Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

Holidays 2008: Social Media Was Just Talk

For all the spending and related buzz about social media this year, it didn't do much for getting folks to actually buy anything, did it?

I know such sentiments amount to damnable heresy.  So many companies are spending so much money on digital campaigns, chat rooms, and on monitoring the incessant chatter that emerges thereby/therefrom.  A multitude of agencies, staffed by enthusiastic experts who've been encouraging such activities, are aggressively promoting more such activities...primarily because so many companies are doing them.  It's cheaper than creating TV commercials, and delivers more eyeballs than a print ad.  Best of all, social media let people interact with, or otherwise touch, your branding. 

Isn't it about time that somebody asked why?

If you haven't already heard about this season's "best" viral campaigns, you will soon: whether an almost-funny little movie about what happens to insensitive husbands and boyfriends from JCPenney, the always-entertaining "dancing elves" e-card from OfficeMax, a similarly customizable makeup toy from Sephora, or another one that I missed...the success will be based on how many people saw, played with, and/or forwarded the stuff. 

But here are some nagging context issues that won't get a lot of coverage:

• The content of these campaigns is inherently more credible if it makes no claims to credibility
• Relevance is directly proportional to authenticity, and indirectly proportional to expectation
• Only the stuff that is apparently worthless possesses any value

It just seems silly to carp about consumers not wanting to buy anything when we spent so much money and creativity avoiding the very suggestion that we wanted to sell stuff to them.

Even some of the most educated tomes on social media require a de facto cognitive dissonance that encourages businesses to work overtime to avoid selling anything.  "That's the old model," or "The language of the Internet is collaboration and consensus."  For every case history offered as a reason to embark on a social media campaign, there's another one held up as an illustrative mistake to avoid (the Motrin Mom catastrophe being one of the latest, or pretty much anything Wal-Mart ever tries to do online).

But what do they illustrate, exactly?

Corporate reputation is already at historic lows, as is customer satisfaction.  For all of the effort companies have made to embrace social media -- what big company doesn't already have somebody blogging because, well, "ya just gotta do it and experiment" -- only 16% of Americans actually trust what those companies blather on about.  Only about one-third of consumers who post anything in a company-involved social media experiment believe they're even heard, let alone subsequently satisfied.

The reality of P2P online sharing, whether as a distribution medium for information or a crucible for the emergence of fact and opinion, is a phenomenon that every business must understand and address.  Its impact reaches far beyond the purview of the folks who do marketing, though: informational sites like Healthytoys.org promise to rewrite the way brands are conceived and delivered to consumers.  

So, for all of the buzz about social media this year, I think we saw that all of that conversation did a lot for agency revenue, and it kept the Twitter crowd busy telling one another how with it they all were.  But making the leap to impacting sales, or building anything sustainable (and sustainably valuable) over time, remained a chasm that has yet to be crossed.  It's the void between fiction and fact.

I think we're seeing that people don't believe companies when we pretend that we're not selling stuff to them.  Corporations have spent the last few years effectively lying to the public, and we're surprised that it hasn't done much for sales?

Holidays 2008: Price Cuts Eroded Value

Frugality is a tough lifestyle choice to monetize.

Of course, people still needed to buy stuff to give to one another in celebration of the holiday of their choice.  Products and services were still required to support the ongoing habits of eating, traveling, entertaining, etc.  Consumers still consumed.

Only it was different this holiday season: folks bought different, and lots of them bought less.  And, while many manufacturers saw it coming, and tried to restructure their marketing to trump value, the most common response was to cut prices.

I think the latter trumped the former.

The utility of, say, toothpaste is pretty much beyond question.  Every human being walking the planet right now needs to own a tube, or two, and has little excuse for not using it up with some degree of regularity.  Toothpaste is not a complex concoction (or it doesn't seem so); dentifrice, combined with a flavor and the odd ingredients that show up as filler in everything from hamburger buns to floor polish and, voila!  You've got a product.

