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.
It’s not too late to add this perfect beach book to your summer reading list.
I refer to Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
This book is beautfully thought, said and constructed. Perhaps more urgently, it is useful for people in the field of marketing.
Here’s what Greenblatt has to say about theatre before and after Will.
The authors of the morality plays thought they could enhance the broad impact they sought to achieve by stripping their characters of all incdiental distinquishing traits to get to their essences. They thought their audiences would thereby not be distracted by the irrelevant details of individual identities.
This sounds like the brand construction strategies of the 20th century, doesn’t it? All brands, even the very best ones, were constructed as if the message could have no subtlety or nuance Branding, even by very gifted marketers, had an inclination to strip everything out. Keep it simple. Stick to genre and formula. Say it loud. Say it often. This was mantra of marketing.
Those days have passed. We are on the verge of brands that grasp what Shakespeare got: brands generalizing in the old fashioned way are too obvious, too crude, too stupid to enter consciousness, let alone move someone to purchase (intellectual or otherwise).
Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generatlized abstractions but to particular name people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation; not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello.
It’s almost as if the brand can’t have a place in the present day marketplace unless it is worthy of a place in contemporary culture. It can’t be commerce unless it’s culture.
I think it’s fair to say that is one of the things that Will wrought. I mean, there is pretty good chance we wouldn’t be looking at this challenge to the way we exercise our will in the world were it not for that Will in the world.
Hey, but what do I know? I make my living standing in McDonald’s drive-through lines (see last post).
References
Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the world: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, p. 34.
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 Wipperfurths 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 Evelyns 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 Suns 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 its 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, thats the way we like it (uhuh, uhuh).
As cultural systems go, ours is not very pretty. Its not coherent. Its 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.
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 UKs 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?
Its 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?”
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.
Economics is everywhere at work in the marketplace but normally we cant see it. It doesnt feature in Hollywood movies or popular novels. It makes no cameo appearances on the sit coms, no courtesy calls on the talk shows. The Nobel Prize recipients are mentioned briefly and with scant regard. (Its clear that the newspapers care so little about this story they have now standardized the reporting formula. “When did I get the news? Well, actually it was my daughter/wife/manservant/cat who took the call. At the time, I was out standing in my garden/garage/helo pad. Editor, choose one.) Economics is part of the infrastructure of the consumer society, everywhere at work, no where in sight. Economics doesn’t usually “show through.”
But thats changing. I give you the label on Honest Tea:
It doesnt take an econ Ph.D. to brew teabut Barry has one and sometimes it actually helps. Heres how. Sugar, like most goods, has a declining marginal utility. One teaspoon takes away teas bitterness. Another adds a nice sweetness. Thats where we stop. More sugar add calories but not much more taste. By the time youve got teaspoons per serving, its liquid candy. Green dragon Tea is organic and just a tad sweet. Honestly yours, Seth and Barry.
Here economics is helping to make the USP and to build a brand! Oh baby.
This is a real measure of how far weve come in the world of marketing. I want you to imagine this pitch at the Coca-Cola Company. “Yeah, and I want the label to talk about marginal utility! This brand is proud of its difference, its difficulty, of the fact that it departs, in packaging and formula, from the cola standard. The USP (unique selling proposition) here is a USD(ifference).
Brand difference of this kind has always worked well in the CSD (carbonated soft drink) category. Many of the most successful brands have come up by “pushing off against the mainstream player, Coca-Cola. Thus did Pepsi, Gatorade and Snapple find a place on the shelf. Given the brand typography of the CDS category, difference sells.
There are of course lots of different differences to choose from for branding purposes, and Barry and Seth chose carefully. There is a little New Age spirituality, tea vs. coffee gentleness, wisdom sourced from other cultures (Asian and aboriginal), a “savor the moment pitch (tea as an experience vs. coffee as a stimulant), naturalness sourced from an organic positioning, a little authenticity (in the naming and packaging), a whiff of Seattle in the packaging, all of this done in a design approach that is has a certain gentrified aplomb and grace. It is, in sum, a well balanced brand portfolio, and it gives Honest Tea depth, breadth and mobility.
