Dim Bulb

Tales of Promise & Woe Pt. 2

While the Cerberus strategy for Chrysler seems ever-more focused on slashing costs under the cover of cocktail party branding, India's Tata Group may be looking forward to a far different strategy if it successfully purchases Land Rover and Jaguar.

Tata is a diversified conglomerate, with interests in everything from manufacturing industrial steel to selling financial services.  It owns some well-known brands, such as Tetley's Tea and Eight O'Clock Coffee, and lots of businesses about which few people reading this essay have ever heard (including yours truly; check out the list).  Tata is based in India, and has been chasing consumer brands outside of the country since 2000.

Yet its public comments say nothing about brands.

While the Cerberus execs couldn't complete a sentence about Chrysler without praising the miraculous healing powers of brands, Tata is interested in something more.  Development.  Production.  Improving the quality of its operations, within its automotive group and across the industries in which it has interest.

Imagine that.  Purchasers who don't think that they're necessarily smarter than the companies they acquire.  How un-American!  Tata's public comments evidence the approach of shrewd operators with a public intention to improve their businesses, not buyout types with a secret plan.

I suspect they know that the value of the labels "Land Rover" and "Jaguar" is internal – in the technology and other capabilities of the businesses – and not external, in the esoterica of consumer imagination.  Tata intends to build better mousetraps, and it knows that brands are an outcome of that behavior, and not the ideas that get attached to products that don't warrant it.

This might be a trend.

While big, established brand names waste time and money building virtual showrooms and trying to hawk infoentertaincontent, companies that exist outside the distracting, comfy canon of branding are gearing up to apply their know-how  The necessity of performance trumps any ROI analysis that requires specially-color glasses to see.

Consider South African Breweries, which bought Miller a few years ago.

SAB has excelled in marketplaces literally defined by who can jab elbows the hardest, capture the right distribution, and otherwise make sure that thirsty folks reach for one of its brands before those of the competition.  SABMiller has since been learning lessons from the experts who’ve succeeded in Botswana and Tanzania.  SAB may never win an award for its branding, but quarterly profit success is a nice consolation prize, don’t you think? 

Or consider Lenovo, which recently purchased IBM's PC division (including its vaunted Thinkpad laptop brand). 

This is a huge Chinese manufacturer that has built a business without the luxury of rich customers to sell to, or rich branding budgets with which to waste their time.  Do you think it's interested in importing ideas like sponsoring golf tournaments or viral videos?  Of course not.  It's going to apply know-how on operations into its system, and apply its own know-how to driving more sales for Thinkpad (which are a great line of machines that never got enough attention of marketers who knew how to sell, not just position).

Lenovo bought a great brand name, but it is focused on building a great, worldwide business.

Wouldn't it be strange if the Anglo/Euro brand gurus were out-pitched and out-delivered by the can-do types building successful global companies from not-so-out-of-the-way places anymore, like Mumbai and Beijing? 

Stay tuned.  There are a lot of bright bulbs who know how to build brands all over the world, and much of their language is incomprehensible to the dictionary of branding writ mid-last-Century in the US and Europe. 

I worry that there's a lot of woe in Chrysler's future (check out the latest inane social media ad for Jeep).  It's very likely that the Tales of Promise won't get written in English. 

Tales of Promise & Woe Pt. 1

Evidencing two different approaches to brand, the prospects for success at the newly-privatized Chrysler seem doomed when contrasted with the promise of Land Rover and Jaguar being owned by India's Tata Group.

The way I see it, Chrysler sees its branding challenge as one of image: consumers defected to imports because they perceived US vehicles to be unreliable, and now they need to be won back.  Quality has improved, but Chrysler suffers from an unfair branding hangover.  If only consumers thought different things about the company's brand, they'd buy more of its cars and trucks.

It has just recruited the top brand guru from Lexus to lead the charge into Our Collective imagination.  Deborah Wahl Meyer is credited with tripling marketing events for Lexus, which included gourmet cooking parties and tie-ins with luxury retailer Nieman Marcus.  She studied lifestyles of the rich in order to launch the LS hybrid, which cost over $100,000.  She's an auto industry lifer.

I worry that this strategy is about a generation too old to do any good.

The American auto industry pretty much invented, if not perfected, the idea that consumers buy dreams and visions over reality.  It had to.  Selling all the units that rolled incessantly off of its production lines required people to buy cars fairly often.  Much like the new season on broadcast TV, or the latest Top Ten music hit, the Big Three gave us the concept of "this year’s model."  Vance Packard wrote about the phenomenon in The Wastemakers.  Vehicles were marketed as fashion statements more than utilitarian tools, and a business model was thereupon built.

And upon that model the businesses faltered.

I am reminded of a photo of Winston Churchill, scion of the British aristocracy, walking to his first day as leader of his country, his black overcoat threadbare along the hems.  For most of recorded history, buying stuff just because it was new was considered stupid, even by most of the people who could have done it.  Apart from the brief blip of mid-20th Century consumer affluence and media naiveté – primarily in America -- folks have tended to hold onto and use things until they stopped working.

Turns out that most of the world never stopped feeling this way.

Without consumers with disposable income to take, companies in Europe and Asia had to create new products that were functional improvements over old ones.  Design mattered – form followed function – and so did marketing that triggered consumer wants and aspirations.  But when it came to cars, the Big Three got ever-better at trying to manipulate people's dreams in order to sell the stuff they manufactured.  Its competitors did it the other way around: manufactured vehicles that enabled people's dreams.

This left the door wide open in the US to competitors that focused on making cars and trucks that actually worked better, longer, and for less money.  And in came the Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, the Europeans).

To view the success of imports – inaptly labeled, as now lots of those "imports" are made in the US – as a branding story is to fundamentally misread this history.

The vehicles were simply better, in every which way.  Not only did they last longer, but the manufacturers had a business model that supported long-term ownership...and made money on it!

