nice to mit you.

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Because today is sharing day

Today's post brought to you by personal [leadership*] branding.

*Prefacing rhetorical aside: Is there a difference between personal branding and personal leadership branding?

As new features began to roll out in addition to rampant-no-privacy-control-facebook-stalking (yes kids, back in my day...), I found, all of a sudden, an audience for whatever would flow through my head-- as, perhaps you can tell, is a whole lot of nothing. Thefacebook.com was a receptacle for braggadocio, contrivances, and other words that get thrown out two years after last SAT.

And so I plugged away, growing more and more elaborate in my presentation of rather mundane events as I became emboldened by supportive and appreciative comments from friends (of course, by my second year, thefacebook had opened up to other schools as well, and I threw exponentially more caution to the winds of nobody-cares).

And then. I overstepped.

What became an exercise in bringing food back to my room because I was really busy working on things (this is permissible) became "stealing food from the cafeteria like nobody cares"-- no part of which was true, mind you-- along with things like "doing one push-up a day for luck."

(I wish this was more serious than trivial so I can use that phrase "hitting rock bottom.")

Suffice it to say, I was publicly confronted by the cafeteria manager, who was actually really really mean and vocal about it. I was just confused--humiliated even-- but I knew that I had to more closely monitor my online presence and think about how other people would interpret what I said. Life lessons: be glad when they happen when stakes are low.

Though probably why I barely know how to use tumblr today. Here is me attaching an article: http://nypost.com/2014/05/01/shaqs-apology-to-disabled-fan-not-good-enough/

Personal branding: live, learn, think, share, repeat.

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Blending Users and Company Messages

In my ill-spent youth, I vicariously lived a rebel's life. Neither purpose nor meaningful achievements did I obtain, but boy did it take a long time.

The fact of the matter is, users today engage with their brands in ways beyond just the immediate point of sale or moment of use-- it can shared, commented on, replied to, and otherwise manipulated from afar.

BlendTec is one of those brands that has unlocked a core truth about the inner child: even though mom tells you no, you want to do it. (Or perhaps it is precisely because she said no...) Blending its way through thousands of dollars' worth of things people normally value, the company taps into that emotional connection of rebellion, discovery, and the glee of controlled demolition.

Putting their blenders up to tortuous tasks the viewers decide, they both pique curiosities without risk (it's hard explaining to loved ones why it was worth breaking a $400+ blender on blending a crowbar) AND prove the performance of their products, 

Customer engagement through two-way communication allows for a collaborative advertising experience. That state of wanting to see more forgives a lot of production values and associated cost, and that desire to simply consume information about the product creates a framework on which to build a mutually-shared myth about the company.

My only question is, will tumblr blend?

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Rebel without.... an Intel Inside sticker

When I was a kid, or really, up until 15 minutes ago, I had always taken the Intel Inside sticker to be a sign of quality. After all, it always appeared to be a slick, shiny metal plate firmly affixed to the surface of the computer. If someone went through all that trouble, it had to mean something.

Of course, I had been duped by that which they in the business call "branding." To compensate, I decided to stage an experiment, to study the science portion of branding: what does a computer without the Intel badge look like?

Here is Exhibit A, my current laptop without alteration:

Here it is devoid of all stickers:

Feels kinda naked, hunh? Like a generic computer? Then there's the issue of Intel in conjunction with Windows. Does just the Intel logo by itself or just the Windows logo by itself look more like the essence of PC-ness?

Perhaps it is just that it's my computer, but both Intel and Windows stickers together looks most natural (and to me, the Intel sticker by itself looks better than Windows sticker by itself).

What are your impressions?

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Furberry

Interesting thought experiment: even if you mess with Burberry's name, you understand "Furberry" to attempt to lampoon the element of luxury associated with Burberry. Which is to say, the attempt to lampoon a luxury brand actually makes the "luxuriousness" of that brand more apparent and therefore stronger.

(As an aside, Burberry started from a 21-year-old setting up a fabric shop, inventing new fabrics, and expanding from there. What am I doing with my life?)

So let's explore this idea further.

