Dim Bulb

Haunting Awareness

I make a living telling clients that consumers are just too smart to fall for branding claims that aren't substantiated by real corporate behaviors, and then AP/Ipsos goes and conducts a poll that finds 1/3 of Americans believe in ghosts.

Worse, almost one in four report having actually seen one.

This is particularly disheartening to me, what with my being the advocate for consumer intelligence, integrity, and respect. 

People aren't terribly trusting of companies (or brand marketing) these days.  The availability of information and shared experiences on the Internet means that they tend to believe less and less in the claims companies make about products or services.  So it just makes sense to reconfigure branding strategies to address this reality.

But then those pesky consumers go and get all unreal on me.

How is it that people won’t believe, say, an automaker's claims about the performance characteristics of a car -- all testable and provable, presuming anyone was interested in doing so -- yet a goodly number will believe that spirits walk among us or, as one respondent reported in the poll results, lived in his closet (and not under his bed, in an interesting touch that just smacks of veracity).

I bet not 1 in 10 viewers who stay up late enough to witness a direct response TV offer for a combination salad chopper and paint-by-numbers device believe it will actually work, yet three in 10 have awakened believing they sensed a "strange presence" in the room.

It's unlikely that you could randomly select a group of people and find any agreement on their expectations for an insurance company making their lives easier, oil companies caring for the environment, or cosmetics actually reducing the incidences of age.  Yet almost 1 in 5 believe in the power of spells or witchcraft.

And in an age when so much marketing and branding doesn't seem to work or have any of the desired effects on its targets, almost 50% of people believe in the power of ESP.

Were it only true, eh?

I think it's interesting that we work so hard to figure out what makes our target consumers tick.  Branding is all about awareness, mental states, and the potentiality of action based on what gets incorporated into the world views of people to whom we market.  The AP/Ipsos poll is a haunting reminder that the black box of human consciousness is anything but linear or, ahem, sensible.

This is why the behavioral marketing online is so refreshing, as it involves none of this peering into peoples’ souls, but rather the absolutely objective and measurable actions they take when they point and click.  Does someone think that clicking on the buy now link also rewards an angel with her wings?  Who cares, as long as they do it?

Perhaps there's more we can learn about applying this behavioral approach to the rest of our communications. 

If almost a fifth of consumers believe in UFOs, maybe it's just too much work (and hope) to think that they're going to think anything dependably useful to you about your product or service.  So while you hope they're thinking about your toothpaste brand or travel website, folks are also thinking about goblins, apparitions, and visits by little green men.

Perhaps the branding strategy should be to get people to do things -- not just think or be aware or them -- as you might not really want to know what they think about.

Just a few spooky thoughts for you on this Halloween.

Boo!

The Successors to T.H.R.U.S.H?

The ongoing branding campaign from Unisys is marvelously vague and then quite incomprehensible.  And it doesn't make much sense, either.

The ad I read, headlined One Step Forward.  Two Steps Forward., featured a paragraph of text describing the importance of security "as a catalyst for achievement" in various business operations.  Ok.  After I read it a few more times, I figured out that being secure meant that companies could take risks more riskfully. 

But is that security in knowing the floor polish in the employee cafeteria will resist scuffs?  The confidence that no competitor's satellite could take pictures through the CFO's office window?  A therapy program to make sure that your salespeople were each secure in their senses of self? 

Who knows?  The graph touts Unisys Solutions for Secure Business Operations, which could be just a less-memorable name of some bad guys facing off against the Man from U.N.C.L.E.  ("Mr. Kuryakin, it seems that USSBO has built a branding confuse-o-ray weapon!"). 

Of course, the branding gurus would say that if you didn't know what us-bo does for a living, you're not among the targets for this ad or campaign.  I'd say that's a lame excuse for writing some really vague copy. 

And on the subject of vague, I had a vague sense that Unisys didn't even exist anymore until I found the ad, and I've lived and worked in and out of the technology world for almost a quarter of a century.  Didn't the company go the way of batch processing and FORTRAN? 

Sure seems like an ad in a major magazine (I saw it in The Economist) would be a chance to say something instead of obliquely alluding to a vague suggestion.

The slogans, cut-lines, and catch-phrases that surround its logo on the ad don't help matters any more.

First, there's the line for the campaign -- "Security Unleashed" -- which makes about as much sense as "Silence Announced" or "Bridled Chaos." 

It's a malapropism wrapped in a oxymoron hidden in a non sequitur. 

Shouldn't the phrase have some inherent, clear meaning, instead of reference some verbal acrobatics that force me to think harder than I did about the last three articles I read before tripping over the ad? 

Then, after its logo and the line "Secure Business Operations" (huh?), it reads "Imagine it.  done."  Yes, the typo is on purpose.  I guess. 

What this has to do with the rest of the ad I can't tell you.  Maybe it's a left-over from a previous nonsensical campaign, or the input from a powerful lobby within the company.  Perhaps some other ad, separated from The Economist by time, location, content, and reader/viewer context, has the secret code for deciphering all of this gibberish. 

The brand somehow comes together across time and space...

"Hah!  I think we've solved this branding conundrum, Ilya."

The Not So Sexy Nobel

As Al Gore's Nobel Prize prompted various, vocal reactions from the global warming faithful, flat-Earther deniers, and at least a murmur of recognition from the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between those two extremes, the Nobel Prize for Economics warranted not even a hiccup.

Yet the economists so honored are pursuing a theory that could make up for its lack in sex appeal by making a difference to business and the business of brand marketing. 

