Artful Realist

Live or Memorex?

Back in the days of tape decks, Memorex ran a series of advertisements featuring Ella Fitzgerald that asked consumers to judge whether the music they heard was live or Memorex? It was a successful campaign that lasted more than a decade. Today, consumers might instead be asked, “is it real, or is it branded?”

The US consumer has been conditioned to focus far too much on the cachet of brands. Now, make no mistake, I make a living from creating and managing brands. There’s a part of me that celebrates the power we’ve ascribed to leading brands, but with any power there’s also danger. If I had $1 for every time a client or a potential client asked me if a good brand campaign could compensate for weaknesses in the client’s product, service, or corporate culture … well, let’s just say I’d have a bigger savings account balance.

The truth is that this mode of thinking isn’t sustainable. I believe that Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party are just two sides of the same coin. Consumers are angry. They feel they’ve been duped one time too many. They’re furious at their government (i.e., the lowest Congressional approval ratings in history) and they’re suspicious of promises (i.e., the odd back and forth of this year’s Republican primary).

Now, more than ever, brands must focus on the substance of their offering. Know what you promise. Don’t promise too much for the sake of winning attention. Promise only what you can deliver. Better yet, under-promise, and over-deliver. There’s nothing new in this formula. Your father very well may have given you the same counsel. But few brands are practicing this approach. The ones that do will be the ones the market rewards. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires management to forego lucrative opportunities that might put the promise in doubt. It requires investment in parts of the business most managers find boring (i.e. human resources, infrastructure, distribution systems, etc.). And, it requires a strong focus on customer satisfaction. The customer is not always right, but when they’re consistently unsatisfied they won’t be customers anymore.

When you manage your brand correctly, your customer should see no difference between real and branded.

Brand Preference, Experience and Memory

Brand marketers often fall prey to a massively faulty assumption. They assume that consumers are rational. I’ve sat through many detailed client presentations, replete with volumes of data, wherein a brand platform is justified on the basis of a logical argument that will convince consumers the client’s brand is better than a competitor’s. They believe that touting the virtues of their brand attributes will persuade a consumer to try, switch or buy more. It makes logical sense, they say. When the consumer weighs the choice, we’ll come out ahead.

But consumers don’t really behave that way. I was reminded of this during a debate over photography with my 13 year-old son. We are both shutter bugs, but our brand affinities are divided. We both started shooting in grade school. I developed an affinity for the Nikon brand in high school, when I would skimp on other teenage luxuries to buy good Nikon glass. My son Luc’s affinity started a little earlier. His school uses Canon equipment in the photo lab, and as a result, he’s become quite a fan. In truth, there is very little difference between the brands. Both brands offer professional grade cameras. Both have legions of famous followers. But neither Luc nor I will concede this point. I will probably go to my grave believing that Nikon is the only brand for a serious craftsman. He’ll probably photograph that experience with a Canon camera.

The irrational consumer is more than a hypothesis. It’s a well-researched reality. In his excellent study, “Product Experience is Seductive”, first published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2002, Stephen Hoch demonstrated that consumers are easily, and often erroneously, persuaded by their brand experience. Hoch describes four aspects of experience that color our brand preference:

1. Experience is engaging
2. Experience is nonpartisan
3. Experience is pseudodiagnostic
4. Experience is endogenous

It is the last two aspects of his study that I find most intriguing. Hoch showed that consumers have a tendency to distort their diagnosis of brand information. If they have a preference for a certain brand, they tend to color any brand comparisons with the preference in mind. This finding flies in the face of conventional branding wisdom, which argues that consumers rationally employ Bayesian logic to purchase decisions. Hoch cites a 1998 study that found that “when equivocal information about two brands is acquired attribute-by-attribute, the evaluation of the next attribute is distorted to support the emergent leader.”

Hoch also describes a fascinating consumer tendency—the tendency to prefer what one already has. “After a decision has been made, consumers engage in a variety of tactics including avoiding negative information and attitude change.” Therein lies the heart of the debate with my son. Despite evidence that might suggest the Canon platform is a viable alternative for me as I prepare to upgrade my camera body, I was unwilling to consider any brand other than Nikon. And Luc scoffed at my lack of sophistication. Surely, he argued, times had changed and Canon was the clear choice. Fathers and sons live for such debates. Brand marketers fail to recognize their underlying message. Brand loyalty often roots in experience, not price/value or quality differentials. Sometimes, the loyalty is tied to a consumer self concept that is validated through ongoing experience—an experience that seduces the consumer and frames their point of view.

Promise or Position?

Two words compete for governance over brands. Is a brand built on a position or is it built on a promise? Promise has become the word of choice in recent years. In fact, my own firm adheres to the promise philosophy of brand strategy. But I might suggest that the two words have different meanings, and should be applied at different times.

A position is a particular point of view or attitude about something. Thus, when a brand is positioned, it is constructed with a outlook. A well-positioned brand can take any subject and interpret it within the worldview of the brand. Positionings are often well-suited for products, where the brand use and scope of interaction is very limited.

On the other hand, a promise is a commitment. It’s not just a point of view. It’s a declaration of intended behavior. That’s why a brand promise is better suited to corporate brands or causes. A brand promise can be applied to many subjects. It doesn’t interpret these subjects as much as it assures you it will do something in relation to them.

