoiding labels isn’t going to change that.

What it IS going to do is make things worse. Unbranded products are bandits and scoundrels of the worst kind. They are accountable to nobody. Not to customers and not to shareholders. They make no promise they must then be burdened with keeping. Your wieners and beans now need only pass government thresholds for safety and no more than that. Your garments can be made anywhere their manufacturer wants to make them, out of anything and by anyone who will do the job. When a product fails, you’ll have nobody to blame. No leverage for you, no responsibility for them. And yet, for all of that, precisely the same amount of our planet’s riches will be consumed in the process of making your stuff, save and except for the grilled swordfish that the ad agency would have been fed while shooting the commercial for the branded versions.

What is most galling about this is that he offers to people, much as that No Logo person did, an alibi: The fact that we’re wrecking our collective home is the fault of brands and the people who market them, not the fault of you and me. That’s all but criminal. It’s like saying it’s not the fault of people who drive SUVs that they burn all that gas, it’s the fault of the companies that made them. We being but helpless pawns in the face of their irresistible marketing campaigns.

Look, if you want to debate the morality of rampant consumption, Mr. Boorman, you won’t find an argument here. But so long as we consume anything, we need to do it as responsibly as we can. That means buying the best quality we can afford, so we aren’t buying all over again sooner than we have to. It means making manufacturers accountable for what they produce and how they do it. It means having respect for the things we buy and the sacrifices made to produce them. And it means giving positive social meaning to doing these things so that the behavior is perpetuated. If, in the end, we buy less but buy better, we’ve got a much greater chance of saving the world than we have by mincing about in our unbranded hemp trousers wagging our fingers at it in smug disapproval.

And those things are exactly what brands are for. A good brand is to consumerism what the constitution is to citizenship. It’s power to the people. There are bad ones, too (you know who you are). But, as it is with democracy, the best way to fix them is from within the system.

That free water still came out of the ground, Mr. Boorman. The plastic bottles it likely came in were still a product of petroleum. The smoke your belongings produced will be inhaled by half the world by the time the wind is through with it, and the whole mess will still wind up in landfill. And you’ll go shopping.

They’ll be chopping a few trees down to print that book of yours, by the way. Probably advertise it, too. And if your literary ambitions are realized, your name will become a household word. A veritable po-mo Guy Fawkes.

Which is suspiciously brand-like, if you ask me.

Next thing you know, he’ll have his own logo.

Bavarians at the gate.

2006-08-22T15:38:00.000-04:00

It was the first week of August, branding’s dog days. I was lollygagging in front of the computer, putting off my commute to the office by reading the internet (It’s really quite huge, and some of it is interesting). Suddenly, I gasped audibly, only the second time the internet has made me do this (the first being that Diet Coke/Mentos thing): The unimpeachable Advertising Age revealed that BMW was about to change its slogan. What was for more than three decades “The Ultimate Driving Machine” was poised to become “A company of ideas.” The article was penned by no less a personage than the redoubtable Al Ries, the Martin Luther of positioning. And he didn’t approve.

Well, neither did anyone else out there in cyber-self-styled-brand-expert land. The folly of a change like this is painfully obvious, I hope. The world’s 15th most valuable brand according to Business Week, the company that generally produces the fattest margins in the business, got there by a) Knowing who it was and what it stood for with resolute arrogance, and b) Rooting that in the bedrock of the product experience. Blah blah blah. Plenty of experts like me have weighed in on that already. This isn’t about that.

This right here is what we like to call a cautionary tale.

You see, what interested me most about the whole eruption wasn’t the bleating of brand experts, but the hue and cry from regular folks (Here's an example, along with the text of the original article. Here's another. And another. ). Practically the day the article ran in Ad Age, internet forums were frothing with indignation. “Since when did BMW become Hudsucker Industries?,” spat one jilted Bimmerphile. “It’s like watching an accident in slow motion,” sulked another. Cruising the message boards, it was fascinating to see how personally people took the news. How betrayed they were. And how suddenly trivial they felt at stoplights.