Called mechanism-design theory, its proponents -- prize-winners Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson -- are exploring how to make the way people share information more open and efficient.  They're trying to remedy a problem you and I encounter many times each day, both professionally and personally: how do you deal with someone who knows more about something than you do?  This disconnect renders any system (markets, companies, relationships) inefficient, irrespective of all the communications blather about, well, the importance of (or official interest in) open communications.  Their technical term for the issue is asymmetric information.

Think about it. 

The lack of real, consistent transparency of information makes some people better able to take advantage of financial markets than others, unlike the Fox Business Channel would have us believe.  A co-worker or boss asks for something, yet the I don't know where you’re coming from factor complicates selecting a response.  We struggle to understand what our spouses and loved ones are thinking, and are constantly challenged to make decisions -- including what we choose to share with them -- based on imperfect knowledge.

From a social perspective, our solution is to elicit and give trust, do a lot of hoping, and never really know the full context or implications of our choices until time reveals them to us. 

In economics, the solution (according to the now-Nobel laureates) is something called incentive compatibility, which means finding the mechanisms that make individuals share private information truthfully and completely, and in doing so also do best for themselves.

Think Adam Smith's invisible hand, only it never balls up into a fist.

Mechanism-design theory has some very interesting implications for business, and for branding in particular:

First, it could enable organizational structures that are far more efficient.  Think of the time spent on prompting communications, and then picking up the pieces when work results reveal the imperfection of that communicating.  It would be far better if org charts and lateral teams could be incentivized to be truly transparent with one another, and still stay focused on achieving their own, formerly mutually exclusive, personal and professional goals.

Second, companies could get far better at delivering branding.  Branding amounts to a religious canon at many companies, in which believers are honored and rewarded on criteria that has meaning only to them, while heathens are persecuted instead of converted.  Brand is imposed and enforced on otherwise unrelated interests, instead of being organic and enabled by those interests.  But if everyone understood their real, vested, personal interests in a common good, it would free them to take actions that delivered a consistent brand.  Perhaps a mechanism-design approach would mean less grumping about a new corporate ID handbook, or wondering why hard-earned money is being wasted on branding nonsense like pretty ads, and more behaviors that individuals felt they truly owned (and that truly mattered, both to them personally as well as to the collective organization).

Third, it might mean something more to how we understand and relate with consumers.

There is an inherent disincentive for people to share their personal information with companies: companies are just untrustable, and consumers know that whatever beans we spill now will come back to spam us later.  So we marketers spend lots of time trying to figure out how to buy those revelations from them.  It's a slippery slope, or game of cat-and-mouse, though, founded not on true respect or any sense of transparency, really, but rather on an uncomfortable quid pro quo that we might call providing added value, but which most consumers see as a violation of their privacy, an intrusion into the quality of their lives, and an unpleasant experience that should be avoided, if possible. 

Is there an incentive-compatibility model that would make such transparency a consumer desire, and not an expense to them?  Imagine if there were planning models that inspired consumers to freely share information with companies, and we with them.  It would flip the standard approach to branding on its head, wouldn't it? 

Come to think of it, this mechanism-design theory thing is kinda sexy after all. 

The bright bulbs will be those folks who apply the thinking to business.  If Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson are right, it might be a very convenient truth indeed.

A Jousting Success

Microsoft's $240 million spend for a 1.6 percent take in social media site Facebook is getting a lot of attention in the mediascape and, as such, has already paid for itself.

Sure, it has prompted questions about the $15 billion valuation for a startup with a fraction of those dollars as revenue, and one wonders what Microsoft will actually accomplish through its involvement (there's talk of foreign ads, widgets, user information, and other areas that are, of course, very strategeric).  But it doesn't matter what happens, at least not substantively.

Microsoft just bought some great branding. 

There's a cabal of inventors, investors, media and bloggers enraptured by the promise of the latest technology, and an even bigger universe of CEOs and their executive teams expectantly reliant on that technology making their lives more profitable.  This informal ilovetechnology mediascape is a self-referential loop of sorts: the same people announce things, write stories, distribute betas, hire consultants, send one another impromptu updates in code from their Dick Tracy wristwatches, and present to one another at meetings and conferences.

Individuals and companies don't do business as much as vie for position, narrating one another's every comment or burp, and declaring the universal truths and importance of their lives as the remaining, vast majority of peasants labor in the dirt and misery of poverty just outside the castle walls.  It's a strange world, really, in which few of the standards or the accountability of normal business apply.

This world is concerned less with being an industry, and more about courtly jousting. 

Microsoft giving Facebook $240 million is like you or I buying a tall coffee at Starbuck's.  It's chump change, and it has no real business significance whatsoever.  Owning such a small stake in the company won't give Microsoft any leverage or particularly special access.  It won't erect a barrier to stop other companies from investing or working with Facebook.  And, since Facebook hasn't really figured out how to actually make money, the investment might be better categorized as an expense.

It doesn't matter, not as a business decision, per se.  The move was intended to show the ilovetechnology mediascape that Microsoft could beat Google to the punch on something.  The ladies and gents of the technocourt are oohing and aahing appropriately.

So it is branding that's far more successful than anything that could be accomplished by even the most creative advertising or web site design.  Score one for Microsoft in the day’s joust.

Even better, they've made an investment in a branding engine, planted in the firmament of the ilovetechnology mediascape, and powered by the ongoing, incessant progression of time.  Every day will give Microsoft another opportunity to announce, leak, describe, or otherwise promote its Facebook connection, thereby earning it ongoing presence -- i.e. branding awareness -- among the people with the greatest, vested interests in paying attention.

This ilovetechnology mediascape throws off stories that get perpetuated by an overworked, underpaid mainstream media that acts less like a filter, and more as a conduit for the breathless prose of "Microsoft beats Google" or "Microsoft's investment underscores the skyrocketing value of online communities..." 

