Another Brand by the Same Name

Richard writes about the rebirth of Woolworth’s in the UK. Removed from the den of serendipity it once was, it’s now been replaced with a rather simple ecommerce site trading on the fading memories of the fledgling brand. In Canada, struggling Woolworth’s were turned into clearance centers called “The Bargain! Shop” in an effort to turn around failing stores. Now, TBS is growing and Woolworth’s is a decade removed.

Same goes for Circuit City in the States, similarly replaced by a website.

And now Starbucks, struggling to regain its credentials as an indie oasis, has decided to give up in spots and is now testing the conversion failing stores into those intended to capture the spirit of independent coffee houses from name to atmosphere, calling the first “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea” and selling beer and wine in the Seattle test location.

"Victrola Coffee Roasters saw the Starbucks people a lot more often.

"They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with these obnoxious folders that said, 'Observation,' " said Victrola owner Dan Ollis."

But these changes do bring up a few questions concerning the nature of brands. Does recognizability trump the skepticism of a brand in a new outfit? Can a shell of a brand be bought and sold as easily today as it was yesterday? How much importance should be placed on the guts of the brand as opposed to just the façade? Or more importantly, can a brand survive by a façade alone?

More pointedly – where is a brand’s meaning derived? And when a brand, like objects, become another data point on our social graphs, can the soul of a brand really be bought and sold? Particularly if the soul itself isn’t really something you can own in the first place.

I suspect the answer to this, as with most things, is not so simple. Meaning is from the product, from the behavior of the employees and management, the color of sign and quality of communication, the proximity to one’s house and the vehemence of opinion from friends. So if a brand’s meaning is a cobbling of experience, maybe it’s just easier sometimes to start with a couple puzzle pieces in our court, or in Starbucks case, removing a couple that work against us, and try again at a starting place of an unknown somewhere rather than a known nowhere.

The Marriage of Advertising and Social Media

At some point we pit advertising and social media against each other when we should have been marrying those core advertising messages with meaningful social development all along. They’re forbidden lovers, those two.

For most brands, there are limitations to what can be accomplished with no advertising at all. Google advertises. Zappos is hiring an ad agency. We know when we advertise sales go up, and when we stop, it’s much more difficult to reach expectations.

This is why we need to get better at wedding these two worlds. Developing and evolving brands to help them become more conversational, meaningful and culturally able to cope with this new landscape, but still using that core of interestingness to focus a brand’s appeal.

The idea of Social Branding starts by slowly transforming away from a world where reach and frequency are king, but still takes the best pieces of what’s worked before.

Particularly for brands with deeply ingrained bureaucracies, we need to slowly and tediously replace the levels of process, the fear of the off-message, the red tape, with transparency, open communication and the encouragement of experimentation.

But those changes can be juiced from the other side as well. Those pretty advertising messages are often a company’s most recognizable outward expression of who they are. As such they certainly can go a long way in helping change how a company sees itself internally, too. Not dissimilar-ly to how you might feel in a new pair of jeans. Certainly not enough to be truly different, but probably enough to make you feel good about those 5 pounds you lost and give you the confidence to lose 5 more.

So this is where we are. We need to find the center of what makes companies interesting and different. We need to help companies build cultures based on sharing and transparency. We can help corporations feel much smaller by understanding how to peel back the layers and reveal the soul. It’s the humanizing elements that allow us to get to building the outward expressions that make the change feel more real to those both on the inside and outside.

It’s that soul that can help us find the motivating message, that focused positioning that moves people to get beyond just liking us and get to liking to buy from us. And from there, we can build the platforms for conversation, insert the people and new processes that make our communication more cumulative and extendable. And only then will our outreach work that way it truly can.

Meet the Yim Gnome. He Wants to Eat You.

Perhaps our relationship ended too quickly. We didn't give each other the proper time and care that allow relationships to survive and thrive. What can I say? Work got in the way. There were fights. He kept trying to eat me.

Plus he still had the stench of Kaitlyn on his breathe, which was difficult to take.

Anyway, with regards to Whrrl and Lauren over at Swarm Collective, I give you my evening with Yim Gnome.

http://whrrl.com/whrrlMini/experience/18060574?s=small&sharer=18060520

Phoenix Phandom

First there was the Phoenix Lisztomania official video.

Then there was the much cooler piece of fandulation with the brat pack mashup.

And finally, similar to a movie remake, here's today's take on the brat pack mashup (called the brooklyn brat pack mashup). Very cool stuff.

It's interesting how these kinds of mashups tend to make for good introductions. For that video, a good amount of views probably just came from Phoenix fans looking to hear more of the music, but all the positive associations with the brat pack allowed new listeners to then shift their interest to the music, as well. Similar to how Roni used this video to transfer interest from a bunch of ad geeks like me.

I would assume the bulk of this mashup stuff isn't necesarily about transferance, but it certainly does seem to have particular implications for brands trying to create higher involvement from a low involvement category.