I hope that some of the world’s other überbrands were paying attention to all this. It proved that even in success there is danger, and in this case the danger lay in the fact that when you make a brand culturally powerful, it’s not yours any more. Brands like that live celebrity existences. They’re owned by their fans. They’ll forever more be dodging paparazzi, never to enjoy another moment of real autonomy, and it will only end in oblivion. Go ahead and change your hair colour if you dare, Britney, but don’t for a minute think it’s just about you anymore.

Very soon after the firestorm over Ries’ piece, BMW rushed to correct the story/reverse its position. Ad Age and Al Ries got it wrong. “The Ultimate Driving Machine” would stay. But by then, the damage was done. The faithful were confronted with the truth that they were being marketed to. BMW wasn’t a religion, it was just a brand.

And I’d already been to the Porsche dealer.

They haven’t had an idea since 1964. There’s no substitute for that.

Reeling in the years.

2006-07-25T17:09:00.000-04:00

Fresh back from a vacation, and I’m feeling benevolent. Besides, I’ve made a bunch of bitchy posts lately, which might leave us thinking that maybe I don’t love brands so much after all. And that would just be wrong. Anyway, as somebody’s mom used to say, “If you can’t say something nice, go into journalism.”

Besides, brands are what put Sweetie and me on that beach last week. So, today, I’m going to say something nice.

Ish.

This, friends, is a story of redemption, and it’s about a brand called Olay. It came to mind as I was sweating off mai tais on the hotel’s treadmill, watching the little television thoughtfully provided to me and my fellow hamsters to relieve the ennui. On came a commercial for Olay stuff, featuring a stern, self-actualized looking woman using the power of science to defy nature. Not a man in sight. This woman was using the goop in question for her own satisfaction, thank you very much. And that’s unremarkable on the face of it, unless you consider the history of this brand.

If you’re old enough that they played ‘Color My World’ at your prom, you might remember the original Oil of Olay brand as it was before Procter and Gamble got hold of it. It was a one-product business. It featured coquettish women of uncertain vintage asking prying gentlemen, “How old do you THINK I am?” The nerve. And it ran ads with copy like, “My wife, I think I’ll keep her,” and a slogan like “Keep them guessing.” Seriously. I am not making this up.

These guys made the Virginia Slims woman look like Gloria Steinem. And this brand should have been given some kind of Viking funeral a generation ago.

But, of course, that’s not what happened. Today, Olay is a vast franchise. Still very much in the anti-aging business, but no longer in the ‘if you want to keep your husband, keep your youth’ business. Where women used to have to sneak this stuff through the checkout the way the fellas do with Grecian Formula, today they can buy it openly and straight-faced like any other cosmetic and not look even slightly desperate. In brandland, this is an Angelina Jolie-sized transformation.

I’d love to credit P&G with a social conscience, but that’s outside the scope of this inquiry. What’s clear, though, is that they understand that this brand is better off owning what it can do rather than why people want it. They never made the mistake of confusing the power to look younger with the social meaning of looking young. That, they realized, is just tactics. And tactics are disposable. More than this, they kept their eye on one really important insight: Meet a marketer who works in this product category, and you’ll eventually hear the cynical expression ‘hope in a jar’. P&G understood from the start that it’s not about hope at all. Just look at that sleek packaging. Olay is power in a jar, baby.

I guess the moral of the story is that a brand is never beyond redemption if it keeps paying attention. If it has a sense of context. And if it’s sure enough of its fundamental purpose that it’s willing to adapt the means by which it accomplishes that purpose.

Of course, selling a product that makes you look good still doesn’t hurt, either.

I could forgive, say, Ferrari a host of cultural sins if I had one in my driveway. Now THAT would be nice.

Beware of Greeks bearing brands.

2006-07-09T14:27:00.000-04:00

I’ve always believed that no brand is wholly in charge of its destiny. Just as Engelbert Humperdinck as a concept is incomplete without his fans, so it is with laundry detergent, cars, colognes, hamburgers, scotch, chewing gum and insect repellent. The brand acquires associations from the marketplace, starting the second it’s born, and continues to evolve that way forever more in a perpetual cultural conversation.

