Dim Bulb

Tribes, the Last Trend Pt. 1

I attended Brand ManageCamp 2007 this week in Chicago, which was chocked full of the latest thinking (and implementation ideas) on marketing strategy, psychology, technology, ROI measurement, politics, and trends.  I heartily recommend that you consider checking it out next year in Vegas (Oct 6 & 7).

The trend presentations got me thinking, though, not so much about what was in them, but about the concept and utility of trend spotting itself.

Trend spotters attempt to identify the exceptional things that people are doing, in hopes that those things are on their way to becoming norms.  Trends can arise anywhere, from technical development (using Compuserve to send emails, or the W.E.L.L. to talk to friends at the same time, would have fit the bill), cultural or social development (going to spontaneous rave parties, casual Fridays back when the rest of the week was still coat-and-tie), to consumer products (energy drinks emerging first in an always-exhausted Japan). 

Spotting trends is an attempt to preempt asking the question "if only we’d seen it coming," the it being some inescapable quality of life now that sometime in the past was nothing more than a hint.  So it's actually a lot easier to point to trends in the past-tense than it is to predict them.  Even better, the saving grace for the spotting racket is that future-prediction can never be wrong: since every trend is inter-related with every other one, they all tend to occur...and not occur...as Tomorrow unfolds.

The utility of such efforts to marketers, however, is that trends should help us make our branding and selling efforts more effective, as knowing even imprecisely about them might have associative value (being part of something cool) and a distributional value (putting an ad someplace that it'll be seen by people we want to reach).

In practice, however, it's a lot more vague.

What constitutes a trend?  Is there an equation that says that something is a trend if X people are doing something Y times a month in at least Z locations during period A which is a B increase over period C?  What isn't a trend  (one person doing one thing one time could be a proto-trend, couldn't it)?  Are individual consumer choices a different category of trend than, say, technical developments by a research department?  Do we measure impacts differently, and by what units (% of choices made, a delta of transactions year-over-year)?  Is a trend of behaviors different from a trend of opinions or expressed intentions?  If we could identify when trends start, is there math that lets us pinpoint when they stop?

More intriguing, does trend spotting spot the ways that new interests and habits change the very nature or way people make decisions?  Even if we notice that trends are interrelated, is there math to study and calculate the behavioral changes across them?

Nope.

A trend could be just about anything.  No two people necessarily have to agree on it, no two spotters concur on its dimensions or implications.  A trend could inspire marketers to develop ad creative, buy space somewhere, invent a web site, even create or label a new product.  Then it could then change, depending on the who, when, and how of the spotter saying so, which would prompt changes in marketing tactics.  We see this illustrated by the daily reports of new web sites that purport to brush your teeth better than yesterday's sites. 

A trend is a lot like a brand.  A cool idea, mostly.   

As a marketer, I certainly want to know this stuff, and some very smart and wonderful people go about finding and presenting it.  But I suspect that the real value is less about noting the individual, latest-and-greatest instances of what we subsequent label
trends, and more in building sustainable strategies for making and selling stuff because of how and why these behaviors fit together.

So here's a radical proposition:

What if the most important or relevant instances we report as trends are really the hints of something else?

Maybe they're outcomes of group behavior that can be modeled and cast as a set of behavioral dynamics.  I'm not talking just income or geophysical attributes, but modeling these groups as all-encompassing world-views, or mini-cultures, that define the what, how, and when of behaviors that include product purchase and use.

Think less trends, and more tribes.

Maybe the drivers of trends are the behaviors that result from the social constructs of groups of people who self-identify on a topic, issue, nationality, lifestyle, whatever.  These groups don't relate to brands, or converse with them: they fit brand names into their world-views, and then discard them when they no longer serve a purpose.

So the questions relevant to marketers would be about finding such tribes and understanding how they coalesce, what they dictate and do, and then how long they last. 

This isn't a new concept: Joel Kotkin wrote about it in 1994, basing his analysis of world history and current events in terms of tribes based on nationalities.  He also predicted groupings based on religion, which did anticipate one of the largest, most active tribes today (Evangelicals).

And a recent book called Consumer Tribes has expanded Kotkin's model to include groups of consumers, yet it tends to generalize the concept to be synonymous with trendy events and, well, trends. 

Tribes have organizing principles, rules, means of communication, rituals, news outlets, fashion options, and all of these criteria can be measured and compared.  They become routine for members, defining their lives so substantively that they do so subtly: the tribe affects what its members care about, how they care about things, and what they do about them. 

Tribes are ultimately based upon ideas, just like brands, but they exist to operationalize them.  So there's a math possible here.

The premise I'll explore in Part 2 of this essay is that studying this phenomenon can elevate our understanding of trends, and better extend it to the approaches and tools we need to develop. 

I'm going to use the steampunk phenomenon as the case history.  If you don't already know about it, you can get a taste here, and some, and some glorious steampunk invention here.

The UAW Brand, R.I.P.

Now that the UAW's first nation-wide strike in 37 years is apparently over, so is its brand.

This events of the past few days offered the opportunity to potentially reverse the decades-long decline in the UAW's reputation: membership has declined just as it has witnessed its comrades-in-arms lose out and disband entirely; a barrage of well-financed opposition from corporate interests and free-market absolutists has made most of us consider the very idea of unions something between a cult and the mob.  Up til now, we've been taught to believe a litergy that says unions help the inadequate stay employed while impeding competition.

The UAW fell smack dab into this stereotypical cartoon-version of itself when it announced that its strike was about guaranteeing job security.

Job security?  What does that mean?

What strange words to we working stiffs, who've mostly been thrown into the employment maelstrom, stripped of pensions, healthcare, and any sense of security that used to come along with the jobs that our parents or grandparents used to get.  Our only guarantees are autonomy, and the ability to regularly troll the Internet for job postings.