But the piece of meaning management that really caught my attention was the diminishment of sugar and the dialing up of taste. Many drinks in America are “liquid candy and all liquid candy tastes the same. By dialing down the sugar content, Barry and Seth opened up some interesting taste experiences at just the moment that Americans are, thanks to Alice Waters, among others, spending more time with smaller portions that have been very carefully managed to maximize the intensity and variety of tastes in play. This allows Seth and Barry to evoke a new set of meanings, and then to build these back into the brand. Hey presto, there is now a more real and sensual connection between brand and consumptions, and, more to the marketing point, a powerful set of meanings for the brand.
One Honest Tea (and sorry I cant remember which one) puts you in mind of the Denver airport. By dumping the sugar, Barry and Seth have made the taste much larger, airier, as if, somehow, filled with light. It provoked a kind of synesthesia (a perceptual confusion in which the sensations from one sense are perceived as those of another, e.g., seeing sounds or hearing colors). Taste buds now operate like eyes and ears. Hey, presto. The consumer is happier and the brand is richer. I believe this is what they mean by win, win.
All the best consumer experiences, with food, clothing, automobiles, domestic architecture and interior design, movie making, graphic design, all of these are getting richer and more nuanced. (Virginia Postrels book The Substance of Style shows how and why.) This is good for the consumer, but it is also, as I say, good for the marketer. It means we have new, and more powerful sources of meaning emerging from the moment of consumption, and we may use these to confirm, revise, renew, rework the meanings of the brand as communicated by our opening moments of contact (advertising, direct mail, etc.). The question is whether we have the research methods and conceptual models for this new and promising aspect of the meaning management process and I think the answer is “no.
On the plane the other day, I fell into conversation with a guy from Nike. (The first rule of anthropological engagement: talk to everyone, all the time, about anything they will talk about.)
He told me that a new way Nike creates meaning for the brand is through a process called "curation." A creative team from Beaverton takes a sport and dives into its history and material culture. They are as curators examining the material remains of the game. In the case of soccer (football), they went to England to visit a famous public soccer pitch. They found a sign in the clubhouse that read something like "no boots in the shower."
Perfect. "No boots in the shower" is going to appear on packaging. It may appear in advertising. It’s a phrase that captures the ambience of men’s sports: the hectoring tone of the club house, the sheer density of the male athlete, the inextinguishable need to spell out the obvious.
You could put 100 creatives in a room for a week and a half and not get something half as good, half as funny, half as unpredictable. And that why it’s such a potent means of meaning manufacture. Traditionally, brands have taken a different road. If they needed to evoke the "rough integrity" of a soccer pitch, the creative would summon it with an ad. (This process was brilliantly examined by Michael Arlen in his study of an AT&T ad.) The pitch would be brought to life by a process of quite remarkable evocation: soccer as we know it, or wish to know it, or once knew it. Nike now contained a concept of the game. The brand was richer, more interesting, more powerful.
Trouble is, this doesn’t work the way it used to. We look at even really fine evocations of a soccer pitch and we are inclined to find them a little predictable, pallid, jejune. "Fine, another ad." "Lovely, soccer, whatever." There is, on the other hand, something about a sign that reads "no boots in the shower" that gets the job done in a new and eye catching way. Suddenly, we are "right there. "This must be the real thing. No roomful of creatives could make this up. It rings with authenticity.
But before we begin an analytic delirium worthy of Stuart Ewen or Naomi Klein, let’s point out that there is no such thing as an historical or cultural bedrock, no really real real, as it were. In fact, we know that no notion of soccer is more authentic than another. Each notion is cultural peculiar, invented and insisted upon. If you doubt me, summon up an image of the "knees up" way an Englishman runs. This has to be an invention because no human being with a trace of natural ability would run this way otherwise. It’s culturally invented and then policed. English kids still yell "knees up" when you run past them (at least they did in Cambridge 20 years ago).
If the phrase "no boots in the shower" has a certain power, if it improves upon the classic advertising treatment, it’s because it is too quirky not to have come from real life. We know that something like "curation" must have happened here, that Nike has made contact with some actual version of the game, and not merely the "creative stylings" of Wieden and Kennedy.
