Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

A Glowing Review?

I just caught Christine Todd Whitman on TV yesterday; she's a former governor and led the EPA for President Bush earlier this decade.  Now she's shilling for the nuclear power industry.

To hear her tell it, nuclear power has been grossly misunderstood, and our country has suffered for it.  The French get it right (yes, this is a Republican giving France credit for something other than cowardice), because 80% of their electricity comes from splitting atoms.  Our 100+ plants produce less than 20%.

I never knew we'd got it so wrong.  There's no radioactive waste problem, the capital costs of building plants aren't prohibitive, and it turns out there's never been an accident (our Three Mile Island leak happened because imperfect humans messed with the perfect computers that ran the place.  As for Chernobyl, well, that happened a long way away and, technically, it was a junky reactor design). 

Nuclear energy is clean air energy, according to Ms. Whitman and the industry lobby's web site: the heat from radioactive isotope decay creates steam, which moves the turbines and produce electricity.  So the worst air pollutants you get from this power source are, well, clouds.

I don't intend to debate the truthyness of these claims, but rather the up-is-down, everything-you-think-you-know-isn't-true approach to rebranding nuclear power.

The rhetoric just doesn't come across as honest. There are legitimate concerns about housing radioactive waste, from the specific threats of theft and leakage, to the broad idea that we can choose to bequeath toxic glunk to great-grandchildren who get no say in our decision. 

As for the capital costs, there's no way a single reactor could have been built up to now had the government not given zillions in assistance to the utilities, either through tax breaks, absolution of insurance costs, or simply allowing them to pass-on the costs to consumers through regular rate hikes.  And the big-ticket construction project approach to industry has some inherent problems generally, most notably the fact that anything that takes years to build is usually years out of date by the time it's completed (ergo, by the time NASA took delivery of its first shuttle, there were better/safer ways to catapult people into space).

When it comes to the risk of an accident, the promise of system and process protections, and even a perfect record, just don’t jibe with the obvious: didn't Ms. Whitman see the movie "Titanic," or know anybody whose iPod crapped out?  Smart people have been building unbreakable, failsafe things for a long time, and have often lived to see their creations break and fail.  Everybody knows this.

So what should the nuclear lobby do instead?  I say tell the truth, and acknowledge legitimate concerns (both immediately practical, and philosophically involved).  People don't have it wrong on nuclear power, any more than Ms. Whitman has it right.  She can be as commonsense and genuine as she wants, but up is not down.  And this style of rhetoric is strikingly old school.  Outdated is perhaps a compliment?   

The nuclear industry needs to engage on the issues -- like use social tools to have actual conversations, and enable people to chew on topics and make the nuanced decisions the subject requires -- and not present its POV...which ends up coming off like a biased, glowing review. 

A Suicide Note

With once-great newspapers becoming extinct or, worse, going online in markets across the U.S., we've been given an interesting twist from a long-suffering paper in London: in The Evening Standard has spent the last month telling its readers that it's sorry. 

I assume this will be followed by an announcement that it as emptied its last ink well, or broken the final printing press, or whatever.  The branding campaign all but amounts to a very public suicide note.

Don't get me wrong, as I'm all for a well-meaning apology.  Admitting guilt, even if it was more perceived than deserved, is a key way to resolve a conflict.  An apology can right a wrong, or simply grease the mechanism of civility that's under fire in waiting lines, crowded street intersections, and the give-and-take of interpersonal relationships.  Residents of Tokyo do it incessantly, as it helps them live closes together without killing one another. 

So why is The Evening Standard apologizing to Londoners?

Because it has been negative.  Lost touch.  Been predictable and complacent.  You see, in holding focus groups, its ad agency discovered that younger readers perceive the brand as "right-wing," and feel that it is preoccupied with crime.  The first leg of the branding campaign was to admit these faults in stark, explicit terms (see image above), and was followed by a second leg that made promises to listen and to surprise.  Part of the surprise will be the appearance of articles by expensive writers, like Tom Wolfe and Tom Stoppard.

What absolute rubbish, as they say over there.

