Here’s a nice little anthropological/economics puzzle.  Why is it that some nations should be prolific brand creators and others, as Jon Stewart would say, "not so much"?

I refer in particular to the fact that Canada doesn’t appear to have a clue in this regard.  The answer is not size or wealth or education.  Otherwise, there would be no such thing as Nokia.

Of the top brands, 62 are from the US, 38 are from various other countries, and zero are from Canada (the US has eight of the top ten spots). This is the seventh year Interbrand has produced the ranking and the seventh year Canadian brands have been absent.

All speculation is welcome.  I will offer my own in a subsequent post.   A hint: Margaret Atwood.

References

Swystun, Jerry.  2004.  Branding in Canada.  Interbrand/Brandchannel.com here.

John Hegarty of Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty says his agency one day made a fateful decision:

[We decided] to say to people, “this is what we believe in, if you don’t like, it’s fine.”

Hegarty was embracing a trade off: Offending some people was ok, because

“other people will find [us] fantastic and will want to buy into [our] brand.” 

This is a great and unheralded event in a society largely formed by the mass media and the meaning makers of the commercial world (advertising, media, branding.)

At some point, almost all the important players in the world of marketing embraced the Hegarty trade off.*  They stopped trying to appeal to everyone all the time. They gave up climbing to ever cheerier, cheesier heights of good humor. They surrendered the “fun in the sun” creative that made advertising the laughing stock of the educated world. Most important, they released marketing from its minstrel pursuit of the maximally agreeable.

The Hegarty trade-off understood that mass appeal was not just clueless, but wrong. It was extensive when it should have been intensive. Minstrel marketing prevents the power and acuity of a particular pitch to a particular segment. As the world segments ever more finely, the Hegarty trade-off becomes ever more important. No longer a “creative opportunity,” it is now the only sensible way of doing business.

Naturally, minstrel marketing lives on. Clients, especially, are nervous of giving offense.  (“My mother watches these ads, you know.”) Much of the bad advertising out there exists because the client cannot work up the courage to embrace the Hegarty trade-off, or the marketer has failed to advise them of its urgency.  But all and all, the deal is done. Those Mentos parodies (sluggish and dim though they may be) are predicated on the received understanding that just about everyone gets that minstrel marketing is over. 

I don’t know that we have thought systematically about the Hegarty trade-off, but here are a couple of reflections Once a marketing team embraces the HTO, there are two places they can go: mystery or antagonism.

Mystery

Take the Volkswagen Jetta ad called “synchronicity.” This spot was maximally HTO. It said, “Let’s create a spot that will speak with real acuity to our segment, even it means leaving the rest of the world out in the cold.” Is there a down-side here? No, the people who can’t “get” the ad are never going to buy a Jetta is any case.  (They might buy a VW of another kind, and this would require of us a marketing calculation of the possibility of brand “halos” and a “bleed” across brands.) 

Antagonism

The other outcome of an HTO strategy is antagonism.  The Synchronicity spot merely mystified.  Some spots are more readable, and we are pretty sure we don’t like what we see.  I am striking out on examples here (I would be grateful for comments), but it is not hard to imagine what these might be.  Vann’s had used graffiti and the Warped tour, both of them the kind of thing likely to strike irritation, if not terror, in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.  (And this has its own very useful brand building effect, to the extent that skaters often  feel themselves outlaws in the eyes of their parents and the owner of every mall in America.)

Hummer ads actually have this effect on me. By celebrating Hummer values with passion and precision, the agency leave this consumer thinking, “you brainless nitwits, what’s wrong with the brand that you must protest its masculinity so.”  This antagonism is perhaps a little less useful than the one created by Vanns. Some Hummer consumers will care that some extra-Hummer consumers think them ridiculous.  (Or not. It is an open question, and a necessary one that obliges the marketer to decide.)   

There are plenty of larger implications here. And you will forgive me if it looks like I am labeling the obvious.  Do we really, you might ask, need terms like Minstrel marketing and HTO strategy?  Bernard Sahlins used to say there is a difference between seeing something and having a concept of it.  Only with the latter are we mobilized to begin the search for a more systematic view, treatment and application. 

