Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

Asleep At The Wheel

Toyota has announced a shockingly comprehensive response to relatively limited reports of a sticky gas pedal: it has suspended production and sales of nine models and recalled millions to replace the potentially offending part. Comparisons have been made to Johnson & Johnson's famous and much lauded reaction to its Tylenol product tampering crisis in the early 90s.

I don't think anybody is going to write a textbook entry on Toyota's actions, however. And it's too bad: as the President's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel said last year, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

This event is likely Toyota's biggest branding moment in recent memory, and what is it telling customers, renters, dealers, vendors, and employees? Nothing, or not much as far as I can tell. We've heard from just about everyone else -- politicians posturing for hearings in the newspaper, and I received an email from Avis reassuring me that it wouldn't let any of those risky Toyota vehicles imperil my next rental experience -- but the company has let dribble only the occasional cautious and brief statement, and usually in response to the continuing (and widening) news coverage of the problem. The it's-not-our-fault declarations of its pedal supplier has been a stark and damning contrast.

I can just imagine Toyota's legal team cautioning against bold, proactive announcements, and that such a seemingly sensible avoidance strategy would play into the company’s Japanese reticence, but shame on the leadership and communications team for not stepping up and doing their jobs. 

Effectively shutting the company down without a commensurately huge ramp up in talking to the world is just plain mismanagement. It renders every one of Toyota's nonsense branding ads and social media stunts little more than reminders of that other thing that we now worry about; context matters, and ignoring it verges on the dysfunctional, which only further substantiates the possibility that there's something terribly wrong with Toyota.

The good news is that this could change tomorrow: the company could embrace the dramatic scope of its production halt and recall and go after the marketplace, telling its customers what's going on and empowering its dealers and employees to do the same. It could be honest and direct and void of all the blather that normally confuses its communications, making it perhaps not the last PR strategy but its first business communications strategy (i.e. communicating business reality and not the pretenses of branding hype). It could be a wonderful opportunity to deliver the proof behind a brand message of continuous improvement, responsibility, and leadership. 

Again, it would be harder to do than the glib marketing nonsense it normally favors, but I believe it would do wonders for strengthening Toyota's reputation. Maybe that's still the plan, though I think it's far more likely that the avoidance strategy will continue. I fear that Toyota’s leadership is asleep at the wheel, and that the damage to its brand is not only partially self-inflicted but wholly well-deserved.  

Evolutionary Marketing

There's an emerging field in science called evolutionary medicine in which the causes for some diseases and chronic afflictions are found in the conflicts between the varied rates of change among human beings, the pathogens that haunt them, and the context of the environment in which it all exists.

It's an interesting model to explain autoimmune disorders, like Crohn's, which have emerged since we improved our hygiene and killed the parasites that used to live in our guts. Our bodies still expect them to be there and go about attacking themselves; enough evolutionary cycles haven't passed to rewire our systems yet. Ditto for higher rates of cancer (we get it more often than other species), since the potentially deadly aspects of our environment have changed more quickly than our bodies. The outcomes are based on these disconnects...

Isn't there a similar disconnect between how fast and widespread the changes have been in technology and culture, and how our human minds (and souls) are still pretty much identical to what they were in the 14th Century? For instance, maybe the growth in social media popularity isn't because consumers are embracing it, but rather a symptom of their alienation from other media. Would this perspective change the way we use it?

I wonder what would happen if we marketers spent less time believing that our job is to embrace the new and instead better understood the conflicts with what's old. 

Marketing In The Matrix

Do you remember the ending of the second Matrix movie, when Neo learns that he's an anomaly in the program, and is supposed to go find Zion, or the CPU, or whatever, and mess everything up?  I just figured out that this was advice on marketing strategy, courtesy of the Wachowski Brothers.

Variability is the bane of all marketing and branding.  We study case histories from business schools and trade media, and no services vendor can close a deal without at least implicitly promising "we did this for that guy, so we can do it for you."  Most media and speaking engagement opportunities require real-life examples, for fear that audiences will not otherwise understand how to apply things to their work. 

Square pegs and square holes.  It's how structures operate, processes function, and most thinking is channeled.

Never has there been a more effective method for distributing failure. 

