Dim Bulb

Lloyd: The Airline Ad

Abstract branding is a double-whammy as well as an oxymoron, as evidenced by the latest, gloriously obtuse ad from British Airways.

The visuals purport to graph attributes like "sweet/dreams" or "having your cake/eating it too," all done up in the cheeky style of a really bad Powerpoint presentation. Each graph is headed with abbreivatedenglish text bullets like you'd expect to see...a declarative word ("Expectation"), followed by a grammatically incorrect or incomplete phrase (like "So fresh.  So clean"), and then a sub-bullet that tries to explain the nonsense it just followed.

I've seen this presentation before.

Lloyd: What Happened is a wickedly satirical novel published late last Century, in which the eponymous hero describes a year of his trials and tribulations in the corporate world via witty prose and hilariously awful slides:

• His expenditures on toys for his kids charted in bars against his disposable income
• A diagram, with bad clip art, illustrates how not to work a party
• A pie chart expresses his wife's diet as segments of salad, sweets, and white wine

It's a wonderful send-up of the faux clarity of corporate perspectives on reality.  You know what I'm talking about...the bullets and graphics that make sense for a brief, shining moment when you first see them, if they ever do so at all, but then leave you bereft of understanding or empowerment the minute you leave the presentation room. 

In the book, the graphics illustrate this disconnect between the fantasy realm of corporate strategies, and the real, messy, impossible-to-graph experience of our lives.  Llyod is funny because we know exactly how he feels, even as the plot reveals his idiocy.  A graph of how many drinks it takes to get him drunk is a hoot, just as the idea of graphing it -- and then, perhaps, trying somehow making sense of it -- is all too familiar to us.

In an ad, the approach doesn't quite work.

It's funny, I guess, but not really.  It certainly doesn't make the message any more obvious for the nanosecond that my eyes gloss over it (I saw it in Wired, and the ad ran along the bottom of two pages, making it even easier to avoid altogether).  It's tough to establish a connection between any ad and the abstract, virtual images of brands I supposedly carry around in my subconscious.  This ad doesn't even try.

Further, I doubt many people will take the time to try and deconstruct it.  There's no plot.  No lovable loser character.  The humor is just...humorless.

The one saving grace is that it ends with a pitch for testing BA's business class service, and lists a web site to register for some contest.  So at least there's a behavioral call-to-action.  Maybe BA can measure its branding by the number of people who find the site and provide their details. 

It isn't likely, though, as the site requires visitors to register first for its frequent flyer club, and that involves at least a dozen fields of information.  Talk about a double-whammy: an ad that makes no sense, and a web site that could be graphed as "time required to fill out form/people who will close the window with a haruuumph."

BA: What Happened?

More Than a Handshake

I have long believed that success is one of the most important attributes of any brand, if not the only one that is dependably relevant and therefore worth the investment of time and effort.

It's funny that the tools to accomplish it are rarely in the control of marketers, whether corporate or, as the above image references, politicians.

We all know that achieving a real, binding agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians is about as likely as reversing global warming.  Ok, maybe its chances are better, however slightly.  There are good-willed people on both sides of the conflict who want to stop the violence and suffering that have afflicted that part of the world for over half a century.  I personally want it to happen.

But a photo won't make it so.  We've seen it before, literally and figuratively, and it triggers a perceptual disconnect with what we already know, believe, and fear.  It's a label all right, but it risks labeling the talks for what they are now (doomed) vs. what the supporters hope will occur (success).   

It's bad branding.

I'm continually surprised by just how dumb the "smart" politicos act when it comes to communicating; the principles and tactics that win election campaigns -- identify hot-button, knee-jerk issues that compel voters to travel to polls on a set day to do a particular thing (i.e. vote) -- are never useful, or sustainable when it comes to communicating long-term policy issues.

The functions of government are a series of behaviors that can be spun one way or another, and sometimes with some immediate, if nuanced, success. But the vast majority of people who aren't otherwise blinded by their own zealotry see through the hype.  Reality is unavoidable.  Worse, most people keep a running tally of the events that constitute their reality.

So it's never enough to appear successful.  Sooner or later, governments need to be successful.

Same goes for commercial brands.

We've seen the corollaries of handshake photos from most brand marketers. 

• The schlubs sitting around the television actually talking about their beers
• Insurance buyers waxing poetic about how happy they are
• Models effusing almost orgasmically over their latest kitchen appliance, technology toy, or car
• The cologne, software, or clothing that 'wins the girl' or 'attracts the guy'

The handshake approach guides most stock photography in print ads and online, too, both in the B2C and B2B worlds: if you've seen one smiling, multi-culturally diverse group sitting around a conference room table, or a would-be consumer holding up a product in which he or she is utterly enraptured, well, you've seen a few, probably.  Or lots.

The branding experts will tell you that we see what they've contrived the photos to say. 

Of course, we don't.  Perception is more complicated than that, and most people see the not-so-invisible hand of artifice behind the images, making the resulting effect at times the opposite to what was intended.  Bad branding, like the Annapolis handshake, hurts brands more than it helps them.

If we thought outside the branding box just for a moment, we could see that, when it comes to perceptions of success, people conjure them from a variety of inputs.  Few of those inputs can be directly articulated by marketing communications. 

Business success is the result of sales, first and foremost...or orders, or inquiries, or even babble of conversation and buzz (that has to connect pretty fast back to sales, or it's just noise).  Success comes from recommendations and referrals.  It’s something to which people can point, not a communication that presumes to be pointed at them.

When they do see success, it's the most potent motivator for trial and purchase.  It's stronger than an FYI referral, more immediate that trying to promote a set of product benefits, and a lot more dependable than hoping a creative slant or slogan will translate into transactions.