The differences between the dozens of brands of toothpaste from which consumers can choose?  Branding, mostly.  One name, and/or package design, is supposed to connote meaning that is different from the others (and, embedded in that thought, relevance, utility and, yes, value). Many millions of marketing dollars are spent telling us so, and retail pricing has some elasticity, so manufacturers can choose to charge consumers different prices, depending in large part on the ethereal presumptions of the brand strategists.

Only now, price matters...not as an absolute (well, not completely), but as a denominator of ratios of value.  And against those imagined differences in toothpaste brands, it tends to reduce the numerator of brand benefit to just about zero.

So cutting prices didn't matter.  Zero divided by a smaller number is still zero.  This emerged as a truism for stuff ranging from economy to luxury: when Chanel kicked-off the October with an 8% or more price cut, it didn't offer more "value" to consumers as much as remove the "luxury tax" it normally charged for its products.  Being charged less is not the same as getting more. 

Apply the same phenomenon to the other products and services marketed this year -- especially those positioned as gift-worthy -- and I think you get a model for what happened to brand names during holidays 2008.  Consumers felt compelled to check for value, and no amount of price slashing could create it (but, rather, it revealed the lack of brand equity).

Worse, I wonder if the realizations will be long-lasting?  Will consumers readily forget that they saw the reality behind all of the marvelous marketing, brand positioning, and other detritus of manipulation?

The general consensus during conversations I had at various holiday parties was a resounding yes.  We're entering a new era of consumption, in which people will still buy and use products (obviously), but will do so for different reasons.  Decision-making will be based on new criteria that depends far more on actual, real utility, relevance, and true measures of value...and less on the imagined benefits of branding. 

People will still buy.  We just have to come to terms with finding better ways to sell.  And cutting prices isn't one of them.

Holidays 2008: Store Experiences Were Terrible

The trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee is a sad symbol of just how terrible retail shopping experiences were this holiday season.

So before the pundits start whining that consumers just weren't in the mood to buy anything, we need to come to grips with the fact that many marketers did a piss poor job of selling.

Let's try to list the three primary reasons why stores exist in our era of online shopping:

1. Convenience
2. Immediate gratification
3. Shopping experience (tangible, hands-on help, etc.)

I'm not sure there was much consistency in how any of those benefits were actually delivered over the holidays.

First, there's the problem of the holidays themselves: this idea that consumers are programmed to buy at certain times of the year is a driver of much retail planning.  I'm not pulling a Grinch and suggesting that this behavior is or should change, but it does prompt business behaviors that are distinctly un-customer-centric:

• Those pre-dawn openings and get-one-before-we-sell-out promotions aren't convenient for shoppers, are they?  Retailers want to herd consumers like cattle, and get them to buy when its most convenient for businesses (which, like movie studios, add up the sales over the Thanksgiving weekend [in the US] as an indicator of overall success, so they want to maximize the available hours of shopping time). 
• The cat-and-mouse game of pre and post-holiday pricing is also pretty inconvenient; at best, consumers know that post-holiday sales will make whatever they buy prior to the 25th seem like it was too much or, at worst, they've learned to play the game and game the retailers.

So opening at 4 a.m. instead of 5 was an innovation?  Not so much, I say.

The second retail benefit -- immediate gratification -- proved to be not so immediate this year, as inventories were kept lean as the precautionary, self-fulfilling-prophecy sort of gesture for that bugaboo of declining consumer buying interest.  It was almost as if choices were more broad than ever before, requiring one rack too many, or a stack of merchandise too high, even in some stores that would have never before considered doing so.

Good luck if you didn't chance upon the product you wanted in the size or configuration you required.  Inventories were being managed to limit retailer downside, not provide the opportunity to prompt as sales upside.  Which brings me to store experiences. 

Yuck.

Hiring temporary store personnel was half the rate it was a year ago.  Merchandise was displayed poorly, with bins of stuff often replacing actual displays altogether.  Stuff wasn't put back on hangars, or replaced in the right spots on the right shelves. Combined with the inanity of weird opening hours and limited stock, the unavailability of sales and/or checkout help pushed the retail buying experience past inconvenient, to approach the downright unpleasant.  Or, dare I say, terrible?