Sure beats buying TV commercial time and forgettably declaring where do you want to go today?, or running those idiotic ads for Office with people wearing dinosaur masks. By actually doing something, Microsoft not only creates a prompt for ongoing coverage, but does so in an inherently real, credible way. 

That's smart branding.

So I hope they've got the bright bulbs in marketing involved.  To really milk this thing, they should be thinking first about what subsequent moves will prompt the most (and most organic) attention, and how to translate that awareness into behaviors that benefit Microsoft's business (here's one equation they might try to figure out: How does X amount of interest in Facebook widgets get multiplied by some other action to deliver Y sales of Vista OS or some other products?).

Hats off to them being as smart as I hope they are.  Now that they've won the day's joust, they have a change to turn their horse around and make another run. 

I wonder if that's a part of their branding strategy or not.

Extraordinarily Ordinary Marketing

NYC & Co has launched a $30 million global marketing push to convince foreign visitors that visiting New York is like stepping into a cartoon.

In an attempt to thematically express some essence of the place under the slogan "This is New York City," the spots feature popular sights that morph into surreal animation as would-be tourists are shown the city"s five boroughs.  The Statue of Liberty waves.  Hot-dog blimps crawl across the sky. 

Other than serving as a promotional tool for making LSD legal again, I'm actually surprised that the marketing is so ordinary.  I suspect two basic things enabled this mistake:

First, nobody said no to the creative folks.  I mean, cartoons?  No New Yorker worth his or her salt would ever resort to a cartoon to represent the spirit of the city, let alone try to convince someone to visit based on it.  Sure, NYC is a dream and a vision, but there's enough there there to portray, and no reason to invent somewhere else. Cartoons are for Kansas City.  Orlando.  Someplace made up, not real like the Big Apple.

When they showed the animation the first time, didn't people in that darkened conference room fall to the floor laughing?  The creative types worked overtime to find an extended, tenuous train of thought that starts in the physical reality of place, yet ends up in some confused, animated fantasy.  Nobody said no.

Second, the campaign was obviously decided by committee, and we know what that approach does for things like recipes and political platforms.

Five boroughs?  Forget foreigners...a significant percentage of New Yorkers have never visited any other borough unless they were traveling to an airport or a drug deal.  And the Manifesto -- the list of things that are supposed to matter about New York -- is so ponderously jumbled and endless that it ends up doing what most committees do: tell you so much that you're really told not much at all.

Now, I'm predisposed to the "I (heart) New York" days, because that campaign let every individual customize the attributes associated with the city.  Such is the inherent strength of the place: New York is everything to anyone, and the challenge is to illustrate that depth and breadth of benefits without turning them into a laundry list, or a cartoon.

NYC's promoters want to get people from the UK, France, Italy and Spain to fork over their hard-earned cash to come visit.  I'm not so sure there's anything in the everything of these spots to compel them to call their travel agents. Cartoons are free on TV.

What would I have done? 

Based on consumer research of one, and a decision-making process about as long as it takes my fingertips to reach the keys upon which I'm writing this sentence, my approach would be as follows:

Play to your customers' biases, not your own.  I'm sure there's a social improvement task force from the Bronx that is thrilled to be included in the mishmash of the commercials, but there's little about the Bronx that’s relevant to your average Italian tourist. 

Or is there?

Could the campaign have been customized against each targeted nationality, and played up the ways in which so-and-so ethnicity had "built New York, and written its greatest stories, adventures, crimes, and lives?"’  Imagine telling the story to Italians (or Spaniards, Englishmen, the Irish, or whomever) that they helped build the greatest city on earth, and that they can come visit the result of all the hard work?

Each country could get it's own unique selling points, perhaps book-ended by some generic pablum about the NYC brand, or whatever.  But directing the content not at what the New York tourism nudnicks want to say, but rather at what their target customers would like to hear, would be a fundamentally different approach than the cartoon spots.

Dare to exclude.  By making the overt case that there's something for everybody in NYC, it kind of comes across like there's nothing that stands out.  Yet there is that ineffable, unique quality of New Yorkness that anybody who has lived there knows.  It's also a quality that is missing from every other city on the planet.

You can't try to summarize it in a list, and it isn't evident in a cartoon version of the list.  I think the challenge would be to pick moments in time -- examples -- of when that quality can be felt.  Instances when New York City is unlike any other place.  London has models, and Paris has restaurants.  New York has New York, which means...

...the creatives could have been challenged with a much better question than whose animation style to mimic.

Finally, pitch people with an action verb.  "This is New York City" is like stating "Here is the 43 Element on the Periodic Chart."  Ho-hum.  Why couldn’t the pitch have the word visit or maybe please come visit?  How about a slogan that references those special NYC moments, like "living New York," or "doing New York?" 

Again, I don't mean to propose creative, but behavior -- making reservations and traveling -- is a lot more important to NYC's tourism goal than prompting lots of thoughts and contemplation.

Such ordinary marketing for an extraordinary city is extraordinarily disappointing. 

A Great Book for Marketers

I've just re-read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and I have to say that you might want to drop a little sci-fi between your next two marketing or business reads.

First published in 1995, it came out a few years after Snow Crash, in which Stephenson foresaw, along with William Gibson's Neuromancer, the collective hallucination of ubiquitous connections, communication, and invention that Stephenson called the metaverse, and Gibson named cyberspace.

Whether realized via chat or other social media, playing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Second Life, or simply conducting finance, research, and other activities online, we’ve all begun the migration to work and play sometimes in those places that Stephenson and Gibson envisioned.

The Diamond Age picks up aspects of that/our future, but then goes much further out.