No insult to the import marketers, but marketing brilliance deserves no credit for this phenomenon, no innovation of branding is the casus belli.  The Lexus branding could have been incomprehensibly perfect; so was lots of the expensive branding that the Big Three did during the same time.  The difference was measured in metal, not imagination.

So how is the new CMO's Lexus experience now relevant to Chrysler's challenge?  It's not.  Not by a long shot.  While she busy hosting cocktail parties and golf tournaments that were "on brand," dealers were busy selling cars that were better (down to the click sound of buttons and handles), lasted longer, and cost less than the competition.  Period.  Form follows function…the Lexus brand was driven by its vehicles, not the imagined presumptions of art gallery receptions or, at Toyota and also credited to Ms. Meyer, the oddly inert, meaningless branding slogan "Move Forward." 

But let's presume for a moment that the Lexus experience were absolutely relevant, and that Chrysler’s new minions said "hey, let’s get her to do that stuff here."

The branding approach would still be doomed from the get-go.  You can't replicate moments in time – there are too many variables – so there's no way she could do the same thing even if she/they wanted to.  That's why the latest Hollywood movie based on the last success isn't such a success the second time.  Chrysler is a different company, with different qualities, in a different place in space and time.

And sometimes the fact that something worked once is the reason why it'll never work again, yet lots of marketers think the opposite.

Chrysler is still out-of-touch with marketing reality if it thinks it can out-creatively brand its way back into consumer relevance.

As I wrote when the Cerberus deal was first announced, there's lots it can do to renew itself.  And I want it to succeed.  If the company can truly connect the functional attributes of its offering into actionable, meaningful consumer behaviors, we're talking the stuff of HBR cases and something far more important than branding awards.

Sales.

But I felt then, as I do now even more, that a second outcome is more likely.  That the real strategy there is to slash jobs and benefits, produce some flashy and otherwise irrelevant branding, and then flip the company to another purchaser for a tidy profit.

Maybe India's Tata Group will buy it.

In Part 2 of this essay, I’ll explore how that company has a fundamentally different rationale for its contemplated purchase of Land Rover and Jaguar, and why its prospects for success are so much better than what I fear is the doomed strategy at Chrysler.

Caveman Gap Ads on Facebook

Well, not exactly.

I've chanced upon three subjects recently covered in the business media as branding stories, yet they have little in common save a shared and skewed perspective on brands.

First, consider the idiotic, money-wasting exercise of bringing "Cavemen" to ABC as a television show this fall.

What started as the punchline to a bad marketing slogan for Geico Insurance – "insurance so easy, even a caveman can do it" – has given us a litany of incomprehensible, unmemorable TV ads (in a wonderfully self-referential move, the latest spots feature a caveman getting therapy because of…the ads about cavemen!), an expensively polished and totally pointless animated web site (called cavemanscrib) and, now, an upcoming TV sitcom.

Why cavemen?  Some focus group research must have revealed that people find insurance complicated, so Geico's brand strategy was to go to the marketing creatives to bring the brand to life.  So we get cavemen, and they become more important than the company or the attributes of its sales strategy, detached entirely from Geico or insurance.

Talk about getting the brand before the, er, invention of the wheel.

What does Geico do to make insurance easier, more dependable, or deliver whatever attributes it thinks its would-be customers care about?  Nobody knows, because in the brilliantly inverted equation of branding, it doesn’t tell anybody what they are.  Details?  Points of real difference?  That's mundane, so beneath even a caveman, let alone the brand.

Instead, we get nonsense advertising and, soon, a TV series that promises to make the Flintstones look like Masterpiece Theatre.

Second, Gap recently reported that its net was up almost 20% for the fiscal second quarter.

Gap did it without driving any increase in top-line sales, but rather by cutting costs (i.e. mostly firing people).  In fact, the increase in net cost it about $20 million in severance payments  The new CEO is known for his skills as a cost-cutter, both by slashing staff, and shifting production to cheaper overseas suppliers.

So what's going on at Gap?  What kind of stores does it plan to staff and promote?  Nobody knows, because its branding ads feature dour celebrities wearing generic clothing items in dullish, artsy black & white photos.

The idea is that Gap's brand is an idea separate from all of the slashing, cheapening, and devoid-of-visiting-customers-silence going on in the stores.  The only place the brand and reality intersect is when the company has to report sales.  Maybe everybody buys the image, even as nobody is shopping at the stores anymore.

Finally, BrandWeek reported last week that Facebook is enjoying an embarrassment of riches when it comes to spending advertisers’ money.

The purpose, after all the yadda yadda about branding, is to spend branding dollars – which, it seems, are different from real-money dollars – because the only measure of efficacy is how many eyeballs glance over the pixels before a chat is begun, photo viewed, or friend request sent.  Measures called interactions gauge the value of engagement with brands.  Facebook's progenitor, MySpace, reports that advertisers are spending with it as obsessively as they did a year ago.

The reality of such social sites is that advertising is mostly irrelevant to users, in that people go to communities to get things done vs. consume marketing.  They're already complaining about the intrusive (and often junky) advertising that has overtaken MySpace.

If only the branding has anything to do with delivering compelling, memorable, or commercially useful information.  God forbid it actually sold something other than the brand, which might not be on brand, or beneficial to the stalagmites of the brand, or, well, add your own favorite nonsense branding blather here to complete this sentence.

What does this latest news about cavemen, Gap, and Facebook have in common? 

It's all related to branding, and utterly unrelated to actual business.

I wouldn't be surprised, come to think of it, to see cavemen doing ads for Gap on Facebook.  It would probably win a branding award.

Branding a Dull Razr

I wrote a week ago about Motorola and its marketing opportunity/necessity for its new Razr 2 mobile phone, but if this ad is any indication, the branding isn't looking all that sharp.

Let's see...what can we learn if we deconstruct the ad? 

Of course, that's already giving it far more attention than 99.9% of humanity will.  Most folks will flip past it in a nanosecond, capturing little if anything from the encounter.  Reviewing ads like they're movies is like calling a spell-check program Shakespeare.