The problem for The Evening Standard is no different, broadly speaking, than the issues   facing the Boston Globe, New York Times, or papers that have already evaporated into the ether (like the Rocky Mountain News): people don't feel compelled to read them.  No amount of fond feelings or other perceptions will change that.  In fact, I think most people like the idea of newspapers, kind of like they like the ideas of public television and diets. 

Good things, but honestly, they're not for me.

The London paper's vague apology and promise reveal that it hasn't figured out the problem.  Readers don't need reasons to tolerate, like, or even adore the Standard.  They need reasons to need the newspaper: 

• What would it take to claim, truly, to be the "paper of record" for Londoners?
• How could it consistently deliver meaningful, exclusive perspective on the news?
• Where might it find affirmation of "truth," so its reporting was trusted above all others?

The Evening Standard needs to rethink its offering, and establish new criteria and tools for being indispensably relevant to its readers lives.  That's not a branding problem, it's a business challenge, and no marketing strategy can fix it.  Newspapers all over the world are broken, but not lost beyond repair, and this paper is no exception.

Unless, of course, it thinks the answer is to try to be another entertainment medium.  Then I'd say the ad campaign just served as its suicide note.

Rebranding California

Say goodbye to surfin' dudes and babes, the amoral party that is Hollywood, and any fashion or legislative references that might imply peace, love, or pukka shells.  California is rebranding itself.

Yesterday, its Supreme Court upheld the voter-passed ban on same-sex marriage by a 6-1 margin.  The state has a seriously (and frighteningly) direct, participatory democracy thing going on, which allows the ballot box to directly set legislation and regulations (they decided they didn't want to pay too much in property taxes a while back, for instance, so a referendum made it so).  It turns out that a simple ballot initiative can also make verbatim changes to its constitution. 

California has been crowdsourcing its government for years.

The Court's ruling simply upheld the legality of the voters to do this sort of thing; voters had decided the state constitution needed a line in it that specifically defined marriage as something that only occurs between a man and a woman.  They could have decided to give healthcare benefits to Martians, or declared flowering plants a protected minority, and the Court's conclusion would have likely been the same.

Never has the disconnect been between what we think about the state, and what it is been more obvious. 

Many millions can get spent to tell us that we should visit, or that California is a great place for economic development; many millions more speak to its image indirectly, as individuals, organizations, movies, songs, and whathaveyou sing the praises the ideas for which the state stands.  Yet a majority of California's active voters beg to differ; their actions speak louder than words, and their efforts translate a hazy, feel-good brand image into something much more tangible and real. 

As one of the brighter lights who reads this blog suggested to me, last November's Prop 8 last November was a demand for a voice in co-creating a relaunch.

It's probably not the branding that most Californians want, whether they agree with the ban or not.  It telegraphs conflict to would-be tourists and business relocators, and its values-based agitation seems a bit tangential to the other issues voters could choose to care about.  The bankruptcy of its government would be one such topic you'd think they'd consider; as the state fires tens of thousands of workers, services risk interruption, and the future looks even more bleak, the fact that voters and its courts want to make sure marriage only happens between men and women says a lot about what brand California really means.

Or does it?

I'd posit that all the news coming out of California defines its brand and, as such, brand California is constantly twisting, changing, and evolving.  A few weeks ago its car emission standards served as the lingua franca for the entire automotive industry, and yet today it's the poster child for bickering, angry extremists.  In a few weeks, it'll be something else that'll thrill or shock.   If you are a fan of wading in the blogosphere, you don’t have to wait until then.  Berkeley bans nukes.  Simi Valley absolves cops.  The brand changes minute to minute. 

California is as California does.

I think there’s a lesson here for how we understand brands generally.  Doing is more important that declaring or associating, and giving your consumers the context for these factoids is probably more important than trying to spin them. 

Sure, California is rebranding itself.  It does so all the time.  So does your brand, whether you know it or not. 

The Confusion Of Good Works

Boeing's CEO for commercial airplanes wrote an op-ed piece in this weekend's Wall Street Journal that started with this declaration:

"Addressing climate change is a particularly difficult challenge for commercial aviation."