Naturally "curation" isn’t anything like the museum version of this activity. But as a means of meaning manufacture, it’s pretty good. It takes the "retro treatment one better, by digging into the actual bits and pieces of the cultural debris field. Budweiser is now running ads that are or appear to be antique and they are now using a can design from the 1930s. And as a meaning making strategy, curation multiplies the aesthetic possibilities open to us. It gets rid of that modernist embargo on things that are old fashioned and "out of date."
My little world has been a Microsoft shop for a very long time. Its a decision I made in the early days when forced to choose between an Apple or a PC. If I wanted to live in a world of third party innovation, the choice was clear. The PC decision helped make another decision. For unsophisticated users, there was one operating system and its name was Microsoft. And this decision helped make yet another decision: the M/S Office Suite my version of “keep it simple, stupid. Like the millions of people who shot the rapids of this “decision cascade, I was now a Microsoft man.
There were plenty of irritations with life with Microsoft. I am still astonished how bad PowerPoint is from a design point of view. With these multiples, Microsoft could have hired Louise Fili or Milton Glazer, and the virtual world of the corporation would now be vastly more visual. Actually, because form is content, America would now actually be vastly more conceptual. But, no. The PowerPoint templates were clearly designed by that special someone who did Travelodge napkins and match books in the1960s. Talk about a difference that makes a difference! Talk about critical path dependency! PowerPoint reproduced Microsofts limitations, and helped to install them in the American mind.
Still, PowerPoint was an improvement on the Lotus equivalent. I forget what this was called but it was so utterly unpredictable that I discovered belatedly that presentations would not be forthcoming unless you got a group of people to lay their hands on the printer and chant in Latin. (This was not in the manual, unless it was cunningly secreted there in invisible ink, perhaps on the page that read ‘this page left deliberately blank.)
Anyhow, to use the language of marketing, Microsoft was producing enough value that I was inclined to stick with it. And this despite the fact that the value was unsecured by robust brand meaning. There would be moments I would imagine that I knew what “Microsoft was, and on these occasions I was almost certainly conflating the brand and its founder. Both the man and the brand were, I supposed, miraculously smart, competitive, a little cranky, pugnacious, unforgiving. Microsoft didnt want me to love it. It was too smart, too aggressive for that. But it expected me to be smart enough to see that it was the power and the glory, and that I had put myself in good company. But even this began to darken. Microsoft, I began to think, was now probably like the Bill of middle age: rich, complicated, and too distracted for me to grasp or for him to act.
New programs would come and go. I noticed the rise of Linux and other competitors, but, like millions of others, I thought “close enough is good enough. I was still a Microsoft man.
Bam! In one week, I defected twice. I left Outlook for Gmail. And I left Explorer for FireFox. The immediate cause was spam. The deeper cause: my confidence in Microsoft now had the stability of a California split level teetering on a rain soaked hill side. Yes, I heard that Bill Gates was now thoroughly steamed about spam. But even this, a direct intersession from Zeus himself, would not change things. It was too little, too late. There are “Port 25 solutions now being implemented, relatively simple ways to deal with spam. Why didnt Gates give us “Port 25 solutions a year ago? This is what industry leaders are for. This is what really smart people do.
Its not that I have a San Simeon view of Microsoft, that Gates and his lieutenants now wander the halls of their magnificent accomplishment but no longer fully manage or control it. Yes, it is. I think I ceased to believe that Microsoft was fully in charge of Microsoft. If it could endure a universe in which an unprotected PCs on line will be attacked by viruses once every 60 minutes (or whatever it is), than something was really kind of screwed up. And dont tell me that Microsoft was now the captive of the third party supplier universe it had helped created. Thats what those mountainous cash reserves were for. Buy Symantec and be done with it.
The thing about innovations is that it hard to eat just one. No sooner had I abandoned Outlook and Explorer than I began to think about whether there isnt a better word processor and spread sheet out there. And it wasnt long before I then began to wonder whether I should sell the handful of shares I have in Microsoft. If I can throw off inertia and walk out of this brand house, there are millions poised to do the same. Indeed, Microsoft has lost market share to Mozilla for 8 straight months. Mozilla has only around 5% of the market, but it is growing at a rate of .5 to 1 per cent a month. After enduring years of put upon loyalty, the Microsoft consumer is ripe for exit.