The first test should be to blink at it once, and then try to remember something.  Here's what my iconic memory registered:

• A member of the band Village People wishing he was holding a bat?
• Something is growing out of the back of the guy's head?
• He's holding a knife, or taking a whiff of his armpit?
• Whatever he's holding takes two hands to support?
• Glowing orb and glistening arms mean ad for suntan lotion?

So much for first reactions.  But what does the ad communicate to that rare reader who dwells on such stuff?

The Razr 2 comes with a stereo Bluetooth headset.  It's a phone, but now it's a gizmo that holds "over 30 hours of music."  Ok.

But wait a minute.  The asterisk reminds us that the music storage only comes with the optional 2GB card.  Lots of fine print along the left-hand margin provides more warnings and caveats than a cigarette ad.  The Motorola web URL nearly hidden at the bottom takes visitors to a page promoting the headset on David Beckham, and it costs $129 on top of the phone.

And, by the way, the Motorola store features lots of Razr phones, including a V3 version, which may or may not be the Razr 2 featured in the ad.  So the ultimate purpose of this branding isn't to actually sell anything.

How inane.

The Razr 2 is a make-or-break product for Motorola, and it needs to be marketed in a field crowded with a confusing array of products and services.  Where does the music come from that goes on the phone?  How much does it cost?  Can you use the phone as a, well, a phone, or is it only good for listening to music? (there's no obvious mic on the headset) 

What about the branding makes this offering truly unique and must-have?

Nothing.  It's just some broadly thematic, unmemorable branding, courtesy of some dim bulbs who value image and color schemes over messages that compel people to take action.  The only behavior prompted by tripping over this ad is to turn the magazine page.

Oh, and by the way, the Razr 2 guy isn't the first band member to appear in a forgettable ad:

   

Fuzzy Branding Logic

A recent article in BrandWeek waxed poetic about the preponderance, importance, and utter wonderfulability of brands among teens, stopping just short of giving brands credit for phases of the Moon.

It turns out that Generation Yers spend twice as much time each week "talking about brands" as adults.  They also talk about "marketing or media" about 20% more often.

So, of course, this means that brands are a force of nature.  Brands inspire and dominate conversations...teens talk about them via text and IM, and this word-of-mouth brandification happens twice as regularly for them as it does for their parents.  The business darlings and required buzzwords are cited, of course, from YouTube and Facebook, to social currency and multichannel conversations.  "Brands are badges for teens," says the guru behind the study (and whose firm sells the consulting based on these desperately intriguing findings).

Riiiight.

What is a brand, exactly?  It is what a company sells?  How it sells?  Is it customer service, or its approach to promotional pricing?  Product performance, or durability?  Employee policy, and the resulting attitudes?  Is it marketing communications, colors, logos, and/or ad creative?  Customer thoughts?  Actions?  Feelings?  Orgones in the air? DNA?  ESP?

Well, brands are all of that.  Brand is a synonym for existence.  It includes anything humans conceive, let alone chat about or consume.  Talk about anything, anywhere, at any time, and you're really talking about branding.  Brand encompasses the totality of everything. 

And it's accountable for absolutely nothing.

That's because it's so overwhelmingly big, so there’s no real defined it to it at all.  When the teen research says that kids "...[are] extremely engaged in conversation about brands," they could be talking about product availability, pricing, or their subjective feelings about their own experiences.  75% of the conversations reported that they talked about entertainment content – so there were lots of "um, that was a cool movie" or "I love that guitar solo" – but this was talk about brands.

Connecting this chatter to behavior?  Nope, at least not by any objective measure beyond links to more nebulous conversation.  The research talks about how much talking about whatever people talk about leads to, er, more talking.

The idea that something might prompt a comment, which leads to a conversation, is nothing new.  Deciding whether this was good or bad for business would be the real ah-hah.  However, since the definitions of brand are so vague and often conflicting, the data reveal nothing substantive or actionable.

Well, all except one action: sell the idea to clients.

It's nice propaganda for selling branding services (via WOM or another other newfangled mechanism), I guess, and it's directed to prompting purchase behavior at companies where the CEO has read the article – or any of the trendy nonsense in other media – and let it be known that the company needs to do something about it.

So, ultimately, it's brilliant marketing, as it makes an argument, albeit with fuzzy logic, to do it.

Whatever it is.  For whatever reason.

Free Has No Value

Recent musings from Rupert Murdoch and analysts about a free online Wall Street Journal make for intriguing conversation, but might miss the real potential value of News Corp.'s latest acquisition.

And this distraction might be completely purposeful.

If you believe the press release blather, News Corp. paid $5.6 billion so it can repurpose the Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal brands into labels for new cable television and online properties.  The company has told stock analysts that it will "expand the Journal’s brand," whatever that means, but which could include making the content on wsj.com free for all.

It's intoxicating to ponder the magic of web site visits and the forever-spinning carousel of clicks and feeds as something independent of substantive relevance.

You can just imagine the business strategy presentation slide, with boxes named consumer and free content connected with arrows to other boxes with various brand names on them.  Money, maybe through advertising, will appear in the hand-off from one box to the next.  By charging nothing, they'll make something.  It says so in the little bubble graphic on the slide.

Isn't this the same nonsense that fueled all of those dot.com sites a few years ago?

People spend time doing things that are relevant to their lives, whether serious or playful.  Even "free" web sites need to have a purpose: the content on YouTube, or the personal profiles on News Corp.'s MySpace, is relevant to particular user needs, some of them nefarious, and lots of them inane.  It costs those services to stay relevant...videos need to get dumber, and profiles racier, because it costs users nothing to visit them versus another site. 

There's no loyalty, because relevance is only as good as the entertainment value of the most recent visit.

Ultimately, this sets up a losing proposition: free content tends become commoditized, as there are no reasons why it can't be copied or bettered when its value starts at zero.  We've seen this happen in marketing offers (promotions are easily copied and work less well the more they're used), employee benefits (bonuses are expected, various assistance services are taken for granted), and entertainment distribution (without the support of iTunes/iPod exclusivity, what do you think the value of an .mp3 song would be?).