The rest of the piece went on to forcefully argue that it's not going to happen unless government makes it profitable and, perhaps indirectly and more importantly, it's not Boeing's job.

What a shock...a company telling the truth.  I think that doing so does more for its brand than any amount of politically correct "we're working together to save the planet" marketing blather it could have run.

Sure, the piece is headlined with the disingenuous "How Boeing Fights Climate Change," and there are throwaway references to how the efficiency of commercial jets has risen 70%, which has meant a 70% reduction in carbon emissions per mile.  See, Boeing is fighting climate change!

No it isn't.  And it shouldn't have to.  Boeing is in the business of manufacturing and servicing commercial airplanes, among its many other businesses.  It has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders and investors, and hopes to gainfully employee its workers as long as there's work to be gained.  It's a nearly-perfect B2B endeavor, as there's little pull strategy for consumer fliers.  You'd no more feel the need to choose which elevator brand took you up and down in a high-rise, or whether concrete sold under a particular name was used to repave your favorite road. 

Whatever mentions it makes about the well-being of society or the planet in its mission statement, values, or other consultantspeak it might have framed on its office walls, is definitely followed like that game you play when you read a Chinese fortune cookie: like adding "in between the sheets" after whatever it is, Boeing's values have the same requirement as any other company to include, however implicitly, "as long as it makes money for us."

Its CEO says as much as he outlines the ways government can help Boeing help the environment"

• Focus on efficiency standards broadly instead of mandating specific emissions limits, so as to encourage innovation
• Improve runway and flightpath management so there's less idling time, or whatever it's called, along with less fuel burned in the air
• Incentivize farmers and refiners to grow biofuels for airlines to use

In other words, doing the right thing means incentivizing it, financially.  Don't rely on them expending shareholders' wealth in the name of some abstract planetary good, or because someone on the board wants to get on the cover of Fortune.   

I love it.  The easier thing to do would also be the most common: namely, hire some smart marketers and publicists, and come up with some symbolic gesture, like a donation or other good work.  Commit $x and then spend many more dollars promoting the hell out of it.  There's an entire racket -- calling itself "corporate social responsibility," or "CSR" -- that gives companies the excuse to claim to do good in order to realize some branding benefit.  Think cigarette companies supporting the ballet and Public Television, only now an entire industry. 

There's an inherent disconnect...no, a dishonesty...between the explicit requirements of businesses to make profits, and the implicit expectations we put on them to do things beside that.  CSR treats good works as a marketing and branding strategy, almost as if it's apart or aside from the base, mercenary activities of the business.

Three cheers to Boeing for cutting through the confusion, however unintended and imperfectly.  If we want commercial jetliners to help save the environment, our government needs to find ways to help them make money. 

If more companies actually told the truth about the sometimes conflicts between good business and good works, maybe we'd believe more often what they have to say the rest of the time.

The F*#wa On My Head

You probably haven't caught wind of it, but some brand traditionalists have issued a fatwa on me.  It's quite a compliment, really, and kind of comforting that I don't rate the scrutiny of a Salman Rushdie.  But they're still pissed off, and they wish me dead.

Why?  Because I question our beliefs in the power of branding.  I'm not so sure we can manipulate what people believe in any concerted or sustainable way, and I don't think it would matter if we could.

Saying just that means I'm too dangerous to listen to, and it sets the purists off on really passionate diatribes on how I've got things so wrong.  I've tried to talk to them -- it's a self-referencing echo chamber of a handful of numbnuts -- but they conveniently ignore my replies, or cut stuff out of context so they can better make their points.  I won't do them the honor of promoting their nonsense directly, but you can probably find it if you search my name, followed by "evil" or "dumb guy deserving a slow, painful demise."

But here I can tell you what I think.

Just like my argument -- which is really more of a series of questions, as I don't think I, or any of us, really has the answer to why brands are harder to communicate, more difficult to maintain, and nearly impossible to rely upon for any price premium anymore (and yet the traditionalists maintain the answer is to keep doing more of the same, which sure seems like a clinical definition of insanity) -- but anyway, just like my argument is simply that mental states aren't consistent or reliable, and hence may not be the best target for our branding efforts, their argument is simple, too: brands exist because people think stuff about things. 