Successful products succeed, not to be too circular about it.  You can see it in the movie business most clearly, when opening weekends determine the ultimate fate of a release.  Popularity and all of its commensurate qualities -- attention, demand, scarcity -- is the most important attribute to which most products and services brands can aspire.

In government, the same rules apply, so in the instance of the Annapolis meeting, some evidence of success needed to emerge.  Considering that all of the non-participants -- Iran and the motley crew of insane murderers it sponsors and encourages -- are committed to destroying any emergent success from the conference means that there was, in truth, no real success whatsoever to promote out of the Annapolis meeting.

No picture can brand something into something that it's not.  At least not for long.

So what should the first steps of a branding campaign in business or politics look like?  Well, I'd take most of the money out of the branding communications budget, and see if it helps do any of the following:

• Improve actual operational excellence.  Make everything work perfectly
• Identify the shortest path from launch/start to desired outcome, and figure out how to get there
• In doing so, find the first meaningful, major milestone that will evidence progress
• Describe the milestone for what it is, and avoiding over-extending your claims past that event

The marketing budget should be oriented toward delivering that business strategy, not pre-announcing it (or fast-tracking to its conclusion).  There's little branding worth its salt at the point of a product or government initiative launch, other than the communications focused on delivering tangible results. 

You need to manufacture the success before you promote it.  Only after achieving it would I spend money on promoting a product sell-out, or a photo of smiling political adversaries. 

Branding success into a core business or government attribute requires a fundamental rethinking of how we communicate with people. 

It requires more than a handshake.

Spam Should Eat It

Spam has achieved near-complete brand name awareness and recognition, and they're not happy about it.   

Almost every human being alive today has thought or talked about the spam of unwanted junk email, as in "I got a lot of spam in my in-box."  Far fewer have elected to ingest the pressure-pasteurized block of pork, as in "I got a load of Spam in my lunch-box."

The food product Spam is manufactured by a company called Hormel, which also markets other meat products.  The stuff rose to infamy as fuel for American soldiers fighting WW2, and then vied with other meat products (like Carl Budding beef, Underwood Deviled Ham, and tins of tuna fish) to feed Boomer school kids.  It can be eaten alone, mixed with, or gulped down instead of just about dish, at any meal.  It has a shelf-life of about 2,000 years.

And there's the rub.  Hormel isn't happy that its brand name is used to reference the detritus of email. 

I think it should eat it up.

Of course, this runs contrary to the most liberal branding theology.  Conventional brand wisdom dictates that names and logos need to be preserved and defended.  History is full of examples of proprietary names that became genericized, like aspirin, and therefore lost all of their value.  So the Kleenex people spend lots of money and time every year to make sure to remind people that they’re reaching for a tissue to blow their noses.  Xerox used to do the same to ensure that the word wasn’t used as a replacement for the verb ‘to copy.’

Brand names and logos need to mean a certain thing, at a certain time, to certain people, with dependable certainty.

Only it doesn't work that way.  At least not outside the absolute perfection of branding Powerpoint presentations.

First and foremost, branding is about awareness.  It's the primer to the pump of marketing and sales...the 'oh, yeah' factor that differentiates the unknown from the somehow/somehat known.  It's the entry to the leaky funnel of sales transactions, and most measures of brand value recognize this quality and tracking recognition of words or logos. 

We can hoo-hah about our ability to associate ideas and feeling to these triggers, but it's usually left to the not-so-sexy machinations of sales departments to figure out how to translate them into something as material and mundane as reality.  Branding is nothing more than a glorified starting point for the rest of the work of the business.

So haven't all the Nigerian bank account scams and Bulgarian Viagra offers done Hormel a favor?

I mean, why doesn't Spam work to appropriate all of the spam mentions, instead of worrying about how to distance itself from them?

Spam's web site is excruciatingly retro-hip, to the point of being irritating and utterly false.  The branding presumes to have fun with the Spam experience, as if we're 1) interested in having fun with the Spam experience, and 2) oblivious to the use of the word to mean something else.  It's obviously spending lots of money to try to generate consumer awareness from a full stop, as if it had a name or product that nobody had heard of before. 

Yet anyone with access to a mail account has uttered the word 'spam' more than once.

Why doesn't Hormel stop trying to invent a brand identity completely detached from reality, and embrace this natural preponderance of the ‘other’ use of the brand name to prompt trial and sales?

• How about an ad campaign entitled "I Love Spam," with imagery and copy that played on the incongruity of the declaration.  It could feature vignettes of Generation Whatevers talking about why they love to eat Spam, and can't understand why other people have a problem with it
• Why not a social media campaign to "trade in" your spam...maybe a contest to qualify for winning a lifetime supply of the good stuff by submitting examples of egregious emails
• Couldn't they consider public service, and brand a spam email filter (i.e. let the real Spam protect you from the imposters)?  Call the software app a "spam eater," and its customers "spam eaters."  Get it?
• Where are the T-shirts, like I've Got Spam, and I Like It?
• Shouldn't Spam go beyond spam, and offer its own community/email service that is totally Spam/totally spam free?   
  

I just think Hormel could have a heckuva lot of fun with this, if only its brand gurus would stop telling it otherwise.  I think there's only one thing to do with lots of unpaid awareness, irrespective of the fineprint.

I say eat it up.

Designer Bioware

Now that there are ads appearing for a branded body part, I know that the future has begun.

The Cypher Stent is a tube that keeps arteries open, while oozing a medication that deters reblockage.  It promises no taste, feel, color, or branding attribute associated with a sports sponsorship or funny YouTube viral video.  A stent is something that a surgeon inserts into your guts, somewhere near your heart, so no adoring or envious neighbor will ever get to see the logo. 

Yet it's getting marketed directly to consumers as designer bioware.

The consumer-ification of the medical world is nothing new.  Elective cosmetic surgery is commonplace.  Lots of people voluntarily take prescription drugs to treat conditions that were once considered unavoidable, if people were consciously aware of them at all.  There's a psychobabble label -- and requisite treatment regimen -- for thoughts and behaviors that prior generations simply endured as qualities of personality or mood.