The last thing I want to hear is some union employee gripe about keeping a job as if it were a right.

Welcome to the real world, buddy, I think to myself.  GM is supposed to promise to give your members jobs, over choosing the right people (or the right countries in which to base the jobs, for that matter)?  Job security is shorthand for everything that's unfair about unions.  Confronted with the choice of supporting some exclusive benefit for a bunch of S.O.B.'s who I don't even know deserve it, or just shrugging as I welcome them into the same swampy mess of outsourcing, independent contractors, layoffs, and, well, you get the idea.  Strike this.

So the UAW used its first national strike in 37 years -- perhaps its best opportunity for near-unlimited press coverage -- to promote the one brand position that was sure to alienate as many people as possible.  I'm sure it was very successful.

It could have played so differently.  Perhaps even enabled the union movement to recapture some of the credibility and relevance it has lost since the heyday of Gompers and an American Middle Class.

You wouldn't know it from how the UAW chose to play the communications on this one, but there was an underlying conflict to the strike: the health care coverage that GM (and the other US automakers) carry for past and current union employees. 

To  union members, these benefits were a part of a deal...an agreement that was more legal than a promise, and more binding than a commitment.  It was a two-way contract: I'll work for you, if you pay me so-and-so.  Kind of like when a husband and wife cut a binding deal when they get married, only insert work for love.

To the automakers, these agreements were (and are) obsolete in a global economy wherein health care costs for foreign competitors are covered by their host governments, and paid up through income (and other) taxes.  GM has referenced a "$25-per-hour labor cost disparity with its Japanese competitors," and calls the $51 billion it has left unfunded to cover its retiree health care costs as liabilities.  You likely heard mention of this issue when those financial wizards took over Chrysler a short time ago.

Up to the moment of the strike, GM and the UAW had been negotiating the creation of a trust, called a Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association (or "VEBA"), which would allow GM to outsource its liability to the union.  A VEBA is primarily a tax and legal contrivance, as it would cost GM about as much to fund it as it would cost to simply offer the coverage to its employees.  Except for a few notable exceptions:

• New employees won't necessarily have to pay into it, so how it goes about funding itself is, well, somebody else's problem
• Worse, going forward, new workers in the US won't get the same benefit commitments, and/or will pay more to get less out of the trust, if they pay into it at all
• And, if GM chooses to employ workers outside of the country, they'll definitely not want to chip in to cover arthritis medication for some American schlubs they helped put out of a job

So there's the connection to job security: if GM shifts the health care responsibility to the union, and then the union keeps losing jobs, the VEBA goes bust.  Job loss becomes a double whammy: current workers have nothing to do, and that means retired workers lose their health coverage.

Yet, confronted with the choice of a headline that read "union fighting to save healthcare for a half million Americans" or "GM leads charge to rob elderly," the UAW chose to promote "job security."

What a tragic and complete branding mistake.

What was (and is) in truth a messy, painful divorce  -- in which the far more powerful spouse wants to screw the other out of money, security, and a lifestyle earned over a lifetime of faithful commitment  -- got portrayed as a mostly technical, business negotiation between equals.

People would have reacted far differently to the truth than they did to the union's tight-lipped, misguided declaration. 

We could have been made aware of the relevance they have to helping solve some of the issues in our lives that appear insolvable by the gridlock in Washington (sponsored gridlock, I suspect).  The UAW could have told us that its brand was about justice, fairness, and protecting working people, and not that it was chasing after something 1) the rest of us can't get, and 2) therefore, they don't deserve.

The issue could have been relevant to all of us in a positive, i-feel-the-same-way way.  Not only might we consumers have agreed with what the UAW was doing...we might have thought a bit about how to become activists ourselves.

Instead, it announced that it's all but dead. 

Be Fair to Microsoft

I know, I know. 

Seems like such a ludicrous thing to say.  But I'm saying it, at least in regard to the grief it got on Monday from the Wall Street Journal.

The paper wrote that Microsoft hired a biggie PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to help it generate regulator and public opinion opposition to Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.  The tone of the piece was that it was a revelation that such shenanigans are going on.

Come on.

Companies have been trying to influence opinions ever since commerce gave consumers two or more things from which to choose. 

In America, it's been a fact of life since gurus like James Ellsworth and Ed Bernays helped kick-off the 20th Century with PR campaigns: Ellsworth strove to make AT&T appear like a trusted friend, and Bernays helped convince women to smoke (for the American Tobacco Company) and get everyone to trade light breakfasts for meals that included lots of bacon (on behalf of Beachnut Packing).

Their tools were surveys, expert quotes, faux consumer interest groups, headlines and background leaked or otherwise provided to journalists, and generally doing anything that injected a dose of questioning into an issue or POV that had prior seemed unquestionable (or just in opposition to their clients' vision).

Healthy debate has long been a synonym for there's no objective truth, and suspension of certitude has influenced generations of misdirected consumers and hung juries. 

To suggest that revealing such tactics in any industry is some revelation, let alone a big deal, begs the question of who (or what) is behind the story. 

The Journal gets regularly pitched by front-groups, biased partisans, and those who seek undue influence, just like every other news outlet (and now, bloggers).  Really slick and hard-to-trace campaigns are more the norm than the exception.  It sounds like much of Microsoft's PR firm’s efforts were above-the-board, and those that weren’t were clunkily obvious. 

Further, it's silly to think that Google and DoubleClick don't employ their own agents, representatives, lobbyists, and assorted PR types, and that they aren't right now busy whacking away at the same issue from the other "perspective." 

So why the "news" in the Journal?

My suspicion would be that one of Microsoft’s PR competitors out-performed his or her competition, and somehow packaged up the story for the Journal's consumption (or it was teed-up for the UK's Guardian newspaper, which first broke the story).  At a minimum, it was the result of some solidly short-sighted reporting.