But dealing with marketing people, as I am occasionally required to do in order to keep gas in the Mini, you sometimes meet up with those who see things differently. There roam the earth legions of brand determinists, a flinty breed who think that every day in the life of a brand is a blank page. That the marketplace will forget whatever you tell them to forget and do and think whatever they’re told, if the logo is swooshy enough.

And I have found their king.

His name is Andreas Markessinis, and it is his professional opinion that Greece is in desperate need of branding (see for yourself). Greece, the country. You know, where western civilization invented its philosophy, politics, morality and flaming cheese? That Greece. This place has been a going concern since before the Leafs won their last Stanley Cup. It’s, like, the definition of ancient. And I reckon it has a brand, thank you.

To be fair, Mr. Markessinis acknowledges as much. But he thinks Greece’s brand is “…sleepy [and] disorganized…”. And, though he confuses the brand with the product experience, he does go on to make a reasoned case that branding is about, as Johnny Mercer put it, ac-cent-tchu-ating the positive. Still, I think he may be a bit too close to the subject - a common affliction among marketers - and that breeds a kind of arrogance that’s deadly to brands.

From New Coke to the Cadillac Catera, from McDonald’s Pizza to Levi’s Slates, brands never experience more near misses at oblivion than at the hands of brand managers who want to make their marks before their hitches are up. They and their market research geeks may mean well, but their disrespect for history is, by definition, a disrespect for the relationships people have with the brands they’re managing.

Do I have to bring up that whole Oakley thing again?

In the world of branding, good intentions like this are Trojan horses. A fact apparently not lost on Mr. Markessinis’ constituency. No posts from him in a year, no forum discussions, ever. Whatever his original agenda is, it’s faded into the mists of time. Unlike, say, the Acropolis. Or democracy. Or Big Macs.

Smelled like teen spirit.

2006-06-21T15:16:00.000-04:00

Our youngest, a strapping lad of 15, has selected his aftershave, an adolescent male rite of passage. He’s picked a tony designer brand, for which I’m proud of him because it evinces some taste. And because it isn’t Axe. It is ever so much more pleasant having a teenager around when they don’t smell like the inside of a taxi.

Axe was an instant cliché. The brand’s proposition was Hai Karate redux: Spray this on yourself and score. And the disarming clarity of that predictably led to a similarly direct advertising strategy: Show a guy spraying this stuff on himself and (almost) scoring. So primitive. So universal. What teenage boy could resist? How could it possibly fail?

Well, of course, for a while there, herds of these lumbering ids bought the pitch. Or, at least, they figured anything that couldn’t hurt and might help was worth adding to mom’s grocery list. Soon, high school corridors reeked of a potent mix of Axe and hopeful testosterone. It got so bad that you began to see news reports of fragrance bans in schools, if you can imagine.

But the flaw in all this was that teenage girls watch TV, too.

What knucklehead really thought that blatantly and publicly telling boys their aftershave was chick-bait was a durable strategy? Not one that knows the first thing about women, that’s for sure. Maybe not even one that’s ever been on a date. As junior junior sagely put it, “Now, girls say, ‘oh, you’re wearing Axe…,’” in the same tone of voice they might use to observe mayonnaise on your chin. Even in grade ten, Axe has become a badge of desperation.

Well, I’m enjoying this all very much. Especially since, this week, a sensation at the Cannes Festival of Utter Social Irrelevance is an exhuberantly puerile promotion for Axe (called Lynx elsewhere). Quoting from the award show entry: “Lynx's problem was that guys 17-25yrs were dropping out of the brand because they perceived it to be for their younger brother (sic). Lynx needed to actively engage 17-25yrs males.”

Might be too late, boys. It seems the girls those guys are trying to impress are on to your game. And so are their little sisters.

Payback Mountain.

2006-06-07T17:42:00.000-04:00

I read this week in Ad Age that Ralph Lauren (the corporation, not the guy) is discontinuing his jeans (the ones they sell, not the ones he’s wearing). Someone from Lauren confessed that the brand had simply been bled dry by overpromotion and overdistribution. Well, true dat, as the young people say. But I wonder if there was a bit more to it.