Now given these images from Mario Testino's 1998 shoot of Stella Tennant (http://www.rag-pony.com/2011/04/burberry-fall-1998.html), if I were to tell you that Furberry was the brand represented by the horse, would you find it simply a lampoon? (Of course, there is no check (mottling of the horsehide?), but there is a strong sense of well-to-do country living at the very least.) Is this brand imagery strong enough, or do celebrities/royalty need to be seen using the product in order for a luxury brand identity to develop?

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The manifold expression of brand-ness

If we are what we eat, do we select what we eat based on who we are, or do we select things to eat that make us into who we want to be? And does it matter that what we eat makes us an "us" that others will judge to either be consistent or inconsistent with our current self? If I am Mr. Chubby and I eat a salad but ask for extra dressing, what is the understanding of who I am? Such is the brand manifold of gluttony, and a puzzle not worth solving.

For companies, though, thinking about who they are on these temporal and constituent aspects results in interesting collaborations today. Case in point: a collaboration between Fuji (digital cameras) and Globe-Trotter (heritage luxury luggage brand).

(Picture from http://www.photographyblog.com/news/fujifilm_and_globe-trotter_unveil_worldwide_exclusive_at_harrods/)

A few years back, Fujifilm, known for good picture quality, changed their design language to harken back to an earlier era of camera form factor, rooted in metals and angles unlike many point-and-shoots today. From simply a good camera, they became a sexy good camera, something they always thought they were. 

On the other hand, Globe-Trotter has been producing "vulcanized fibreboard" (layers of paper that have undergone a special process of destruction-resilience) luggage for decades (Winston Churchill had their luggage, and the Queen is a big fan). Globe-Trotter is unable to change over to carbon fiber, for example, because it changes their brand heritage, but they are able to stay technically relevant by careful selection of collaborative partners.

Together, these companies launched an exclusive collection at Harrod's, bringing together colliding and complementing meanings of luxury, technological excellence, traditional craftsmanship, and exclusivity. At some point, there may need to be a dimension orthogonal to the brand manifold vector space in this example, but the fact remains that a brand can shift its own meaning while avoiding channel conflict by changing the way it engages with other brands, in addition to changing or expanding along the brand relationship spectrum itself.

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This is a meta-post. It is amazing how for a split second, I felt like I had achieved something special, and to share this would be in actuality advertisement for tumblr. Given the next-to-nothing cost of digital goods, companies today have more outlets than ever to remind people of who they are, what they stand for, and how users fit into that paradigm.

Touche, tumblr. Touche.

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Kit o'Menities: the subtle brand reminder

I have been looking for a good piece of carry-on luggage and just so happened to come upon a Lufthansa Rimowa brand amenity kit. Rimowa is a German luggage brand known for its polycarbonate designs and high quality, and here they had recreated a little box for many airlines' first-class cabins. It turns at, aside from Singapore Airlines using Givenchy at one point, amenity kits are now becoming more focused in terms of luxury-brand partners and specific design.

Photo source: http://thepointsguy.com/2013/11/flight-review-lufthansa-first-class-747-400/

Photo source: http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2010/11/18/1225955/399009-singapore-air.jpg

So it turns out the cost of these amenity kits varies from $4 to $30, and requires logistical finagling at times. And for what purpose? Aside from the fact that customers may have paid thousands of dollars for seats, the Singapore Airlines in-flight experience (for example) gets to go home with the passenger as a souvenir. The partnering brands (Kiehl's, Bvlgari, Salvatore Ferragamo, and more of the like) all tap into the more aspirational/luxurious well-being desires of higher-end clientele. It, in fact, isn't actually [only] a ploy to advertise for other brands and gain revenue, but it is adding a tactile reminder to the service intangibles, and so together, the experience lasts in the memory longer. Some airlines have even moved to iPad case to more daily interaction.

So even though I have no need to fly let alone fly first-class, do I want to do so just to get an amenity kit (the cool manly version) in addition to great service? Yes. Oh god yes.

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North Dakota called. It wants to socially facilitate the lightening of your wallet.

Wine, the glamorous frontier of sophistication and well-heeled intoxication. Traditionally a European endeavor (and by traditionally, I mean centuries ago), that Old [World] guard was shocked-- SHOCKED!-- into acknowledgement of the quality of New World (Americas and Oceania) wines.

Today, Concho y Toro (a Chilean, banner-bearing New World producer) has not only learned from the winemaking techniques of the Old World, but also its pricing techniques as well.

