Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

The Year's Best Marketing

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

Great branding and marketing happened all the time in 2009, only it often occurred in some less noticed and most unlikely places.

In fact, I'm not sure we possess the right criteria or language to agree on what "great" even means. So many things have changed − from our channels to our expectations − that much of what was celebrated in the media (and promptly resold to other clients) just left me flat. I had this sneaking suspicion that we were missing something all year long. 

A shared idea of purpose. Criteria for success. 

A program.

I wrote a number of Dim Bulb essays during the year on what I thought were home runs that you'd otherwise miss; when I reviewed them for my new book, I discovered an underlying consistency across all of them. A pattern of design and execution that I believe drove all of the successes, whether large or small. The best campaigns all exhibited novel thinking in one or more of what I've concluded are the six categories, or Six C's of Success, which are: 

1. Channel. "New" shouldn't be a synonym for "digital" when it comes to media for reaching consumers. The truly inventive campaigns used new ways to communicate, like incorporating heaters in bus stops with ads, or newspapers that were written differently, not just reformatted to look like web pages. Every communications channel is "new" unless you choose to use it in old ways.
2. Creativity. I'm a sucker for a good fart joke just like the next guy, but the really creative content in 2009 wasn't focused on making people laugh as much as inventing new ways to talk about products and services. Who would have ever thought of giving life insurance as a gift, for instance? Successful campaigns redefined the mandate for creativity and put it against finding ways to engage with consumers thatwere relevant, meaningful, and had some utility beyond eliciting a chuckle. 
3. Competitiveness. Some marketers rejected the babble of talking about "enhancements" or selling imaginary benefits, and got back to talking about real differences with competing offers, sometimes going so far as to invent their own competition to crowd a market. "Why we're different/better" proved to be a far better basis for social conversations than whether folks thought an ad was good or not.
4. Content. Home run messages had meaning and relevance, not just entertainment value. One of the key winning ideas was to pull campaigns back to the old-fashioned idea of sampling, which helped make a beer message very compelling.
5. Clarity. The best ideas weren't focused exclusively on marketing communications, but the business behind it. 2009 gave us examples of clients linking marketing efforts to results (holding agencies accountable for results...gasp!), which the media interpreted as punitive. It wasn't. Could selling be emerging as the new marketing idea? It would be laughable if it weren't possible.
6. Call to Action. This was perhaps the most important quality of all. Home runs have objectively real actions attached to them, so they're memorable for what happened (and not for what people thought about them). So, for instance, an emotional attachment was less important than the offer to "try our toilet paper." Beyond all the babble about conversation for the sake of conversation, the most successful campaigns provided something after the talk.

The Six C's cut across the more common criteria by which brand and marketing strategies are discussed; I think that one of the biggest risks we run is when we try to do "a digital campaign," or look at a business challenge in terms of the marketing tools available to us. Home runs go above and beyond those common vendor definitions, and are assembled by sometimes unlikely (or unexpected) elements.

They can also be nothing more than scrappy singles, to push the baseball analogy perhaps too far. I'm convinced that some of the best strategies in 2009 were mistaken for tactics; doing "little" things really well was perhaps one of the year's "big" ideas.

So you've got my recipe for success. Want to know which campaigns I thought were the home runs of 2009?  

Buy my book.  :)

Keep A Friend Home On Black Friday

I can all but guarantee that someone you know and care about is planning to go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. You need to intervene.

Black Friday is a contrived, customer-hostile, bait-and-switch, potentially deadly symptom of what's wrong with bricks and mortar retailing. A handful of grotesquely low prices on a smaller handful of products are advertised as "doorbusters," and we've been subjected to years' worth of propaganda intended to associate the day with shopping deals, however imaginary. With inventories somewhat leaner this year versus last, there's also the implicit suggestion that if you don't run out and buy something, you might not be able to find it later on...so go ahead and buy that marginally discounted TV when the three that were on sale are nowhere to be found.

The necessity of shopping this Friday is wholly the creation of retailers who choose to abandon any other reason to compel a visit, provide a pleasant in-store experience, or associate any value to the store brand other than perhaps the hint that there are deals to be had if and when the stores dole them out.

