Branding is surrounded by spectacular change.  In this section, I want to canvas some of our strategic opportunities.

The Learning Personhood from William Shakespeare post: Brands are going from wooden, overdrawn, repetitive creatures to something more nuanced, complex and interesting.  This just happens to be the transition that Shakespeare brought to the theater of 16th century England.  (See the post here.)

The Learning Charisma from Cate Blanchet post: We take the comparison a step further.  If we have something to learn from Shakespeare’s theater, we have something to learn from Cate Blanchet’s charisma.  (See the post here.)

The Learning Playfulness from Craig Ferguson post: And why not take a step farther still?  (We could have called this book Learning from Hollywood.  I may yet.)  Here we look at what Craig Ferguson brought to late night television.  By this time in his distinguished career, Letterman is very like many brands we know.  At this point, he’s just phoning it in.  Ferguson is playful, a little surreal at times, vivid, changeable, unpredictable, insinuating, co-conspiratorial, and a little hyperactive.  Branders take note.  (See the post here.)

The Learning Cocreation from Chevy post: We have seen from some time now that brands have to give up some of the levers of control.  This is hard to do.  It’s scary to do.  And it’s easy to do badly.  Most of all, it takes a new set of tolerance for noise and for risk.  But it’s got to be done.  The only way to participate in the world of the consumer is to let the consumer to participate in the world of the brand.  These are early days and we have lots to learn.  I think Chevy offers a brilliant first effort.  (See the post here .)

The Learning Multiplicity from Unilever post: As we know, consumer taste and preference have fragmented.  This means the brand has to learn how to be many things to many people.  Consistency is dead.  We must become masters of multiplicity.  (See the post here.)

The Learning Mystery from American Express post:  Perhaps the most revolutionary thing a brand can do in it’s effort to manage meaning is to embrace meanings that are a little unclear.  This breaks the first rule of marketing (keep it simple, stupid) and it’s precisely what American Express did when it asked M. Night Shyamalan to do ads for their Oscar campaign.  It is a study in indeterminacy, and perhaps the most daring piece of advertising we have seen in a long time.   (See the post here.)

The Learning Transmedia from Mr. Clean post: As brand messages now travel in more media and new media, we are having to create brands that speak with many, different voices.   "Transmedia" is a concept given us by MIT colleague Henry Jenkins, and in this post I try to apply it to the brand called Mr. Clean.  (See the post here.) 

The Learning Brand Theater from My Own Experience post: This post describe my attempt to build a brand by taking a theatrical approach to meaning making.  This marks a shift from the "big cannon" approach to branding, the one that uses mass media, simple messages, and constant repetition, to something much more nuanced, personal, and indeed, person to person.  This is branding as a tiny theatrical production in your own local pub or bar.  See what you think.  (See the post here.)

The Learning Networks from Nike post: Social networks are the single biggest revolution to sweep through the world of the marketing since World War II.  In this post, I examine how Nike with Nike+ managed to go from" selling shoes" to a much richer, social experience which is now doing magnificent things for the brand, volume and profit.  (See the post here.) 

In sum, branding is now a lively art.  Brands are becoming more animated, charismatic, and playful.  They are learning to be more things to more people, to include the consumer as a brand creator, and to master more subtle meanings.  Finally, they are learning to use transmedia, brand theater and social networks. 

A friend said to me, "Hey, I guess it’s true that they say about marketing.  It’s not rocket science.  If what you’re saying is true, it’s more complicated than rocket science."

Brands are built…out of culture…out of meanings from culture. 

In the Volvo campaign, the meaning was safety and symbol for this safety was a little girl.  Pretty standard.

But this book is interested in new ways to source meaning.  Let’s look at new, emerging brand tactics. 

The Dove Mining Culture post: Dove went looking in a new place.  It noticed that our culture is changing the way we think about beauty.  It seized on this as a brand opportunity.  Anyone could have done this.  But only Dove did.  And there are lots of additional cultural ideas out there waiting to go.  Who will step up?   (See the post here.) 

The Nike Mining History post: Nike has worked the world of sport pretty extensively.  And now the brand is looking for new meanings, in this case from the history of sport.  "No Boots in the Shower" brilliant.  This is a bad of the culture of sports as cultivated by the British tradition.  Vivid, evocative, meaty.  (See the post here.) 

The Kleenex Mining Emotion post: A lot of marketing has devoted itself to a kind of "fun in the sun" creative.  (Think of those Coke ads in the 1950s that showed kids racing down a beach in an open convertible. Donna Marie still turns out this kind of thing.)  This is the sort of thing that made branding seem simple minded and insubstantial.  But there is change here too.  In this case, Kleenex actually reached out to claim negative emotion.  A brilliant marketing move.   Hat’s off to JWT New York. (See the post here.)

The BMW Mining Frustration post: BMW did their research.  They reached into the professional lives of the BMW owner and discovered a problem.  All of us have one of these problem.  He’s that nitwit, the  one who uses the resources of the corporation to frustrate the corporation and the talented people who work there.  Brilliant move.  A meaning that resonates with my life.  I know it resonates with yours.  Splendid way to build the brand.  (See the post here.)