Count me at the front of the line to complain about Microsoft.  I detest what AutoUpdate did to my PC, which I have since abandoned.  And I think its branding and marketing on Vista was shockingly bad. 

But let's be fair to Microsoft.  Hiring a PR firm, and trying to twist public debate in its favor via any means short of using outright falsehoods, isn't so bad. 

It's an American tradition.

And it certainly isn't news. 

Gloriously Incomprehensible

Weatherproof Garment Company spent upwards of $75,000+ to run an ad in the latest New York Times Sunday Magazine, featuring a Geico-inspired cavemen modeling one of its coats.

Ready for a contrarian viewpoint?  I don't think it was such a dumb idea, per se.  However, it was a gloriously incomprehensible execution.

It's easy to trash the idea of extending the caveman concept to a soon-to-be-canceled TV sitcom (that has yet to air).  And I've written before that the underlying brand nonsense behind the creative itself -- that associating the cavemen with Geico communicates easy, or anything memorable whatsoever -- is, well, nonsense. 

But here's why the ads for Geico and Weatherproof could make sense:

They could prompt action. 

Insurance is effectively a commodity; worse, nobody thinks about it, let alone understands the intricacies of insurance policies, until an accident happens.  Same goes for overcoats like the one the caveman wears in the ad.  In this day of Target/Kohl's/Wal-Wart, it's virtually impossible to own a look.  All ads (and most coats) look pretty much the same.

So Geico and Weatherproof are comrades in arms, both facing a similar conundrum: how to break through the morass of similarity that constrains the branding in their respective industry categories.

Enter the cavemen.

They stand out, for the moment, perhaps as much because people think they're stupid or irrelevant than anything else.  But they capture attention.  The Weatherproof ad has the caveman in a stupid, proto-typical fashion model pose.  Maybe it's a sly self-referential satire.  Who cares?  You notice it, just like you can’t help but pay slight attention to the Geico caveman TV spots.

They're benign versions of the guy holding the gun to a puppy's head and declaring listen-to-me-or-the-dog-dies.  The ads successful ask us to look up from whatever it is we're doing.  Full stop.  In an era of shorter, less-focused attention spans, these are tremendously precious, and usually quite expensive moments to come by.  So this is actually quite an accomplishment. 

Then they squander it.

What am I supposed to do after my nanosecond of smirking at the Weatherproof ad?  I'm certainly not going to remember it, the design of the coat, or the name of the company.  It contributes no essence or association or conceptual stalagmite to my perceptions of the brand.  The ad includes a web site (which doesn't exist) and a phone number, which is answered by some gruff guy who barked "Weatherproof" when I called.

Imagine if the ad had been conceived to prompt a behavior.

A visit to a web site that had something compelling about why or how Weatherproof coats were great.  A  policy or offer that distinguished it from all other identical-looking coats.  A further step, like registering, or voting, or whatever.  Fall started the same day the ad ran; you'd think there would be a reason and way to connect a warm coat to that fact.

Same goes for Geico.  Instead of being satisfied that consumers will smirk at the cavemen when they see the pilot on TV, why not attach something actionable to every time the characters appear?  Analyze my insurance.  Ask me one question.  Lead me to another action.  Keep track of what happens.  Call, write, visit, calculate, act.

The gurus would argue that branding is somehow separate (or above, which is really what they suggest) from the messy, uninspiring world of communications activities they've classified as direct marketing or sales promotion.  God forbid the branding could get confused with something as mundane as lead generation.  Gasp!

But in today's world, consumers make no such distinctions. 

No brand name gets my attention all that often, and the idea that any business would squander such a moment to do nothing more than vaguely amuse or dumbfound me is gloriously incomprehensible.

 

Airports as Amusement Parks

Miami Airport's terminal operations employees are taking classes in customer service from Disney, which is an incredibly bright bulb idea.

The similarities between the two environments couldn't be greater, as are the differences.

Visiting a Disney theme park should be an absolutely miserable experience.  It is, actually, for at least those who have a visceral allergy to feeling the magic, but for the rest of us in the Tourist Class, our experiences are strangely acceptable, if not often times utterly satisfying.

Long lines are endured.  Food is served.  Attractions are findable.  You always find nice little touches, and trip over the occasional surprise.  Perhaps most commonly -- and uncommonly pleasant -- there's consistently good and mostly useful communication between Disney staffers and their "guests." 

This makes your average airport experience seem like Dante's journey into the Inferno, only minus the poetry.

Lines, food, directions...it's all bad, and then gets worse, as airline personnel often seem less like they're holding the pitchforks and moving the damned along, and more like fellow inmates.  Contrast the implicit promise of any airline ad -- whether promoting a destination, or the offer of an extra quark of in-flight legroom -- with the explicit punishment travelers endure at either end, and you come up with this odd sense that airline branding can aspire to little more than claims to a somewhat pleasant Purgatory.

Actually, it's not so odd.  It just falls outside the purview of how airlines see their brands.   They seem to relegate airport experiences into same category in which we put bad weather, stepping in gum, and other inconveniences of circumstances or Fate.

That's why it's so interesting that Miami Airport is trying to improve the experience.

Serial raters J. D. Power ranked Miami the fourth-worst big airport for overall satisfaction this year.  It shouldn’t matter to them, should it?  Travelers have other airport options, but not really.  They're prisoners of the airlines’ route system, and it's unlikely that an upstart facility will find enough land and equipment to open up a competing airport across the street. 

Disney could certainly help the workers at MIA learn to stop treating travelers as intruders, or a nuisance.  If successful, it might have some overlap effect with passenger perceptions of the airlines. 

I want know why the airlines don’t take a more proactive, responsible role in this regard.

Airline branding is all about experience and services.  Since a plane is a plane, and they all have to fly around the same bad weather, the areas for differentiation seem to be before and after flights.  The major, though not only, areas to accomplish this differentiation would be in airports.  Yet these areas seem beyond the pale of most airline branding.