And our conclusion is that consumers didn't want to buy? 

The Illogic of Sales

Isn't sale pricing the antithesis of branding?

Now that stores are in full-swing with after-holidays markdowns, discounts, red-liners, or whatever else they call them, they're really telling consumers the same, basic thing:

What we charged you before wasn’t what our stuff was really worth.

Now, I know that there's no merchandise theory of value like Marx once postulated underwrote the sweat equity of labor, but CAGR is an approximate measure of at least a core cost for products and services.  Add up the expenses of gruel, lead paint, and large shipping containers, and you've got a base price for most toys sold this year.  Oh, and don't forget the cost of all that glossy branding, and anything else that can be legally, if not wholly credibly, attributed to requirements for getting "on shelf."

So Brand Name X costs Y.  Got it.  I might not like it, or agree with (or understand) the calculation, but I acknowledge it.  Price/benefits = value.

It's only when you get into the complicated dance routine of supply vs. demand that the picture gets all out of whack. 

Christmas, being the biggest gift-giving moment for the largest number of people in the Western World, creates a natural deadline: prior to December 25th, consumers need to buy things, so demand should push prices up.  With that pressure relieved Christmas morning, prices can fall, as few shoppers are thinking ahead 364 days.

Now, think of that switch on any given day, as any business changes pricing.  Maybe it's prompted by some complicated computer model identifying the optimum pain consumers will endure at any given moment.  Or perhaps it's because the store manager saw too much stuff gathering dust on the front table. 

If the worth of stuff can change within days -- and sometimes quite dramatically, as a review of sale offers in today’s newspaper attests -- how does brand stay constant?

Branding absolutists will say that we're talking apples and oranges. 

Brand equals emotional, associative, social, and then, perhaps lastly, functional benefits, while price is quite literally the ever-shifting cost for acquiring those benefits.  Sure, they correlate -- I can't sell a Hyundai for the price of a Lexus -- but people engage primarily with brands in a way irrespective of place, time and, generally, cost.

Putting a brand on sale means consumers can get all those same benefits for a lesser price.  Sales are broadstroke CRM, or blunt, mass-media rewards for people who desire one brand or another.

I say that such reasoning is illogical. 

Consumer experiences of brands are inexorably woven within situational and behavioral details of space and time...i.e., experience isn't with brands as much as by, among, because, thereupon, with, and resulting from them.  The context of reality is far more important that imagined position of brand. 

Businesses know it picking prices, whether MSRP or sale.  So do consumers, when they learn to play the sale game. 

Slashing prices the day after Christmas is a ritual, really, for which consumers plan, and the gash between "list" and "actual" cost is likely to be severe.  The half-life of any apparel pricing, especially women's fashion, is shorter, too.  And we're seeing that technology products don't age well, mostly, and car models change prices almost as often as the wind changes direction.

With any number of bloggers, chatters, and Internet sites ready to remember, track, and predict these patterns, you'd have to be willfully blind to its implications for valuations of brands. 

Because, as retailers try to make up with sale items all the sales they were unable to realize with regular pricing, they’re daring consumers to revalue what they're buying.  The greater the pricing variability, the less qualities of brand have any inherent value.

Something that costs less due to the exigencies of sellers can never fully be worth more when it comes to the needs of buyers.  Sales are a chronic affliction for businesses, and a constant reminder to consumers that all the imagined promises of branding don't necessarily connect to the reality of prices. 

This week's sales aren't price discounts; they're proof that efforts to sell stuff the remainder of the year will be attempted at inflated prices. 

The Night After Christmas

'Twas the night after Christmas, when all through the store
Every employee was working at an annual chore:
The sale signs were hung by the windows aplenty,
In hopes that tomorrow, the store wouldn't be empty.

The merchandise all piled on every surface,
Hung on hangers, and displayed for one purpose:
For all the branding consumers weren't enticed,
The market requires the products repriced.

When out on the parking lot arose such a clatter,
One of the employees sprang to see what was the matter.
Away to the door, she flew like a flash,
Happy to stop bemoaning the store's lack of cash.