Why should it be any different when it comes to the news business?

Rupert Murdoch is a smart, bright bulb, so he knows that valuations – whether by consumers, or by stockholders -- require calculations of costs and benefits.  People pay for access to the Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones Newswire because the content is relevant to their needs.  The labels with those words on them mean little.  Bad, irrelevant information from Dow Jones is as worthless as it would be if branded by Reuters, the Financial Times, or Fred's Tropical Fish & Stock Market Commentary.

So I suspect the various ideas about free or somehow popularized content he (and others) are throwing around are, at worst, simple musings about what to do and, at best, purposeful distractions to make competitors do dumb things.

The real opportunity for News Corp. will be to make its new content relevant to people in new ways.  It will mean linking it with the right technology/distribution, so that it addresses consumer behaviors that the company wants to prompt and support.

I bet they're considering services dedicated to particular users, and which warrant a fee in ways that no other business could provide.  Tools that enable targeted customers to accomplish things better, faster, or more economically.  Interactive mechanisms that surpass the versation of a generic finance chat room, and somehow yield more authoritative insights.  Expanding content creation to provide mobile, push-related access to information, again in ways that substantiate the name, and expense, of Dow Jones or the Journal.  Frequent-reader benefits?  Exclusive access to company or industry-specific news, chat, or something else? 

News Corp. has immense opportunities to adapt its latest content properties to behaviors in the marketplace.

Junk it up, or give it away in vague hopes that branding will somehow provide the valuation and profits, and it’ll miss all of them.

Free has no value.

A Razr Thin Margin for Hope?

Motorola has very quietly announced plans to introduce in the next few weeks the successor model to the most popular mobile phone in history, the new Razr 2.

The news got minor pickup in the mainstream media, and a few blog mentions.  The press release is buried on Motorola's site, though one of its rotating home page graphics will take visitors to a promotional site to enter a contest for more information.

An info site is sort-of visible on the home page, too, where you can find lots of animated phones flipping and spinning, all to the soundtrack I think they used to play before Yes took to the stage at concerts in the 70s.

It is on this new product that Motorola hopes to make some margin.  I say good luck.

Past all of the exquisite and obviously expensive branding already wasted on the launch, I think there are at least five things Motorola could do to sell products – not just "position the brand" – and make the Razr 2 a must-have purchase:

First, highlight a function, not a functionality laundry list.  I know the rage these days is to offer phones that floss your teeth and read your mind in addition to placing calls, but most people find it impossible to grasp (let alone value) lists of attributes.  The Razr 2 functions are many and diverse, but it all adds up to more uncertainty – it begs the question "how well does it do any of them?" – instead of simply offering to do at least one thing flawlessly.

There should be an obvious reason why it’s not just an enhancement or cosmetic update to the original Razr, but something truly worth owning.  Save the list for supporting arguments, if anybody asks for it.

Second, tout reliability.  Not only did the first Razrs capture lots of sales, but users clocked lots of time using them.  You’d think Motorola could claim to have put all of that experience into ensuring that Razr 2 calls don’t get dropped, data isn't lost, batteries stay charged, etc.  Right now, the phone is as technocute as any other.  It claims to do a lot, but what's to believe?  (see Point #1 above)

Third, create adoption incentives, not just slick branding.  There's noting in the current marketing, or in the descriptions of the various service provider offerings, that says buy now.  Are they just above such crass commercialism?  Don't tell that to Motorola's shareholders.

This could be the time to invent novel incentives, such as hardware subscription offers, back-end loaded pricing, or actual financial reward for referrals that result in sales.  The company needs early adopters to get the word out.  It's strange that the marketing isn't laser-focused on this outcome.

Fourth, Motorola could approach Razr owners as members of a community, not just purchasers of a device.

Beyond the obligatory send to a friend and Digg This options on the product web page, why not create the real qualities of community: shared purpose, reward, incentive to communicate, responsibilities.  Perhaps Razr 2 owners could get special content – like product or entertainment reviews based on their calling areas – to which they could contribute, share, or do whatever else people in communities do.

After all, phone users are de facto participants in a network.  Why is that network conceived only from a technology perspective, and not the basis for an interactive community?  The marketing folks are strangely quiet on this front, perhaps because it's the purview of technologists.

And, finally, the company could also approach Razr 2 loyalty as a usage program, not just a CRMified opportunity to throw more sales offers at unwitting customers.

Imagine if callers could accrue frequent call minutes the way fliers collect miles?  Higher use would result in more benefits, perhaps additional ways to feedback to the company, or anything that developed a sense of participation and loyalty through experience, not just the hype of marketing collateral.

There's lots Motorola could do to make Razr 2 the success it needs it to be.  The only stumbling block will be whether there are any bright bulbs there who are able to consider options beyond traditional branding.

You've Got to be Kidding

The State Department last week named baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. its newest American public diplomacy envoy.

The announcement was the government's chance to shoot some YouTube video and propagate paragraphs of blather about global dialog, young people, and how important it is that administration flunkies get to travel to far-away places to attend sporting events and have lots of cultural exchanges over ceremonial dinners.

You've got to be kidding.

If geopolitics were a sport, these days it would be cagefight deathmatch.  The government rarely misses a chance to tell us that America is fighting for its very life.  Media reports show us that lots of people who once liked us, or at least were happy to ignore us as they killed one another, now want to kill us.  For sport, it seems sometimes.

In marketing terms, democracy – or simply the rule of law vs. divination by the perturbed – is losing the brand preference match against the brands that promise chaos, human misery, and endless, violent retribution.  A generation of people around the planet is being successfully taught ways to not just resent everything the West takes for granted, but see it as provocation.

So the US government has hired Cal Ripken to organize baseball games and help kids think good things about America.

This would be laughable if the stakes weren't so high.