Imagine if...

• An airline chose to make sure its airport personnel always had updated information on delays, and solutions handy
• Check-in people had tools to move the what-do-you-mean-I-can't-check-in-with-only-my-name-written-on-toilet-paper numbnuts off to the side of the counter, and keep the line moving
• Strolling airline reps had hand-held gizmos to check reservations, change seats, rebook
• Baggage claim services were staffed by people who could patch together cogent sentences, and registering a lost bag was easier and quicker than signing up for health insurance
• Bad weather automatically elevated staffing and offers at various key junctures within the system 

In other words, imagine if the airlines were taking those lessons from Disney, but also had the operations commitment to deliver the goods?

Ultimately, you can ask poorly-paid people to smile as they deliver non-answers, but the key to providing real customer service is to empower (and incentivize) them to deliver the right answers to the right questions.  And that means making the operational changes to obviate the necessity for asking lots of them, as well as providing the substance to answer the rest, when necessary.

No amount of airport training can provide such solutions.  Three cheers for Miami Airport if it can make visits a little less painful, but it is in the hands of the airlines that we place (or perceive that we place) our fates when we travel through airports. 

So the real opportunity is for airlines to take some of the money wasted on that aspirational, meaningless dreck that passes for brand advertising, and spend it on adding a little magic to the airport experience.

I bet the first to do it consistently and well would have something to advertise.  So would the second.

Until then, traveling through airports will never be all that amusing.

A Modest Proposal

Cybercrime is a fact of life, along with its more benign yet still benighted stepchild, illegal downloading.

Personal information, sales activity, and credit card info in corporate databases are regularly stolen. Web sites are hacked. Consumers get phished. Personal web pages on MySpace can get filled with gibberish, as can various locations in Second Life. We all get emails that attempt to steal money from us.

College kids still download a gazillion songs every nanosecond via illegal file-sharing services. When companies hire firms to impede this skullduggery, those firms get hacked, too, as antipiracy firm MediaDefender revealed earlier this week.

Don't any of these cybercriminals get caught?

I know more about the shenanigans of bad guys robbing stores in parts of my town I haven't visited in 30 years, than I do about the prosecution and punishment of evil-doers who haunt the web in which I spend many hours every day.

In this dichotomy, I see the glimmer of a solution to the problem of cybercrime:

Bring it into the mainstream. Make it visible, and just maybe it'll deter wanna-bes.

I know that many of the criminals are uncatchable, just like it's impossible to track down terrorists who surface from the muck just long enough to post their pornographically violent videos. An IP address in Bulgaria, routed through Gezhuntheitistan, etc. Some "student" burrowed away somewhere in Kuala Lumpur wants to introduce the world to his latest computer virus, and there may not be much we can do about it, other than protect ourselves from his infantile sneeze.

But what about the rest?

I don't think I've ever once heard about a criminal ruling, or sentencing of a cyberthug. For that matter, I don't even know who they're looking for these days.

If there's no visible consequence to pulling off some brilliantly devious hack -- other than the adulation of fellow alien-named blog posters -- where's the inhibition to committing the crime?

The RIAA had obviously figured this out when it started going after downloaders, apparently indiscriminately (you may have read about the grandmother who "only" downloaded one illegal song, or someone like that). Whether it was legal or not, this absolutely chilled lots of collegiate music fans who might have contemplated sampling a download from some P2P site in the Gaza strip.

Why so much visible action chasing kids, and so little going after the biggies?

Where's the "most wanted" cybercriminal list? Why doesn't some agency or policing body estimate damages and costs incurred by hackers, showing a connection with supposed bloodless crimes and real people?

Perhaps most importantly, where is news of prosecutions and convictions? I'm not suggesting we publicly display them in stockades, at least not yet. But shouldn't some authority make a point of pursuing law-breakers, and publicizing their progress and/or conclusion?

The US Dept of Justice has a site. It does none of the above. There should be big, ugly mug shots. Video from courtroom apperances. Forums for victims to post complaints. Less government. More sex appeal.

Like I said earlier, I know it'd be impossible to pull off in lots of cases. And you could argue that publicizing cases would help further promote the bad guys, which is what they want. But they're doing a pretty good job of getting publicized on their own.

I must be the dim bulb on this one. I'm just sick of knowing the excruciatingly detailed ins and outs of O.J.'s latest legal woes.

He should have committed a cybercrime.

Hot Air, The Most Important Gas

Ikea has debuted a new branding spot on TV that is beautiful, hypnotic, and utterly pointless.

(disclosure: I love this store, and have bought from it a couch, lamp, and many bags of Swedish meatballs, all of which I heartily recommend).

In the campaign, horses run in Lord of the Rings slo-mo past a trailer home. Clouds of birds waft in front of a hazy highrise. More high-style homes, from houseboat to house on a hill. Then comes the punchline: Home. The most important place in the world.

The spot, delivered globally by a double-digit increase on a spend that hit almost $85 million in the US last year alone, is intended to make people forget headlines about economic woes, and spend money on house furnishings anyway.

"Long-term brand building helps you through turbulent times," explains Ikea's branding guru.

Expect the spot to set off a mad dash of similar branding obfuscation. Mattel could orchestrate a comeback with Play. The most important activity. McDonald’s could confound its health critics with Your Stomach. The most important organ. My favorite would be Exlax and Rotation of the Earth. The most important movement.

And I can't help but recollect that the plot of a book entitled Infinite Jest takes place during a calendar year that has been designated The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

It is possible that the people at Ikea approved this campaign without breaking into uncontrollable laughter?

Let's see if we can reconstruct the branding logic:

First, people shop at Ikea because it has lots of good products at great prices. The entire company is organized around delivering quick, easy, and cheap style and utility.