But I have in mind a more practical outcome.  I hope that the account team will now pause the next time the client makes so particularly stupid “fun in the sun” suggestion and say, gravely, “well, of course, that would be off target from an HTO point of view.” I am hoping the client will go “oh, there something more than agency creativity at stake here” and defer to agency genius.  There is, finally, virtuous cycle already in play.  The better ads get, the greater our sophistication, client and otherwise, and the better ads get.  As British advertising generally demonstrates, everyone gets well.  If This Blogs Sits At can help with a few new terms, we are most pleased to help.

References and acknowledgments

With many thanks to “I have an idea” blog, and the interview with Hegarty from which the quote comes.  Find the interview here. 

With a hat tip to The Hidden Persuader for the link to the interview.  Find The Hidden Persuader blog  here.

* Notice please the "Hegarty trade-off"  is a label of convenience.  I do not know that Hegarty is the first or the best author of this trade-off.  My guess is that many people embraced it, and that indeed this is one of those decision made in a collective manner, and not because there was a single hero of the piece.  But we have to call it something, if only to give the client pause.  (This caveat may be unfair to Hegarty if he was the hero of the piece, and if this is true, I apologize!)

Is there a voice in blogland more astonishing than that of Evelyn Rodriguez? The rest of us are sleep walking by comparison. Evelyn is very smart, very well informed, fearless in her choice of topics and treatments, and she writes like a dream.

My question: how can anyone this smart be this wrong?

Yesterday, she was thinking in that effortlessly mobile way of hers about the inclination of people and brands to freeze into place. She reproduces, with approval, this passage from Alex Wipperfurth’s Brand Hijack.

The next type of brand will provide consumers with a higher purpose. Think of brands like Apple and Linux, which have been elevated beyond their functional and emotional performance. Their purpose, if not political, is at least of a social nature. The next type of brand will declare a worldview, not just an individual benefit, and play a meaningful role in people’s lives.

I cannot think of a more wrong headed notion of the brand. And to make my case I will use the opening paragraphs of Evelyn’s post.

I recently read that until the 1830’s, the typical daily newspaper was sold by subscription to a small audience whose interests were purely business and politics. “Just the facts, mam” fit neatly into four pages. Then in 1833, The New York Sun transitioned into a Penny Press and began telling “stories” with a “relevance to their reader’s lives.”

The Sun’s first issue sold out immediately, and contained numerous “human interest” stories (a form practically invented by the Penny Press) that drew an audience of readers “starved for information about other people like themselves, distressed souls from other lands or from upstate farms – people marooned in a rapidly growing city that was often inscrutable, uncaring, or unintelligible,” writes historian George H. Douglas.

We may think of brands as stories from the Penny Press. They are definitional resources that consumers scrutinize for notions about who they are and how they might live. This is a biggest value add of the brand proposition, and, as it happens, one of the toughest thing for the marketing to wrap its head around. The key here? Consumer paging through the press looking for stories on their own and assembling them for their own purposes.

The moment that brands presume to tell a larger story, this is the very moment when brands cease to serve us well. “Declare a world view”? Alex, you little fascist. The very point of the exercise is consumers browsing the world of ads and retail looking for concepts they can use to constitute their private and/or public sense of self. Some of this is “eureka, this watch is me.” Some of this is “Maybe, just maybe, this is who I might someday be.” There is lots of noise, contradictions and dynamism here.

But it’s all choice followed closely by assembly. There may have been a time when consumers looked for all-embracing, pre-fabricated concepts. (“I am a Audi kind of person.”) There was a time when some brands thought they could sell more or less embracing concepts (“I am a Nike kind of guy.”) There certainly was a time when intellectuals got their knickers in a knot at the idea that either of these fictions might come to pass.

But in point of fact, the consumer society works as a cultural system precisely because consumers are free to choose products but also the cultural meanings contained in this products. There are no sole-source suppliers of these meanings. Consumers must cast the net wide. They must make their own choices and do their own assembly. The moment we begin talking about brands with a world view, of brands with a comprehensive set of meanings that will offer comprehensive definitions of the consumer, this is the moment when our cultural/commercial world does indeed get “hijacked.”

This is the power of the commercial world as a cultural system. It supplants other meaning making systems and most of these are comprehensive in their claims. Ideology offers a sole-source, comprehensive set of meanings. Religion did the same. As Philip Kotler, Peter Drucker, Syd Levy, and Theodore Levitt told us, it is the genius of capitalism that it decentralizes the meaning suppliers and multiplies the meanings supplied. Now we have Audi pitching one notion of driving (and driver) and Volkswagen another. We have made the great engines of capitalism cultural players.