The plot follows the misadventures of a little girl and an engineer in a world that has discovered the secret to infinite resources through nano-engineering (matter compilers can rearrange the atoms of pretty much anything into pretty much anything else).  It's a very rich tableau rendered with detail and surprise, which is part of what makes the book so cool.

What makes it relevant to business, however, are the social and character elements.  So even if the sci-fi stuff bores you, there's lots more here to dig into.

In the future, associations between individuals -- communities based on shared interests and habits, called phyles -- have replaced nations and business as the ways people define their lives and give order to their actions.  The techno, hardcore sci-fi ways that create this circumstance are far less compelling than the implications:

• Society has re-ordered itself into enclaves of ideas; consciously-agreed-upon deals between individuals replacing top-down government (or communication)
• The agreements are to live by a certain set of rules that give the communities great meaning, but maybe be utterly irrelevant to one another; for instance, the nano-engineer is a member of group of neo-Victorians who have chosen to wear certain  clothes, print namecards, and live by a variety of very well-defined social constrictions
• Therefore, such community membership isn't just about identification or other superficial badges that might be familiar to us as brands; rather, communities define what matters, how choices are made, and what things may be chosen
• The how people express this reality -- whether via conversation, cool gizmos like books that talk and react to you, or whatever -- is far less fascinating than how this backdrop affects the character's action and interplay and, as such, moves to the forefront. 

This imaginary world is particularly relevant to our ongoing conversations about social media and technology.

We are learning much these days about why people are drawn to things like chat rooms and MMORPGs, but talk less about what they take away from them.  The term community is applied pretty liberally, becoming a synonym for just about any point the cybervoid where at least a handful of people visit to do just about anything.

There are far more profound dynamics at work here:

• As our choices and opportunities multiply, are there reasons folks might actively choose to limit either (or both)?
• Could there be a social-organizing counterpoint to search and other online tools trying to market to us as individuals?  Might our trust in our phyles make us immune to behavioral targeting?
• Are brands (or single issues, like the environment or pet safety) organizing themes for true communities, or are there deeper, more wide-ranging defintions?
• What are the qualities of real communities enabled by technology?  Chances are it's a far cry from a Facebook posting or MySpace page
• Is talking enough to constitute community? How do we, like the communities of The Diamond Age, translate the content of a society into its behavioral functions?
• Already, there's a Diamond Age location in Second Life (see pic below), and the players of WoW organize into guilds (another type of community)

You could argue that sci-fi writers are really scenario planners, of a sort, taking a presumption or set of initial conditions and then, wham!, letting it unfold over time and describing what happens.  The best stuff really isn’t about the settings, laser beams, or aliens, but rather about such social experience.

For what it's worth, Philip K. Dick saw a lot about human nature when he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968 (The 1982 movie Blade Runner was loosely based on the book’s plot basics).  Dick imagined a world in which all the rules and criteria for judgment had been erased by nuclear war, so people struggle to define themselves by their possessions and status in the community.  He also saw people working out on a Stairmaster-type machine, called a Mercer device, that let them feel empathetically connected to one another's struggles.

So, not so much fiction, after all. 

I think there's a lot to be studied and said about community, and maybe some quality sci-fi is as good a way as any to get into it. 

Pick up a copy of The Diamond Age if you get the chance.  I guess a TV mini-series is in development on the Sci-Fi Channel.  The book will be loads better, even if the show is good. 

You just might find it to be one of the best marketing books you read yet this year. 

The Car Disappears

See the car pic above?  That's one more car than you'll see in the entire new Hyundai Motor America branding campaign, which not only doesn't show vehicles, but also isn't intended to drive traffic to showrooms, or say anything specific about the company.

The stuff sure is artsy.  Spots appear shot out of the window of a moving vehicle and have trance-inducing music accompaniment, each featuring subtle, thought-provoking text -- like "Shouldn’t you drive a car that inflates your intelligence" and "not your ego" -- then closing with a URL ThinkAboutIt.com.

Following that link gives you a variety of graphics and games that have been rendered with lots of care on a site that is really not about cars at all.  Hyundai's logo appears washed out at the end of the TV spot, and the company name gets a full 10-pt type treatment on the web site.

Some industry watchers like the campaign because, they say, it's building brand image.

Brand image?  Am I missing something?

Marketing in the car industry seems to oscillate between two extremes, promoting either:

• Specific technical attributes, like engine size or fuel economy, or
• Esoteric emotional attributes, such as the recent spots from Cadillac

Both approaches don't quite work, as both are somewhat removed from the reality in which most consumers live.  Car companies mostly leave it to dealers to create, fund, and run those low-rez buy-now-or-my-head-will-explode-because-of-our-low-prices ads.  All the corporate marketing is supposed to do, in this and most instances, is to "open consumers' eyes about Hyundai," according to one of the gurus responsible for it.

See, the way it'll work is that the broad, vague, intangible atmospherics of the spots will create this backdrop of sometimes subliminal awareness, which will then get triggered by actual ads that say something, and then get converted someday into faster and more frequent sales.

How will anybody know if the branding did anything?  They won't, not really, although I guess they can count visits to the whacky web site as some absolute good, or perhaps track real business indicators -- showroom traffic, time to purchase, ultimate sale prices -- and shrug their way back into the void to claim some influence from the brand.

In other words, the branding will succeed no matter what: it will increase awareness somehow, somewhere, measured some way and, if sales go south, the gurus behind the campaign might still win an industry award for doing such a good job promoting the brand into the ether.