Second, bad economic news tends to dampen consumer expenditures of all sorts. Folks don't have the inclination, time, or perceived financial latitude to buy stuff.

Therefore, and thankfully, Ikea is in a perfect and obvious place to address Point #2 with the reality of Point #1.

But fahgetaboutit! The brand has to be something more, something utterly disassociated from time, place, cost, history, or common sense. Ikea is a synonym for home. Get it?

Mundane things like products and prices have created a "sea of sameness out there," according to the brand guru. Not only do the TV spots establish a brand statement that soars about the messy reality of, well, shopping for home furnishings, but the requisite social media tie-in lets people submit photos and posts and yadda yadda.

Such a strategy could only have made sense in a darkened, hushed conference room.

It's pointless...expecting consumers to think about Ikea when they think about their homes, or visa versa, or whatever it is the company is trying to accomplish. Last time I checked, Ikea hadn't figured out how to monetize thoughts, although I wouldn't put it past them to try. There are lots of bright bulbs there.

None of them were involved in this campaign, however.

There's pretty much only one way to overcome the negative, inhibiting pressures of a bad economic environment, and that's to give people reasons to act.

Ikea possesses such reasons in droves. It would have been straightforward to create creative, memorable, and motivational branding based upon them. They've done so in the past, and produced some really amazing creative and funny stuff.

But none of those reasons appear in its celebration of home-ness.

So go ahead and think. But don't bother shopping. Branding is too important for that.

Has the Clock Started?

The first big news out of the new Wall Street Journal is that it is going to produce a monthly glossy magazine.

The pub, called Pursuits, will be filled with lifestyle coverage, including articles by the Journal's "wealth reporter." "The Wall Street Journal holds a unique passport into this intriguing world," the company's press release crowed.

So has the clock officially started on the ultimate ruin of the fabled financial news outlet?

The promise of exploiting the lifestyles of the wealthy is, well, rich, and far from unique. Magazines have gone after them from every angle, from business (Forbes and its various ASAP/FYI variations, mostly historic) and recreation (Robb Report), to travel (Preferred Destinations).

The Journal has done it indirectly for years, considering it's not complicated math to suggest that folks with financial means are more likely interested in business news than those without. So putting its logo on an entertainment rag isn't all that much of a stretch.

And everyone knew it was coming.

Rupert Murdoch, newly the owner of Dow Jones, promised nothing less, both explicitly and implicitly. The guy is a genius at capturing consumer attention -- whether via newspapers, internet sites, or satellite TV -- and then selling advertisers the right to exploit it.

It could have been a lot worse, all things (and media outlets) considered. Here are four ideas I'm sure the bight bulbs at Dow Jones and News Corp. rejected:

MyTurn, financial news from MySpace

Forget reading what The Man wants you to read; now, members themselves can write the financial news, and then vote on what stories should appear in the Wall Street Journal. Talk about consensus estimates! Meet members who love the same stocks that you do. Add sexy stock widgets to your own pages. Post quarterly earnings calls as .mp3s.

"The Adventures of Dow and Jones" from 20th Century Fox

Tom Hanks stars as Charlie Dow, journalist and entrepreneur in turn-of-the-century America, in this tale of love, loss, and industrial averages that starts in a small basement office at 15 Wall Street, and ends up with Dow dead within a few years of becoming his company's first president. With Jude Law as Ed Jones, and Nicole Kidman as Louise Egan, Dow's alluring ingenue employee .

Wall Street Journal Hedge Fund Idol

You haven't heard a competitor scream in pain until you witness America's hedge fund greats compete to be the best. Ed Lampert, Kenny Griffin, Dave Tepper and a host of would-be hedgers culled from tryouts across America trade their hearts out to win, and you decide who will be named the Wall Street Journal’s Hedge Fund Idol. Hosted by Jim Cramer, with a not-to-be-missed musical tribute to spreadsheets in Sanjaya's unique musical stylings.

Wall Street Journal -- Shootin' For Riches, the video game

Experience the intriguing world of affluence laid bare in this violent, sex-filled, raucous romp, playable on PCs and all consoles. Pick your character from a full menu of employee types -- back-stabbing manager, overly-loud cubicle neighbor, under-qualified yet overly-ambitious new recruit -- and then try to shoot your way to the corner office. This games takes you from the dark, dangerous, churning alleyways of opportunity, to the broad, shining boulevards of success. Winners will appear on MySpace.

Jeez, just think of all the synergy projects between these synergy projects! Makes the idea of a glossy lifestyle magazine seem almost tame and reasonable.

Consider the clock started.

A Really Nice M

A friend in the UK shared with me some glorious branding nonsense coming from Morrisons, a large supermarket chain.

The company's business strategy seems eminently sensible: build on its strengths -- distribution, pricing, and history -- to deliver food that's fresher than its competitors. There are functional attributes that can differentiate it, and lots of ways to earn the trust and commitment of shoppers. The company has deep roots in Yorkshire, which is a region known for people who are hard-working and direct.

Too bad its branding has nothing to do with any of that.

You know the drill. New guy takes the reins, and about six months later there's a new image campaign underway. Morrisons presented its version of this kabuki drama last March on a slide entitled Development Areas in a presentation to analysts. It read "inconsistent perception of the brand." The rest of the bullets identified other problem areas, such as poor selection, cluttered stores, outdated systems, and competency gaps in the organization. All were separate items.

Of course, a design firm was already hard at work, having beat out the braintrust responsible for that shockingly jarring London 2012 logo. A few weeks after the declaration about its inconsistencies, Morrisons had a fresh, new approach to its brand.

It replaced this logo:

With this one:

I know. You’re trying to calm yourself.

The brilliance of the font selection, layout, and color scheme has taken your breath away.

The resonance of the yellow.

The implied trust of the serifs on the M.