The moon glow on the pavement proved,
As illuminating as a video on YouTube.
When, what to her inquiring eyes should appear,
But the branding guru, and in his eye, a tear?

The marketing had failed, the sales not triumphant,
The guy sneaking away was the company's consultant.
More rapid than eagles his course was quite plain,
A getaway with successful branding he would claim.

"Now Viral! now, Social! now, Awareness and Retention!
On, Creative! On, Catchy! on, seeking only mention!
The brand was made memorable, I won't take the fall!
Didn't they know it wasn't supposed to sell at all?"

As the store was chocked full with images and colors,
Assumed to have uses by exploited dullards.
On TV and online the ads, they still flew,
But there wasn't much of anything they'd do.

And then, in a twinkling, she heard only silence,
No customers, no visitors, no interested clients.
Turning around, she surveyed a store haunted by vague hopes,
As the branding guru seemed to say "adios, you dopes!"

He was dressed all in black, from his head to his shoes,
His clothes stylishly modern, a necktie refused.
A messenger bag of work samples flung on his back,
She could tell by his eyes that he'd never come back.

Armed with examples of what branding can do,
Off to find other clients' budgets to burn through.
Supported by branding claims so esoteric,
Unquestionable, like a Church of Branding cleric.

So what if consumers didn't show they cared?
Paying for the brand attributes they weren't prepared.
Ev'ry abstract claim, all that clever stuff,
To prompt purchase behavior, it just wasn’t enough.

And at stores like this one, left high and dry,
With very few options left to try.
No time for more hype, people don't buy air,
Expecting them to magically arrive is unfair.

So a righting of wrongs, a balancing occurs,
The process of matching wants and needs endures.
Give consumers real reasons for them to buy,
And sales results may warrant more than a sigh.

The staffer returned to repricing merchandise,
Ignoring the branding blather, to be precise.
Then the guru added, as if to her labor regale:
"Happy Christmas to all, and good luck with the sale!"

Holiday Insurance

In our era of heightened expectations and outsourced responsibilities, I'm surprised that we aren't able to insure a holiday.

A single family get-together -- say, for Christmas tomorrow -- adds up to an apparent endless number of interconnected variables.  Change one, and some and/or all of the others are affected.  Weather, guest health, personalities, mood, food quality, presents, order of presents given, music, conversation topics, you name it. 

Our mental pictures of a happy holiday are idealized and usually static, while our experience is dynamic and multi-dimensional.  And thus full of risks.

So why can't we insure them?

I mean, I don't want to simply hope for a nice holiday event, or wish it had been more satisfying after-the-fact.  And it's not like I'm ever going to be surprised by what happens, at least not completely, and certainly not if it's at an annual holiday shindig.  Past events and behaviors already give me a range of possibilities, or identify the variables that might most impact the gig.

It shouldn't be surprise that no snow on Christmas might make everyone's mood slightly less cheery, or that too much might ruin things, too.  There's a solid chance that my kid will find that electronic gizmo X wasn't the be-all/end-all gift she claimed it was on her wish list.  Uncle Fred (or someone else) could arrive with a head cold, and the chicken might get overcooked.  Some younger cousin will enrage an older one, whether by declaring an affection for anarchism, or simply refusing to answer questions in anything longer than grunts. 

But if I can list these variables, why couldn't I assign values to them -- likelihood, casual links, the "cost" of resulting outcomes -- and insure myself?

I'm thinking three-levels of holiday insurance:

• Pre-Event Planning Services: If some outside agency could help me identify and assign values to my event variables, it might also assist with planning to avoid or overcome the negative ones (and encourage and expand the good ones).  I'm too busy worrying about getting the card-chairs from the basement to think about how unpleasant cousin Daphne will be for the entire evening if she hits her head on the doorway like she did a few years ago.  It would be great for some service to make a note of it, and give me a preparatory solution that let me (and my guests) reduce the risk of that variable to zero.  Ditto for seating arrangements, trade-offs between what I cook vs. what I buy pre-made, and whether the field of Republican hopefuls can be safely discussed at all
• Real-time Event Support: One of the hardest aspects of any holiday gig is that once it's happening, there's usually nothing you can do about it.  The event simply occurs, or unfolds.  You ride the wave and hope you don't drown.  When the appetizer singes, a friend of the family drinks too much, or the guitar for the video game my kid wanted only works once before going silent, there's no customer service to call for immediate assistance.  What if I could call some real-time support line, kind of like an event concierge, who could get things done while getting them done still mattered to the quality of the experience?’  Need more ice delivered?  A homemade fix for radio game controllers?  A new conversation topic for your niece who is sitting in the corner staring strangely at ornaments?  Maybe there are a set of event health indicators -- number of arguments about God, sidelong references about how small my house is, percentage of food left untouched on napkins and plates, or gallons alcohol consumed -- that a service tracks in real time, and proactively offers advice before they lead to irrevocable changes to the party?
• Post-Event Payoff: Sometimes, planning an annual holiday event is like getting ready for a hurricane or earthquake; you can try to minimize the damage, but the thing is going to hit pretty much not matter what.  If I can insure my roof or basement from damage, why can't I insure my party?  If an argument is bound to happen, or the beans come out cold even after repeated irradiation in the microwave, it would be nice to get some monetary recompense the next day, just to soothe my jagged nerves.  Assessing the cost, and then finding the investor parties interested in assuming such risks, would be far less dicey than spinning those cute-rate, never-going-to-get-paid home mortgages, wouldn't it?  Maybe a post-party user assessment would canvas all party-goers, and come up with a conclusion review that triggered payoff not just to the host, but to everyone involved.  We could all be "insured" from the possibility of having a bad time.

We can already insure our physical existence, and things like vacation travel commitments.  It isn't such a stretch from insuring the material aspects of life, to insuring our ephemeral life experiences, is it?

Think holidays, secular events, even daily routines (imagine being able to insure your average weekday).  The services and technology development opportunities might be immense. 

It would also make the brand marketing a lot easier, if not simply a lot more fun.  Who needs to get consumers to engage with cavemen or bulldog mascots when you can promise them great life experiences?

Andy Warhol's Branding Strategy

Back in the Dark Ages of the late 1960s, pop artist and Crispin Glover-inspiration Andy Warhol once quipped "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." 

He meant fifteen seconds, right?  Or perhaps the time it takes to post a shot on a social media site (and maybe add a single return volley)?  Maybe it's however long a Super Bowl commercial might be?  If Weathproof Garment Co. had its way, fame could be sliced into increments no longer than three seconds.

That's what the Wall Street Journal reported last week: Weatherproof had proposed to divvy up a 30-second spot with nine other brands, planning to give each about enough time to blurt out a company name. 

5 seconds.

Only guess what?  A quick Internet search reveals that Weatherproof's PR impressario made the same announcement last year, duping mainstream reporters into covering it.  The stunt was quickly exposed, generating lots of virtual press clippings as folks tisk-tisked the entire shebang.

10 seconds.

So is it news current, or past, or maybe never?  Some more checking... 

• The Weatherproof corporate site doesn't have a news report more current than one dated March 3, 2008
• There's no publicly available list of the brands committed to blowing millions of dollars on Super Bowl XLIII
• Most stories on the event focus on 1) how many big names have dropped out of the lavish expense, or 2) the ludicrous lengths marketers like GoDaddy will go to in order to get publicity for whatever they plan to do (or not).

Ah.  Make news with the what if, which prompts a snippet of time far beyond whatever could get bought by a commercial.  Who cares what, how, or why?  Remember, Warhol repeated his 15 seconds-quip for the next few decades, achieving repeat recognition simply because he was recognized repeatedly.   

15 seconds.

It would be tough to find a better, more pure and unadulterated example of the utter inanity of traditional brand thinking. 

Exposure for exposure's sake. 

Distraction in the name of awareness. 

Attitudinal attributions and associations that exist for nothing more than, quite literally, the blink of an eye (or jab in an online forum).

Andy Warhol looks a scream,
Hang him on my wall...
Andy Warhol, silver screen,
Can't tell them apart at all...