Well, I’ve got a few thoughts from a reality-calling perspective:

• Remember Infiniti? When Nissan launched its new luxury division in the US back in the late 1980s, the marketing campaign featured rocks, trees, and zen-like language about being a different car company.  The ads were universally panned -- and later replaced with more traditional cars-speeding-down-winding-road spots -- but the fact was that Inifiniti was totally different: it had been designed from the ground-up to offer different services and support, as well as sold cars that looked different (the lack of a front grille was just one aspect of the first Q45 models which, sadly, was also replaced with a Mercedes-like face in subsequent iterations).  The lesson: if things are different, don't go all conceptual and find creatively distracting ways to tell people about it.  Tell them directly.  I wonder how different Infiniti's history would have been had the company skipped all of the creative nonsense at launch, and established instead why people should care that it was different.
• Provoking thoughts isn't enough anymore.  Our brains are provoked by every moment and experience.  The idea behind the Hyundai spots is that they’ll break through this clutter and provoke...what, a question about what's going on at Hyundai?  Perhaps, although the trip to the web site doesn't answer anything.  It's just a likely that the provocation will be to muse that the ads make no sense, or that one of the images is pretty, or whatever.  Maybe the viewer will be provoked to wonder what company was even behind the spots, but a subsequent web search is just full of more provocation.  The lesson: why waste a single instance of demanding (or intruding upon) consumers' attention without motivating them to do something that leads to other behaviors with relevance to your business?  How about taking one of those elements of how Hyundai is really different -- if it is, that is -- and then creatively casting it as provocation to find another bit of info, answer question, comment on something, etc.?
• Do, don’t tell.  The era of declaring brand attributes is long ago over.  So Hyundai's ad campaign could lay claim to the secret of eternal life, let alone some remotely reasonable brand attribute, and it's unlikely that anybody would take it to heart.  This is due in large part to the miracle and madness of social media: if people can talk to one another, and any/all information about a company is pretty much available to anybody, then brand image has truly been outsourced to the ongoing conversation via chat, IM, forums, etc.  TV spots featuring pretty scenery and vague language are pretty much irrelevant to the conversation.  What impacts it instead are the real actions, small or large, by companies, to which individuals and groups can react and forward.    

Imagine if Hyundai chose to tell people why it's different, and provided people with real, tangible reasons to respond.  Maybe it really could rise above the clutter and short-track itself to better recognition and purchase consideration.

Right now, it's just a car company spending a lot of money on ads that don't sell cars.

Exchange Students From Another Planet

There's a nursery school opening in New York City designed and hosted by Blue Man Group.  They hope to extend it eventually to at least the fifth grade. 

And you thought it was hard reaching today's consumers.  Wait until the first few Blue graduating classes emerge onto the mediascape.

In case you're not familiar with them, Blue Man Group is a performance art troupe/marketing machine.  Its show combines Vaudeville physical comedy with art, social commentary, and lots of strange, entertaining moments of live theater.  What started as a performance art event in New York’s East Village has morphed into quasi-family entertainment institutions with open-ended, concurrent performances in Chicago, Las Vegas, and other cities around the globe. 

You really need to see one of their shows to understand the bizarre nature of the concept, and to grasp how odd it is that they're applying it to primary education.  Search for them on YouTube.

We're talking foam-covered walls, black-light painting that appears during Glow Time sessions, a machine that creates images of dragonflies that can be lit and made to soar across the walls, and strange devices that let kids make sounds and music mixing the croaks of frogs, bays of barnyard animals, and just a little Emerson, Lake & Palmer synth.

The idea is to get kids thinking creatively and abstractly, which is very much in keeping with the original intent of the guy who invented kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel.  He probably would have liked Blue Man, actually.  So I'm all for it.

But it raises interesting questions for marketing's understanding of consumers and behavioral segments.

These Blue grads are going to look just like their brethren from public and parochial schools.  They'll go on to college, mostly, and join the workforce and legions of consumers whom we want to target for our goods and services.  We'll hope to understand them based on their demographics, geography, search and buying patterns.

But they'll be different.

That's the whole point of putting them into the Blue Man Group school in the first place, isn't it?  Their parents want them to grow up with a unique approach to living.

They won't be alone.  Consider all of the kids who are home-schooled, or go to other experimental schools.  What about people who are raised to believe in ghosts, spirits, or Marxism?  How can we fathom the decision-making processes of people who believe in angels, vast government conspiracies, or the impending apocalypse in 2012?

I'm not sure I really want to know how these various groups of people interpret the world around them -- as they're defined not by their interests or lifestyle demographics, but rather by the very nature of how they've been hard-wired to make decisions -- or that I could if I tried. 

So imagine trying to guesstimate the efficacy of branding thrown at them.

Many of our expectations for the benefits of branding are implicit, and based on our assumptions of some shared basis of understanding, some commonality of experience. 

The Blue Man Group school is just a small example of how this assumption is not longer true.

Gnome If You Want To

Travelocity.com broke a new series of ads this week, featuring its Roaming Gnome visiting vacation spots and making its "travel wishes" come true.

Well, not new as in new, really, since the Roaming Gnome has been Travelocity's mascot since 2004.  Do you associate it automatically with the company?  I don't, but it seems to be able to sell them for a profit.  It has the requisite MySpace page, and its own website.

The ads insert the little statue into its most desired vacations, and does so as any red-blooded 10 yr-old would do: it gets thrown down a mountainside, frozen solid in a wall of ice, etc.  Supposedly the jovial icon screams and yells and quips sarcastically.  The punchline remains "you’ll never roam alone."

I can totally relate.

When I was 10 (or so), we used to build plastic models of tanks, fighter planes, and warships, with the sole intent to blow them up with firecrackers, throw them off the roof of our building, or setting them afire as they floated in a full bathtub.  This was pure juvenile (unadult-erated) fun, and I remember it all with great joy.   