And what a good thing this proves to be. The meanings that prevail in our culture are at any given moment emergent. They do not come from elites. They do not come to us as whole cloth. They do not make imperial claims on our selfhood or our world view. They offer bits and pieces which we variously embrace, deploy, consume, and, eventually, throw off. The moment brands take a Wipperfurthian turn, this is the moment that brands begin to act like ideologies or religions and it is time to reach for our pistols.

When all those consumers are surveying all those meaning sources, embracing and using them and throwing them off, in all those various ways, we create a net out of which our culture comes. This is what we use instead of the wisdom of elites and the presumption of ideological or religious world views. This is what it is to live in a society of strangers, this is what it is to share a society with strangers. This is what it is for us all to pursue our separate projects and somehow create a single universe. In the great voting procedure that is the consumer society, we all act for ourselves in millions of consumer choices and in the process construct something like a single cultural world. It is of course a world that is multiple, fractious, contested, confusing, conflicted, changing and for all of these and other reasons, dynamic and emergent. And unless I am very much mistaken, that’s the way we like it (uhuh, uhuh).

As cultural systems go, ours is not very pretty. It’s not coherent. It’s not at all predictable. But it is a treasure, the single best way for strangers to make up their collective mind in the absence, and now free from, the presumptions of elites and their ideologies. The last thing in the world we want is brands that act like emperors. And this should give us pause about the courtiers who argue this course of action and the intellectuals who embrace it.

References

Wipperfurth, Alex. 2005. Brand Hijack: marketing without meaning. New York(?): Portfolio.

The exemplary work of Evelyn Rodriguez here.

It is a truism of marketing practice that small, “niche,” brands are smaller and more nimble than great, big ones. Someday, this may prove to be wrong.

Thanks to Piers Fawkes and Simon King at PSFK (and http://www.Vogue.co.uk), this news of design innovation from Coca-Cola UK.

Coke invited Matthew Williamson, Manolo Blahnik, Damon Dash, Jonathan Saunders, Wayne Rooney, Gharani Strok and Bay Garnett to redesign the Coke bottle. Some of the bottles enter limited circulation through Harvey Nichols stores, and the original is auctioned to raise money for the Terence Higgins Trust, the UK’s leading HIV charity.

We may take this as a test run for the day, in the not very distant future, when even the most pedestrian Coke bottle will feel the transforming touch of great design. There will be many Coke designs in circulation at any one time, and the turn-over will be fierce. You like the Manolo Blahnik (as above) now in the stores? Snap it up. It will be gone in a week. (We never repeat ad campaigns, however successful they were. Someday we will take the same attitude towards packaging.)

We know that the current uniformity of packages is the artifact of an economic moment that has come and gone. National brands bargained for consumer loyalty by delivering uniformity. We were as a culture mesmerized by the idea of consistency and constancy. Both these moments are disappearing like morning mist on the links of St. Andrews. Someday, consumer packaging will stream with innovation.

What happens to the competitive landscape when this is so? Big brands will stream better than small ones. We may think of them as big pipes, capable of carrying a vast amount and diversity of brand meanings. Little brands, new to the world, will “stream” at their peril. They will need constancy to stake their claim to a place in the marketplace.

Clearly, this reverses the traditional relationship. Now big brands will be the changeable ones. Little brands will be boring, stodgy, and a little predictable. They will be forced to give away the very dynamism on which new entries traditionally depend. Hmm. How then will little brands manage to come up? What will the advantage of littleness be?

It’s as if we have been occupying just to quadrants of a four-part table, the “fast but little” plus the “large but slow.” What happens when big brands take up residence in the “large and fast?”

Reference

The post from PSFK here

Post Script

This blog has been preoccupied with the dynamism of consumer taste and preference and we have from time to time wondered about the instruments with which we might improve our ability to track and predict this dynamism.

So I was impressed to hear of the work of PSFK and its founders Piers Fawkes and Simon King. Here’s how they describe themselves:

PSFK is a community of trend spotters, futurists, forward-thinking-individuals and cool hunters in Fashion, Design, Advertising, IT, Government, Art, You-Name-It around the world. Sightings of trends are fed to a group of main site editors who then may or may not publish them on the site. We email a weekly and monthly newsletter too to subscribers.

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