Yet crowds will dutifully start lining up at their favorite stores tomorrow long before the sun rises. TV journalists will broadcast from shopping malls with faux insightful comments about "consumer sentiment" and other aspects of the commercial community in which we all belong, though none of us claim membership. An unofficial legion of shoppers will tweet from the front-lines, narrating which store deal is ripe for exploitation. Next Monday's headlines will declare that the entire holiday selling season will be big or a bust.

Who are the numbnuts getting manipulated by the stores?

They're our families, friends, and neighbors. David Ogilvy once said "the consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife," only if your loved one or friend can't resist the Pavlovian command to shop on Back Friday then the "moron" label is a compliment.

The retailers are morons, too, because they keep doing it year after year, though I guess you can't fault them for repeating something that regularly proves to be somewhat effective. Every item that gets purchased by a customer is one less item gathering dust on a store shelf. Sales on Black Friday are guaranteed to be better than sales on a Friday of any other color. Registering transactions now, however they're delivered and at what ultimate cost, is a better business strategy than waiting for them to magically appear as we get closer to Christmas. Folks lining up in the dark outside Walmart aren't shopping online (unless they have their smartphones with them).

So who cares what it'll do to the retail brand next month, or next year? Without comp store sales this year, there may be no tomorrow.

I say this logic is utterly flawed. Black Friday is moronic for everyone involved because it represents a collective effort to destroy retail, and here's how:

• Retailers strip away every pretense of authenticity and credibility to their brands by so bluntly detaching pricing from product and purchasing value; doorbuster offers are no different than the promise of winning the lottery.
• Consumers subject themselves to the most crowded, competitive, unpleasant, and more than likely unsatisfying shopping experiences possible; bricks and mortar stores couldn't do a better job of promoting online shopping if they tried.

Both retailers and shoppers are somewhat co-dependent in this dance, even if sellers have to work harder each year to try at hit their sales goals just as buyers have to work harder to find what they want to buy. Internet retailers have been inspired to copy the practice with their own day dedicated to shopping, which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it. However successful these events will be this year, next year's will be more of a fight to simply match them.

This is the market at work, friends, and the collaborative malaise known as Black Friday will continue until somebody yells stop.

Is that somebody you?

Imagine if each of us sought out a person we know is going to humiliate him or herself on Black Friday; you know, somebody who is already plotting out which stores to hit, what times, how much they want to spend, etc. Be a friend and keep them away from the stores. Go to a movie. Start an art project. Walk the dog (a lot). Do anything other than shop.

Staying home on Black Friday would tell the retailers that we want more from bricks and mortar shopping experiences:

• They should be better than trolling web sites in our underwear at home, and that means strategies other than getting the most of us in stores at the same time to battle over merchandise
• We are willing to see value in retail brands beyond price, but that we expect more creativity from retailers in hopes of delivering it
• We want respect from them, not manipulation, which would start by stopping prompts like doorbuster sales and other ruses to get shoppers out of bed at 4 am to buy toys.

Our friends who are Black Friday shopaholics can't grasp this, for now, so don't try to rationalize it. Just keep them home. 

They're helping ruin retail for the rest of us.

Your Reputation Sucks

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

In case you haven't noticed it, almost every public and commercial establishment blew up this year. Your reputation and brand aren't what they used to be.

Citizens no longer believe in their governments. Investors don't trust the markets. Science, history, and even the very definition of what constitutes facts are up for debate, quite often contentiously so. Even though our planet is evermore wrapped in the knowing embrace of instantaneous communications, networked conversation, and access to literally infinite amounts of information, people seem to agree less, distrust more, and rely on a shrinking list of common beliefs.

And what we marketers talk about most often is how consumers want more conversation?

It's like we're debating over a nuanced description in a sentence that nobody is reading, let alone has any capacity to comprehend. Process over purpose. Right answer, wrong question.