Duh.  When asked, folks can remember words or terms associated with brand names.  It's obvious that brands exist.  People think different things about Apple than Microsoft, or BMW versus GM.  To suggest otherwise isn't just heretical, it's stupid.  So I'm a doomed ingrate.

Well, I say not so much.  There are two basic problems with the "I think brands, therefore they are" argument:

First, if all we had to do was think things to make them true, then ghosts and UFOs would be real, as would the conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Towers, implementation of the Protocols of Zion, and I'd look 35 instead of a few days older than, well, older.  We human beings have deep, conflicted internal lives that are subjective, imprecise, self-referencing, and ever-changing.  Brands exist because people think about them?  Seems like a pretty dubious and unreliable place to look, even if your survey questionnaire says otherwise.

Second, it's doubly dubious because let's assume that we could implant consumers with our image of brands...the connection to subsequent behavior -- purchase behavior...buying things -- is about as dicey and incomplete as the thoughts about brands themselves.  People regularly think one thing and then do another, sometimes to their own surprise (and chagrin).  Fond feelings toward names or logos don't have a direct link to sales.  We can strive to make people think happy thoughts until we've exhausted our marketing budgets, but if branding is intended to get people to think about branding, it's sort of a circular, pointless pursuit. 

My premise is that we marketers have got it bass-ackwards: brands emerge from behavior, and we shouldn't try to impose them on things.  We don't put things in people's brains as much as they do, and then they rearrange, recreate, and mess it all up, like every minute of every day.

Companies might to better to re-imagine their branding as the efforts they take to do things...real actions far beyond the invention of creative marketers, and intended to be relevant to the lives of consumers in ways that prompt actions.  We could then study the resulting behaviors as evidence of our branding efficacy.  And we'd have an objective, reliable palette of data that everyone could understand and agree upon.

I say brands are behavior, not something beyond or above it.  Again, just saying something like that makes smoke come out of the brand purists' ears. 

It would be a great debate, though, wouldn't it?  There's lots to consider, and our conclusions could affect how businesses go about spending billions of dollars every year.

But when it comes to a handful of folks who want to pocket some of that money by delivering the consistently wrong answers, it's easier to wish me dead for asking the right questions.

Branding According To Trump

Lies.  Exaggerations.  Facts and figures thrown around based on popularity and something called "mental math"  Welcome to Branding 101, courtesy of Professor Donald Trump.

The Donald is in a New Jersey state court defending his, er, reputation from the conclusions made in 2005 in a book entitled TrumpNation by New York Times editor Timothy O'Brien.  The book cites anonymous sources pegging Trump’s net worth at somewhere between $150 and $250 million.  Trump says it's more like $4 billion or more, and that the low-ball numbers caused him to lose out on deals all over the world.

"The publishing company will pay me hundreds of millions of dollars," he says.

Now, what is the variable that completes the equation, and turns one estimate in the low hundreds of millions..into the other estimate of multiple billions? 

Branding.

In the few tidbits I've read, culled from his deposition or various comments he's made publicly, Trump makes no bones about his squishy, thumb-in-the-media method of brand valuation.  Here are his branding tips for all you budding brand gurus:

• Fib.  He has no compunction stating things that he knows aren't true, like declaring his investment interest in one property as "equated" to something more because of the value of his brand
• Twist.  He's an owner of at least one property because of the licensing agreement to use his name, so he would "...say that it could be interpreted to be a form of ownership."
• Fantasize.  When challenged on the net loss of $4.6 million for an investment in a golf course, Trump imagines that he'd eventually make $120 million...based on what he calls "mental projections."

In fact, when challenged on a 2007 estimate of his net worth as $4 billion or more, he counters that $6 billion would be a better number, counting his brand value.  And then, in the same deposition, when asked if he has ever exaggerated, he replies, "I think everybody does.  Who wouldn't?"

So what's the truth?