I cant help thinking what would have happened if the branding had been a little better. I mean what would have happened if Bill had gone out and hired a good brand man, a Sergio Zyman, for instance, while he was out hiring Milton Glaser? In the big picture, there just aint no telling. The little picture: Id still be running a Microsoft shop.
References
McGann, Rob. 2005. FireFox adoption shows signs of cooling. Clickz.
Debbie Millman is launching Design Matters on Voice of America. Heres a description of the show:
Design Matters with Debbie Millman is an opinionated and provocative internet talk radio show airing on the Voice America Radio Network. The show combines a stimulating point of view about graphic design, branding and cultural anthropology. In a business world dependent on change, design is one of the few differentiators left.
Explore the challenging and compelling canvas of todays design world with Debbie Millman and her weekly guests live every Friday from 3-4pm Eastern Standard Time. It will repeat Saturday at noon.
Theres a piece on brands by James Surowiecki in Wired. Its stuffed with interesting observations and dubious assertions.
Brand numbers are up:
Since 1991, the number of brands on US grocery store shelves has tripled. Last year, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued an incredible 140,000 trademarks – 100,000 more than in 1983.
So is brand noise:
The average American sees 60 percent more ad messages per day than when the first President Bush left office.
Brand loyalty is down:
Consumer-goods markets used to be very stable. If you had a set of customers today, you could be pretty sure most of them would still be around two years, five years, ten years from now. That’s no longer true. A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later.
The added value of the brand is in question:
Look at Nokia. In 2002, it had the sixth-most-valuable brand in the world, valued by the consultancy Interbrand at $30 billion. But the very next year, Nokia made a simple mistake: It didn’t produce the clamshell-design cell phones that customers wanted. Did consumers stick around because of their deep emotional investment in Nokia? Not a chance. They jumped ship, and the company’s sales tumbled. As a result, Nokia lost $6 billion in equity.
The take-away:
[T]he long-term value [of brands] is shrinking. They’re becoming nothing more than shadows. You wouldn’t expect your shadow to protect you or show you the way. It only goes wherever you do. The truth is, weve always overestimated the power of branding while underestimating consumers ability to recognize quality.
The warning:
Marketing types either don’t see this trend or choose not to talk about it.
My analysis:
Finally, this piece disappoints because Surowiecki appears to hold to the old fashioned wisdom about a “rational consumer. This is where Adam Smith and Karl Marx came down on the same side. The consumer is a most concerned with price and quality. All the rest of epiphenomenal. Smarter, better informed consumers see through branding and marketing. They go for value.
The trouble with this approach is that it ignores academic work that was started by Sid Levy and Irving White in the 1950s. Over half a century, marketing scholars and professionals have developed a sophisticated understanding of what value is and how branding contributes to it.
It is now not unusual to suppose that value comes from two sources. It comes from utility, the ability of the product to solve problems in the world. And it comes from meaning, the cultural significance with which the product is charged.
This means that the product is only half done when it emerges from the lab and the plant. It is not complete until marketing, defined here broadly to include design, advertising, and consumer co-participation, gives it cultural meanings. Thus does marketing engage in “meaning manufacture. Utilities and meanings, these are the two founts of value.
Is there a problem? Of course, theres a problem. Living as we do in a dynamic world, consumers are more various and more changeable than before. Creating current meanings requires deep knowledge of the culture and constant adjustment to its changing trends. The best brands are a little like sailing ships. They have the deep ballast of long standing meaning, the deck cargo of recent meanings, and tall sails that must be repositioned often to adjust to constantly, sometimes whimsically, changing consumer taste and preference.
To say that brands are having a hard time adding value is merely to say that they find themselves charged with the task of responding to a world that no one thought was possible. (Remember when capitalism stood accused of producing a monolithic, static culture?) It should also be observed that both marketing professionals (Lafley at P&G) and marketing scholars (see references) are hard at work trying to figure out how responsiveness might work.
Brands may becoming more like shadows, as Surowiecki says. Indeed we must hope that this is so. It will make them more nimble and fluid than they used to be. “Shadow management, perhaps this is a new brand strategy. But it will take a subtlety and responsiveness that the marketer has yet fully to master. As the Elizabethans used to say: “Pursue your shadow and you will never catch it. Run from your shadow and it will follow you anywhere.