You wouldn't know it from the "best of" successes we’re going to hear about over the next month. We're supposed to emulate campaigns -- whether new or old media -- that deliver awareness, engagement, social currency, branded content, and a myriad of other made-up benefits while ignoring the ugly fact that nobody really believes or cares about the crap we're propagating (or certainly don't care as much as they once did).

We've detached our branding and marketing efforts from the reality we were once expected to influence, and there's no more graphic example of this phenomenon than in the financial sector:

• Their very structural foundations were called into question early in the year
• Cold, hard facts proved old processes and certitudes to be no longer reliable
• Individual investors lost untold amounts of money
• Financial firms responded with expensive branding that effectively told people "don't worry, be happy"
• The firms announced no changes in behavior or reporting. Consumers are still wary and mad

A similar disconnect is evidenced by big brands that announce philanthropy or other creatively symbolic gestures in lieu of real actions:

• Worried about global warming? Your friendly neighborhood oil company is on it with glossy commercials of its scientists busy at work solving the problem
• Bothered that agriculture businesses making oodles of profits while a large chunk of humanity starves? No worries, because they contribute to charity
• Product tampering got you spooked? The brands, whoever or whatever they are, promise to never let it happen...again

It seems that we marketers have confused communications meaning and relevance with volume and frequency; yet no amount of repetition, whether declared in an ad or press release, or repeated by online evangelists or in chat rooms, is a substitute for substance. While we're focused on getting our metrics for smart new marketing up, every reasonable measure of corporate and institutional reputation is not just down, but way down.

Consumers don't wake up in the morning hoping for a closer relationship with brands, or wishing that they'd get more marketing intrusions in their lives. I think that every exhortation to "talk more" or "add to the conversation" belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketers' challenge.

If the last year has shown us anything, it's that the medium is not the message.

The message is the message. 

My prediction is that consumers aren't as dumb as we think they are, and that in 2010 credibility is going to be a major brand differentiator...perhaps even more so than any emotional or associative benefit. People can connect the dots, or believe that they can, and the fact that they're rejecting most traditional forms of marketing could have something to do with the fact that what we're saying hasn’t been credible for quite some time. 

They just don't like our dots, however brilliantly rendered.

Similarly, we've had to invent ROI measures for newer forms of communicating that don't even presume or aspire to credibility, per se, and offer new metrics that aren't particularly related to the old ones (i.e. sales). 

The reality is that reputation has moved out of the hands of image makers and into reality. Reputation and brand depend on what your business does, not what it says or how creatively it says it. The marketing challenge is to find ways to narrate this process and experience, and in doing so restore the credibility in what we do. You don't need a new media campaign or better billboard ad. No channel is more legitimate than another.

The marketing opportunity is to discover the content that matters. Until we do that, corporate reputations are going to suck.

The Bulb Asks:

• Instead of brainstorming what you want your customers to believe, should you come up with reasons why (and how) they should believe your brand?
• Communicating doesn’t occur in a vacuum, so do you know how your content relates to the context in which it's consumed?
• If your 2010 branding goal was to be trusted, would that provide you the platform to promote a variety of added benefits? Conversely, if your brand isn't actively trusted, does even the smartest marketing only add insult on top of injury?

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)

Apple Envy

'Tis the season to diss Apple in some very creative and entertaining ways. I'm just not sure whether it's a sign of strategic marketing insight, or fishbowl-like confusion of message over meaning.

First came Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaigns, with its snippets of slice-of-life everypeople declaring their stereotypical lifestyles, and then shoppers explaining how they'd first looked at an Apple but then chose a PC because it was a better value. I'm all for comparison ads but the nonsense of contrasting PC-ness with Apple-ness is kind of silly. Here's why:

• Apple has been running those hilarious Justin Long/John Hodgman spots for a few years now, but I'd venture to say that they haven't touched Apple’s sales much
• They preach to the faithful, and mildly entertain the rest of us
• It's probably anathema for any advertising-interested person to say this, but Apple has a tradition of running corporate branding campaigns that have no connection to consumer behavior
• The "Think Different" campaign was strikingly memorable, but I'm not aware that it did anything for sales (coming on the heels of the first iMac launch, I think sales even dipped)
• Even the "1984" spot (and the sorta lame HAL9000 follow-up) were creations of great art and panache, but almost purposefully said nothing about sales
• It's all great art, but not particularly smart marketing

Oh, wait a minute, that's the point, right? 