I say it doesn’t matter.  Sure, the court can and should decide if the author purposefully misstated Trump's net worth, but I think that's going to be all but impossible, considering that Trump has made a career of doing the same thing.  How could low-ball estimates be a crime if sometimes, er, rosy projections aren't?

No, the truth is that Donald Trump is a genius.  I can't help but respect him for what he has accomplished.  I have no idea if he knows squat about real estate, but it doesn't matter to me; he understands, perhaps instinctively, the miracle of marketing and, as Daniel Boorstin called it, the potential of the "pseudo-event." 

Trump's business is to appear to be in business.  He is successful at appearing successful and, as such, he follows in a line of stars who are famous for being famous.  Charro.  Paris Hilton.  Dennis Rodman, and all the numbnut has-beens who show up on Trump's celebrity wrestling TV show.   

In this sense, the lawsuit about his worth is just another strategic decision for him, as no event that creates publicity for him can hurt what he does, truly, since what he does is create publicity for himself.

So class, Professor Trump clearly has important things to teach us about the uses of branding.  I'm just not sure you want to apply his tips to your next new product launch.

Or do you?

What’s Left?

I read last week that Sprint is in talks to outsource its network, and it kind of got me wondering what would be left if it did.

A company name.  A logo.  A marketing budget. Everything else would get done by someone, or some thing else:  

• Devices are made by Motorola, Nokia, etc.
• Customer service is handled in some far-away land
• Billing and other transactions are all done by computer, or all but automated
• IVR answers the phone for them
• Partner companies run sales promotions

And now, a business like Ericsson might manage its cell towers

This is amazing, if you think of it.  Kind of like ascending to another level of existence, or a new stage in evolution.  Sprint is well on it's way to becoming pure brand.

Only in our Age of Chaos could such nonsense get floated under the guise of corporate strategy; even the Wall Street Journal story about it read, in part, that the move would free up strategic resources...things like "product development, marketing and strategic partnerships."  I get the box on the PowerPoint slide that Sprint's management bought from the hoity-toity consultants who make up that stuff, but what does it really mean in practice?

More cost savings, pretty much.  Why spend money on doing anything?

If Sprint can get away with putting its branding on phones made, delivered, enabled, serviced, and supported by others...well, that sounds like some hyper-efficient, virtual, Internet-enabled, insert-you-buzzword-term-here sort of deal, doesn't it?  Sprint could be a virtual company, promising lots of things but doing nothing except cutting deals, punching computer keys, and cashing all the checks that come in.

I have a nagging suspicion that brands don't get delivered that way.  Isn't the real differentiation and sustainability buried in all those messy activities that Sprint is hoping to avoid? 

Consumers care about reality a lot more than image, even if they can get momentarily transfixed or confused by a particularly witty pitch.  And when it comes to the promise of outsourcing, hasn't it been responsible for most of the most egregious brand violations in recent memory, such as lead paint on toys, weird chemicals in toothpaste, and ever-present, nagging little disappointments consumers experience when it's impossible to get clear answers to simple questions?

The how stuff gets built, sold, and serviced actually matters far more than the what of its description. 

So when Sprint loses a million subscribers in the first quarter of 2009, I don't think the culprit is their lack of affection or engagement with the company's branding.  Now, if Sprint were building some massively smart, real-time model for managing all the disparate parts of its business, well, that would be something to celebrate, and probably something that would give consumers reasons to subscribe again.  

But simply outsourcing every activity that isn't nailed down, or swapping jobs for lower-cost vendors, isn't really much of a business strategy.  It passes for planning these days but, after you turn off the presentation projector, there's nothing left.

Value

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the utility of ad placement on social media sites, and whether it's the most enlightened way to monetize services like Facebook or Twitter.  I'd posit that there are two broad, and somewhat mutually-exclusive schools of thought on the subject: one looking forward, and the other back. 

The forward-looking model is extremely hopeful, and suggests that online commerce occurs within self-contained ecosystems.  Activities and pricing are determined by transparent communications and the other attributes of efficiency.  These principles apply to all types of commercial communities, whether eBay or some proprietary site for sourcing industrial parts.  Participants will pay for the value they receive for access to these services, whether as buyers or sellers.