Demarketing

A friend turned me on to a great story on Studio 360 about signage for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site. Here’s the dilemma: how do you design a symbol that will instantly communicate ‘danger’ to future generations? Think about it. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years. The site needs signs that don’t rot or deteriorate rapidly, and those signs must warn future archeologists about the dangers of the treasure inside without much explanation. The future explorers might not speak our language. How do you create a mark that intuitively deters people? It’s not as easy as you might think. A skull and crossbones sounds good on the surface, but it’s also a mark that is associated with pirates … and treasure. By trying to forewarn the treasure hunter, you might actually incentivize him to dig to his death. The challenge reminds me of a great article penned by Sidney J. Levy and Philip Kotler back in 1971. In “Demarketing. Yes, Demarketing,” they asked somewhat hypothetically how marketing might apply to reverse market situations. We’re very familiar with the conventional use of marketing—trying to drive demand for products and services when there is ample supply. But they asked if marketing, and branding, could be used to discourage customers. Certainly, some marketers have used this in a widespread fashion with dangerous products, such as cigarettes. Levy and Kotler described the tricky process of using demarketing to reduce demand in unfavorable business segments, and they described the ethical issues in doing so. But, while much of their work focused on marketing practices and policies, they didn’t address the big symbolic question: how do you create a brand that discourages product use. It’s worth contemplating. Sometimes, thinking about questions such as these helps the marketer to better the brands that must do the opposite.

On the Subject of Brand Narrative

This is from a presentation I gave earlier in the week to a large technology company. It’s a mix of legacy content from Legendary Brands and new content from my upcoming book, Brandlore.

The Dark Side

One of the most fascinating ways to study brand equity is to study the deviants—the “dark side” of branding. For anyone who thinks that a brand doesn’t have power, look no further than the Mongols, an outlawed US motorcycle gang.

The Mongols took the extraordinary step of securing a trademark for their logo. The brandmark is synonymous with trouble, so much so that the US Department of Justice successfully petitioned for, and was granted, control of the trademarked logo. As a result, the government has the right to seize possession of any item bearing the gang’s logo. The landmark case is causing a first amendment fire storm, but I think branding is the really interesting part of the story. First, you have an example of a government taking control of trademark rights and using those rights to enforce the law. Second, you have a great case of a legendary brand — a mark that is associated with a belief system that drives a narrative and a culture. It is a great example of a brand as the centerpiece of a narrative and social conflict. The brand can literally get you arrested—or at least detained.

Why I love the Miller High Life campaign

Too many brands and advertisers try to sell you on cultural norms — you should use our product because everyone else does. They try to pander to social paranoia. There’s nothing I love more than a brand that says, “maybe you’re not for us.” The new Miller High Life campaign achieves that goal. It takes a decidedly strong point of view with a comic twist. It’s tied to sports and manhood and common sense, and it delights in every way. I may actually be thirsty for a Miller.

Cinemax Antes Up

I scoured the web to find some examples, but the campaign is still too new. Check out the new Cinemax rebranding. In the high stakes world of premium cable, Cinemax has finally stepped up to the plate. It’s too early to tell whether or not their programming and scheduling will measure up, but the new brand campaign is clever and distinct.
In case you were wondering, they have not abandoned their late night platform. I’m not sure it fits with their new positioning, but it’s there, nonetheless.

More Than Voice Alone

I spend a fair amount of time coaching clients on how to apply their brand voice. Brand voice is most often associated with a brand’s personality. It guides the tone and style of verbal and visual identity. It’s easiest to understand brand voice when reviewing copy. Sometimes, the way the brand chooses to express itself in words just feels wrong. When that happens, we say the brand is not “in voice.”

Sometimes, the words a brand uses are out of voice but the brand experience still feels consistent. When that happens, it’s usually the visual system kicking in. Because our minds are wired to read more from pictures than words, we skip over the inconsistencies in the verbal expression and read the visual elements that are consistently in voice. Which leads me to the topic of this short post.

As more brands use digital media to connect with their customers, the compensatory yin and yang of verbal and visual identity are often separated. An email, SMS message, or chat room cannot always convey the visual crutches that bolster poorly chosen words. The simple solution is to pay more attention to the words, but then there’s the issue of context. When we speak to one another in person, we can read each other’s body language. That helps to provide cues about our intentions and our state of mind. On the telephone, you can hear vocal inflections that convey meaning. Try reading context from an SMS message. This very limitation is the origin of the dreaded smiley.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how a brand develops digital body language — mechanisms to compensate for the limitations of the medium. I’ve been impressed by W Hotels new SMS service for its most loyal customers. Somehow, they seem to achieve the right tone and style despite the fact that there is no hip imagery or house music to parlay the brand. The question is: how does a B2B brand achieve the same result? What do you think?

Blast Off

The (maybe not so) latent nerd in me still gets fired up about NASA and the space program. These photos of a recent Discovery launch are a great insider’s look at how the orbiter is assembled, prepped and launched.

I’m fascinated by the NASA brand. It has such a rich narrative legacy, and yet in recent years, it seems to have lost some of its luster. The agency is still as vibrant and exciting as it was 20 years ago, but the brand system is falling apart. It’s time for some branding.