Variability is unavoidable, even in the most explicitly detailed models.  No scientific experiment setup is 100% reliable, nor its conduct completely free from data "noise" of one sort of another.  Throw in the interpretive license that is inherent in consciousness, and you get the reason why everything in science is considered a theory, and not a fact.  Our observations of gravity are certainly not the result of a rounding error, but any self-respecting scientist would acknowledge that there's always the possibility that even the biggest, most obvious knowledge might be at least somewhat flawed. 

In business, a case history is only as good as its identified variables, which means most of them aren't terribly good at all. 

There's no way that the efforts of Company X can be deconstructed, analyzed, and then replicated by Company Y.  Too much stuff impacts the stuff that happens.  Worse, lots of the impacts aren't obvious, or even known.   Breakthrough successes are a result of the unexpected, not great planning, yet cases get reported as if surprises can be foreordained.

That's why most marketing and branding plans are also-rans.  Novelty is impossible to duplicate, by definition, so we get lots of positioning that's reminiscent of other positions, only nowhere near as successful; social media campaigns that mimic one another; everything from company logos to product packaging that starts to seem pretty generic, as they're all based on the same processes (and often delivered by the same small cabal of branding firms).

Our "studies in excellence" are these case histories that make the rounds of trade media and conferences.  There's some job protection in this duplication process, but not much; we all get a little worse at copying copies of a copy that wasn't too clear in the first place.  It's not a good approach for keeping clients, or for staying employed. 

Enter the Wachowskis to suggest a two-pronged alternative; if your brand were, say, an alien computer program called the Matrix, you would want to:

1. Make sure you identified and assigned values to every possible variable.  This would mean going far beyond the studies most often presented as proof of a case; imagine coming up with, say, the 25 influences on a project's success or failure, and making each one a tangible number (absolute or percentage likelihood, or whatever)?  You might discover new, more meaningful reasons for various outcomes, and get a better idea of what you could hope to copy...and what might have been a result of unique circumstances that no longer apply
2. Actively embrace a variable, and do something in each activity, whether a strategy or tactic, that was purposefully something out of Left Field.  Make it counter-intuitive and somewhat open-ended, specifically because you want to see how it affects your presumably deterministic variables.  Make it the round peg, or the zigzag one.  Or no peg at all.  In doing so, there's a chance that you'll spark some really effective, successful connection, outcome, or other event that never appeared in the case history you're emulating, but rather will define the accomplishment that the next guy will miss when they copy you. 

Doesn't your next marketing plan need a Neo?

Not So Innocent

Coca-Cola intends to buy between 10 and 20% of Innocent, which is the company that all but invented the idea of a "socially conscious, good-for-you fruit smoothie" in the UK.

I think it's a deviously brilliant move, but not for the reasons feted in the marketing media.

You'll read a lot about Innocent's branding brilliance...its unconventional marketing is considered ethical because it gives away lots of money, and maintains a cuddly, we're-not-really-in-business-to-sell-stuff-to-you tone in its ads, on its website, and even on its product labels.  This is why it has been successful, and now Coke wants to own a piece of it, and perhaps import some of those wise ways back to the Mother Ship in Atlanta.

I've got an alternate history for you to consider:

• Innocent concocts really fresh, simple, good-tasting drinks that it can legitimately claim are good for you
• It introduces it to the market not through some creative brand marketing, but rather by giving it away to pretty much anybody who will reach for it with an open hand
• It builds a reputation on this quality and directness, much like Apple has built its brand on the realities of its products and services
• Competitive businesses and their marketing departments totally misread these truths -- flipping the proverbial cart before the horse -- and introduce at least a dozen copy-cat branding strategies in the UK...lots and lots of smoothie products that come across as equally cute, cuddly, and at least somewhat ethical
• Therefore, Innocent can't own a position, to use a typical branding term, or hope to command consumer preference based on its communications, which have mostly become commodified (just as most words and images can be similarly genericized)

What it can own is...wait for it...shelf space!

So forget trying to be the bestest, most cuddly brand communicator; I'd argue that one of Innocent's core growth/survival strategies is to be the only or most visible smoothie on store shelves (and/or available at more locations).  Think of how many more units it can move by being a part of the uber-Coke products distribution scheme? 

As a matter of fact, I'd call it a smart branding strategy.  I wrote about the idea that distribution is a branding effort far more important than much of the imagery that passes for it -- the channeling of choice, really, versus what amounts to hoping for it -- in some detail in my book, Branding Only Works on Cattle. 