Social Derivatives Take 3

Thanks to a nice reminder from Gareth, here's quite possibly the ultimate in the social derivative. This time from Cartoon Network's Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends at Macy's turkey day parade with the real-life rickroll. Pretty awesome bit of cultural thievery there.

Social Derivatives take 1.
Social Derivatives take 2.

What is Good Advertising

In describing The Elements of Style, Morgan Meis said,

“language is simple, direct, and expressive… except that it's magical, dynamic, and unfettered. [E.B.] White looks at Thomas Paine's famous sentence, "These are the times that try men's souls." He tries switching it around to, "Times like these try men's souls." It crashes to the ground. Why? We simply do not know. No explanation seems adequate…The first sentence is better and we damn well know it. We don't know why. But we know it, as certain as the hand in front of one's face, the rain falling on the plain.”

I mentioned a shitty derivative execution by Trident with Single Girls, or better known as the mass marketing death knell of the manufactured flash mob.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLj5zphusLw&w=545&h=330]

But why exactly is the Trident video so painful to watch when the T-Mobile ad that begat it is such a pleasure?

We could say that great advertising tends to be the most original. Except T-Mobile was fantasticly thievish, just a little higher up the food chain.

So what does make great advertising? Or great anything? How would you describe something that’s good versus something that’s not, be it movies, television shows, a blog post or a letter to the editor.

Obviously, it depends heavily on the context. TV shows need great acting, or cinematography, emotive writing, whatever. But none of them are the sum of those parts, and generally, the things that work simply have an indescribable spark. And usually that just means they are the product people whose tastes and temperament tend make sparks happen.

In other words, some people got it, and some people don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually the people who outwork and outthink and outunderstand that are the people that "got it." So it probably has less to do with something bestowed from above and more to do with the hustle to make it work.

It’s the people who are able to find the simplicity in a message, without sacrificing the threads of magic and complexity that keep it interesting.

Social Derivatives & Brand Influence

It’s interesting to find how brands can be easily and more directly reflective of cultural blips simply because of the fact that new memes are much easier to discover.

For instance, Noah Kalina used his daily photos as shorthand for his own life’s journey.

The journey which the NBA co-opted for its “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. They similarly told their stories through still photography, using the same score that was originally written for Noah. The Rebel Xsi went back for round three, telling simple stories through photography with a track reminiscent of Noah’s.

Charlie Todd’s Improv Everywhere went sharesville by pausing about 200 or so agents in the middle of Grand Central station and filming the reaction.

T-Mobile spun it by giving it a theme song and a dance routine. Trident took a whack at it with the far less successful Single Ladies flash mob (who’s failure is probably a subject for another post).

I would call these executions Social Derivatives, marked by a semi-obscure creative influence while seamlessly using familiarity to breed favorability.

These social derivatives form a sort of tacit reverse sponsorship. Or a shorthand to say a brand’s human alter-ego might be into the same things the audience is into, while equally reflecting something new, exciting and mostly undiscovered by the mass.

So it’s great when brands can create their own cultural contexts, but it’s very difficult for most brands/people/things to be unabashedly original all of the time. At the very least, most things are borrowed most the time.

But we can use our much larger distributional platforms, our big brand voices, to bring these small interesting pieces of content/conversations/experiences and help them find new audiences who are prone to appreciate them, while giving a nod to all the folks the original material met along the way.

The Socialization of People & Things & Places

It's interesting to see this shift towards brands as a conduit for socializing in physical spaces, or as David Polinchock would call it, the "socialization of place."

From the past week, we've had the lovely sequel to the Life's for Sharing campaign (with strategy work done by the very brainy Richard Huntington).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orukqxeWmM0&w=485&h=300]

And we've seen McDonald's turn a billboard into an enhanced photo opportunity in the very touristy Piccadilly Circus in London. Of course, they've also got a flickr group for you to share photos, as well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjVYVQOOJA8&w=425&h=344]

Reminds me again of David's Brand Experience Lab and they're super cool theater gaming experience called AudienceGame.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6izXII54Qc&w=425&h=344]

Certainly beats an expected reaction to just running a TV advert, no?

Mash the stuff that brings people together with the mobile elements that connect us to objects as well, then we're likely to push these types of experiences even further. To put this in context, I'd highly recommend this talk from Kevin Slavin of area/code from PSFK called "This Platform Called Everyday Life" (via Helge).

http://blip.tv/play/gfNK_YE6g6hf

My favorite quote from the talk, "“Here’s your fucking mobile media plan, it’s a sneaker and a ball and a plant and a truck and a shark."

It's quite fantastic to see these two trends converging so quickly. As we find new ways to bring people together around shared experience, and new ways to create ecosystems between people and things, things to other things and things back to people, there's still a whole bunch of interesting shit left to do for anyone with a little imagination, some empty space and a cell phone.