The new ads make me think it might be fun to similarly torture or destroy the Roaming Gnome.  Especially if it talks and can cry out in pain.  I have no idea what it has to do with booking travel online, however.

Let's say my inner-pre-teen actually recalls one of the gnome abuse spots...what am I supposed to do with that recognition? 

• Is there some special service that Travelocity is offering (like a "be a kid again" adventure booking service)?
• Should I use Travelocity because it gets better fares, or has a better service for letting me cancel or change my bookings without getting a bloody nose?
• Can it tell me something meaningful beyond prompting me to chuckle maniacally at the statuette's misfortune?

Nope.  It's just branding. 

There are any number of online tools for booking travel, but I'm supposed to remember and then ultimately use Travelocity because I want to punish its little mascot.

Am I a dim bulb, or does this smack of lazy, imperfectly conceived business strategy, if it's a business strategy at all?

I'm sure there are any number of ways the company can measure exposure, engagement, or exploitation of its Roaming Gnome.  Whether there are any casual links to sales, or repeat purchase or, gasp!, customer loyalty, well, that's not the purview of the brand gurus, I guess.  Three cheers for their loyalty to purchasing gnome schwag, but that's not the point, is it?

So go ahead and gnome if you want to.  I'll bring the firecrackers.

Deja Vu, All Over Again

Samsung is reportedly seeing its product margins shrink just as its top-line product sales are slowing.  Its most-recent quarterly profits were down, making it four consecutive quarters of such bad news.

This comes only few years after it was writing a far different story: Samsung was a name that claimed to make digital electronics products that were as good as the products we presumed were good, like Sony, only it charged less for them.  It became a worst-kept secret that the company was building much of its inventory in the same back-room kitchens as its more-famous competitors, so it stole business and market share.

Now, it's Samsung's turn to feel the pain:

• There's a new I-make-the-same-stuff-only-cheaper darling, Vizio, which has teamed up with Wal-Mart (in the US) for distribution
• Consumers are even less loyal to brand names than they were a few years ago, as it's now common knowledge that most of the innards of electronics devices are interchangeable, if not identical
• Manufacturers haven't done themselves any favors by introducing ever-more complicated products, many of which offer slightly nuanced performance characteristics that consumers find debilitating more than motivating

People are confused and suspicious, and default to making decisions based primarily on price, if they decide to make purchases at all.

Samsung is in a bit of a pickle. The good news is that it hasn’t been singled out for this rude treatment; the bad news is that all of its competitors are contending with it, or will, soon.

All of these businesses have to answer a fundamental question: what, if anything, constitutes brand in a 24/7, transparent, consumer-empowered marketplace and, after that question, how do businesses deliver branding?

Solutions aren't obvious or inescapable.  Nobody needs consumer electronics brands, or at least nobody thinks that they do.  And the actions that are going to change their minds aren't going to come from the same folks who brought us Branding 1.0: marvelously funny or visually stunning TV ads, virtual showrooms in online communities and games, and ever-new ways to push garbage onto our mobile phones are just dancing around the central challenge, without addressing it head-on.

Nobody cares.

I bought my last flat TV (plasma, LCD, I don't know, and I don't care) online from newegg.com and, as I type this, I can't tell you the brand name on it.  I don't think it's Samsung.

There's the rub.  Making the name and logo mean something is the only way any of the CE companies will get out of this wired/tired routine. 

And if all they can do is muster more brilliant branding communications, then I fear it'll just be deja vu, all over again.

Great Logo, Terrible Business

British Petroleum ("BP") announced last week that it would drastically overhaul the company, after a series of spills, safety violations, and snafus on the production front yielded years of sub-par performance.

But it sure has a cuddly logo.

BP got kudos from the business press for its rebranding effort under the leadership of former chief John Browne: a pastel green logo, stations designed to look environmentally friendly, and a slew of corporate ads that made it appear as if BP were contemplating the important eco-issues of our day.

Clearly, it wasn’t focusing on the business behind that advertising.

We could debate the wisdom of an oil company hoping to claim that a concern for the environment was one of its concerns at all (past the regard mandated by law, or kept in check only by the limits of technical feasibility).  I found it almost laughable that BP and its competitors wasted millions on trying to come across as necessary evils, like low-tar cigarettes or a nicotine patch for we addicts of oil consumption.

But it never occurred to me that BP's branding would be even more detached from business reality than I'd jokingly supposed.  In fact, this latest admission from new chief Anthony Hayward renders the company's prior branding claims an outright lie.

Efficiency is a Guiding Principle in ecology, a cardinal rule that dictates such other qualities such as integration, balance, and sustainability.  Inefficiency produces waste of every kind: energy, resources, quality of decisions, even hours of human lives.  The environments of an inefficient company -- within the businesses, and between them and the world around them -- are degraded.  Bad business isn't eco-friendly.

So when BP admits that it hasn't been running its operations well, it's tantamount to revealing that its claims about environmental concern were, at best, the invention of marketers too disconnected from the rest of the business and too creatively savvy for their own good and, worst case, well, the same thing, actually.

Think of what could have happened had BP used its branding aspirations as a call to action for changing the actuality of its business?

• Instead of hiring a hoity-toity design firm to create the external appearance of green-ness, it would have focused on reassessing the internal structure of its operations
• A program to empower its employees to design and implement eco-responsible activities could have yielded cost-savings (efficiency usually yields them)
• A challenge to its vendors could have done the same
• These actions might very well have revealed the operational problems that are only now trickling to light
• Then, this strategy could have served as the substance of BP's branding claims, illustrating by behavior that the company was concerned about the environment and doing something about it

This branding would have been more believable and memorable because it was actually true.