Coke has actually written the book on this approach, really: for all the blather about choice when it comes to colas, where can consumers actually pick one over the other anyway?  Once you get past the grocery store shelves, where the cola companies don't make any money anyway), choice all but disappears; Coke's success (and Pepsi's...and the multitude of competing brands that have failed) is determined by its exclusive or dominant distribution footprint, whether at restaurant fountains, sports stadiums, or whathaveyou.

So the Coke investment makes great sense for Innocent, and the UK smoothie's success will benefit Coca-Cola.  It has everything to do with really smart business...

...and nothing to do with branding, charity, or anything so innocent. 

Read All About It (In French)

 

A future for newspapers?

The French government has announced a ten-fold increase in its support for the country's print media, in an effort "...to make sure an independent, free and pluralistic press exists," according to President Nicholas Sarkozy.

While there's some grumbling that Sarkozy's motivations might not be so pure, I understand the problem he's trying to address.  One of the elements of that response is that the government will underwrite a year-long newspaper subscription for French citizens when they turn 18. 

It's an idea worthy of a headline.

One of the many myths confusing folks these days is that you can crowdsource truth.  If everyone blogs and chats with everyone else, or so the liturgy goes, the crowd will eventually wiki everything to the lowest, most common denominators.  There is no truth beyond these conclusions; any thing before or outside them is simply an opinion.

It's an intriguing idea until you start to work through, say, medical research, crime investigations, or just about any subject in which facts matter.  Objective truth can't be determined by a committee, it turns out, and interpretation can't take its place.  The mechanism of crowdsourcing -- endless participation by an infinite number of individuals -- isn't the same thing as a true consensus, and it's also lumpy and imperfect.  Before the collective has spoken, if it ever does, there can exist much ignorance and confusion in its place.

So we get large groups of people who believe that black helicopters are trying to install a One World government.  Or believe that there's no connection between H.I.V. and AIDS.  Or simply and selectively decide what they choose to believe as truth, because truth is in the eye of the believer...because facts are nothing more than variables, there are endless contradictory, walled communities of shared insight, often times irrespective of what the greater "crowd" might deem the truth.

In other words, newspapers are more than just a delivery technology.

The media, conceptually, are aribiters of fact, if not truth.  There are imperfect but still reasonably rigorous standards for "old" media reporting: because of a combination of thoughtful criteria (confirming sources, names attached to stories) and circumstantial ones (newsprint has a life far longer than flaring electrons, and circulation has to be large and regular in order to support ad rates), they have to ascribe to established rules instead of the ever-changing crowd. 

Nobody ever liked newsprint, per se, and newspapers are just a distribution channel for content.  It's that content -- and a community's reliance of some consistent rigor for noting and reporting news -- that gave the medium its relevance and utility. 

So turning newspapers into printed versions of web sites, or repurposing newspaper web sites with blogs and comments just doesn't make much sense.  I don't know why these "old" media haven't aggressively reaffirmed their reporting criteria, almost as a here's why you need objective reporting declaration to would-be citizens.  

A community needs regular doses of objective fact on which it can rely; once informed, people can feel free to wait for the crowd to assess whether a lone gunman shot JFK.

We don’t need newspapers as much as what they do.  Or what they did, since most of the American versions have relaxed their standards, cut back their investigations, and otherwise done their best to hasten their own demise.

So I choose to view President Sarkozy's gesture as an effort to insert the role of newspapers -- not necessarily the medium itself -- back into the lives of the citizenry.  He knows that routines are hard to break, so if he can get a community to witness shared media, perhaps they can develop the habit of sharing facts, not just passing opinions on them.

It's a classic strategy: give away the razor (newspapers) so users get addicated to the blades (objective reporting).  It might help rescue the true community of real-world civilization, while it enriches the publishers the President wants to schmear.  And even if people choose electronic blades over time, at least they'll have a better idea of why they need them.

When Are the Olympics Again?

Is it just me, or is there a paucity of interest in the Beijing Olympic Games, which I think are starting sometime next week?

There was the buzz over the Tibet crackdown a while ago, and I've caught some stories lately about the yucky pollution (air and algae), limitations on Internet access, and the rumor that much of Beijing will have to endure rolling blackouts in order to light up the section of the city in which the foreigners will cavort.  And there's been a blip here and there about American competitors, like a swimmer who may have failed a doping test.