Today's consumers can change how they look, feel, and act.  And "ask your doctor" has become nothing more than a perfunctory step in the democratization of decisions regarding medications and procedures that were once the domain of the authoritarian few. 

What's a medical degree and years of patient experience worth anyway?

I mean, with the empowerment of ignorance, confusion, and desire, consumers with access to Internet search are in a much better position to make choices for themselves.  Buying a tube of toothpaste, new blouse, computer, car, or heart stent, it's all the same, isn't it?   

So intense pain slams into your chest and knocks you to the ground.  You can hardly breathe as you dial 911, after which you’re rushed to the hospital and booked for an immediate angioplasty.  But before you roll through the doors to surgery, you muster the strength to grab your doctor’s wrist, and gasp..

"Doc, I only use Cypher brand stents, ok?"

The growth of a designer approach to bioware is marvelous news for marketers, as Johnson & Johnson’s Cordis division demonstrates with its Cypher branding.  Think of the potential opportunities just around the corner:

• Ferrari-branded hip replacements, Nike knees, Ray-Ban lasik surgery, and other literal and figurative brand extensions
• Celebrity-endorsed medicines, like Wolfgang Puck's acid reflux pills, or a hangover cure from Amy Winehouse
• Co-branded transplants, like a pacemaker featuring the logo of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, or a cochlear implant from Apple
• Seasonable promotions, like a Halloween special on statins, or a customer-service related promotion, like retailing Zocor at McDonald's

For that matter, maybe we're already well into the sunset phase of medical branding, and entering the world of medial social media:

• Surgical procedures and drug treatments voted best or worst via social media
• Doctors reviewed on Facebook pages
• Would-be patients putting doctor recommendations for comment in their favorite chat rooms
• Medical advice blogged instead of delivered in examination rooms

Remember, the consumer knows best.  No medical marketer really cares whether that's actually true or not.  Their goal is to sell things. 

If your goal is to buy things, versus staying healthy, perhaps designer bioware is just what the doctor ordered.

Amazon’s Newton Moment

Amazon's launch last week of its Kindle electronic bookreader in an attempt to put itself out of business.  And it's a cool idea, even if the gizmo is a modified Newton.

I mean, think about it: Amazon sells books, so what does it do -- or do uniquely -- if its customers forsake bound paper ones for digital alternatives?  Amazon is facing that possibility...well, not facing it as much as daring it. Tempting Fate.  Inventing the future.

Amazon is challenging its own marketplace hegemony before anybody else does.  Or at least that's how I'd spin the story if I were doing the marketing for them.

But instead of focusing on this really innovative, smart, and bold business strategy, the glowing headlines, like the cover of Newsweek, chose the digital delivery of books via electrified readers as the story lead.  As if it's a foregone conclusion.

It's not.

Books aren't a delivery system in need of repair, and Amazon's Kindle doesn't purport to replace the concept as much as modify the details, anyway.

So what if it can produce endless screens of text, or provide uplink to download comments or updates?  A book has a beginning, middle, and end, just like movies and symphonies, only you can control and customize your experience of it almost infinitely.  Books don't run out of power, break when you drop them, or require that you learn any skill beyond page-turning and, well, reading.

Presuming you don't need to read in the dark or underwater, books offer an incredibly flexible and reliable UI.

The Kindle doesn't represent the future of books.  Not by a long shot.  We can already read on our mobile phones and iPods.  A Newton-like gizmo isn't revolutionary or even evolutionary.  True breakthroughs will change the how and where we read:

• Maybe it'll involve printing out books at home without murdering a couple of ink jet cartridges
• Or imagine being able to read a book on any surface, or via words hovering the air a few inches in front of your nose
• Perhaps there'll be some "live" interactivity with authors, combining blogging and real-time social media ideas, so a consumer would buy a work in progress...or perhaps a book would be a subscription to an episodic publication a la Victorian pot-boilers
• Maybe there'll be some joining of authorship and user-generated content, and people will create some “joint production’ approach to books

It's these sort of novel opportunities to change how we could experience novels that will unleash lots of innovative ways to deliver the required words. 

The Kindle is just smart branding, because it's smart business.  Amazon gets to play with the idea of digital book delivery, front and center, and it gets it loads of credit from a less-than-actively-inquiring popular media.  Maybe it trips over some opportunity along the way. 

But I'd skip all the nonsense about the medium itself, or about the Kindle being anything more than Newton was to Apple.

Amazon's management deserves the kudos for being smart and innovative, even if the results now and then aren't so sexy.  I wonder what other strategies it has in place to shake up what it does (or how it does what it does).  I know Bezos has a rocket company as a hobby project...could there be lots of little put-a-man-on-the-moon type projects underway? 

The way it's positioned now, when Kindle flops, it'll reflect badly on Amazon, instead of the company getting credit before, during, and after the launch for being the Apple-like company that innovates stuff all the time.

I'd try to develop some consistent publicity on that.  Not so much for the new gizmo.  I think we're going to all chuckle over the Kindle (and its dumb name), sooner versus later.

Reserving Your Card

AmEx's small business division has launched the Plum Card, making a big deal out of the possibility that you might not get one.

Instead of setting the limit on card membership solely on the number of qualified applications, it's qualifying the number of cards available to would-be members.

It's a limited issue or measured release credit card, more like a club membership than an open call for the cash-impaired.  And I think it's a damn good branding idea.

Everybody and his brother wants to lend to you, especially at the onerous rates not-so-quietly buried just beneath the mouseprint on the introductory offers for most credit cards and variable rate home mortgages.  That's because whether squandering cash as individuals or in small businesses, generally people are bad judges of the cost and value of money. 

There's good money in our bad money habits.