If sales go up, squint one eye, balance on your left leg, and ask people if they remember the ads and, voila, you have circumstantial if not casual proof of value. If sales stay flat or go down, well, consumers still probably remembered the ads, so the branding isn't at fault as much as those pesky consumers just not doing what they're supposed to do. All that matters is that they're talking about the campaigns, can recollect them if asked, or can make a VU meter on a digital dashboard register some conversational measure, like "social currency" or "tone."

And this is the nonsense its competitors choose to mimic?

If anybody thinks Apple's brand success has much if anything to do with these artifacts of communications, they're idiots...or, more specifically, they work at Microsoft or one of its ad agencies, because they chose to take the irrelevant declarations of a company that represents a fraction of a percent of the global PC business, and made it the focus of their positioning. Jeez...PCs aren't even a product, per se, but rather a category of products in which Apple is included.

"I'm a PC" inherently declares "I'm not a Mac," which is kind of like the U.S. basing its global reputation on reminding everyone that it's a country, but not Liechtenstein. 

Then came the "iDon't" campaign for the Droid smartphone, which chose to list its features in contrast to Apple's iPhone; everything it did differently was a statement of something that iPhone couldn't do (some features were truly unique, though the iPhone has its share of those, too). It sorta felt like a Mac spot, and ended with a whacky garbled static thing like the closing scene in the horror movie Prince of Darkness.

Does a list of don'ts add up to a list of benefits? We marketers might snicker about how the ads belittled iPhone, but I say it was a bass-ackwards way to make the point, at best, and statements like "iDon't allow open development" couldn't have made much sense (or provided comfort) to most non-geek buyers. 

More to the point, did the ads do anything to drive people to stores to buy the damn gizmo? Verizon won't say, but estimates are that they sold at least 100,000 units in the U.S. during the first week. Apple sold 1.6 million units in 8 countries during the same period of its launch. Clearly, the "iDon't" campaign was another branding success.

Now there's another spot trying to humiliate iPhone by banishing it to goofy Island of Misfit Toys we Boomers remember from the claymation Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. It's there because it has lame 3G coverage compared to the Verizon map that has a lot more real estate filled-in with company red.

Touting 3G coverage reminds me of arguing over processor speeds in computers, or surfactant percentages in dishwashing liquid. In the technology world "more" is even a bit better than "new," even if nobody knows what the hell it means. So is it a meaningful difference? Are there experiential proof-points to make the case that 3G yields better experiences, irrespective of device? Does it prompt sales? 

We simply don't know these answers because the marketers decided that the only question worth asking was "how can we slam Apple?"

Some ad critics have decided that these campaigns are evidence of a new day in which Apple is somehow under fire and less secure. I wonder if it isn't evidence of the exact opposite: Apple so dominates the categories in which it chooses to compete that its competitors can't come up with anything meaningful to do about it. The best they can do is find ways to creatively declare "We're not Apple" or mock Apple's ads, which just furthers their reach.

Apple doesn't care about the ads anyway; it's the products and experience that destroy its competition, and the celebrated cool kwan of its brand trails that fact vs. preceding it. Apple's brand story isn't a promise, it's a narration of experience.

Every dollar that its competitors waste drawing contrasts with image and brand attributes is money that could have gone toward revealing meaningful and relevant differences that could have prompted their own experiences. And sales.

Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, but Apple envy won't get you anywhere.

Social Media's Promise in 2010

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

All the incessant chanting of new media's Greek chorus notwithstanding, 2009 revealed two emergent facts about the promise of social media: first, it's not really "social," and second, "media" is its least important quality. Instead, the opportunities it presents arise from what goes into it, and what comes out of it. Ignoring these inputs and outputs are its downside, too.

There has been no shortage of experimentation during the year, and I've written extensively about the thriving cabal of researchers, pundits, bloggers, and consultants who conspire to sell the idea of new media to marketers who are either disillusioned with traditional media ("those pesky consumers just aren't doing what they're supposed to do!"), or simply didn’t have the budget to pay for it anymore.