The whiteness, representing freedom and possibility.

The new M truly captures the ideal of Morrisons imagined position.

And it only gets, er, gloriouser. Ads promoting it use TV personality Denise Van Outen pushing a shopping cart through green fields, on board a fishing boat, and down a busy street. She's left off her make-up and skipped combing her hair, so she can look more like the frazzled would-be shoppers who're supposed to care about the spots. There's a new cut-line with the word "fresh" in it.

Voila! Brand fixed.

Unfortuntately, Morrisons have fixed nothing but the profit margin for its branding consultants.

We can endlessly dissect the logo, just as reviewers examine TV commercials as if they were high art. But it's all rather irrelevant, isn't it? Any company can create a logo and hope it says just about anything. Most do. And don't. A logo has no inherent meaning, or lasting associations, separate from what behaviors it represents, or prompts.

The Morrisons M needs to represent progress on all those other Development Areas on that slide. Its branding problem isn't that its customers have inconsistent perceptions of its brand, but rather that they consistently experience it for what it truly is: poor selection, cluttered stores, outdated systems, and competency gaps in the organization. Just past the shiny new M is reality. The stores are the brand, especially in a high-frequency experiential category like supermarkets.

So why not make those changes themselves the substance of the brand communications -- the real things it can and must do to differentiate itself -- and only then plaster a new M (or whatever) on it?

Good question, with no good answer other than that Sir Ken Morrison has become intoxicated with the promise of branding blather (the new CEO is a former Heineken lifer, and beer marketers are notorious spenders on the vagaries of brands). It'll certainly report frequently on its brand index, to track its imaginary results that can't be deciphered in actual bottom-line performance.

Imagine a different approach.

Morrisons realizes that its brand potential is embedded in its operational aspirations, so it sets out to quite literally reinvent each of its 370+ stores and retrain/reincentivize its 100,000+ employees. It announces its intention to change the shopping experience for every customer in the UK. All of the elements of local, fresh, responsible, and whatever are declared.

Then it goes about doing it.

Makes each store a project that involves local press, local suppliers, etc. The pitch to shoppers is the becoming of a new concept in supermarkets, not a declaration of imagined brand destination, position, or DNA, or whatever. Every communications activity involves them, giving them reasons to visit, or soliciting their ideas, in ways that evoke the involvement they remember (really or wistfully) from back in the nostalgic days of local butchers and shopkeepers. Involve the employees, too, and make them a visible part of the customer experience. Build on traditions while building new ones. Announce each store as it has been re-invented. Ask customers to come back, again and again.

This approach would give Morrisons any number of opportunities for more press, more meaningful ads, and more events to prompt consumer traffic. It could form the basis for more evolved and involving CRM. And it could buy it the space to make mistakes, such as the recent e.coli breakout at two of its stores in August.

Brand as ongoing behavior is just more credible than fantasies of branding communications. The reality of such a program would be so much more compelling than the slick and expensive redesign of its logo, website, and TV campaign.

But hey, instead Morrisons bought a really nice M.

McBranding or McMoment?

Researchers at Stanford have affirmed that kids choose McDonald's-branded food over generic versions, and then like the taste better, too.

This further adds to a corpulent body of psychological insight on how human beings can alter their experience by their very preconceptions. Most of us already know that our expectations at least color, if not downright determine what follows. Dentists have been suffering from such self-fulfillingness forever.

On the physical sciences side, physicists have long noted the apparent ability of our consciousness to not only perceive reality but, by its very involvement, create it, or "collapse the wave function" of probability into certitude.

But is the research proof of branding?

The researchers think so, from the very premise of the study -- "to study the overall influence of a company’s brand" -- to its implications, which the top researcher says "...support efforts to ban or regulate advertising or marketing...directed to young children."

The McDonald's brand folks should feel complimented, though I wonder how much of the supposed brand preference has anything to do with the communications inputs.

Granted, the company's iconography is memorable, and often unavoidable. More kids are able to name Ronald McDonald than can identify the President, probably. I still remember "two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun," and I first heard that slogan when I was 12.

But there's no science to affirm (or specify) whether, not just how much, any of these communications conceits have anything to do with purchase or repeat visits. We can talk about how kids feel about McDonald's, but the science behind branding can’t explain what it means. Or how it happens. Or if it matters at all.

The conclusions about changes to advertising might have no impact, if the advertising itself has no impact to begin with.

There is, however, science that can explain the McDonald's phenomenon. It has much more to do with mcmoments that mcbranding.

First, there's biology.

A meal at McDonald's offers more physiological highs than any other legal substances. Sugar. Salt. Fat. Caffeine. Stuff that gets into your system, and flips switches of joy and satisfaction that evolution has programmed into our genes. It's addictive; just ask one of the more than one hundred million Americans who are overweight.

Eating bad food feels good, and that's not a creative branding accomplishment. McDonald's could run ads that told people to stay away, and anybody who dared to show up would still experience a quasi-orgiastic feeding moment.

Second, there's the psychology of behavior.

"Going to McDonald's" is much more than selecting a destination, or scheduling a trip. It requires little planning, since its locations are effectively omnipresent. A visit means the enabler (i.e. parent) doesn't have to plan a meal, prepare it, or clean up afterwards. And it's certain that the kid will be happy with the junk food consumed, so there's no risk of dissatisfaction (i.e. incessant kid griping).

Visiting McDonald's is easy, cheap, and feels good. Do it a couple of times, and you experience something psychologists call operant conditioning: you associate visiting McDonald's with all those good feelings, and tend to favor doing it again. Your kids associate the same things, and then associate negative feelings with NOT doing it again.

Households have experienced this dichotomy all over the world today, just like yesterday. Happy kids who get to go to McDonald's (or Taco Bell, or any other outlet). Other kids who are pissed off because Mom or Dad said no.