I don't mean to slight Ripken.  He was an incredible utility player, and made history by showing up and playing the game with incredible consistency.  He embodies the traits that I want to teach to my daughter, and attributes that I definitely think about when I think about what it means to be an American.

But diplomacy isn't about thinking, any more than branding is.  It's about behavior.

The politicos have taken a page from the branding playbook, and think that they can make people think things...or that it matters.  This approach has given us woefully symbolic communications, from the oft-derided "Mission Accomplished" stunt after the invasion of Iraq, to elevation of the vote there as an all-meaningful event.

Yet these symbols are empty.  They fall on deaf or distrustful ears, and distract our vision from the things that really matter.  Institutions.  Routines of daily life.  Necessities for family safety.  Involvement in things, not just witnessing them...or falling victim to them.

Finding ways to deliver such behaviors, and ways to get people involved in them, is the communications/branding/public diplomacy challenge of our Times.  We lose the debate if all we do is talk.  Just like most corporate brand marketers lose consumers when they promote things that nobody needs, cares about, or can do anything with.

I can just see it now.  The photo of Cal helping teach a shoeless Chinese kid how to hold a baseball bat.  The caption will celebrate the expression of American values, the moment celebrated as a communications success.

But no cameras or captions will follow the kid as he’s returned to the factory and the loom, to which he will remain chained, until the next special moment of Americanness comes around.

No stack of clippings at the State Department featuring Cal, Michelle Kwan (another important diplomat), or similarly-staged events for their boss, Karen Hughes (a party player who got the plum travel-the-world gig), will change the way anybody lives.  They stay focused on image and reputation, and wholly ignorant of the behavioral reality from which those attributes emerge.

When corporate marketers get this equation backwards, quarterly profits suffer.  Bonuses are reduced.  When the government gets it wrong, people keep getting killed, and its communications stay inert, on the sidelines.

Three cheers for Cal Ripken.  He deserves his reputation.  But there's nothing his reputation can do to help keep the team he just joined from losing. 

Integrity Schmegrity

You'd think that widespread agreement, especially among commercial competitors whose only common ground is a common interest in killing one another, would herald a Universal Truth.

So what does it mean when Sony, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and a long list of other PC manufacturers "recommend Windows Vista?"

The line appears in ads just about everywhere.  Some corporate web sites devote space to it, like Alienware's "True Vista Experience" page.  Microsoft has spent many millions of dollars to incentivize its partners to plug Vista.

I don't know why they spend the money, or why anybody would take it.

First off, shouldn’t Microsoft focus on telling people why Vista is any good?

It's an OS – an operating system, which means a goodly number of PC buyers probably don't realize it's something separate from the hardware system they purchase – and it replaces another OS, Windows XP, that didn't really have too many people complaining about it.

Vista comes in multiple, confusing versions.  It improves XP functions that functioned just fine, while introducing new things that will cause more than some users a bit of a learning curve.  Many people will never discover many of them, just like they've never used a majority of the functions buried in XP (I haven't).

Microsoft introduced Vista early this year with a US$500 million branding budget and ad creative that focused on life changing events.  Dubbed "The WOW Starts Now," the introductory campaign also included events (like acrobats climbing big Microsoft logos in Times Square), a faux social media web site, and an alternate reality game.

I'm not sure many people really got what the WOW is all about, other than that Microsoft is very excited about making all of humanity go out and buy new computers: it brilliantly designed Vista to be inoperable on the majority of old machines currently in use, so it's not an upgrade.

And there's the rub.

Vista comes pre-installed on all of the new PCs now in the marketplace.  The only consumer "choice" is over which complicated version to activate.

So Microsoft is spending oodles of money to do two things badly: first, ineffectually promote a product that few people understand, or asked for (so it's not a meaningful value-add, and certainly not a motivator for a store visit, or a trigger of purchase intent), and then, second, pay its manufacturing and retail partners to promote a product that is inescapably installed on every new PC anyway.

I sure hope it makes branding sense to the dim bulbs at Microsoft, because it certainly doesn't make much business sense.

The second thing I don't understand is why any PC manufacturer would risk its good name by repeating Microsoft's "(Insert Company Name Here) recommends Vista" spiel.

I know it's probably considered a bright idea within the manufacturers, as it represents money in their pockets, and probably little skin off their advertising noses.  There's a long history of such propaganda placement – Intel has done it intensively with the "Intel Inside" logo and sound-effect – and it doesn't really conflict with what is the generic content of most PC hardware ads. 

Or does it?  Might it hurt their credibility?

Why should any consumer believe any statement in an ad, when it's obvious that at least one of them was not only irrelevant to their purchase consideration, but clearly a pay-for-play placement?

It's like they're endorsing electricity, or recommending that people breathe air.  Recommending Vista when it's inescapable is laughable, especially when you realize that every manufacturer has lined up to take Microsoft's money, and dutifully repeat the company line.

I think it says something about these brands, and any branding that includes such obviously sponsored, illegitimate statements.

After all of the cute, online, virtual, expensive branding communications that gets thrown at consumers ever year, this is a noticeable hint that what they choose to promote isn't necessarily fair, right, or true.  I can't understand why the brand police wouldn't keep something like this from ever happening.

Unless it means that they don’t care.  After all, we're just talking about ads.  Like anybody's paying any attention to them anymore.

Integrity schmegrity.

Bree is Dead

Bree, otherwise known as Lonelygirl15, was killed Friday, August 3, 2007, marking the end of an era...and perhaps the start of a new one.

In case you're not familiar with her, Bree was a fictional 16-yr old character in a drama created in the early days of YouTube.  The twist was that she was introduced to the world as if she were real; the show's creators revealed the conceit only after her videos had helped mainstream the idea of user-generated content by generating some of the immense site traffic to YouTube (that eventually helped it collect lots of money from Google).

Lonelygirl15 wasn't some cute kid posting rambling vblogs, but rather an Internet show, replete with a story arc, supporting characters, plot twists and, a few weeks ago, a season finale.  Viewers typed in instead of tuning in, and witnessed the program via short video posts.