Interestingly, when applied to social media sites, it's assumed that the value to participants of their participation is zero, and that the cost of that participation to the operators of the sites is effectively free. 

People don't pay for chatting or trading funny links, as if the content is somehow an externality to the pricing model.  The forward-looking model suggests that such content will always be value-less, and that profits will have to emerge from activities "around" it, like ad placement, sponsorships, and other ways of charging commercial interests for the privilege of accessing the folks doing all the free stuff.

I think this approach is distinctly old-fashioned, at least going back to the days of broadcast TV, when channels gave away content, and then charged advertisers for promoting before and after it.  The only difference is that Facebook or YouTube are outsourcing the programming, and getting it for free.  The efficiency of behavioral ad targeting is what makes it new.  Didn't online portals do sort of the same thing a decade ago?  We know how quickly those futuristic visions faded into past tense.

Which brings me to the other approach for understanding value in social media, which is looking back...not just back to the heyday of mass media, but really back, like many hundreds of years prior, to the model of the medieval marketplace.

Markets emerged (and thrived) before there was a thing called "legal tender" or anything even approaching a standard currency.  People bartered merchandise, gossip, and traded their time for the very experience of participating in a local confab.  They paid for the privilege, and got paid for it, only not in cash.  Value was a quality of the participation itself.  The monetization -- cashification, if you will -- came later, and not always in the best interests of the markets themselves.  

So you probably don't go to social sites to transact business or spend money, right.  But value still drives every visit; you wouldn't go if it didn't.  That value isn't an externality to the experience -- at least not for the experiencers -- but rather central to the purpose and function of the "social" market.  You do pay for your visits, and you get paid for visiting. 

Just not in cash.

I wonder if we could invent ways to better recognize and reflect this type of value, instead of taking it for granted?

For instance:

• Could a sponsor offer a way to credential users, in a real and meaningful way (i.e. not just allowing them to anoint themselves as "power users"), that allowed for their voices to be better heard and appreciated? 
• Could brands help visitors find meaningful sections or areas on sites, and somehow improve how content is shared? 
• Imagine a loyalty program that awarded points for frequent visits, or if participants paid for admission, so to speak, because they received some added benefit from conversing with one another, or with a corporation?

We human beings have long believed that the most important things in life are free (or priceless, as MasterCard recently reminded us).  Only maybe there's no such thing as "free" but, rather, just instances wherein we can't (or won't) assign and measure value. 

Ultimately, I suspect that the opportunity for social media is to do just that. 

I Don't

The image ad from Bessemer Trust reads "Why Should You Believe Anything We Say?" followed by a handful of paragraphs that explain why. 

Well, I don't. 

In light of the incomprehensibly insane upheavals in the financial markets, and the shattering of pretty much every snippet of believability or trust that was ever attached to this industry category, here are the reasons why I'm supposed to think differently about Bessemer:

• Their headquarters are on Fifth Avenue, not Wall Street, and their approach is a "million miles away" from the rest of the bums
• They're privately held, and have been around for 100 years, so, well, there's no way of knowing what's ever been on their balance sheet
• They're not investment bankers, underwriters, brokers, or anything else you'd easily label; instead, they're a "diverse team of experts specializing in everything that might affect your wealth."  Sounds like the staff at an EST seminar
• Oh, and they share the same research with every client, so you're not alone.  Nobody really knows what's going on

Here's a little thought experiment: imagine if, say, your best friends each had a spouse who was revealed to be a spy, or the vanguard of an alien invasion.  Everything they'd been told or taken for granted was a lie.  Now, you're sitting across the kitchen table with your spouse or significant other.  Things are just a little tense.  Then, she or he breaks the silence with some declaration, like "hey, I'm not like that, you've just got to trust me" or "I'm not technically a spouse, dear, but more of a specialist in all things Klingonese." 

Convinced?  Yeah, right.  Ad on top of it that you heard this nonsense in an ad, not directly from another human being (or an alien who looked like one).  Ads are hard to believe by definition, so any creative ad copy that starts out effectively saying "everything you ever read in advertising is a lie," doesn't do much  for whatever case is about to follow, does it? 