References
Fournier, Susan. 1998. The Consumer and the Brand: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research. Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. March: 343-73.
Levy, Sidney J. 1959. Symbols for Sale. Harvard Business Review 37, no. 4 July/August: 117-24.
Levy, Sidney J, and Dennis W. Rook. 1999. Brands, consumers, symbols, & research: Sidney J. Levy on marketing. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.
McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolism of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
______ 2006a Culture and Consumption II: markets, meanings and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Due out Spring.)
_______ 2006b Flock and Flow: managing change in a dynamic marketplace. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Due out Fall.)
Prahalad, C. K, and Venkatram Ramaswamy. 2004. The future of competition: co-creating unique value with customers. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Roberts, Kevin. Lovemarks. a book and a blog here.
A brand is like the tree a farmer leaves standing in a field. It just shows up one day, struggling upwards, trying to find its way out of the corn into the sun.
The farmer could have dug it under. But he liked how improbable it was: the poplar that doesnt get that its out of place. Or maybe, the poplar that doesnt know it isnt corn. Or maybe, a poplar with so much self possession it just doesnt care it isnt corn.
He let the poplar stand. He let it grow. The farmer isnt sure what it has cost him over the year. A lot, probably. It represents a real chunk of his tillable land. It got steadily more demanding, taking up more space, stealing water and sunshine. Happily, the farmers affection grew as the popular did. He let it stand, he let it grow.
Eventually, the accidental became the emblematic. The farmer couldnt imagine his field without it. It was the place he ate his lunch. It was the place the kids came for adventure. It was the thing that identified his farm to others. “Levis place. You know, the big popular out on trunk road. It was the first thing he and the kids saw coming home. Without the poplar, Levis place would have been just another field of corn.
Lately, Levis been thinking. If the poplar is his emblem, shouldnt it keep pace with the times and his new prosperity? He put a ring of rocks around it. He started fertilizing it. He even got it trimmed. He planted smaller trees, to set it off and give it scale.
Then Levi thought, “what the hell, took out the poplar and put in a giant blue spruce. Naturally, they flattened half the corn field, bringing it in. It created a certain amount of confusion for the locals. “The Levi place, the poplar, er, the blue spruce. Blue spruce, what is the matter with that guy? The kids said, “Dad, how do you build a fort in an evergreen?
So it wasnt perfect. Now Levi is thinking about a bunch of trees, all different, all equally grand. Or, no, what about statues, a sort of Greek bower? Briefly, he wondered if a statue to Ernie Banks might not be a good way of honoring his childhood hero.
Levis field draws a crowd. Because theres always something happened. Trucks coming and going. Trees give way to statues, statues give was to bowers. Levis field is more interesting than the country fair. Corn? No, he doesnt grow corn there anymore.
References
Deutsch, Claudia. 2004. New Logo and Tagline for Xerox. New York Times, September 13, 2004.
[T]oday, Xerox is bidding “The Document Company” and the X a grateful goodbye. In their place will be a new, cleaner-looking logo, featuring the Xerox name over the signature “Technology/Document Management/Consulting Services.” Industry experts applaud the change.
Branding is a process of meaning manufacture that begins with the biggest, boldest gestures of the corporation (see last entry for a treatment of Google’s Gmail) and works its way down to the tiniest gestures.
This is one of the reasons that design matters. The look and the feel, the fit and the finish, the beautiful, the sensual, the tactile, design is an essential medium of the brand message. Good design captures, commandeers, takes control of every interface and interaction between the consumer and the brand, right down to the little sound that packages make when we close them. Click. This is a brand message. (For a wonderful treatment of this topic, see Virginia Postrel’s The substance of style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness from HarperCollins.)
This brings us to one of the mysteries of Metropolis Magazine. (Thanks to Steve Portigal for the heads up on the May issue.) This is a dandy magazine. The May issue has a wonderful story about the origins of the yellow color of the New York taxi, the shape of the Bell logo, and the person who designed the Greek “we are happy to serve you” coffee cup (Leslie Buck, 1963, Sherri Cup Company). There is also a spectacular article on built form and light.