The creators have started to monetize their investment, both by placing the spots on Revver (which sells ad space and shares the cash with video producers), and finding novel ways to put commercial products into the programs (a new character was actually purchased by Neutrogena).

Now that Bree is dead, however, I think the Internet video-phase of the property is over, too.

The creators promise that other girls will take her place and further the plotline – some evil cult is chasing girls with a certain blood type, which is a little creepy if you think about it – but more video segments, and more commercialization, won't make Season Two any bigger, better, or more directionally intriguing than the first.

It's just not the phenomenon it once was.  There are lots of competitors now.  Many of Bree's early and most rabid fans were less interested in her skills as an actress, and more intrigued by the possibility that she was a real 16 yr-old posting her innermost thoughts online.  YouTube is awash in video content. 

I think Lonelygirl15 as an Internet video show is dead.  But what may be very much alive is where the creators could be taking it next.

Reality.

You see, the program was never truly linear, nor was it particularly self-explanatory.  Episodes have hidden clues and messages.  Fans didn’t just watch, they got involved, inventing many more explanations and backstories than were evident in the actual content.  The episodes didn’t make sense, really, unless the viewer helped complete the experience with his or her own effort and creativity.

It gets even better.  At least once during its inaugural season, the show invited viewers to a real-world event: some meeting referenced in an episode actually took place somewhere in Los Angeles, and viewers showed up to witness a straight-faced, play-acted gig, at which they found further clues that fed back into the Internet videos.

So the potential for subsequent seasons of Lonelygirl15 isn’t so much creative content for videos, as it is the broadening and extension of experiences into reality.

Imagine the show as less of a program, and more of an ongoing puzzle.  What matters is both how people experience it, and what behaviors are a part of that experience.

It could involve a variety of communications tools – email, voicemail, mobile calls, billboards, whatever – as well as plot hints that have real-world corollaries (find a physical clue hidden on a train, or count the number of skyscrapers visible from so-and-so vantage point).  Gigs in the real world…events, parties, you name it.

Think multiple plotlines, depending on which angle a viewer/user chooses to follow.  We're talking media experience as quantum moment: your own conscious involvement completes the content, versus simply witnessing it.

And what you're doing is all around you, rendering moot the distinctions between real and virtual.  The story here isn’t a newfangled technology to send messages to friends, but rather the concept of integration.  Ubiquity of creative.

Lonelygirl15 isn’t creating this approach, but rather contributing to something called alternate reality gaming, or ARGs.  The genre that has been around for a few years now.  Entertainment companies use it to help market movies by burying hints in posters that the most-curious can follow to discover things.  Some pure games, like the UK's Perplex City, got thousands of people to search for real-world clues in order to deliver the plot payoff.

As a marketer, this is really exciting stuff, not because games can be used to promote the next toothpaste or car launch.  That's too easy.

Rather,the dynamic of consumer involvement in the game experience should suggest ways to get people involved in brands, instead of just engaging with marketing communications.  ARGs don't promote brands: they are brands.  It's a way to deliver consumer involvement, and perhaps purchase behavior and repeat loyalty, in ways that are far more compelling and lasting than the funniest branding ads.

So imagine a new product launch that itself is an ARG, not just using a game as a tactic that incorporates the brand imagery or colors.  This is a rich area of exploration and experimentation for marketers, presuming we can kick our addiction to telling instead of doing.

And it might make reality the precedent-setting domain of Lonelygirl15's next season.  We could probably learn something from following it.

Bree is dead.  Perhaps her progeny will live on someplace near you.  Really.

Blank Boards

There's some troubling news emerging from the knee-scraped, bleeding-edge of skateboarding:

Brands don't matter.

It turns out that all of those devilish turns and jumps that we see on the annual X Games or late at night on ESPN723 start out rather unsuccessfully in the backyards of competitive hopefuls.

Teenage skateboarders can smash or otherwise wreck a skateboard every month or so.  Blank boards – sold without snazzy lightening bolts, or other cosmetic hoohah – can cost half or less of what the branded versions go for.

This isn't an instance of anti-brand sentiment.  No kid has been quoted as claiming that the brand names are somehow uncool.  Brands are just irrelevant.  It's non-branding or, maybe better put, the most popular practice equipment is the skateboard branded blank.

The industry trade association has been up in arms about it, even taking out an ad supplement in skateboarding magazines to argue that buying blank boards hurt the sport.  The decks are "bland, unwarranted commodities that support faceless factories that do nothing to support professional skateboarding," the copy went.

Skateboarders don't agree.  Few of them will ever get to be pros, and I don't think they're the types to think it's a matter of principle to spend more money for skateboards that are less bland, carefully-warranted, and support branded factories.

It's a cool subculture that seems to resist, at least in this small instance, the encroachment of commercialization.  Skateboard brands just are not relevant to skateboarding.

What a frightening prospect for branding gurus the world over.

Isn't everyone supposed to sell-out for a price, or buy-in to a marketing premise if it's done right?  Nobody is supposed to be immune, and certainly not a loosely-knit group or unassociated consumer demographic.  Branding – whether celebs, logos, great creative or ubiquitous presence – should conquer all.

Failure in this instance is pretty easy to understand, though.  If boards are pretty much all the same, it makes more sense to bust up one that costs $30 versus one that costs $60, or $120.  No amount of imaginary branding value could overcome the jarring simplicity of that equation.

Reality matters, and I'm just not sure the branding folks are bright enough to solve the issue with the standard voodoo of marketing communications.

So it's encouraging to read that manufacturers are upping their research budgets, and putting unique and/or exclusive components into new models.  One board uses a layer of Kevlar, which I believe also goes into bulletproof vests, to help resist breakage.  Maybe the bright bulbs are looking at ways to craft consumer relationships that might allow for board exchanges, so that a consumer who breaks multiple decks can somehow subscribe to a supply of equipment.