I haven't attended a conference of marketers that didn't celebrate "the right way" to "do"social media. The thought of newer, even more arcane and intangible measures of benefits makes people downright giddy with enthusiasm and a sense of their own special worth...like it lets them forgo another round of educating those hapless bastards who run companies or pay client bills, and instead tell them that they need to change entire organizations before they can truly understand the merits of social media.

Yessss, feel the power! 

It occurs to me that social campaigns cost less because they are worth-less. Maybe the market pricing model works, and the Invisible Hand is telling us that it doesn't necessarily make sense to replace the already-questionable metrics developed to support a few generations of branding and marketing with new ones that seem even more vague. Yet the presumption these days is that consumers prefer conversation over content, relevance, meaning, or utility, and that this given truth requires only more efforts at tactical delivery. Survey after poll derides marketers who are lagging in this regard.

So we've seen lots of really creative, memorable campaigns that capture clicks, downloads, and headlines. The sales successes usually involve distributing a coupon or notice of a sale, which is absolutely legitimate, but absolutely not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. Return from the conversing that goes on is usually measured when campaigns are linked to other events simply because they are concurrent: people clicked on a funny video and sales were up, ergo social media drove sales.

If the metric for success is that things happened at the same time, however, we should also credit social media campaigns with making the Sun rise and ensuring that gravity functions correctly. Who knew causality was so casual? Maybe we should put world peace on the docket for the next Facebook campaign in 2010?

Be prepared to hear much more of this next year, often times from people who are either too young to remember Y2K, aren't interested in reading the business history of tulips or the South Sea, or just presume that the Internet is this miraculous agent that everyone else loves so much because they do.

The pundits aren't going to be much help to you, either, as they're at least indirectly in the pocket of folks who want to sell this stuff. You've got to figure things out for yourself.

The good news is that social media have amazing promise. There's a ton of truly revolutionary thinking going on, but you have to look past the immediate examples of glitzy campaigns. It's impossible to understand the utility of social media campaigns unless you explore what goes into it − corporate behavior is much more important than creative marketing − and what comes out of it, in terms of participant behavior and involvement yielding actions in the real world.

That 2009 has illustrated is that it's less important to spend money on the mechanism of how these inputs and outputs are connected − the social media tools, whether Twitter, Facebook, or A Player To Be Named Later − and more crucial that businesses understand the connectivity at both "ends." Figuring out how to waste consumers' time in the meantime, however pleasantly, isn't an accomplishment whatsoever.

Think instead along two broad paths:

First, what and how are your corporate behaviors -- decisions large and small, and whether recent, real-time, or planned -- identified and shared with people who would care about them? This is the publishing function that marketers talk about, only it's not like publishing news releases or ad creative. The engine of your social efforts is what your business does, not what you hire smart people to declare. The creative part comes in deciding how this reality can become real for everyone else.

Second, where and why the people who might care about your actions might do something with/about them? Consumption of messages isn't an action, taking an action is an action. So inventing a creative idea for people to enjoy is at least two steps removed from what matters; instead, the real challenge is to invent ways for consumer behaviors to track with your corporate actions. Think share, test, vote, inform, dissect, visit...verbs that require a subject and object. 

The medium isn't the message, it's the conduit that connects you and your consumers. 

So if your branding strategy is to get people talking about your branding strategy, you're probably doomed despite all of the encouragement the punditocracy might shower upon you. And those stupid operational folks who you're telling to change the position of every molecule in the company? If you stay focused on the blather of conversation for the sake of conversation, even if it's spot on your brand attributes (or whatever), it'll become apparent to them that the only thing they need to change is you.

The language of social media is behavior, and the challenge for 2010 will be for you to discover how to realize this ultimate promise.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you trying to make social fit for your company, or does you company have a clear, objective reason to use those tools?
• Do you know how broadly and frequently you're already doing it (hint: think employees, vendors, customers, and critics, not just your marketing department)?
• Could you confuse tactics like tweeted customer complaints (i.e. the tail) with the operational functions that really matter, like customer service (i.e. the dog)? 