So here we have an addiction, supported by operant conditioning, and we choose to give credit to artful communications?

Add celery to the menus. Force ads to tout healthy eating. It won't change much, I don't think.

It's not that Mcbranding hooks preschoolers; mcmoments do, because they're fueled with addictive ingredients, and then wrapped in experiential cues that say they're worth doing again.

Describing it as branding, per se, gives credit where it isn't due, confuses the conclusions, and obscures the appropriate actions.

McDonald's doesn’t have to say yes to any new limits on its advertising or branding. Let them spend zillions on it.

Parents need to say no more often when it comes to feeding their kids junk food.

This research reveals that eating badly, just like relying on brand marketing, is nothing more (or less) than a hard habit to break.

Sacrifices for the Brand

No, really.

Early this month, Nepal Airlines sacrificed two goats in front of an airplane that had been acting quirky. The slayings were intended to appease the Hindu god Akash Bhairab. Bhairab is the god of the sky, and seems to have a corporate endorsement deal with the airline (his image appears on its web site).

It worked. The plane is operating perfectly. Not so much good news for the goats.

You can question the wisdom of solving what authorities suggested was an electrical fault with a ritualistic murder, but this dim bulb chooses to wonder about two other implications:

First, how many goats does the average brand marketer sacrifice with every program?

No, no, not really, but figuratively, in terms of actions that have no provable or measurable casual link to the desired outcomes of branding.

Lots, it turns out. Publicity stunts. Chat room blather. Virtual showrooms, nutty TV commercials, and any of the other things we do in service to the god of awareness.

We regularly prostrate ourselves in deference to the vague spirit out there, in the hope that our sacrifices will appease it, and allow our products to succeed. Our rationale is no stranger than what I'd imagine the brand gurus/high priests at Nepal Airlines believe.

We just know there's a reason why we do what we do. Sure, it defies most operational conventions around us, whether at our companies or our clients. So many drones just don't get it...the it of brandness that is bigger, better, and holier than the humdrum of their existence.

It's a small step to bringing on the goats. We make sacrifices for brands all the time, though those sacrifices usually involve our own careers. If the latest ritual fails to sell product, fix the airplane, or make it rain, we often get fired. Slitting goat throats isn't so much incomprehensible to us as just plain gross.

Which brings me to my second question: what if the only casual link required between action and reaction is belief?

Nepal Airlines reports that the plane is operating smoothly. It wasn't embarrassed by the goat sacrifice: it took a picture, and a spokesman spoke about it. However fervent their commitment to serving Akash Bhairab might be, they've got to run an airline. Do things to sell tickets. Make a profit.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with this picture. The airline did what its customers expected of it. It was smart branding.

In reaction to real or perceived issues with its plane, it didn't run an ad apologizing to the sky god. It issued no press release, or post a sponsorship sign over the doorway to the neighborhood yurt. Its behavior is what mattered. The casual link to the issue is that it did something that its customers expected.

Who knows whether the sky god was pleased, or even if it exists? Its customers think so. This is indeed a different realm from that in which most marketers work.

I'm reminded of JAL, another Asian airline, when one of its 747 crashed in 1985. The CEO didn't post some nonsense yaddayadda movie on the company's web site or on YouTube. It didn't make a perfunctory donation to a charity, and then spend more money promoting it.

The CEO resigned. And the maintenance guy committed suicide.

Talk about sacrifices for the brand. Well, that's what we do. Talk.

I'm sure Akash Bhairab isn't pleased. Neither are lots of consumers, who aren't paying extra for all the stuff we say instead of do.

They're certainly done making sacrifices for brands.

Cigarettes & TVs

Mad Men on AMC is a quality soap opera set in heyday of the 1960s ad business. I recommend it to anyone who loves character development, attention to Rock Hudson/Doris Day-type fashion and design, and wonderful references to a marketing culture that is both shockingly dated and very relevant.

There's a scene in the first episode when the lead ad guy helps his cigarette client deal with government restrictions on making health claims in ads. It seems that a smiling doctor had been one of the most popular marketing props.

"This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal," he explains. "We have six identical companies, making six identical products. We can say whatever we want."

Now fast-forward to 2007.

TV makers are seeing smoke. Most every seller of liquid-crystal displays has been sued for patent infringement this year. It turns out that many of the components come from the same factories, so there's not a lot of difference between the brand names. Except the brand names. And nobody seems all that willing to pay for them anymore.

Is this the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cigarettes?

Yes and no.

Yes, because advertising in this category has been particularly atrocious for quite a while now.

Check out some of these high-end ads. Do they tell you anything? Inspire some realization? Prompt (gasp!) an action? Or do they look shockingly similar? What these brands seem to want to tell consumers is, well, not much at all.

"Advertising is based on one thing," the TV ad guy character opines. "Happiness. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is ok."

What in these TV ads screamed anything at you other than technogobbleygook and incomprehensible creative? Can you tell me the difference between a plasma and LCD screen? Maybe today's crisis is a wake-up call for TV makers: find qualities about your products that actually matter to people and, more importantly, prompt purchase.

Make buying these complicated devices "ok?"

But here's the rub. Ads won't do it, like the way the guy's impromptu suggestion of "it's toasted" saves the day for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Today's networked, social mediascape requires that branding be supported by fact, promoted by experience, and endorsed/recommended by the voices of consumers more than the Voice of the Brand.

So to make TV brands -- and all of the ads, PR, promotions, or any of the other tools of communications tactics that we recite in the hushed tones of brand canon -- companies will first need to invent behaviors that differentiate their products. Branding today is about doing, not declaring.

New services. Promises of support. Different designs and configurations. Functions with benefits explainable in simple language. Only then should the marketing folks figure out how to disseminate and brand it, whatever it is.