Oddly enough, there's this teeny-weeny line near the end of the ad, which reads "We invest our own money right alongside yours.  We're in it with you.  Literally."  Then, if you poke around on the web site for a bit, you can discover that Bessemer has realigned its management structure, put in place new policies, and generally taken steps to act differently in this different world of ours.

So why aren't these behaviors front and center in its branding? 

All those other banks and brokers are busy sitting across the table from us shrugging, or looking the other way, or telling us to relax and give them the time of day when their actions suggest we should run away screaming, and put our family finances under our mattresses.

Bessemer is actually doing things things to reconfigure its business, only its branding experts elected to bury it in the same hype that any other company could (and has) run.

I get the reasons why the financial world is in disarray, and I believe that most firms have a bigger problem than simply weathering the current storm.  People, and particularly individual investors, are going to need to see lots of concrete, real action before they jump back into the fray.  Happy talk branding isn't going to cut it.

I don't understand why Bessemer didn’t tell us something we really needed to hear, especially since it seems like it's doing it.

Unless, of course, that something was klaatu barada nikto.

Smoke Gets In Their Eyes

Burger King is trying to throw more raw meat on the grill by redirecting marketing funds normally spent by franchisees, and using it to run more corporate branding.  We're talking $25 million next year, and $40 million every year through 2022. 

Its National Franchise Association, which represents the vast majority of those franchisees, has filed two lawsuits to stop it.  As I possess friend of the Whopper status, I'd like to submit a brief in support of the complaints.

The dynamic between "corporate" and "the field" has always been dicey when it comes to spending marketing money.  Headquarters like to focus on communicating the brand, and other long-term things that, arguably, the mother ship should worry about.  The field -- whether franchisees, dealerships, or stores of any kind -- have more immediate, short-term interests at heart...namely, selling stuff this afternoon.  Finding an uneasy middle-ground is how most marketing campaigns get realized.

Burger King has made such detente impossible.  Lately, it has aggressively pursued some of the most notable, expensive, and utterly pointless branding the world has ever seen. 

Campaigns on Facebook.  Edgy videos, like "Whopper Virgins," scripted and shot to be forwarded via email.  An entire campaign and website dedicated to a cologne that smells like broiled meat.  Bikini-clad BK Girls in New Zealand.  And the incessant, widespread appearances of its creepy mascot, in everything from television spots, to video games and Halloween masks.

This is a company that, back in 2006, decided that its corporate marketing mandate was to "participate in the collective conversation," and has pioneered many inventive, edgy ways to get consumers to interact with its brand.  In fact, it has helped define the wonderfully circular school of thought that says the purpose of branding is to get people to interact with your branding.

It just doesn’t sell Whoppers.  Hence the lawsuit.

While Burger King has been receiving accolades from inside the branding fishbowl, the business of retailing burnt cow and potatoes has been decided by product development, menu offerings, store cleanliness, service quality, price, and all the less-sexy things that bore creative marketers, but actually matter to hungry customers.  McDonald's has out-performed Burger King during some of the quarters in which the nonsense branding activities peaked...by focusing on those very things that drive consumption. 

There's no connection between Burger King's participation in the supposed "collective conversation," and any sales or profits.  The franchisees must know this, just like they know that no business can survive if all its customers do is think about its products. 

Reality matters, no matter how expertly the branding gurus have worked to obscure (or ignore) this fact.

Of course, the lawsuits could be the result of the operators wanting to keep the cash to spend on their own pet projects instead of those at corporate.  They're not inherently going to be smarter or better at making marketing decisions, per se.

But the best brands are built by a real integration and, gasp, recognition and coordination of business strategy and communications.  Branding run amok, however brilliantly it prompts impromptu and passing conversation, doesn't build anything except the bank accounts of those responsible for creating it.  Generally, it's a tax on those who are tasked with earning it.

Maybe the franchisees are finally seeing through the smoke, and want to use marketing dollars to sell more hamburgers (and build the brand accordingly)?