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)

An Opportunity To Chase Business

JPMorgan Chase announced earlier this week that it plans to hire 1,500 new mortgage and small business bankers by the end of 2010. I think this is a tremendous branding opportunity.

"We have invested in new systems, aggressively grown our capacity and are now looking to increase our sales force," said its head of home lending in a statement reported on CNN.

Up to now, you could have fooled me.

Ever since the economic meltdown began, the communications from Chase and its competitors have been just shy of criminal: no details, no insight, no evidence of any action other than page after page of paternalistic, insulting branding blather that amounted to little more than saying "don’t worry, we've been through tough times...just trust us."

Financial firms received billions and billions of dollars because their very stuctures and ways of doing business were suspect, if not revealed to have failed outright. The few actions we learned about -- paying one another giant bonuses, raising fees whenever possible, and resisting government exhortations to please .loan money to customers so the rest of the economy can get out of the crush of your ineptitude -- told us much more than the branded communications. Oh, and we learned from the government that the firms were actively working to stifle any efforts at improved or increased oversight.

We still don't know what has changed, if anything. I've written before that there is an ugly, nagging, gaping hole in the spot where customers used to place their trust in financial institutions. No creative slogan could restore the qualities of credibility and authenticity upon which these firms once relied. I am shocked that none of them have done anything to repair their reputations.

This is why I find the news from Chase so encouraging. Hiring staff is doing something other than hiring branding gurus to invent nonsense marketing. It might not be terribly strategic, and rather simply a staffing up for an anticipated uptick in loan applications, but if I were advising the bank, I'd find a way to make it a catalyst for communicating real change:

• How will its loan offerings be different?
• Who will they be targeting (i.e. will it be more selective)?
• Will there be different vetting processes for approving loans, whether mortgage or commercial?
• Are there lending goals for regions and/or sectors, so people can feel involved?
• What are the loan servicing changes that will help make borrowers feel more secure/less likely to default?
• Could there be real, meaningful synergies between Chase financial products, instead of treating customers as targets for cross-selling exploitation?
• If there are new or improved regulatory and reporting conventions supporting this new phase in the bank’s growth, what are they and how could they matter to borrowers?

Again, I could be reaching for straws here -- Chase's strategy could be to change absolutely nothing and just wait for new customers to come calling -- but the hiring announcement could be a great opportunity to start seeing its brand as a set of actions, not just words and images. I have to believe that people will be more likely to fork over their money, and commit to loans, if they're given proof that it's not just business as usual.

The Bulb Asks:

• Did your last financial or operational news announcement support the ongoing narrative of your brand?
• Do you identify & communicate things your business does differently than your competition vs. what positioning differences you want your customers to know?
• How can you translate your corporate news into terms that matter more to your customers than to your branding?

You Get More From Almost Great Ideas

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch as we roll into 2010).

Home runs are fun to watch, but the nearly great plays are more illustrative and instructive.

We marketers tend to focus on successes, holding them up as proof of what’s possible, whether in conference presentations or new business pitches. "Show me an example" is the litmus test of ideas that deserve to get shared and mimicked; go-forward plans are based on what we learn from standouts and exceptions. This has been true since brands ran their first newspaper and radio ads. The most glorious social media campaigns of 2009 will yield a bevy of flattering copies in 2010.

I think we set ourselves up for failure when we try to "learn" from the most successful case histories, primarily because you can't separate a campaign from its context and goals. Every circumstance is unique, and the variables involved and both varied and often times unknowable. Chance drives the zillions of intersections between expectation and outcome, so discerning why something worked is a loaded, imprecise challenge. Even if we could nail every detail of a success, the limitations of physics and human skill would make repeating it unlikely.

So why don't we spend more time studying the also-rans?

Granted, it's a less sexy agency pitch -- welcome to our reel of sorta good campaigns -- and it might be hard for a corporate middle manager to allocate time to reviewing things that failed, but almost great ideas are far easier to explore:

• What were the expected actions that didn't happen?
• What unforeseen factors influenced the campaign?
• How were the goals mismatched to the content of the program?
• Were there unintended benefits? Drawbacks?
• Might the successes have been extended or multiplied?