These are smart, meaningful behaviors.

Skateboarders won't stop being a potentially valuable demographic for a host of marketers.  They exhibit behaviors that require clothing, music, and sports equipment.

But the blank boards phenomenon means that brand must emerge through company behavior and user-experience, so the solutions must involve everyone, not just the communications strategists.

It'll be cool to watch what happens here.  Good prep for when the next target group opts-out of having branding targets pinned to their backs.

Ten Years Too Late

Blockbuster's recent acquisition of movie digital-downloader Movielink evidences a business strategy that is at least 10 years too late to matter.

(Disclosure: I used to work at Blockbuster, and I have good friends who still work there).

Blockbuster was founded as a distribution channel.  The geniuses of the entertainment industry had made buying a newfangled media format called videotape prohibitively expensive, so Blockbuster rolled up many of the independent businesses that had sprouted up to rent the cassettes.

It standardized the consumer video experience, and brought millions of people to the format by making its stores generically pleasant and family-friendly.  It broke no new ground, per se, but it Holiday Innified the nascent videotape category.  This was brilliant business strategy, and it made its founders deservedly rich.

Indirectly, I think Blockbuster should get credit for being the midwife to the birth of Internet porn, as it created a pent-up demand for the stuff when it banished the X-rated movies that used to hide behind the beaded curtains in the first-generation video/tropical fish/insurance policy stores it bought.

But porn was only one of the distribution changes that followed on its heels.

Cable, satellite, video-on-demand, then the DVD format, mail-order rental, and far-lower retail prices all conspired to migrate consumers to more varied, ex-Blockbuster sources of movie entertainment.  Its profitable extended viewing pricing (i.e. late fees) started to seem more onerous to consumers who were no longer dependent on the stores for their movies.

Yet Blockbuster saw these as distribution challenges, and either tried to accommodate them – like adding, and then subtracting, books and music from its stores – or ignoring them, such as the opportunity for mail-order, which gave rise to a robust competitor in NetFlix.

It was run as a glorified convenience store through the past decade; its products DVDs instead of Slurpees.  It branded itself with colors and unmemorable ads, and marketed products by populating its stores with the latest releases, and then hawking frequent purchase cards and other POP promotions when hungry consumers chanced by.

Now, it's just one distributor of many, and not one that is any more credible, reliable, convenient, or unique among distributors of entertainment content.  In fact, it lags in one or more of those categories.

Ten years ago, it had a leg-up.

Customer information.  Lots of it.  Regular, habitual users, who happily handed Blockbuster their money and, in doing so, allowed it to aggregate an understanding of consumer needs and interests that got bigger, better, and more powerful with every passing day.

So, while competing forms of menu-driven, open-access distribution came into play, Blockbuster could have charted a different path for itself, and carved a competitive difference that would have been hard to copy.  Maybe impossible.

Intelligence.  Recommendations.  Ability to bring new titles to the attention of consumers.  Functional, behavioral qualities that would make its brand mean something more than storefronts or a logo.

Customer knowledge could have guided its business strategy, including acquisitions.  With all that rental knowledge, it could have become synonymous with matching consumer interests with filmed entertainment, both as a renter/seller of the content, and as a glorified front end/back end for the studios.  It might have given it reason to purchase content libraries, or cut distribution deals for hard-to-get titles (or older ones).

As such, Blockbuster could have appeared on (and monetized) various tools for movie-watchers, like an Internet widget that helped find content and review it.  Why wasn't there a BlockbusterViewer for online previews?  Who knows...it might have even gotten itself into the viral business with BlockbusterTube before those YouTube guys were out of grade school.

Instead, I fear its simply managing its name, which is a declining asset (if it's really one at all, separate from the real estate on which its stores sit). 

Branding gurus can tell it to make sure the store colors are consistent, or that store associates all repeat the same cross-sell pitch at checkout that most consumers will ignore.  Branding Movielink as Blockbuster won't give consumers anything new or better in this regard.  And the ongoing mail-order war with NetFlix – or the rotten retail/rental environment, which will only get worse over time – are tactical battles that it probably can't win, and certainly won't contribute to winning the war.

Blockbuster lost that war over a decade ago. 

Minuses Over a Plus

Johnson & Johnson ("J&J") has decided to sue the American Red Cross in a branding scuffle that is irrelevant to anybody except lawyers.

At issue is commercial use of the red cross symbol, which J&J owns but has allowed the charitable group to use since 1895.  The spirit, if not the bulletproof letter of the agreement, was that J&J could use the symbol in service to Mammon, while the Red Cross slapped it on its good works.

Some numbnut at the Red Cross decided that good works included making money, and cut retail merchandising deals to sell for-profit disaster kits, hand sanitizer, and rubber gloves, all labeled with that little red cross.

This prompted the trademark police at J&J to aim its formidable legal guns and file suit in federal court: not content with stopping the charity's retail sales efforts, J&J wants all the profits so far, and then all the products destroyed.

There are lots of minuses to this row over a plus.

Traditional branding theology says that trademark images matter.  So does experience.  We recognize the golden arches as belonging to a McDonald's restaurant, and use icons like British Rail’s opposing arrows to help make purchase decisions.  Companies invest money to make such symbols recognizable, even as they waste much more money on trying to attach various ideas or creative conceits to them.

Did you know that the red cross belonged to J&J?  I didn't.  It doesn't appear on bottles of Tylenol, or come up in the first dozen search results for "red cross" on its corporate web site.  J&J might own the little red plus, but it isn’t relevant to its consumers' behavior enough to use in its marketing much. 

Conversely, I'd bet most people recognize the red cross as a symbol of, well, the Red Cross.

It's used quite frequently as a symbol for reliable (if not simply available) help in times of disaster.  It belongs on relief trucks, hospital tents, and nurses hats.  It's as ubiquitous as its sister symbol, the Red Crescent (the crescent being a symbol that also appears on national flags, as well as a shape every month in the night time sky).