The Mastercard Mining Payton Manning post: Celebrity endorsement has been with us for a long time.  In this campaign, Mastercard finds a new and interesting way to use Payton Manning in a brilliant piece of strategic and creative work.  Hat’s off McCann-Erickson/New York and of course Mr. Manning.  (See the post here.)

The American Century Fails to Mine Lance Armstrong post: When American Century created this campaign, Armstrong was just about as important as a celebrity could be.  He had defeated cancer and he had won the Tour de France.  But American Century blew it.  There is a method for extracting meanings from a famous person.  If we don’t get it right, we can do more harm than good.  (See the post here.)

The Acura Fails to Mine the Culture of the Moment post: This bring us full circle back to the opening post, the one about Dove.  Dove managed to find something in our culture that could make the brand resonate.  Here we look at Acura trying to the same thing but failing to get it right.  More proof, I think, that this meaning management thing is harder than it looks.  (See the post here.) 

In sum, two things:

1) we have build brands out of meaning for a long time, but we continue to make mistakes so fundamental I believe they qualify as "rookie errors."

2) there is plenty of room for experimentation and innovation here at the tactic level.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005. Meaning management.  In Culture and Consumption II: markets, meaning and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 175-191. 

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Meet Rosi: scourge of the new advertising.  This Blog. October 27, 2008.  here. 

Branding and marketing books have a bad habit.  They ignore other branding books.  They ignore other authors and ideas.

This is one of the reasons the branding debate is such a mess.  We are not good at discouraging bad ideas.  We are not good at promoting good ideas.  In fact, the branding debate isn’t a deabate.  It’s everyone talking at once. 

The My Heroes post: This is a quick review of the authors, ideas and communities I admire the most.  (See the post here.) 

The Kevin Roberts post: Roberts’ book has some good ideas, but mostly it’s an ad for Kevin Roberts and his ad agency.  Books have a solemn duty: to make original proposition as clearly as possible.  It is not to shill on behalf of a person or an agency.  (See the post here.) 

The Sir John Hegarty post: Hegarty is a big sneeze in the English marketing community.  Hence the knighthood.  And you would think this position of leadership would make him a good spokesman for the field.  But no.  Instead, Sir John decided to tell the world that marketing and branding is effectively mysterious.  You either get it or you don’t.  It’s about taste, which you have and you don’t have.  This is just bone stupid.  But worse than that it takes back to the day when ad agency turned the creative process into a black box, and said to the client, effectively, this is much too complicated for you ever to understand.  Just give us the money and we’ll give you an ad.   (See the post here.) 

The Clotaire Rapaille post: What do you say about a guy who claims to have cracked the code of India?   One of the things we must grasp in order to be better at branding is culture.  (This is one way to move the debate beyond Sir John’s "it’s all about taste" argument.)  But when Clotaire treats culture, he simplifies it shamelessly.  Now I understand that he is a charismatic guy and that he can have a memerizing effect on the C suite.  But marketing and culture are too important to the brand and too important to the corporation to be treated with so little nuance, knowledge and power. (See the post here.) 

The Jerry Zaltman post: Jerry is a prince of a guy and I loved having him as a colleague at the Harvard Business School.  But the trouble with his work is that Jerry doesn’t understand culture at all.  He is a perfectly typically b-school prof and this isolation has cost him dear.  Zaltman is at least an improvement on Rapaille.  He doesn’t just make stuff up.  But when Jerry sits down to divine the cultural meanings, he is not qualified to deliver good results.  More particularly, you may not talk about metaphor, unless you know about culture.  (See the post here.)

The James Surowiecki post: I have great admiration for Surowiecki.  He is the author of the Wisdom of Crowds book and a real contributor to the marketing debate.  But in the Surowiecki essay I study in this post, we see Surowiecki insisting that we think about the consumer as a rational creature.  When consumers comes to brands they are not calculating interest narrowing defined.  They come to our brands looking for ideas with which to furnish their worlds, their families, their homes, and their selves.  When we think about them as interest seekers, as creatures of the economics paradigm, we misunderstand them most fundamentally.   Now, some people want to broaden our view of the consumer by insisting on the consumer’s left brain, their emotion, their creativity.  And this is useful as far as it goes.  But in fact, what we really want to get into the paradigm is culture.  This is where we see the consumer whole. (See the post here.) 

The Clayton Christensen post: Christensen is another person for whom I have great respect.  I was lucky enough to have had him as a colleague when I was teaching at the Harvard Business School.  But I have to say, I was astonished when he proposed this idea of the Purpose Brand.  Wow, talk about missing the mark.  Talk about failing to see the consumer and brand in their full richness and complexity.  Talking about undercutting the marketing mission.   We are obliged to say, pace Surowiecki, that marketing is not economics.  And here we must say it’s not engineering! (See the post here.)

The Chris Anderson post: This post came about in a strange way.  I made a stray remark about The Long Tail, and Anderson dropped by the blog to challenge me.  And naturally I responded.  I was trained at the University of Chicago.  We are built for combat.  Anderson apparently didn’t know this about the University of Chicago and retired from the field immediately.   I hear from friends he now speaks ill of me privately.  (Dude, man up and say it in public. )  Anyhow, here’s a guy who was in a very nice position to take on the big issues that confronted branding now that we are engaged in what the Cluetrain boys call a "conversation" and he whiffed completely. (See the post here.) 

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Wordle.net for the image.