The Plum Card, however, doesn't seem to be relying on our gullibility to peddle its services.  It offers money management tools -- like an ongoing bulk purchase discount, and the flexibility to time-shift (i.e. delay) some payments -- that seem designed for use by small businesses. 

Think about this for a moment. 

A product that is branded based on actual functional benefits. No 60's rock soundtrack, Dennis Hopper lifestyle imagery, or furtive attempts at wry humor.  The card does tangible things versus obliquely suggesting that it will improve your sex life.

The branding creative comes in the form of this limited issue launch: AmEx is "initially releasing" 10,000 cards. 

Scarcity is a great tool for encouraging demand and promoting a sense of exclusivity, and communicating both qualities make perfect sense when the seller has real value to communicate to potential buyers.  The AmEx print ads are broad washes of plum red, over which an image of the card appears along with the text "Who's getting one?"  The company promises to announce some winners on MSNBC, and the web site looks like it's set-up to note all of them (?).

AmEx could have done lots more to flesh out the concept of exclusivity, mostly by requiring something more of its applicants than telling them to fill out what appears to be a standard application.  One of the best ways to get people to feel like they're getting something valuable is to ask them to give something in return (other than their SS # and bank details). 

Would-be Plum card members could have been screened for some notable qualities -- like type of business category, or something about how they conduct business -- so winners really felt like they had qualified for something, and not just passed some litmus test based on their likelihood of falling into debt.

Also, I'm not sure I'm following the idea that there are "AmEx" cards, and then "Open" cards, and that card flavors come in green, gold, platinum, red, plum, clear.  Are the distinctions all that obvious, or branded?  Sometimes it seems like the divisions at AmEx aren't necessarily talking with one another.  The card colors risk clashing.

But overall, I'm impressed with this approach to launching the Plum Card, and I suspect it'll be successful.  It reminds me of the old membership has its privileges line.  The Plum Card branding hasn't misinterpreted that concept to mean promotions or other supposed "loyalty" benefits (lots of businesses think that loyalty means the privilege to market the hell out of customers).  The Plum Card looks like it's providing something substantive.

I wonder if I quality for a reservation?

A Sponsor For Thanksgiving

As we Americans sit down this evening to a meal purposefully conceived to subsume our every gastronomic need and inhibition, we should take a moment to ponder what has become an empty ceremony.

Think of the contradictions.  We're celebrating abundance in an Age of Abundance.  Collecting family to commemorate pioneers who left their families in search of new lives.  Without any official liturgy or canon, we give thanks broadly for our general well-being.

The idea of a celebration like this isn't odd. Ceremonial dinners are a mainstay of most world religions, harvests, and national charters. The UK's Queen Elizabeth had a 'day of thanksgiving' earlier this week in celebration of her birthday.

Our gig is loosely based on an event back in 1621, whereat the Pilgrims in North America celebrated their haphazard survival with a few days of praying, followed by a meal.  Wampanoag King Massasoit and a load of his tribesmen came to the party, bringing the deer to complement the colonists' harvested peas and wild fowl. 

End of story.   

The colonists and Indians went back to alternately trading, cheating, and killing one another for the next century or so.  There were occasional thanksgivings (small t) declared for various events along the way -- usually involving the settlers' avoidance of starvation or scalping -- and, in the mid-1700s, we started celebrating trading, cheating, and killing the British, like with a thanksgiving in 1777 for winning the Battle of Saratoga.  After President Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he decided the entire country should give thanks for that, too.

But there was never an annual thanksgiving meal (capital T).  It wasn't even a consideration until a successful entrepreneur, women's suffragette, and magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale spent a few decades of the early 1800s lobbying for it. 

Hale was very active in civic causes, and as an interesting aside, penned the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."  She led one of history's first recorded special interest group efforts, tirelessly writing letters to any politician who could read.

Enter President Lincoln.  It's 1863, and the Civil War is at its bleakest for the Union.  Everyone is scared and depressed, and Lincoln is casting about for a way to get folks thinking about what is good in their lives (and not the rebel troops threateningly encamped across the Potomac).  A national day of thanksgiving fits the bill perfectly, so he makes it official.  His proclamation references the natural bounty of America to promote his imagined strength of the Union. 

Thanksgiving wasn't intended as a celebration of guys in funny, broad-brimmed hats and shoes with big buckles on them.  Lincoln had a specific intent in mind: he wanted everyone to give thanks for what they presently possessed, not for the past. 

It was brilliant branding.

Subsequent presidents liked the idea and continued to proclaim annual days of thanksgiving, usually adding their own political messages into the gigs.  Franklin Roosevelt tried to move it up a week in order to get Depression-era shoppers to behave differently and start shopping earlier (it failed).  Congress sanctioned Thanksgiving as a legal holiday in 1941, as the days were bleak due to the Nazis conquering Europe.  The Japanese were within two months of bombing Pearl Harbor. 

By the time we get to tonight's meal, we're left with a contradiction: for what are we giving thanks?  We stuff ourselves silly with food, watch football games, and otherwise appreciate getting time off from school or work.  Hurrah!

Thanksgiving is an unrealized marketing opportunity.

Forget that first dinner in the 17th Century.  Thanksgiving has never been about history...Independence Day celebrates the past.  Thanksgiving is about how we-of-the-here-and-now look at ourselves, and how we look toward our future.

So why doesn't the President step up and really make something of it?  How about announcing that today is dedicated to the soldiers in Iraq or, more broadly, the cause of freedom around the world?  Skip the ceremonial Turkey on the front lawn of the White House, and instead challenge every American to do something.  What?  I don't know.  Write a letter to a solider.  Reach out and help someone in need.  Make it something more than words in a press release that nobody will read.