Metropolis is a design magazine and it is beautiful thing to hold and wander through. Images and text are exquisitely chosen. These people have laid out on lay out. The magazine is a thing of pleasure.
But as I work my way through the magazine, something is fighting me. It’s something caught in the pages. It’s a “blow in,” those 4 x 5 pieces of paper that are subscription offers. Actually there are several of them. Four to be exact. As I make my way through this magazine, I find that these offers force it open in some places and shut in others. And then some of the little pieces of paper actually land on the floor so that I am now obliged to stoop down, pick them up and through them away. My passage through the magazine is resisted and interrupted.
So let’s review. Metropolis turns out a magnificent piece of art direction. They come from a world that understands that everything in the design mandate counts, that everything sends a message.
Then they give us a magazine that resists our passage. They use their design efforts to interrupt and provoke us at the very moment they are suggesting we might wish to subscribe.
Every little gesture sends a message and this one couldn’t be more clear.
Three brands: Ebay, Adobe and Google. All of them are success stories from the dot.com era. But none of them seem to have more than a rough idea about how to build a brand. Some of them are learning. Well, ok, not Google.
full text:
EBay was until recently the worst offender in matters of brand building and it still misbehaves pretty extravagantly. It’s most important interface with the consumer was a webpage that looked until very recently like a dog’s breakfast. There was too much information, arranged with scant regard for clarity or ease of access. Good design and the exercise of brand intelligence doesn’t cost very much. Ebay has been spinning revenue. Was there really no money to sort this out?
Recently, Ebay went through a redesign. It is a little better. But it is still resembles the bulletin board of a community centre more than the future of the market place. This business is now almost 10 years old. It has nearly 6,000 employees. It is run by a woman who graduated from one of the great marketing academies of our time: P&G. When does Ebay step up?
Adobe:.
Today I had the very pleasant surprise of opening a PDF file that did not oblige me to spend 10 seconds looking at a self congratulatory splash page from Adobe. Ten seconds is a long time these days, especially when it’s obligatory. We can’t get to the Adobe software until they are through blowing their own horn. And, really, do I need to know the names of all the team members? Unless Adobe is chosen to pay these people in recognition, I think we will just assume that they are marvellous and hard working, and leave it at that.
This is interstellar stupidity. Adobe found a way to use a moment of interaction with the consumer to piss them off. This is the opposite of brand building. This is brand destruction. People are going to do something with those 10 seconds, and most of us use it to think, “who the **** do they think they are?”
So, if they have put this right, good on them. Let us hope they will move on with the rest of the suite of software.
Google:
There was a note today from Lance Ulanoff called “Is Gmail safe?” Lance says:
“Individuals, public advocacy groups and even states are nearly apoplectic over the fact that Google’s completely automated technology will be “reading” mail received in its still-in-beta Gmail free e-mail service.”
Is anyone surprised by this? Google won the search engine game larging by being the most elegant solution to the problem. They were not just the fastest in retrieve times. They were “fastest” in terms of conceptual clarity. We went to the Google home page and we knew just where we where and what to do. (Compare this to the double dog’s breakfast that Yahoo remains.) Google was a compelling brand proposition because it was exactly what we wanted in the form that made it most accessible in every sense of the word.
And now Google is going to read our email. At a stroke they have taken an almost pristine brand and surrounded it with a shadow of doubt. Sure, sure, we don’t really have to worry about privacy. That, from a branding point of view, is not the point. The point is always “who do we think they are?” With Google, that used to be clear. Now it’s not.
Will this make a difference to Google image and brand image? Of course it will. But there are more troubling problems. It raises the possibility that when Google went looking for a way to monitize their opportunity, to build a business model, to capture some of the value they have been creating, they did not have wit enough to factor in what the Gmail option would cost them in terms of the brand equity they were now trying to leverage. This truly is sawing off the limb on which you stand. The further question is: will the markets punish them? When is the Google public offering anyway? I believe some analysts will look at the Gmail option as a reckless spend of the thing they had hoped to buy.
The article by Lance Ulanoff is from PC Magazine Online and it may be found here.