Wow. So smart business and smart branding not only can go hand-in-hand, but really must do so.

I wonder how many other companies right now are suffering this disconnect between great logos and terrible business?

I Love This Ad

Coca-Cola is running a particularly brilliant ad these days.

It features a can of diet Coke wrapped with one of those cardboard holders you put around a cup of hot coffee.  The headline reads "Good Morning," and the punchline is excruciatingly simple: Try Diet Coke instead of coffee.

This works on any number of levels:

• The ad is simple, requiring no deconstruction or interpretation of some inside, witty joke
• I understand it in about a nanosecond, so I can't really avoid getting the punchline no matter how fast I turn the page
• There's nothing associative or emotional that I need to remember; there's no branding blather here, no promise that Coke will make my life better, or make the sun shine
• And it declares a call to action that gives me something to do, linking a place, time of day, and product into a behavioral moment

I love this ad. 

It's most notable because it comes from the same folks who waste millions annually on marketing that is complicated, hard to understand, unfathomable on what is important to remember, and has no link to any moment in real life.  Coke are the experts in this sort of branding hoohah, so I'm almost surprised that this elegantly smart ad even saw the light of day.

The ad industry is obsessed these days with the challenge of digital media and changing consumer habits, and the chosen responses have often been to produce more complicated online campaigns to "engage" with consumers (and hopefully, someday, sell to them).  Coke hasn't been silent on this front, either, getting written up recently for its global online integration efforts, as if websites in Des Moines or Dubai have any connection to people drinking bubbly brown liquid (let alone with one another in some fealty to the brand).

But promoting a new use for a product in a simple way could have far-reaching implications, not just for the media component of how we approach brands, but also for product development, customer service, and other company operations.

Imagine if Gillette chose to promote a new use for its however-many-bladed razor -- say, a "before you go out on Friday night touch-up shave" -- instead of trying to innovate its way to more sales by adding more blades, batteries, or whatever?  Or what if Dell (or any technology company) decided that improved, more consistent customer service could differentiate its brand more than trying to launch and sell another round of devices named after alien planets?

Ad great David Ogilvy would have appreciated this Coke ad, especially its clarity and purpose.

I do, too.  I love this ad. 

Wandering in the Desert

Although the Association of National Advertisers ("ANA") wrapped up its annual conference in Phoenix this weekend, it's pretty clear that it left many of its members wandering in the desert.

I understand that the punchline for this year's gig (called Masters of Marketing) was that consumers are spending more time with digital media, and not enough advertisers are spending enough money putting ads there.

The digital agencies that make and place said stuff should be giddy with anticipation; maybe even pay a finders fee to consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which penned the case for more digital ad expenditure.  Microsoft is also rumored to be very excited about extracting said money from worried marketers.

The ANA should be embarrassed for subjecting its membership to such mercenary and misguided pablum.

The consultants' study was based, in part, on a survey of 184 marketers, and provided faux quantitative research on such questions as whether companies thought they were "digitally savvy" (whatever that means, less than 24% answered positively).  It also queried how much money was being spent on digital marketing, and posited that number against the consumer usage numbers (suggesting that the former should be increased due to the latter).

What the conference failed to address were at least two basic facts of consumer behavior in this digitally-enabled world of ours, namely:

First, digital media are not channels like traditional media

• They’re two-way places where people go to do things like chat, debate, declare, and many times collect information that may influence their purchase decisions
• Ads -- or any of the traditional constructs of branding -- don't have relevance the way they once did.  Nobody has to endure them in order to watch "free" Internet, so crapping out chat rooms with the cyber-corollary of billboards, is just dumb
• The substance of the conversations online has replaced with detail and sometimes veracity the broadly thematic and most-times artificial inventions of brand
• So increasing ad spend in this domain is akin to yelling louder at a deaf person
• Yet they were sold this idea that said online yelling/activity is, in and of itself, valuable, and worth prompting.  One of the scheduled presenters was Anheuser-Busch, which has the audacity to promote its experiments -- like a complete online "TV station" with its own sitcoms -- as if capturing consumer attention was worth any price, while it still remains worthless as a contributor to the bottom-line

Second, consumers still live and, more importantly to the ANA's member interests, most buy and consume stuff in the real world

• While an easy answer (both re implementation, and then explaining it to industry or Wall Street analysts who don't know any better), doing more digital marketing might just not make sense for many companies
• If consumers need to buy something -- a bottle of beer, a bar of soap -- the challenge isn't to figure out the digital domain, but rather how it connects to the analog, real world
• Context and connectivity, between information shaped and shared online, and then the scenarios in which purchase decisions are made and actualized in the real world, are far more important that learning how to keep more plates spinning on the Internet
• Online behavior is simply a really detailed, focused snapshot of one aspect of overall consumer behavior
• Spending a few days in Phoenix listening to technologists explain why that snapshot is all that matters (it isn't), or marketers wax poetic about how they're influencing it (they're not, and if it's not connected to a real-world sales funnel, who cares?), would be comical if there weren't so many budgets and jobs on the line.

Digital should bring marketers closer to the real world, not farther away

There is immense opportunity to integrate the digital phenomenon into a better, more productive understanding of consumer behavior and, as such, selling to, with, through, and because of it.  But it isn't going to get realized by marketers talking to themselves, or talking about the agencies ready and willing to spend more of their ad budgets.

The ANA should be challenging its members to define the very premise and construction of brands.  Consumer adoption of digital anything means that impacting what they think is much harder to do, and far less relevant unless it's linked to some subsequent action.  This is a difficult, complicated subject that requires far more creativity, initiative, and risk than does the application of old ideas about perception and awareness to new media. 