Find What Makes You Human

What makes a company feel comfortable with communicating and the things that make people likable and interesting are inherently different.

Companies like to stay “on message,” repeating the same kinds of things over and over. They like to look the same wherever you find them. They avoid incongruence and disagreeableness. Redundancy is lauded as an exercise in brand building.

Interesting people, quite obviously, are the opposite of all these things.

As I’ve said before, this is probably a function of both nurture and nature for most companies. Decades of training from marketing types expert in the art of the big idea and a natural leaning to avoid risk rather than embrace it.

Secondarily, we know our rational brains are actually pretty irrational. Often our decisions are a product of emotions rationally explained in the aftermath rather than a step by step pre-purchase process.

Wine tastes better when it costs more. We may buy a t-shirt on sale today, but disrespect the company who sold it the next because of some perceived lack of worth. Blind taste tests provide better information for psychologists to ponder than an indication of what products will eventually sell.

Any brand is an amalgamation of every ad, every product experience, every passing mention, every in-life product placement. It’s everything a person has thought, consciously or not, right or wrong. And now there are more opportunities for people to stumble across you than you towards them.

So while big campaign ideas are still relevant for some objectives, a much more persuasive brand is such because of a series of smaller interactions, a brand formed by the sum of all the good feelings from a series of experiences, complemented by interesting narratives, not existing because of them.

This is our landscape. One in which word-of-mouth is the ultimate driver of purchase in a marketplace full of more inputs than have ever existed. One in which reasons for purchase are anything but rational, and most of the subconscious data has more room for disruption from our pre-packaged persuasions.

We can’t build influence in this space by yelling louder. We must be good listeners, engaging in reciprocal relationships and mindful of the needs of others. And to be talked about, we should do all these in ways that people find worthwhile enough to share. Yes, the sorts of things likable, interesting people might do.

In describing advertising today, Mark Crispin Miller said, “The most obvious metaphor is a room full of people, all screaming to be heard. What this really means, finally, is that advertising is asphyxiating itself.”

So instead of choking ourselves to death, the brands who simply choose to breathe will be the ones who win.

(photo via vw-busman)

Our Emotional Brain.

We think of ourselves as mostly rational beings, separated from the animals based on our ability to reason, to control emotion. It's a subject Jonah Lehrer (if you're not reading his blog, you're missing out big time) tackles in his new book, "How We Decide."

It's an image with roots throughout history, starting with Plato's description of humans as the rational Charioteers of our emotional horses. It continued throughout most of Western culture, from the Cult of Reason to the inception of our country with Jefferson's "governed by reason and reason alone." This is probably because people simply don't like thinking themselves to be something other than rational decision makers, nor do they want to feel duped by irrational emotions. We tend to think of emotional decisions negatively.

But that bicameral description isn't fully accurate. While obviously our rationality can overcome some of our emotional urges, we've also found that we can't really have the rational bits without the emotional either.

In studies of people with damage to the part of the brain involved with emotional processing in regards to decision-making, they actually tend to no longer be able to make decisions because of over-rationality. They obsess over the mundane details of life, from what color of pen to use to what restaurant to choose. After countless hours of weighing options, they've lost the emotions that allow them to use their rationality.

Or think of it this way. Our emotional instincts have been instilled in us over billions of years. Birds, fish, worms, etc. operate on emotional instincts solely. These parts of our brain are much more refined. It's the rationality that's new. Or as JL says:

“These new talents were incredibly useful. But they were also incredibly new. As a result, the parts of the human brain that make them possible - the ones that the driver of the chariot controls - suffer from the same problem that afflicts any new technology: the have lots of design flaws and software bugs. (The human brain is like a computing operating system that was rushed to market.) This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic better than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe computer can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation and correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn’t had the time to work out the kinks.

The emotional brain, however, has been exquisitely refined by evolution over the last several hundred million years.”

This reminds me of Feldwick's missive, "Exploding the message myth." Too much of our advertising is focused on selling rational benefits without catering enough to the emotional underpinning. He describes how a couple funny chimps kept a tea the undisputed category leader for decades. Or consider the explosion of Cadbury's Gorilla, or the goodwill created by Zappos on twitter. These companies are shedding emotional bread crumbs for the audience to use in forming opinions about the brand. It's not about the hard sell, but giving the consumer a greater volume of meaningful short cuts to use in decision making. Short cuts that make you a more viable option, mostly through trust and context, not necessarily price.

So what do we do with this? It means doing more cool stuff. Increasing small, expressive interactions and worrying less about the mass and meaningless. Don't do things that make you look like another cog in the corporate machine, do things that make you a valued member of a society. More reciprocal relationships and less trying to sell shit. In short, our new mission is to simply "be awesome" in every thing we do.

As Marty Neumeier described, "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service or organization."

And our "gut" has everything to do with combining the emotional and the rational. One can't exist without the other.

(photo from kevindooley)