What about a Green Thanksgiving, on which we could be asked to turn off our lights for an hour in order to help combat global warming?  Imagine the energy savings inherent in those 60 minutes!  Or how about declaring a Bridge the Divide Thanksgiving, at which each family invites a family from "across the aisle" (politically, religiously, whatever) and shares their dinner?

We live in times no less challenging or scary than those of the Depression, Lincoln's divided America, or the rough hewn days and nights in Plymouth Colony.   

Thanksgivings have always been celebrated with a specific, current, and relevant purpose.  I think we need to be challenged to come together, in our country, and with the world.  Some enterprising politician who expects to win next year's Presidential election should be thinking through this marketing opportunity.

Thanksgiving is a holiday in need of a sponsor. 

A Better Alarm Clock

A device called Chumby promises to bring Internet widgets to the spot that once belonged to your bedside alarm clock.

Behind its 3 x 5 touch screen is a Linux-running, Wi-Fi enabled device, capable of bringing at least 50 web services to your bedstand, like Flickr Photos, MTV News, and a cam trained 24/7 on an elephant at the San Diego Zoo.

Oh, and it'll also wake you up in the morning.

I love the idea of Internet ubiquity.  I've dreamed of it ever since I read Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Vurt.  The idea that we could have infinite knowledge available anywhere -- say, by posing a question to the ether, much like the way characters in Star Trek access their omnipresent computer -- will forever change things like, well, just about everything.   

I'm sure that even in our lifetimes, we'll look back and chuckle at the days when we were tethered to big glowing boxes on our desks and laps.  Even hand-held devices will seem archaic: the Internet, and all of the computing power thereupon accessed, will be woven into the very fabric of our lives, sometimes noticeably, but more often than not seamlessly and invisibly. 

This sort of ambient control is the Big Kahuna of this evolution; the challenge is in finding ways to give us information we need, when we need it, in ways that are simple and simply integrated into the moment of our experience.  Internet ubiquity will make those moments of our lives better.

Interestingly, the Internet doesn't make Chumby a better alarm clock.

It does lots of other things -- things like making your Facebook page available to you without lifting your head from your pillow -- but the alarm clock functionality is no different than competing, non-Internet enabled alarm clocks.  You might as well embed Internet access in your coffee maker.  Or on the insides of your shoes. 

Worse, Chumby is going to make money for its founders by selling ad space on its little screen, bringing the irritation of marketing to replace the irritation of a loud buzzer.  Well, not replace, but add to the irritation.  Chumby believes that there are companies willing to pay to be associated with those feelings you feel the moment you awake on dark, chilly weekdays.

Good times.

I do think that this new little gizmo is an interesting step along the way to true Net ubiquity, and its branding is brilliantly executed, replete with the cuddly graphics and layout, hip copy, and the requisite social media elements.  And, since it does make designing widgets to work on it an open-source-sort-of proposition, maybe it’s asking some enterprising hacker to come up with a real reason for somebody to purchase the contraption.

I have a few ideas:

• How about designing software that adjusts your scheduled wake-up time based on up-to-the-minute weather and traffic conditions?  Snow on the roads could push back the ringer by 10 minutes.  Ditto for a snarled traffic report on your favorite road
• You could add an app that made the thing smarter over time in this regard, so it got ever-better at predicting when you needed to awake (maybe based on some feedback info on how commutes actually played out?)
• Why not somehow filter your online calendar functionality so you awoke to changes in your meeting or class schedule?
• Maybe there's an app that reports the weather...not just straight-out, but somehow expressing the delta from the forecast the night before, so you could make decisions about what to wear as you pulled yourself out of bed

These aren't branding ideas, but functionality benefits that could be branded in any number of catchy, memorable, motivating ways.  Chumby might have spent a little less time on its hipster look-and-feel, and a little more on what its little gizmo does.

I'm still waiting for somebody to come up with a better alarm clock. 

Where’s the Sausage?

I've just read David J. Taylor's "Where’s the Sausage?" and I heartily recommend that you consider doing so, too.

David has written a branding book in the form of a comedic novel.  His lead character, Bob Jones, is a sales department lifer sent on an exchange program to the strange, exotic world of branding.  The story follows (via first-person blog posts) Bob's year-long adventure as marketing manager for Simpton's Sausages.

It doesn't start out auspiciously for him: he can't wade through more than a few pages of the incomprehensible branding book his wife buys him for Christmas, and can't define what "brand" means as he sits at his new desk waiting for his black-clad, spiky-haired, frappuccino-swilling (and obviously just terribly busy) marketing department associates to arrive at work.

Turns out that they don't know what it means, either.

So the story follows Bob as he stumbles through the branding ecosystem in search of a purpose to his job.  Seemingly endless rounds of meetings, off-sites, brainstorms, presentations, and then more presentations make a visit to Dante's Inferno seem downright reasonable: at least there, people suffer damnation due to their actions while alive.  In "Where's the Sausage?" the brand gurus are accountable only for glossy slides on their computers.

Granted, they've replaced rivers of flaming ooze with meals and drinks at posh restaurants and clubs...yet their discussions of the brand's pure essence or psychocosmic valuation (or whatever) still come across as hellish.  That's because our Bob is the perfect every-man foil.  He's a sales guy, so he knows that people need to buy things in order to fund all of the afore-mentioned branding brilliance. And he can't seem to forget that Simpton's is in the business of selling sausages.

His fellow brand gurus think otherwise, wasting lots of time and money inventing new ways to apply, extend, or redefine the company's brand.  Bob tags along, providing us with numerous examples of what makes the branding ecosystem so self-referential, self-congratulating and, ultimately, self-defeating.

"Where's the Sausage" is funny, and it's an entertaining way to explore branding, especially for readers who don't already consider themselves experts.  Bob doesn't just encounter all that's wrong with it -- which, in the book, is pretty much all of it -- but also presents what does work.  Ultimately, the book provides lots of positive ideas about branding that could be applied to your business starting tomorrow.