But that's all?

The Olympics was founded as a tool to help build a peaceful world.  Its charter is over 100-pages long, and is rich in declarations, aspirations, and hope that sport will help kids grow up with the right bodies and minds, and that the world's conflicts might be better resolved (or avoided outright) by the friendly competition of the Games.

Zzzzzzzz.

The Olympic Movement's nobility aside, the original Greek idea a few thousand years ago was that competition was just shy of godliness.  Naked athletes got together to best one another, and participation was limited to those who had the status or money to get in.  Perhaps more important than the sport itself, they gave us drama , and my gut tells me that the narrative of the competitions was far more important to them than the scores.

Now we're talking.

The marketing machine behind our modern-day Games should have been all over the drama starting many months ago.  Skip earning the right to get rendered on the side of an urn, and get people writing down the dates for various competitions.  Pit athlete against athlete, or country against country.  Tell us what the match-ups are, and what they might mean. 

In other words, exploit the hell out of it. 

Could it be that there’s enough of a built-in audience that they don't have to worry about viewership?  I doubt it.  The Olympics programming, beamed live in the middle of the night to the Western World (which means results will precede the programming by, what, 12 hours?), has to compete with summer TV series, videogaming, families on vacation, and any number of other draws for attention. 

Perhaps the narrative will emerge during the competition -- those vignettes on athlete backgrounds that run to fill space between races -- but isn't that too late? 

Where's the drama now...the Russian weightlifter vs. the Swede?  The hurdles teams vying for a new world record?  An athlete who has overcome some terrible illness or hardship to compete?  There's are zillions of media outlets, and the stories could appeal to media far beyond sports. 

Have you heard much if any of this?  I sure haven't.  I mean beyond the repurposing of content that's underway at NBC...between the ads and the faux stories inserted into local news programs, they're doing a great job of using all the outreach tools at their disposal. 

But is it enough?  In a time when we could choose to get connected to the Games in so many different ways, 24/7, I wonder how many people will be connected at all?

When are the Winter Games?  The time to get to work on that drama is now.

Pick Up the Phone

An associate of mine and I have kicked off a program to schedule speeches in front of financial analyst groups in support of my upcoming book, as there are topical and structural issues about how brands are conceived and valued that should be very troubling to anyone who hopes to accurately assess the health of companies that do business with consumers.

Well, actually we've been emailing, mostly and, so far, the first few responses we've gotten have not been encouraging.  For instance, we've heard "...it's not the sort of thing our members would be interested in" at least twice.

What could they be more interested in instead?

The financial community has always had an arms-length relationship with branding.  It's slotted in as an intangible, or goodwill component on a company balance sheet, which makes it an exception to most anything else that is measured and attributed to (or debited from) estimates of corporate value. 

Analysts, like the executives they haunt, like to use the word brand to reference or explain lots of things that aren't dependably explainable, like awareness, momentum, buzz, and any word that has a future tense to it.  These are all reasonable, qualitative observations about human behavior and society in general, but they're certainly not primary sources of information like the other data used in financial analysis.

So brands can get mentioned as a reason to consider a stock or not, but branding is rarely, if ever, used as the pivot upon which to move trades.

Which is a good thing, considering what's going on in economies around the world these days. 

Price pressures both real (energy costs) and imagined (lack of confidence) are daring consumers to spend less, and do so less often.  If those intangible numbers had any value beyond the confines of the .xls in which they've been placed, now would be the time to prove it.

Only they don't. 

Luxury brands aren't doing necessarily much better than lesser aspirants.  Near-luxury brands are doing lots worse.  The brands that charge less for the privilege of buying their packaging and underwriting their advertising are selling more than those that do.  So it turns out that all that intangible value may very well be, well, intangible, at least in a down market.

I wonder if this isn't just a topical issue, but perhaps a glimpse into a structural shortcoming: irrespective of market direction, if brands can't be depended upon for added price or sales reliability in a bad economy, what are those valuations predicting in a good one?

For instance, might a prudent experiment be to rank companies in a particular industry category in terms of how much they spend on intangibles, and see how they're performing (sales, not how analysts are valuing one anothers' picks).  Another corollary to explore might be to study prices over the past, say, 6 months or year, and see if "better" brands have held the line of prices any better than others.