Too Much vs. Too Little

Yahoo's new limits on user data retention and Facebook's latest row over faux college groups illustrate the bizzaro-world conflict between too little and too much information in search, social media, and online life in general.

Why is it that companies know too much about us, and we know too little about one another?  Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Yahoo is going to delete after 90 days some of the personally identifiable search behavior data it collects.  These are the breadcrumb trails that we all leave when we look something up on the web, and the standard is to hold onto the stuff for at least a year or so...because it's commercial gold: by tracking and correlating the queries you type into your computer, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo can extrapolate tons of conclusions about your lifestyle, and your interests. 

This allows them to sell access to your eyeballs to companies that might sell you stuff that you might want.  So two people entering in the search term "tuna fish" might get two different sets of paid results, depending on how the engines have predicted the likelihood of one commercial interest exploiting your interest vs. another.  We get sold every step of the way.

It's called providing a better search experience.

Conversely, the latest row on Facebook involves a company setting up faux college group pages, with the intention of capturing names for some similarly nefarious (i.e. commercial) purpose.

The rise of social media has been driven by people interacting with one another based on at least some shared tidbit of information (interest, gender, topic, education, etc.), yet little of it is certified as authentic.  We interact with one another online almost wholly as anonymous trollers, identifiable only by the stuff we choose to share.  While a search engine can map your behavior with near-actuarial certainty, I know nothing about you when we "meet" online.

Detached from the responsibility of identity, participants in social media can be whomever (or whatever) they want to be.  So can companies, which continually try to exploit the medium with faux indviduals (that person in a user forum who won't stop waxing poetic about  the virtues of Microsoft Vista is probably a paid agent) and pages/groups.

The common retort of the word-of-mouth community is that the crowd will eventually out the violators, whether individual participants or entire groups (as in the case of the latest Facebook heresy).  I'll eventually discover that you're not who you say you are, or that the community I've joined is a scam.  There are no secrets, ultimately, on the Internet.

So true.  But it begs a central question: whom, where, and when do you trust?

For all of the vast, interconnected enormity of the Internet, it comes down to two extremes, in my thinking:

1. You either build very closed communities, in which you can certify that the members are really who they say they are (and are there for the reasons they've revealed), or
2. You outsource your trust to the most authentically anonymous crowds possible (that, by definition, are too generic to have any POV or bias to manipulate you, or if one emerged, you'd know it)

I'd put the big search engines and many online social groups somewhere between, and I'm not sure it's a sustainable place to be.  I wonder if people are going to trend to the extremes of the experience continuum.  If so, while it's great that search engines like Yahoo promise to limit data exploitation, and that faux communities or individuals will ultimately get outed, it might not be enough.

Scent of a Burnt Cow

Burger King has debuted a cologne that smells like flame-broiled meat, and I can't decide if it’s a stroke of utter branding brilliance, outright madness, or a little of both.

Flame comes with its own website, on which images of the King doing a full Burt Reynolds in front of a fireplaces are interspersed with generic shots of flowers and nature.  The cologne promises to deliver "the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat."  A Barry White wake-up-and-grill-me-somethin-love track plays in the background.  You can click around and actually find a store that sells it.

The cologne concept generally isn't so weird.  Most celebrities have "signature" scents.  So do many fashion brands.  Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has made its stores smell, and imbued its clothing with the odor. 

I suspect Flame is a gimmick, though, don't you?  I mean, the idea that anybody would want to smell like a greasy fire-pit is, well, not all that appetizing.  It brings to mind other olfactory abuses that should never be bottled:

• Swimming pool perfume
• Grade school hallway body wash
• Smoky bar hair conditioner

Also, the very concept of linking the odor of hamburger meat with the way people smell is particularly gross.  Name a food or ingredient that makes people smell good.  Garlic?  Alcohol?  Asparagus?  Yuck.  I don't think eating hamburgers does anything for one's natural odor.  The spray-on version must just make it worse?

But it's a funny joke item, probably not intended for actual use.  I could imagine it as a stocking-stuffer for the kind of guy who stuffs burgers and can (or should) laugh about how bad it makes him smell.  And then it gets put on a shelf, or re-gifted at the next white elephant party.