Observe the Liv-ex 100 (think of this as the wine world's blue chip stock index, available at liv-ex.com (do not leave out the hyphen)):

Admire how the index has maintained a level above 200 for the post-recession recovery. Despite falling back down as of late--as people realize that Lafite is really only marginally more than some rather excellent grape juice-- bottle prices for these ultra-luxury range from $200+ to an eye-watering $2,000+. And these are just more recent vintages.

Teacher: What is the lesson to be learned here, young North Dakota?

North Dakota: People are also impressed by the price?

Teacher: Yes! Luxury is part reality, part perception!

Concho y Toro: I couldn't help but overhear, let me do that too for my portfolio. (Pricing info from wine-searcher.com (hyphen optional here).)

Concho y Toro: Well, shoot. I can only move so much at the low end since this segment likes to buy wines with little animals on the labels. Let me try pricing bumps at the next tier up...

Concha y Toro: Oh sweet malolactic fermentation, there is hope yet! Our formerly-sort-of-Super-Premium labels begin pushing Super-Premiums to Ultra-premiums, and formerly Ultra-premiums can push into Icon territory in terms of wine prices!

Concha y Toro: So I guess the lesson here is... branding perception is also driven by pricing, and market acceptance of those prices!

Teacher: Well, duh, that's what I just told you.

Concha y Toro: Shhh, listen to that money come in.

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Rogers: my factors could beat up your factors

In Everett Rogers' world, we can size up the rate of diffusion and adoption potential of a brand/product/innovation by considering relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability.

Let's go a step further, on a visual level, what would that analysis would look like? Well, for a peanut butter slice, a silver bandage, satellite radio, and iSmell, ranked in three qualitative high-low steps, it might look something like this.

Disagree with the ratings if you would like, but I only showed that to talk about the understanding of the ratings. If you saw those shapes, what would you think? (Yes, in theory, to make things easier to understand, I could normalize "complexity" to be "ease of use" so that the outer-most "high" ring would be best, but this is MIT. Deal with it.)

We can start thinking about general categories of potential rate of diffusion and adoption:

(There is overlap from trialability to compatibility between All-Star and Snuggie.) This sort of pattern recognition leads to some understanding of product/tech potential. All-Stars would clearly be the most successful. Gadgets are the fringe/early technologies with few adopters (unscrewing hotel room phone jacks for dial-up) before things get mainstream. Snuggies (the green boomerang) are a quiet seller, because although limited in world-changing potential, they get into people's lives easily (and arguably relative advantage could be a notch higher).

The chindogu category is for stuff that you just laugh at because they are so ridiculous (that little purple lump of skewed goodness in the graph above). A chindogu is a Japanese concept of a completely useless and yet almost-viable product (there are a whole set of rules around them, which can be found here http://www.tofugu.com/2012/02/20/chindogu-useless-japanese-inventions/, which is also where the following photo is from).

Back to the four items. Looks like satellite radio and silver bandages are okay, somewhere between All-Stars and gadgets. iSmell is almost in gadget territory, but a hybrid of gadget and chindogu. Let's call it a "dodget," as in "stay away." Peanut butter slices are almost chindogu-- an odd little lump that could almost fit into your daily routine. So close, yet so, so far.

Moral of the story? Don't be a chindogu.

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Even if you didn't see the lower right...

...you would still know which beer this was. Even though the long-neck bottle is a distinguishable feature of Corona, a simple word association game of "beer" + "lime" would most likely yield "Corona" a vast majority of the time.

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This is MIT.

This is not a picture of me.

As a first post-- a rather meta one at that-- I have decided to think about MIT and branding, in preparation for the MIT Branding class. MIT has been able to develop its own particular brand of quirkiness and how'd-they-do-that? For example, why put Breaking Bad attire on a statue? Nay, says MIT, why not put Breaking Bad on a statue!

More importantly, the man is made of math.

The interesting thing is while the institution may pick and choose the decor and direction of its resources, it is the students that have taken on a tradition of "hacking" everything in sight. So the brand of MIT appears to have come from a decentralized series of activities that have coalesced and built on previous efforts into a uniform identity. Do the persistence and power of the brand, then, come from attention paid to the culture of the university subsequent to grand achievement, or do the two go hand-in-hand?

Welcome to 15.846, said I to myself.