So, if all the ANA had to tell its members was that digital expenditures and "experimentation budgets" (i.e. digital agency slush funds) need to be increased, it did them a terrible disservice.

In fact, it probably left lots of them wandering in the desert. 

A Centralized Spigot

SABMiller PLC and Molson Coors Brewing Co. have decided that the best way to address consumers' taste for smaller, more customized, unique "craft" beers is to merge their US operations into a conglomerate controlling approximately 30% of the market with about US$6.6 billion in annual revenue.

The rationale?  It's all about operational efficiencies, whether slashing corporate staff, buying raw materials, demanding better deals from retailers, or getting more space from advertising expenditures.  Going forward, the newly combined SABMillerMolsonCoors will conduct its business better than the constituent parts did formerly.

So the merger has nothing to do with the "front end" of selling beer -- products, labels, marketing, whether craft brews or mega-names -- versus controlling and managing the "back end."  This is very intriguing to me, considering how much we hear about  branding when it comes to the beer segment. 

Anheuser-Busch and SABMillerMolsonCoors between them spend a billion+ US$ on marketing each year, and lots of that spend is on branding intended to entertain vs. marketing that delivers news of any specific functional differences or benefits.  Some of the most egregiously funny or obscene ads have come in support of one or more of these brands (the flaming horse fart will always be a favorite of mine).  Bud just blew through US$15 million-plus hosting an online "TV station" for its own sitcoms.

Yet what drives the business decisions of these concerns -- like mergers -- are the how and where of manufacturing and distribution, and not the flights of branding fancy:

• The valuation of Coors is numbered in store shelves occupied, and not synapses of consumer memory
• Miller's strengths are measured less by the memorability of its slogans, and more by the number of sports stadiums that dispense it
• The relative age of Anheuser-Busch's delivery trucks is probably more of a competitive advantage than Jay-Z's latest hip-hop ad campaign

So it's not hard to imagine the role brands will play for this newly-merged beer conglomerate or, more broadly, their role in the category (and in others).

Branding is a tactic.  It's awareness, if even that. 

What it's not is an investment for these businesses, as there's no collective "equity" that is reportable on a balance sheet, accrues over time, or is otherwise dependable in the marketplace.  What gets credited as branding is really just the stuff of ongoing communications, and it's a practice wherein frequency and volume (and size) matter far more than substance.  It's an expense that is all but content-neutral. 

Creative, slogans, Internet widgets, and whathaveyou will come and go, and products will be "innovated" and pass through consumers' consciousness for a bit, if they're lucky. 

This latest merger news is proof that what matters is who owns the spigot.

Work, Work, Game, Work

It turns out that about a quarter of white-collar workers play games at work.

This number doesn't include all of the conscious and unwitting machinations, emotionally-stunted manipulation, and just-cause-I-can game-playing that fills the days of the other three-quarters of employees. 

We're talking casual video games, primarily those available not only during work but 24/7, thanks for such game developer sites as Pop Cap (from which this survey comes).

Forget plot, character development, or anything even approximating a narrative.  This is the domain of electronified pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.  Such "casual gaming" is a high-growth area on the Internet, and seems to attract as many women as men (and time wasters...er, gamers...of all ages, including folks old enough to know better). 

Pop Cap estimates that over 200 million people are so self-identified.  There's a good chance you're one of them (us), whether via solitaire on your PC, tetris on your mobile phone, or an online game.

But why?

The survey suggests an answer that probably jibes with your own life experience: it's relaxing, in a mind-numbing sort of way.  Like staring at something eventually lets you relax your eyes.  Sometimes doing something is a better way of chilling out than trying to do nothing at all.  Focusing let's us unfocus. 

And there's something about the feedback in any sort of game that helps capture and keep our attention.  There are rules, a finite number of possible actions, and immediate outcomes for each decision. 

Now, contrast that with our supposed "engagement" with brands during the day.

A banner ad flashes on the screen.  A company is mentioned in a news release.  A stupid viral video somehow mentions or explodes a product or service.

Would anybody seek or choose these experiences?  Is the dynamic of the interaction with the content truly engaging?  Is the context of that experience at all relevant to anything we want to do, the least of which might be relaxing?

No. 

In other words, people pay more attention to games than they do to most brand marketing.  And what does that attention they pay to casual games produce?  Something approximating sleep, or at least conscious disregard.

Makes it hard to believe that ads can accomplish much of anything these days.  It's a frightening proposition, and one that has inspired lots of marketers to try and make games into ads, like Toyota's latest Xbox game to support its Yaris model.  Burger King says it sold 3.5 million advergames that let customers interact with its mascot, tallying gameplay that added up to the equivalent of having broadcast 1.4 billion 30-second commercials.

But does it matter to the casual gamer stealing a few minutes of solitaire at work whether the backs of the cards are branded or generic?  So a consumer products company helps put my mind to sleep, instead of a web site like Pop Cap.  So what?

The Pop Cap survey on the pervasiveness of casual gaming has a different relevance to brand marketers, but the opportunity isn't to turn games into ads: rather, it may be to turn ads into games.

If the gaming paradigm is compelling enough to capture attention, the challenge could be to provide content and context that makes that involvement pay off for brands in ways more substantive than simple, generic exposure to a name, logo, or mascot. 

Being satisfied with wasting folks' time bonking the Burger King on his virtual head doesn't even begin to realize the potential (think of those 1.4 billion 30-second commercials that delivered no information, meaning, relevance, or actionable next steps).

• What if a marketer took a brand's attributes (or USP, or marketing messages, or whatever nomenclature its gurus have designated) and turned them