For decades, Ralph Lifshitz imagined, invented and nurtured a mythic America that never was, and then invited everyone to immigrate and buy clothes there. And you didn’t even need a passport to cross the border. Just a credit card and a willingness to surrender your individuality to become a mannequin in Ralph’s diorama. In my mind, the apogee of all this was the 1980s, an era when everybody was pretty much okay with joining socioeconomic glee clubs and wearing their prescribed uniforms. People willingly sported the little pony logo as a badge of sophistication or aspiration, if you can imagine, oblivious to the brand’s true positioning, which I will now reveal:

Polo Ralph Lauren was Garanimals for yuppies.

(Remember Garanimals? Children’s clothes for people who are terrified by Gap Kids. All you have to do is make sure each day that all of little Biff’s or Muffy’s clothes have the same animal label – a giraffe, say - and you’ll know they match. Much easier than figuring out that whole plaid versus stripes thing.)

This consensual self-delusion continued for Polo for about as long as it did for society at large. Then, in the 1990s, it ended like a parade going over a cliff. Authenticity became the new black, for brands and for folks. Everybody ran screaming from affectation, and the cooler you were the faster and further you ran. Pretty soon, you could get Ralph’s natty duds at The Bay. Could “overpromotion and overdistribution” be far behind? And will it end with Ralph’s jeans? Or is this just part of the long, slow, inevitable fading away of a brand that was never more than a mirage.

Well, I can personally guarantee you that no actual cowboys wear Polo jeans. Not one. And I know about these things. And I’ll wager that the same absence of the Polo badge could be observed at the prep schools, Hamptons beach houses, English country estates and Virginia horse farms to whom that silver haired smoothie owes a debt of inspiration.

It’s only a matter of time before everybody quits you, Ralph. You can’t dine out forever on an invented past.

Now, if somebody would just tell that to the Roots boys, I’d be a happy camper.

The Dr Vinci Code.

2006-05-21T13:32:00.000-04:00

A couple of years back, I got hoodwinked into reading that DaVinci book, about which I am reminded everywhere I turn these days. (It wasn’t very good, since you asked. Take out all the God stuff, and you’ve got a lame thriller that would have made Ludlum blush). Anyway, among the things that I thought didn’t warrant all the fuss was the character of Sophie Neveu, winsomely played by Audrey Tautou in the film. I just kept thinking, dudes… it’s been 2000 years. Even if she IS a relative of you-know-who, she isn’t a close one. Genetically speaking, there’s not much left in there after, oh, a hundred generations or so.

This is what I’m thinking about as I sit in an interminable meeting, sipping a Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. Not just a Dr Pepper, mind you. And not just a Diet one, or a Cherry one, or a Vanilla one, but a Dr Pepper so manifold blessed that it possesses all of these characteristics in a single, genetically engineered chimera. A third declension of what was a niche little brand to begin with. (A brand so aware of its own marginality, by the way, that it has forbidden the use of the period after ‘Dr’). I selected it from the tray, choosing it from among all manner of surer things, soda-wise, out of sheer incredulity.

Good Lord, what chucklehead brand manager thinks that there is so much meaning in the Dr Pepper name that it doesn’t matter what he puts it on? So, we’ll drink it even if it has mouthwash in it, as long as it says Dr Pepper on the can?

Good luck with all that. Who do they think this brand is? Apple?

Brand extension is a risky business at the best of times. It’s like adding a deck onto your house. It might look nice if it’s proportionally right and made of the same or some complimentary material. But make it the wrong size or too different, and your house will look silly. And if your house is a shack, the whole mess might fall down while you’re hammering away, leaving you with nothing but your new deck, which will be useless unless your hobby is reviewing passing parades.

Let me now return you to my regularly scheduled analogy. This Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper making rings on the boardroom table in front of me was a bit like Sophie: cute, but there wasn’t much of the original brand left in there.

I should have taken the Coke.

Classic, that is.

Hey, don’t look at me. At least that’s just one adjective. And at least its parent brand is ‘the real thing’. Which is more than you can say for Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. Or Sophie Neveu. Or possibly Dan Brown.