The bigger question is whether it does anything for the Burger King brand, and whether that branding does anything for its business.  Ultimately, BK needs to sell actual hamburgers, not just a whiff of 'em.

The logic must be similar to the thinking that has driven millions of dollars' worth of propaganda on the Burger King mascot: win share of mind with something irreverent that should be funny to a target demographic (who will "get" the humor), and it'll translate somehow into purchase transactions sometime.

In today's dog-eat-er-dog marketplace, however, I wonder about the wisdom of that note-to-balloon floating approach to brand marketing.  Better, more direct, even more (gasp) obvious connections to behavior might be a smarter way to go, and the creative challenge being to find ways to do that creatively?

Could every bottle of Flame come with a coupon good for a free Whopper, and a visit to a restaurant to "recharge" your scent?  How about some buzz program to encourage guys to actually wear the stuff, and have models pick them out of crowds at bars (by their, er, odor)?  Right now, there's no behavior attached to the cologne, beyond a weak chuckle.

It just seems to me that Burger King exhibits some marvelous invention, and sometimes casual disregard for propriety (which can be cool), but then stops before taking its ideas past the point of branding blather. 

Does an irreverent idea have merits in and of itself, or is a concept that doesn't prompt behavior for a brand just kinda stinky?

Bernard Madoff: Branding Expert

Accused swindler Bernard Madoff will likely get vilified and prosecuted for his financial legerdemain, but I hope somebody recognizes his branding brilliance.  His was a textbook case for delivering successful brands.

It was all about behavior.  More specifically, the delivery (not promise) of profits.

The very concept of hedge funds generally defies comprehension, let alone believability.  It depends on a basic bit of cognitive dissonance: that it's possible to deliver returns that are impossible to return.

Every conceivable experience a person might have -- not to mention those gained from reading the news, or any knowledge gleaned from actually investing in the humdrum world where the rest of us live -- screams that beating the market is simply inconceivable...unless you skirt or break the law.  Even the suggestion should be greeted with suspicion, if that. 

Yet hedge funds not only suggest that, but somehow deliver it...or did, thanks to some secret sauce algorithms, and insights from financial wiz types who would consider membership in Mensa a demotion.

Granted, the numbers they delivered were just symbols that appeared on spreadsheets and montly statements.  They represented profits without actually comprising of, say, deliveries of bushels of wheat or gold.  And these statement are admittedly incomprehensible to most folks (a notable admission from some of Madoff's clients, for instance, not to mention the regulators and fellow financial types involved). 

But they obviated the need of any brand promise or association; delivering the stats was the behavioral punchline of the entire hedge fund promise.  So people could ignore any suspicion or inference such investments prompted.  No sponsorships, charitable works, or imagined lifestyle benefits mattered whatsoever.  Madoff spent not one cent trying to convince his clients of anything, other than giving them numbers every month that far surpassed the numbers delivered by his competition. 

His numbers rendered the unbelievable believable, and that's all anyone needed.

I think this is an intriguing case history about the power of branding, and perhaps the limitations of our intentions to make brands all about emotion or other internal states (or, for that matter, experience and engagement). 

Like many of his hedge fund brethren, Madoff effectively told everyone that he could make a brick wall disappear, and then gave people the math to support his miracle...just  as he encouraged them to run headlong into it.  The clarity of the payoff obscured the wall in front of their faces.

How people got there was immaterial.  What they felt didn’t matter.  No qualitative poll on their perceptions of Madoff would have mattered at all.  Madoff delivered a result, a benefit that needed no qualification, analysis, or interpretation.  There was no enhanced experience, or improved engagement, or happy two-way conversation between victim, er, client and firm.

Gigantic profits.  That was Madoff's branding brilliance.

How many brands can you name that offer a similarly obvious, uncontested benefit?  I'm pained to name a few, if any, though I can name lots of products (and campaigns) intended to obfuscate that fact (or lack thereof). 

Too bad Madoff's payoff was a ruse.  It was brilliant branding.