Bob's real-world, common-sense approach is David's also: what your business does is far more important to what it says.  Branding isn't a logo or an ad, but rather how the entire business behaves, and then interacts with its customers.

David has been delivering this thinking to top-tier, global brand name clients for years now, and has written serious business books about it, too.  I happen to agree with him just about 100% of the time, so he's a kindred soul, and an honorary Dim Bulber.  You can check out his blog here, and his company here.

"Where's the Sausage?" is a fun and fast read.  David's idea to help people explore a serious business issue through a fictional story is absolutely brilliant, and it works.  I would have enjoyed more sex, violence, and intrigue, but hey, that's me, and I can always wait for it in the movie version. 

So never mind the sizzle.  Buy the book.

The Dog Ate My Sales

J.C. Penney has put a bold twist on the usual excuse clothing retailers use for poor sales.

It claims that the sales drop was the result of its middle-market customers "...being taxed by a toppled housing market, a credit crisis and soaring fuel costs."  Poor planning was not responsible.

Now, I would have preferred the weather excuse.

Almost all apparel retailers use the weather excuse as a catch-all dodge for explaining otherwise "inexplainable" business performance.  It's an admission that, despite inconsequential little details like designs, colors, prices, or actual customer wants and needs, consumers choose apparel depending on whether or not it's raining outside.

Now, I'll give on the meteorological connection -- for instance, it's hard to think about buying a winter coat on a sweltering summer day -- but that’s why stores are full of T-shirts and swimsuits during those months.  Giving the vicissitudes of weather forecasting any more importance or credence amounts to the collective shrug of retail sales reporting (to experience this grand tradition, just check out the latest sales reports).

Doesn't every business have to expect the unexpected, and then be held accountable for how it plans and/or responds? 

This is where the Penney excuse gets particularly thin:

• It couldn't predict the American financial crisis? That would mean that Penney's management has avoided reading newspapers, watching TV, listening to talk radio, or conversing with friends and family over the past few months.  We're not talking about the breakdown of some arcane demand forecast: this wasn't like trying to anticipate where lightening would strike next.  USAToday ran the headlines on its front page.  The idea that Penney wasn't able to anticipate the effects a financial meltdown would have on its customers is downright odd, to say the least
• More importantly, wasn't its branding supposed to overcome such challenges? The company made a big deal earlier this year about its brilliant new branding strategy: themed  "Every Day Matters," it included lots of TV spots, print ads, and "webisodes" that made emotional connections with consumers without saying much, if anything, about its products.  The campaign was born from some ad agency tripe called "lovemarks" which purports to promote brands apart from the actualities of design, color, prices or actual customer wants and needs.  I did a podcast on it many moons ago (you can listen to it -- "Name That Retailer" -- here), and questioned the reliability of such a marketing campaign if Penney hoped to, gasp!, sell anything.  Even if management was legitimately surprised by current events -- or by an unseasonably warm October -- it chose to dedicate considerable resources to branding that sold feeling and image, instead of rationale and reality.  I suggest that what's surprising about all this is that anybody believed in the branding nonsense in the first place 

Did it work until Fate intervened, or was Fate the driving force behind Penney's performance all along, irrespective of the oodles of money it spent on beautifully unmemorable ads and Internet movies? 

There's just no way to know. 

Well, there's one thing we can know for sure: it's good to be in the branding business, especially at the front end, when clients are ready to blow through loads of cash in search of a perfect excuse: 

If sales are up, it's brilliant stuff.  If results are down, it's not their fault. 

They can say that "the dog ate my sales."

Of Pizzas and Rental Cars

Ordering a pizza is getting easier, while renting a car is getting harder.  Which industry evidences the better branding?

Papa John's now lets its customers text their orders, as well as store favorite orders, delivery preferences, and methods of payment.  Typing "FAV1" will prompt a confirmation text message.  Any subsequent steps will involve eating.

Contrast that with J.D. Power's latest review of customer satisfaction among rental car agencies, which has dropped precipitously since last year.  The average wait time to rent a car is 22 minutes.  That's longer than the averages for checking into a hotel, getting through airport security, or reclaiming checked baggage.  Or ordering many, many Papa John's pizzas.

Do you think Papa John’s will get any credit for its smart branding?

I couldn't tell you its brand position.  If I’ve ever seen one of its ads, I can't remember it.  I assume its delivery people generally look like other pizza delivery people.  It's a fair bet to assume that its corporate identity colors include pizza sauce red. 

Conversely, I see rental car branding all the time.  Enterprise cars wrapped in brown paper.  Avis always trying harder.  I get membership mailings and other CRM-inspired spam email more often than I care to recollect.  Hertz's corporate colors are black and yellow.  Budget is orange. 

And yet, in spite of all that branding, I bet Papa John's customers are happier and more loyal than any victim of rental car agencies.  This observation fits into one of my big propositions, which is that there's a negative ratio between the amount of money a company spends on its CRM, and the actual improvement in its customer satisfaction.  Same goes for branding and sales.

Papa John's is cooking proof that customer relationships are not bought by marketing, or delivered by technology.  Loyalty is something that a company bestows upon its customers, not the other way around. That means doing things -- not describing them -- that deserve and prompt customer behavior in response.  Good ads and supporting technology sell things, but actions turn disparate transactions into ongoing relationships.

Papa John's wants to make it easier for its customers to order pizzas.

Imagine if a rental car company decided that it respected its customers enough to make the check-in process fast and painless.  No more long lines, endless forms filled with gibberish, signatures required in 12 places, or assistance provided by agents who are mostly disinterested (or downright put upon when asked to do their jobs).

I wonder what other behaviors would improve the rental experience, or enable one company to differentiate itself from another by something other than corporate colors.  You'd think that the return from such innovations would be more valuable than the awareness an average branding campaign might deliver. 