So both sides are wrong in this branding scuffle: J&J has no good reason to agitate about the symbol, except to keep its lawyers satiated (and perhaps its marketing gurus, too), and the Red Cross is dumb to denigrate its good name by selling junky stuff at Target stores.

The little red plus has little to do with the brands these entities worry about. 

Both are in the business of relieving pain.  J&J does it with analgesics and other consumer products, and the Red Cross accomplishes it through its charitable services. And, interestingly, the only place J&J seems to use its red cross logo is on first-aid kits and other products that certainly look like they're being endorsed/sold by the Red Cross folks.  Funny backwards associating, eh?

Right now, they're busy instead causing pain for each other, because of a mistaken understanding of how they best communicate the benefits they provide to their respective markets.  J&J should call off the slash-and-burn legal attack if the Red Cross gets out of a retail business it never belonged in.  The row is a minus for both entities.

They should get back to focusing on more important things than a little red plus.   

Remember the Names

Employees are showing up in ads again, and we should hold the creators of the campaigns accountable for what happens to them.

Companies including Tylenol, Boeing, Verizon, and FedEx Kinko's have all recently run ad branding centered on employees.  The Boeing campaign is broadly thematic, entitled "That's Why We're Here," while Verizon and Tylenol feature employees who proudly declare that they're utterly thrilled to work for the companies.  The FedEx campaign highlights specific instances of employee perseverance, and links to a frustratingly over-produced, slow-to-load web site for anyone who wants to explore the branding in excruciating detail.

I find it interesting that these brands have elected to focus on employees in our Age of Technology & Outsourcing.

Most big companies haven't read a job description that they don't feel couldn't be improved with the replacement of an employee name with the words software or India.  Health-care is a cost, not a service.  Benefits are something to be reduced, labeled by business media as some undeserved affliction that keeps companies from being otherwise competitive.  Unions and pensions are about as common as live-dinosaur sightings.

And it seems that when revenues or profits are down, the first thing companies do is fire some swatch of middle-level managers.  If it hasn't already happened to you, I'd bet real money that you know somebody who has gotten whacked by one of those broad-stoke axes.

Job security has gone the way of secretaries, Selectric typewriters, and faith in the bond between employer and worker being anything more than impermanent, opportunistic bondage.  The media might celebrate our Age as somehow empowering individuals to take control of their careers, but I know quite a few of those folks who would love to simply have careers again.

So why would such big companies feature employees in branding campaigns?  I think there are two possibilities:

First, maybe they've made employees into true competitive differentiators.

For service businesses like Verizon and FedEx Kinko's, the only real variables they have are their people.  Cellular networks seem pretty much identical, and FedEx's competitors can buy the same number of trucks, planes, and delivery-planning software.  But better service can differentiate these brands, and employees are the best, most constant, and best adaptable resource to deliver it.

It would make sense if they've made industry-leading investments in their employees...empowered them to accomplish things no competitors could even imagine, and then incentivized them to exceed every expectation.  There could be "zero employee defection" programs in place, so FedEx and Verizon could claim the most tenured, expert, and committed employees in their respective industry verticals.  These claims would only grow in value and marketability over time.

But wait.

Why would Boeing and Tylenol care about service, per se?  Dosage and possible drug interactions are potential customer service questions about pain killers, but Tylenol needs no robust user group for consumers to compare stories about swallowing capsules, or opening bottles of medication.  Boeing must maintain an incomprehensibly deep customer service function for its airline customers, but I can't imagine consumers calling the company, unless they're looking for charitable contributions.

Which brings me to the other possibility: namely, that it's all just a bunch of crass, stupid marketing.

The Boeing and Tylenol campaigns could be directed at a small subset of viewers, probably with something to do with government purchasing or regulation.  Maybe a stock analyst here and there.  For that matter, all of the campaigns could be aimed at employees themselves, in some slightly twisted experiment in doublethink: celebrate them publicly, in hopes that it might convince them that what they experience privately isn't so bad after all.

Maybe the unnamed employees in the Boeing spots aren't even employees, but instead nothing more than comely actors.  That would make perverse sense: actually outsourcing the role of imaginary employees.

You just can't tell what’s up when you look at the marvelous, slick branding.  And there doesn't seem to be much chatter about it online yet.

If the employees are real, the companies should prove that the branding is real by promoting what they're doing on the human resources front.  Get somebody involved in the next phase of the campaigns other than the marketing gurus, and put some meat on the who, where, why, and how behind the what of the spots.  Don’t tell us marvelous stories. 

Substantiate them.

If it's just hype, people should slam 'em for it.  We could start by simply remembering the names.  Maybe somebody could stand up at next year's annual stockholder meetings, and ask if they're still employed.  Or if their families have health insurance.

Highlighting employees in these times of employment uncertainty was big-time risky, and maybe really smart branding.  Whether it was a dim or bright idea for each company depends on the reality of the campaigns.

We need to remember the names.

AMD's Chip

Intel might be facing distracting, costly antitrust charges around the world, but AMD is busy promoting the chip on its shoulder instead of delivering smart marketing.

It seems that AMD has worked tirelessly to help make the case that Intel pays off retailers, jerks around manufacturers with delayed payments and deliveries, and sometimes sells components at a loss.  The alleged goal, of course, is to subvert the market, and put AMD out of business.

It maintains a web site dedicated to sharing this information.  It regularly briefs analysts on it.  And, when the European Commission announced late last month it would formally charge Intel, AMD ran a nah-nah-nah-nah-naaaah-nah full-page newspaper ad.

For smart technology people, they're a bunch of dim bulbs when it comes to the AMD brand.

Kudos to their lawyers for making Intel's life miserable.  Shame on Intel if it has done something wrong, and it should have to pay a fine, or readdress in future filings whatever statute or regulatory subhead it violated.  Fascinating stuff.  And three cheers for the spirit of antitrust, which AMD's leader Hector Ruiz notes in beautiful lawyerspeak in the ad, "[should] promote efficient economic productivity and the welfare of consu