Brands can and should matter to how we understand and predict corporate performance, only now we’re seeing that they're just nice-to-have references in annual reports and in newspaper quotes.  Now could be the time for the financial community to come up with an inventive, new definition of what goes into branding, and perhaps agree on a methodology to assign values to companies...values that are tangible useful to them, to reporters, and to the working shlubs like yours truly who buy and sell the stocks.

Obviously, with my book coming out, I have some specific thinking in this regard, and would love to help jumpstart the brainstorm. 

But first, somebody has to pick up the phone.

The Mistake Economy

When a credit card company assesses a fee on late payments, and then raises four-fold or more the interest rates it charges, it's not just realizing one of the primary sources of income for the entire industry.

It's a pillar of the Mistake Economy.

Have you checked lately what rate you're charged for minutes beyond the limits of your mobile phone calling plan?  Ditto for driving beyond your allocated rental car miles.  How about paying a shipping and handling or restocking fee for returning something you've bought?  Some municipality budgets rely on writing enough traffic tickets.  Even car and health insurance plans are priced differently once mistakes from driving or illness intervene.

Many businesses don't start making really good money until consumers screw up.  Some don't succeed at all unless their purchasers fail at something first.

The Mistake Economy subtly affects how products are marketed, too.  Introductory offers work because of an implicit expectation that consumers won't do the math on what something will cost after the special deal expires.  Companies that outsource and then charge for customer service do so with the presumption that customers are at fault for their own problems.  Even the very conception that people will perceive (let alone believe) some of the more fantastic expectations of branding rely on consumers making the mistake of credulity.

It's not terribly customer-centric, unless you envision your customers as targets.  Or victims.

I suspect that consumers are wise to the dishonesty inherent in the Mistake Economy: I know that I am, and you probably are, too, as you're careful not to break the rules that product or service providers now wrap around their sales.  Maybe a larger audience is just dimly aware of it, and that's why corporate reputations are consistently low.  Maybe it's why it's so hard to engender and maintain customer loyalty. 

When we think as brand strategists instead of consumers, we can convince ourselves otherwise...or maybe close one eye and squint with the other, and thereby hold out hope that points or discounts will keep people happy.  But as we avoid addressing the fundamental disconnect between branding's rosy promises, and the thorny reality of experience, I suspect even the most carefree consumers don't miss entirely.

Maybe the Mistake Economy just makes people more wary.  From wariness a lot of other emotions arise, such as distrust, cynicism, and sometimes outright disdain.

So if your business participates in the Mistake Economy, maybe you want to take some of the money you're spending on all that glorious branding nonsense, and find a way to stop waiting for your customers to slip up?

Luxury Schmuxury

"Mass-affluent" brands like Burberry, Tiffany, and Coach are hurting in this dicey economy of ours, just like their lesser-branded competitors.

I guess I still don't understand the branding equation: expenditures on branding are an investment because they imbue products and services with attributes, associations, and a substantive equity that should somehow supercede competitive comparisons of function or price.

Better brands should deliver performances that are somewhat better than their competitiors, and do so at least partially independent of broad economic trends.  People will pay for that brand equity.

Er, not so much, it turns out.

Branding orthodoxy defined a psychology of a mass group of consumers in search of affluence.  People who felt well-off wanted to buy stuff that affirmed and promoted their success.  So luxury brands produced models, clothing lines, and services priced to exploit their aristocratic desires.  Presto!  Faux, or perhaps partial, wealth appeal.

What the marketers missed were the behavioral qualities of this group, which rendered it not much of a group at all.

Turns out that people spend more money when they have (or think they have) more money to spend.  And what they think about potential purchases has far more to do with their own unique contexts -- job, personal life, time available to shop, products friends and neighbors love or hate, etc. -- than with any larger absolutes of brand equity or awareness.

And when those contexts get dicey, those boring comparative qualities of function and price actually matter most.

Maybe the concept of mass affluence was itself a bubble, if not a non sequitur, or an outright mirage? 

What if what was happening instead was this:

• Lots of individual consumers were riding their own mini-bubbles of inflated home values, stock market gains, and boom-cycle-induced spending euphoria
• What they had in common was nothing psychological as much as similar bank accounts or credit cards that cried out to be used or abused
• Once those accounts don’t appear so rosy, these consumers start to penny-pinch, just like the rest of us
• They're less likely to pay more for brand names when 1) they're retailed right next to cheaper alternatives, which 2) for all practical purposes (i.e. functional reality) are truly the same

So the ihe intrinsic value of mass-affluent brands, like Ralph Lauren?

