Cookies 'n Ice Cream (and Cultural Context)
I'm currently reading Brooke Gladstone's thoroughly enjoyable graphic novel "The Influencing Machine". The premise of the book -- opposite of the title -- is that media is dependent on advertising, which is dependent on an audience, meaning media outlets cannot be sustained without an audience. Nothing new there, but Gladstone posits that this revenue structure dictates media's role in society: media reflects us, it doesn't make us. (She does, however mention that "we're dealing with a mess of mirrors" (think: the mirror maze in Enter the Dragon) and that we most likely see ourselves only in a fraction of what is reflected back to us due to all the distorsions.)
So what does this have anything to do with the way we market our products? I'm going to make the connection between a concept from the book, one about brand purpose and tie them back to an anthropology-based view of brand strategy.
Concept #1: Daniel Hallin's "Donut Theory" (see comic strip at the top) is a theory that describes where on the media spectrum journalists choose to do their work. That's the "what" of coverage: it's fluid and varies across time and place. Gladstone argues that objectivity (with respect to the "how"), while noble, is an extremely difficult thing to maintain given journalists' investment in a story. What we should strive for instead, and what technology has made possible (nowadays, hiding, is impossible) is transparency, or, being privy to the context that surrounds the journalist and the story itself to better frame its consumption (the "why").
Concept #2: PaaS, or Product as a Service. Your product becomes a brand the moment it enters culture, i.e. not when it's being put together on an assembly line, but once people start using it, sharing it and talking about it. I'm paraphrasing Simon Sinek in his excellent TED talk about "How Great Leaders Inspire Action", but his main thesis is that you can't affect behavior or inspire loyalty with functionality. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." What is implied is that when people talk about your brand, they're actually talking about themselves. If you agree, all brand strategy should start from the center, "why" (your purpose), and work its way outward to your product, the "what".
It's akin to the case John Winsor and Alex Bogusky make in "Baked In", that brands should bake their marketing into the product itself. This happens all too infrequently, and marketing often ends up being a veneer that's slapped onto the product as an afterthought. There are four options that explain how the disjointed product design and marketing processes "work together":
1. The product has no story, and neither does the marketing.
2. The product has not story, but the marketing makes one up anyway (that's what many agencies are unfortunately tasked with doing)
3. The product has a story, but the marketing tells a different one (or many different ones)
4. The product has a story, and the marketing makes it sing. Amen.
Technology has changed the game for brands; everyone is more connected than ever before, this connectedness has given us the possibility of scale, and in a connected world, reputation matters. To all crappy brands without a story or with a fake one: consumers are going to call your bluff, and publicly, and there are going to be repercussions. (Sometimes they'll blow over quickly and people won't even remember it happened because of the ephemerality of much of our rapid-fire communication, but tread carefully.)
Let's look at the "why", or the raison d'etre, that grounds both journalism and product development a little closer.
Cultural Innovation Strategy: I'm a huge fan of this book because it debunks the traditional blue ocean myth and phony emotion-association marketing. It offers a cultural framework that elevates cultural context and presents a way for brands to be relevant. Every social disruption is an ideological opportunity for brands to flip off cultural orthodoxy and deliver an innovative cultural expression by way of myths and cultural codes.
The caveat here, is that that our world is constantly changing and evolving, which means that brands need to be offering outlets for new cultural tensions all the time.
At a first glance, Ben and Jerry's and Oreo appear to have a similar strategy: identify issues of the day and build your marketing around that. But Ben and Jerry's is a brand that baked the story into its product from day one whereas Oreo doesn't seem to have a real point of view. Rather, it's adopted this "steeped in culture" strategy for its 100th anniversary campaign and work with DraftFCB. Oreo routinely illustrates the headline of the day (recently, Spain's resounding Euro Cup victory), giving it an Oreo "twist" (get it??), garnering thousands of responses on FB. I'm not sure if these "appropriations" -- including the Pride one -- go beyond providing great "imagebytes" for their owned media channels (which is still commendable) or if these pop culture representations of the famous cookie somehow align with the many ways in which Oreos have been consumed since their inception. I mean, they have been a huge hit with families, since, oh, 100 years ago.
Ben and Jerry's, on the other hand, was very much borne out of the Diggers/countercultural/back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s; they called their homemade ice cream "Ice Cream for the People", eventually set aside 7.5% of annual profits towards their environmental/social foundation and took on giants like Pillsbury when they tried to put them out of business with strong arm tactics. So when they came up with new themed ice cream flavors (such as Cherry Garcia, an ode to Jerry Garcia and tongue-in-cheek jab at Reagan's nationwide crusade against drugs), there was already a strong contextual environment that could be understood and embraced by Ben and Jerry fans as something much larger than just a tasty pint.
Norms shift. What was once the sphere outside the donut (deviance), becomes the donut (legitimate controversy), becomes the hole inside the donut (mainstream).
For all the risk that brands think they incur by living on the edge (of the donut), what was once deemed controversial and charged with cultural friction, eventually becomes mainstream. Take for example, the opening of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", whose harsh dissonances, unusual choreography and political setting caused a riot that put an abrupt end to the performance. That same piece is now considered a classic; it's performed by a throng of boring orchestras to even less daring subscribers and is even featured in Disney's Fantasia. Quite the departure from the screaming and ruckus it cause in Russia in 1913.
The irony, though, is that the benefits of endorsing a budding, but still fringe, ideology dissipate once this ideology becomes the cultural orthodoxy.
So don't sit this one out on the sidelines; the risk of being milquetoast and standing for nothing far outweighs that of wholeheartedly believing in something and walking the walk to prove it, even if that "something" isn't yet the norm. The great brands embrace a form of deviancy, and share their story at every connection point in their ecosystem (intentionally leaving little seams in their narrative for consumers to jump in).
To go back to "The Influencing Machine", Gladstone references Dante's Great Refusal and all those anguished souls, the neutrals, who are barred from heaven and hell because they refused to commit themselves and take a position.
You can't have your Cookies n' Ice Cream and eat them too.