Every major TV brand should be having its own Mad Men client meeting moment. Only in 2007, they need to be talking about differentiation in reality, not in the imaginary world of branding communications. There should be operations folks in the room. Services, too.

The marketers in the room should be busy asking questions, not trying to answer them. Some things have changed since the 1960s.

Except why does the nervous ad guy boss still look like Larry Tate?

Best Practices Make Imperfect

A reader suggested that I write something about the best practices racket.

It's a brilliantly vague phrase, isn't it? There's lots written about it. Classes to be taken, and boondoggling to be done at conferences. People get it put into their job titles, which is what prompted my friend's suggestion.

Yet it's an oxymoron wrapped in a fantasy inside a mistake. Kind of like how we define brands.

First off, best practices suggests that anything else a company does is somehow less, or just not as good. Something being a "practice," which could be defined as a habit or routine within an organization, or across an industry category, strains the definition and link to "best." "Common" might be a better word for practices; things that are best are usually exceptions. In a competitive marketplace, something is only best if it isn't routine for everyone. So best practices aren't so best after all.

I love oxymorons. They're kind of like doublethink, only with attitude. Get one like best practices in your job title, and you're pretty much guaranteed employment for life, since nobody could truly explain what you did (or ever point out what you didn’t do). Come to think of it, that’s certainly a best practice.

You'd stay employed because the fantasy is that best practices are repeatable: if we study a success, we can duplicate it. So business actions are analyzed, and then academics and gurus codify them. Kids are taught the right way to launch a consumer product. Gurus tell would-be clients that they can do something like their competition just did. It's easier to gamble a budget or a career on something that worked before.

Only it rarely works out to be so best the second or twentieth time around.

Just ask the producers of most movies or music that come out of Hollywood, or the marketers who're behind all the products that we never bought and don't remember. To twist Santayana, those who learn from history can't repeat it.

If you think you can avoid the variability inherent in all experience, not to mention the likelihood that the best-laid plans will unfold sometimes in the worst ways possible, you are doomed to deliver mistakes, not successes. And you certainly won't know why.

In the realm of branding and marketing, what enabled or qualified a success was rarely predicted, factored into the plan, or reported in the post-game analysis. Unseen circumstances, operations, and anything else that doesn't fall under the purview of what brand marketers can understand or control stay, not surprisingly, unseen and misunderstood.

There's no such thing as a best practice in branding separate from what occurred in finance, production, sourcing, human resources, world affairs, the economy, the weather, and, well, you get the idea. History is a litany of endless fractals, with qualities that twist like tendrils around other qualities and tendrils. You can see and copy the swirls of the picture, but you don't get at the underlying math that created it.

What we get instead are skewed versions of history. Incomplete, biased stories. Fantasies. When it comes time to repeat them, it generally doesn't work, or work as well.

And it might be a mistake to even try.

Brand and culture are inexorably connected, and they're grounded in qualities of time and place that make them very real for a particular moment, and otherwise nonsensical for another. What makes sense to us right now might have been incomprehensible to consumers a generation ago, and could be laughable to consumers 5 minutes from now.

So even if we could analyze the fractal of, say, the last successful razor launch, and deliver the exact same activities down to the color of the hair of the guy who writes the press release, it still won't work.

By definition, a different moment in time is a different moment in time. To deliver those very same activities, you'll modify them simply by implementing them; you'll be inventing a new moment, with activities made new by experience, and thus changing what's best into something "new." What was perfect can't and won't be this time around.

This is the basis for the full-employment of writers of business cases, but it's a sloppy basis for a marketing plan.

Yes, there are rules and basic approaches to business function that need to be learned, applied, and constantly improved. There are truisms, from group and individual behavior, to be recognized and factored. And business planning requires awareness of influences, yielding realistic scenarios into which strategies should be placed.

But right now, how many folks are sitting down in marketing meetings to look at the work output of other marketers? Such best practice makes imperfect, thinks this dim bulb...

Ode on a Beige Box

With Acer's announced acquisition intention
comes a re-run of PC branding convention:

The addition of Gateway's brands makes three
logos and names that otherwise identically

try to cover-up with branding's latest rage
shiny little boxes all unmistakably beige.

Bring on the gurus, go film TV spots!
Use humor, indie rock, and virtual robots!

Talk about segments and attributes esoteric
in hopes of distracting folks from products generic.

But will branding these identical boxes suffice?
Not if customers buy them based solely on price.

Pick Acer over a Dell? Lenovo? Or HP?
It’s hard to charge more for a commodity.

So while Acer waxes poetic about markets and brand,
I wonder if this moment it’ll understand

that if transistors and chips are identically the same,
it needs to define its brands by more than a name.

That lifestyle isn't an image, usage not just a thought:
to sell computers, it must address what its customers bought.

Show a little insight, a flicker of wisdom
that it's selling much more than a technology system.

What appears on the screens? What services unique?
What experiences do its customers seek?

How are offers configured? How is loyalty earned?
How can things get done so customers return-ed?

It could go beyond the promises of image and theme,
and find out what its customers really mean

when they ponder a purchase, consider a transaction...
and deliver to them not brand, but satisfaction.

Cost-cutting and efficiency will get Acer some savings
that fund its expected "brand strength" ravings.

But, like automakers and CE gizmos have shown,
there's no brand positioning that manufacturers can own.

No declarations, no artsy laptop covers comply
with consumers real desires to find a purchase why.

Relying on such branding nonsense is just too common
and its made the PC business a race to the bottom.

For Acer's ilk, beige is not just a hue,
it colors just about everything they do.

And the commodity world isn't terribly nice,
where brand is replaced by ever-lowering price.

The opportunities for Acer to succeed are vast,
but preconceptions about branding it first must past.

You have to earn it, through operations and behavior,
And thus earn your target consumer’s good favor.

Oh, and a bit of advice, from friend to a friend?
Skip that disingenuous Microsoft Vista recommend.