If you must, you could start with the stunning successes that your clients and management want to talk about, but try to rip them apart as if they were incomplete. What could have been accomplished? Where were the connections that would have saved resources, or furthered the reach? How might program have worked faster, or been more reliable? Was the when of execution a deciding factor and, if so, why?

The facts you discovered would allow for something the futurists call "scenario planning," which means you could use your insights as a modeling tool, and thereby really understand the underlying mechanics that might differentiate "almost" from "totally."

Contrast this with relying on the happenstance and sometimes outright magic that drives the biggest successes. A blogger chances upon a topic. A community forms around it for some reason or another. A store sells out, a competitor falters. It's a particularly sunny or rainy month. Lightening strikes. 

We see what happened as a guide to what will happen, and blithely go about constructing campaigns based on organic, unique, sometimes first-ever events occurring a second time (or many times after that).

And you wonder why you're always explaining yourself and defending your budget?

We're going to get inundated with "best of" lists over the next few months, just like we've spent 2009 celebrating successes to give hope to our struggling industry. But I'd challenge you to understand the almost great ideas...really smart, strategic programs that were well conceived, delivered, and then stopped short of realizing their full potential:

• Viral videos that got watched a lot, but stopped short of prompting a sale (or getting consumers tangibly and reliably closer to one).
• Promotional campaigns that seemed too good to be true (promise overload that defied belief).
• A customer service problem that was adequately fixed, but not extended into a sales opportunity.
• Contributions from unlikely sources, like distribution or finance.

You need to deconstruct what happened in order to truly envision what's possible. I think you'll get more from almost great ideas.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you basing your 2010 expectations on unrepeatable exceptions?
• Can you take the successes of the case histories you're presented, and explicitly confirm the tangible benefits (i.e. achieving something other than awareness)? 
• If you can identify the causal links that lead to success, does that mean you can build campaigns that are far more reliable (and relegate stunning success to the nice to have category instead of risking your job on it)? 

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)

Forget About Harley and Apple

Have you noticed that most conversations about branding inevitably include references to Harley-Davidson and Apple? Sprinkle in mentions of Coke, Facebook, and Zappos, and you get the context of every agency pitch for more spending on brand engagement, loyalty, or whatever else these examples might suggest.

I suggest you ban these references from your next conversation. Forget about them altogether.

Marketing's dim science lets itself get distracted and misled by the stand-outs and exceptions. It's no surprise, since we're in the standing-out business (and think of ourselves as quite exceptional, thank you very much), but we tend to read a lot of meaning into uniquely complex accomplishments that can't be copied because of their unique complexity:

• See what Apple does? When you mimic it, you're just copying the detritus of its imagery, or producing lame mockups of its design (which is what its competitors have done, both in computers and smartphones).
• Want Harley's rabid customer loyalty? Start a company in the midwest a long time ago, cater to an exclusive niche customer, and still watch your income drop by more than four-fifths last quarter (i.e. great name but no new customers).
• Do you want to be a household name like Coke? Spend umpteen billions on every medium known to man for about 100 years.
• Facebook look like an opportunity? Find investors who will let you give stuff away for free, perhaps forever. Good luck with that.

Yet these are the very examples that we see featured in new business presentations and industry conclaves. They're visual, often fun, and speak to our desires to deliver emotions and other intangible values; brand identity is what makes what we make different from what others make. This is the guiding principle so amply (and repeatedly) illustrated by the exceptions...the stand-outs that "do it right," and which we should try to duplicate.