Nada.

It seems to me that truly valuable brands assert real, lasting connections with consumers.  In fact, there are behavioral rules that apply to individuals and groups alike:

• Do something objectively better
• Make it relevant to people's needs, not just wants
• Deliver it at a competitive price
• Support your customers better than anyone else 

The recent success for the mass-affluent brands wasn't based on any of these principles. It's kinda obvious, now that consumers have two choices: either buy something that costs a little less, or by nothing at all. 

Competitive products and purchase inertia are two sobering variables in the branding equation that cannot be ignored. 

Call them the schmuxury factors.

They're Here

A new strategy of installing TV monitors at Borders to show original programming, ads, and weather, will bring "knowledge and entertainment" to the affluent book browsers who spend an average of an hour in the store.  It'll also direct traffic to its web site and pave the way for more "cross-promotional deals with large media companies."

Voila.  Thus has this week's dim bulb award been won.

It's too easy to dis the concept of putting TVs in bookstores.  A million consumers are reminded each day of the inanity of the idea when they endure the white noise of monitors in Blockbuster outlets...and that's a video business.  Monitors sort of make sense in elevators.  Maybe in airport hallways. 

But not in a bookstore, or even in a cross media integrated entertainment content whatever they're calling themsleves-store.

I know that every aspect of our lives is becoming like every other aspect of our lives.  Each moment is an opportunity to interact with media, commerce, and the infinite cosmos.

So it's no great insight to exploit your customers for that brief time you have their attention.  Why stop with TVs?  Borders could install vending machines, sell space to jewelry kiosks, stock more impulse candy and plush, and allow Jehovah's Witness proselytizers to buy customer lists. 

But any bozo can find ways to waste someone else's time.  That's not branding, and it's not even good business.

I'd suggest instead that Borders -- and any brand name -- might want to figure out ways to differentiate offerings instead of mucking them up exploitative detritus.  Add real value.  Create a nowhere-else offering. 

The way to do that wouldn't be via communications tools -- which anybody can buy or promote -- but, rather, with behaviors.  Do things in unique ways, especially when it comes to businesses that offer experience instead of a particular proprietary product or service.

In this sense, the combination of things that happen in a Borders store, along with anything it might send to consumers directly or otherwise tell them via mass media, could be the elements of a truly integrated brand offering.

Here's what Borders could consider:

• Use multimedia to enhance the book business, not distract from it: There are probably cool ways to integrate multimedia with book displays, from simple links to movie versions (perhaps discounts), to screens that let browsers enjoy soundtracks, etc.  There's content upon which to organize the store, whether by title, genre, and/or release date, that could provide opportunities to make book browsing -- still the primary business, right? -- more engaging.  TVs running commercials are a distraction.  Tell people about better browsing experiences, and it might actually attract customers to stores
• Help consumers get more from books: I wonder how Borders could provide more context for the books it offers; right now, tables and shelves filled with titles is a pretty poor way to display them (especially when compared to the info available far more easily online).  There's got to be a better way.  Ditto for book reviews, reading clubs, special events.  I'd focus on things that must and can only happen in real world/real-time
• Do one better than the Internet regarding finding books (or any other media formats): It's unlikely that anyone would brave the weather, traffic, and our fellow citizens to go to a store and hope to find something that they would have a far better chance to find online.  Of course, some people might prefer looking in the geo-physical world, but the opportunity would be to make every possible aspect of that visit useful.  Using real people...employees...to provide information is a giant, useful variable in this regard.  Yet there are more people ready to help me at a Home Depot than there are in an average Borders (or in any book store)
• Make the entertainment component truly interactive, not canned: Readers are a uniquely involved, odd bunch (I consider myself one).  They have opinions, are curious, etc.  Couldn't Borders invent ways for its customer to interact with one another, not necessarily with canned advertising?  So, for instance, why not offer some real-time tracking of customer interests...maybe there's a "top 10" list to which every visitor contributes upon arrival to the store

Borders has lots of opportunities to approach its brand as a business, not a label that it puts over whatever it chooses to do. 

Televisions blathering on with commercials does little for the former, and isn't the strateregic idea for the latter.