No so much when the rental companies ponder the possibility.  It's far too easy and expected to outsource the responsibility for branding to the brand gurus.  Creative messaging and hype will surely overcome any unpleasant intrusions from reality.

I say there are some bright bulbs at Papa John's.  They've made it possible for me text my pizza order when next I'm stuck in line, waiting for my beautifully branded rental company to deem my presence worthy of its attention. 

The Sound of Music

When was the last time you listened to a song and had a problem with the sound quality?

According to audiophiles, it should happen every time you fire up your trusty mp3 player.  Your favorite songs have been compressed to fit on little mobile storage devices, so some sounds have been flattened or robbed of their nuance.  Others have been deemed expendable by the technical algorithms, and lost altogether.

Only nobody notices or, if they do, they don't care.

It's no surprise.  Apart from a brief renaissance of audio quality and playback technology during the latter part of the 20th Century, human beings have spent their lives listening to crappy sounding music. 

Usually, it meant hearing somebody nearby sing or play an instrument, and often times do so poorly.  The most common musical experiences were in-home, often impromptu, and rarely, if ever, produced by professionals.  Melodies were passed down when sung from parent to child. 

Music experience was live...not just in relation to recorded versions, which would have been unknown to most souls who've walked the earth, but as in living.  A part of their lives.  Something that pretty much anyone could make and, in doing so, enjoy. 

Teaching kids to play a musical instrument is a throwback to a time when people were expected to make music for themselves.  No longer do we send off our tots to learn how to jar fruit, make butter, or sew their own clothes, but music is still considered, perhaps unconsciously by many of us, something people do, not simply consume.

So it's kind of funny that we've branded the problems facing the music industry in terms of controlling distribution. 

Looking at things that way, it's a losing proposition, whether you try to do it with sheet music, player-piano rolls, wax cylinders, vinyl records, magnetic tape, compact discs, or computer files.  Music ends up everywhere, regardless of where it originates. 

That's why iPod and .mp3 players in general are so popular.  It's not because they sound particularly good, but rather that it's good they bring sound practically anywhere. 

And it turns out that they do sound pretty good after all. 

A song recorded at a rate of at least 128 kbps, and heard via reasonably good speakers or earbuds, sounds all but indistinguishable from the original studio recordings.  Combine that with the fact that listeners are usually doing something else while they're listening -- maybe mowing the lawn, chatting online, or singing along -- and it's not that people don't appreciate quality music.  The quality is just fine.

So let's do some math: music has been ubiquitous, live, and very personal for, say, 11,950 years of human history, and controlled, recorded, and impersonal for about 50, give or take.

I say the music industry as packaged-goods distributor is the exception -- irrespective of listening media -- not the rule.  And people are edging back to behaving the way they've always behaved.  Music is on its way to being everywhere again, along with all of its commensurate imperfections and uniqueness. 

iPods are just a stop along the way.

This has some interesting potential implications for sound quality vis a vis artists and music distributors:

• Is the era of recording artists going to be replaced by performance artists?  Madonna's recent deal with LiveNation suggests that the real draw for her consumers -- "draw" defined as the activity for which they'll pay the most -- are her live performances.  This shift, if adopted across the industry, could change how performances are delivered (more of them, in more diverse settings, etc.) and how music is recorded (who cares about making a single song perfect, when the idea is to keep a stream of music shooting out to entice would-be concert-goers?)
• Is being an artist really a job for a select few, or is creating art a job for everyone?  Along with breakthroughs in distribution technology have come innovations in how music can be created and recorded.  I personally possess more recording capabilities on my computer than the Beatles had at their disposal at Abbey Road (unfortunately, I don't possess one billionth of their talent).  When everyone can make music and record it, the requirements of those recordings shift perhaps...from quality and presumed perfection, to honesty, uniqueness, or other qualities
• Could there be ways to make the experience of music more living, like music labels distributing semi-finished or mixable songs?  Imagine if the next Radiohead album wasn't just provided online for free, but marketed with adjustable instrumental tracks, or a series of vocal tracks that could be consumer-selected?  I know the result might give you or me a headache, but there's something here in the concept of active listening or user-completed content

Ultimately, I just think the experience of music has little to do with quality, and much more with the enjoyment of sound.

Green with Ennui

Universal's current green initiative is mostly hot air, which isn't so good for global warming.

Talking about the issue is certainly important, since there are still a few holdouts who prefer the pretense of debate over the reality of a crisis.  I guess that's not surprising, as there are also people who can keep a straight face while saying humans used to ride dinosaurs, or that the CIA blew up the World Trade Center.

It's a great idea that Universal would focus its not-so-small resources on 1) nailing the science and education on the issue, almost as a public interest education Manhattan Project, and telling the world about it, and 2) developing real tools for schools and businesses to embrace it, and act on it.

Only that's not what’s happening.

Instead, "Green is Universal" offers some lukewarm programming that mostly feels like we've already seen it (same experts, same preaching-to-the-choir tone).  Web site features and links repurpose blather from other sites hoping to cash in on the issue.  Feel-good tips on saving the planet abound, as do lots of pretty graphics and breathlessly enthusiastic copy.  The new thing we're getting lots of glimpses of is a colorful Green Universal logo, not to mention a ton of outbound marketing touting its green-ness.

So it's just a dumb branding campaign, dreamt up by some enterprising young turk in the marketing department (or an inspired agency type) who looked at the audience polling numbers and realized that young people care about global warming.  Some slick brand later and, voila! Universal is green.

Imagine if the family of companies really got committed, and announced that Universal media outlets would be the go-to destinations on the issue... taking risks, prompting whatever real debates needed to get resolved, and holding elected officials (and candidates) and other corporations accountable?

That would be remarkable. 