Only we can't, for two primary reasons:

1. Your brand can't duplicate all of the operational and contextual realities that make those brands real. You can't even know them all; what you see instead is the marketing "layer" that often trails the actions and events that accomplish the differentiating. Brand communications is a fascinating shadow play on a cave wall; the brands you are told to copy by spending marketing dollars to manipulate what people think are succeeding because they spend operational dollars impacting how people behave. Asking marketers to explain this operational reality is like asking an adolescent why an airplane can fly, and being told  "because the pilot is really, really good."
2. Even if you could know and copy the operational and contextual realities of exceptional brands, you'd fail because they’re already onto changing them. In fact, their successes should be an indication of what you shouldn't try to implement, because it was already done. Think how many brands opened retail showcase stores without any purpose, or the rapid spread of cookie-cutter promotions on Facebook. Exceptional brands do exceptional things that defy the experts' case histories and recommendations. Yet you're peddled the rehash of yesterday's news, and told that some truisms warrant your efforts at accomplishing something similar. 

And we wonder why so many marketing campaigns fail to live up to our expectations?

Scientists know that you have to take outlier data out of any experiment for risk of skewing or simply confusing the results. We see the impact of allowing political discourse to be run by extreme, absolute positions. A soprano's highest note is considered a peak and not the home of her range. You get the idea.

So why still do we try to understand brands by studying the anomalies?

Text is the New Multimedia

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch as we roll into 2010)

If video killed the radio star, wasn't video supposed to obliterate text?

It hasn't. Not even close. Who would have thought that 2009 would witness instead the continued resurgence of the written word?

The language was sometimes indeterminable, and the conversations often unrepeatable without a blush added to the shrug, but text has proven amazingly resilient as a communications medium. Words "work" on printed pages and mobile phone screens (i.e. cross-platform), find utility for marketing strategies old and new (you can use them to declare, or to converse), and prove convenient and adaptable for users young and old.

Think back to a few good creative communications ideas that had to be translated into imagery, and then required deconstruction by viewers. Seems like a long way to go to make a statement, doesn't it? I'm all for a funny clip, and it's very true that a picture can tell a thousand words...but most of the time, 99% of those words get misused, misinterpreted, or outright ignored.

For something so immediate and compelling, you couldn't find a medium better able to substitute the simulacra of a connection for the transfer of actual content or meaning.

As opposed to video, text is a "hot medium," if you buy into Marshall McLuhan's theories about media (and I do, for the most part). Even when viewed online, words engage a single sense, and thereby establish a direct connection that is richer in specific information and meaning than more participatory, or "cool" multimedia experiences.

When we're blown away by a video, we translate it into words to label our reactions, code our memories, and subsequently share our thoughts. Even reduced to tweets and abbreviations, text remains the most facile communications engine available to us, only you wouldn't know it from all of the media excitement and agency sales efforts to tell us otherwise. 

Worse, it's not just that companies have been misled by the lure of the moving image; 2009 has been a banner year for slogans and gibberish in business communications, from nonsense adjectives in press releases, to incomprehensible statements about branding. Companies spent time orchestrating faux conversations instead of contributing to real ones; corporate strategies were described in blatheriffic doublespeak; popular phrases, like "innovation," were used to obfuscate the purposes of new management teams, as well as new products. 

Why do businesses use words so poorly?

Maybe because words seem free when compared with the cost of producing a video or sound file. Perhaps because social media conversations are so fast and frequent that specific word choices seem less important. One of my pet peeves is that we still use words to satisfy ourselves; we talk to our aspirations for our brands, and not to make those direct connections to readers.

I think the year proved that what companies say matters, whether as the inputs into social media, or as the tool by which they make those direct connections with their consumers. But it has to be accurate, honest, and credible. It's harder to get away with a lie when it's literally spelled out; conversely, if we use words to state truths (and avoid all of the nuances that distract or lessen them), then text is a powerful tool that transports across technology platforms, and works with all age groups.

I believe that 2010 will give us great and useful opportunities to use video and other media to communicate with our customers, but I suggest that there’ll be even more, better, easier, and more cost-effective chances to wring more impact and value out of the lowly, simple, written word.

The Bulb Asks:

• Do your press releases need so many adjectives? Is your product really “world class,” and what does that mean, anyway?
• Are you telling your social networks things that really matter, not just what your brand lexicon might dictate?
• Will your next communication tell something meaningful, relevant and useful, or will you expect your customers to decipher something? Think less secret code, and more direct statement.

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)