I can't say it would be such a great idea, as it would require its news-related outlets to take a side in a debate that unavoidably has become political.  But then again, wherefore art thou, objectivity anyway?  Maybe taking a side on an issue that shouldn't be political might help de-politicize it.  It sure would get it noticed in ways far more meaningful (and profitably?) than a watered-down branding exercise.

Ok, I want to riff on this a bit.  What behaviors would make this Green campaign something real?  Universal could:

Announce that all its operations are carbon neutral. Skip the helpful hints garbage (pun intended, FYI) and actually do something.  Think of all resources that get used up to broadcast TV signals, run the lights in animation studios, and keep movie sets supplied with fresh croissants and mineral water.  Universal could buy offsets from companies that are carbon negative from the get-go; better yet, it could initiate an internal program to actually become carbon neutral through its own actions.  Replace incandescent bulbs with florescent.  Install passive solar arrays.  Do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to get it done.  Each Universal media outlet could narrate the process -- each from its own area of focus, whether scientific, historical, political -- and viewers could get involved in helping each outlet analyze problems, find new solutions, etc.  Talk about a great trigger for developing social communities.

How about going a step further, and turning the carbon credits into a true position that's supportable with a consumer promotion?  For instance, watch MSNBC for an hour, and Universal will offset the energy used to transmit that signal to you.  So consumers could literally help save the planet by watching TV!  Maybe Universal could promise to offset its production/transmission energy use in increments tied to Nielsen ratings for its programs.  Watch more, do more good...

Why not make every media artifact recyclable?  Every DVD, CD, printed material, or anything else it sends out into the consumer world could be made recyclable.  It could look inside, and decide to promote recycling programs, which need not be a part of a larger program of becoming carbon neutral.  For instance, what happens to all those old scripts?  When Keith Olbermann throws that crumpled ball of paper at the camera each night, where does it go afterwards?

Reduce car and limo usage.  I know, this is cutting close to the bone, but come on now, we're talking LA traffic and an obvious contributor of greenhouse gases.  Where's the Universal private jitney service?  Make riding a bus cool and Universal will have done more to combat global warming than every other idea put together

I'm sure there’s lots more Universal could do if it really wanted to make green-ness important and a lasting identifier for its businesses.  It should have changed itself before it started lecturing its viewers on doing so.

Mouseprints On Your Brand

I have a simple equation to suggest to my friends who endeavor to measure brand equity: commercials with lots of fine print -- spoken or written, and referenced in the vernacular as mouseprint -- cost you more poker chips than they could ever deliver.

Mouseprint comes in two broad flavors:

1. The your-head-could-blow-up warnings, like the ones in commercials for exotic drugs or alcohol
2. The we-didn't-mean-what-we-just-promised qualifiers, which appear in credit card and travel promos, for instance

Does anybody take at face value the branding promises that are hobbled by mouseprint? 

Nothing can hide it; whether printed in .005 pt. type or spoken by an agitated chipmunk, the mere existence of mouseprint is a cue that the advertiser is revealing something that it otherwise wouldn't want to reveal, save for the requirements of regulators, or the warnings of suspiciously protective lawyers (or both).

Or is it?

• The mouseprint billboards on cigarette ads haven't really stopped people from smoking.  In fact, they've sometimes served to reinforce the bad boy branding benefits of lighting up
• The suggestion that an erectile dysfunction drug might result in the problem of an erection lasting more than four hours comes across as a downright benefit promise, not a caution
• People still pay the same money for smaller portions of cheese slices and laundry detergent, even if those size changes are noted on the packaging

Now, your immediate reaction might be cool, consumers can be conditioned to buy things irrespective of completely rationale inhibitions.  Marketers are just too damn creative, whether in how the warnings are worded, or where graphically represented.

Nope.  It's bad news for brands, for two reasons:

Selling to consumers who aren’t paying attention is not a branding transaction.  It's exploitation, however slick an expository veneer you choose to put on it.  If people are not paying attention to what should clearly interest them -- say, the suggestion that a product could make them bleed profusely from all orifices, or something -- then how do you know what they are reading or hearing?  Are they interpreting, remembering, adapting, or applying your branding messaging in ways you expect?

Remember, a survey or focus group captures a moment in time.  At best, you get answers to specific questions that may not be valid the moment the test concludes or, just as likely, weren’t even true, only the respondents didn't know it.

And marketers talk about trying to establish or maintain some consistence atmospheric presence of brand in the subconsciousness of such targets?

Second, if they ignore the warnings, they won’t ignore them for long.  Slick branding that diminishes or exploits mouseprint eventually backfires.  Interest rates go up.  There's one less serving of cheese for the evening's meal.  Somebody's head blows up because they took a drug to give them better urine stream.

All the PR crisis communications in the world can't undo the damage such events cause, because there are networks on the Internet where these truths are communicated and preserved.  No consumers stay unaware forever.

Just as likely, maybe there’s no crisis directly relevant to the mouseprint, yet something bad happens to the business.  Lead paint is discovered on a toy.  A plane crashes due to no fault of the airline.  If consumers have been in a lulled state of ignorance when they transacted with a business, any conscious, material, negative event can serve to shock them into awareness.  And it's awareness of bad stuff, followed thereafter by suspicion and cynicism. 

Brand loyalty depends on reality of consumer experience, not blind or unconscious trust.  Microprint relies on such consumer disinterest, and allows companies to exploit it.  A single negative event reveals the paucity of such a strategy.  That's bad for everyone involved.  And it's particularly bad for brands.

When the marketing gaggle talks about engagement, isn’t this a prime example of where it’s needed?  Nobody needs to get engaged with creative branding, per se: rather, isn't it in the best interest of businesses to make sure they're not just following the letter of the law (or the minimizing inventions of their graphic artists), but actually conversing with their consumers honestly, openly, and repeatedly? 

The alternative is a ticking bomb, however softly the clock might be advancing.

If you have mouseprints on your brand, your customer will eventually see a rat.