Culture is my business

At the age of 22, I had a net worth of $45 and was chauffeuring for the Saudi royal family in Paris while studying semiotics at the Sorbonne. That’s when I got the inspiration to be a Brand Anthropologist. I realized I already had an exotic population at hand in which I was fully immersed as an “outsider participant,” my own posh clients. I worked on mapping the cultural code of luxury projecting how it would evolve into the future and found myself, years later, serving as an anthropological consultant on this subject for high-profile marketers at Diageo, Bulgari and Nestle Waters. Along the way, I’ve been a frequent speaker at the Future Trends conference and have served as a consulting futurist at Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve and the Wharton School. Today, I’m traveling the world as a Brand Anthropologist inside the WPP network and my client list has expanded to include Bacardi, Philips, Virgin, Diesel and Coca-Cola. My work in recent months took me to Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow, Cape Town and back to Paris where my voyage of discoveries first started. I’ve learned that every marketer, whether for a corporate brand or one’s own brand, has to learn how to transcend the psychopathic narcissism which always plays some part in their drive to promote themselves. This gives them a good chance of creating content that is not perceived as merely self-serving. This blog seeks to open new levels of insight about why we do - and buy - the things we do and what that teaches us about the cultural codes that subtly bind us together. Tweet

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New Insights for Big Brands at SXSW 2019

This year's SXSW was one of the most revealing I've ever attended (this was my seventh time). I'm sharing here three layers of insight I gathered: human life, brand strategy and measures of effectiveness.

With a new sense of how dangerous our screens are to our well being, progressive brands are putting a new emphasis on experience and culture in their marketing spend.

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“What to Read” is actually “How to Imagine.”

An unconventional reading list for ambitious marketers and planners I went to the book launch of Velocity: Seven Laws for a World Gone Digital a few years back. I had my $20.

I often get asked for book recommendations. Here is a list organized by ways of imagining things.

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Irrationally Successful - how to make a rational benefit work in irrational categories

What we know we ought to do and what we actually do are very different things in the lives of humans. Everyone who has ever tried to improve themselves learns this humbling truth. 

People who make big and positive changes in their lives often say that the secret is to trick yourself into making these changes. If you focus your energy on avoiding what tempts you, then you’re still focused on the temptation. You need to find something else to wrap your busy mind around. It’s better to spend your energy on a new good habit than it is to “white knuckle” your renunciation of a bad one.  

Knowing that something is better for us is pretty much useless. We have to fall in love with the change we’re making. Emotion drives us far more deeply than knowledge.

Why wouldn’t this also apply to brands as well? 

If you have a new and improved version of something that involves making a sacrifice, wouldn’t you also try to trick your prospect into seeing it as something they must have on its own terms?  

But many marketers lose sight of this. They are earnest and well-intentioned. They want to talk to consumers the same way they talk about their product or service inside their own organizations. “This is such a good idea. Everyone will be so much better off when they see how good it is. Isn’t that great? We are a force for good in the world.” 

Well-intentioned…but potentially deluded. 

Let’s look at five campaigns which all got stellar results by ignoring the rational argument and instead “tricked” their consumer into buying into it.

1. “Keep Texas Beautiful” becomes “Don’t Mess with Texas.”

Among the different states of America, Texas has one of the feistier cultural identities. In fact, it’s looked at to this day by the rest of the country as a swaggering, loud and assertive culture. And Texans take that in their stride.

But this was not on the minds of the Texas Transportation Authority. They were looking at their highways strewn with trash in the 1980s and they were deeply ashamed of their pitiful state.

They got a sizeable budget to run an anti-littering campaign. Signs would go up on highways and appeal to Texans, proud of their state’s natural beauty, that would say “Keep Texas Beautiful.” 

And they even got an ad agency, one of Texas’s best, GSD&M to agree to create the campaign.

They conducted research into who has the highest rates of littering. The research turned up a prospect they called “Bubbas”: young men 18-35, masculine, brash, gun and pickup truck owners. They loved their state but didn’t connect with the idea of “Keep Texas Beautiful.” To them, it sounded like their grandmother talking and they weren’t thinking of their grandmother as they barreled down the highway with an empty beer bottle in their hands.

GSD&M conceived of a completely different message. “Don’t Mess with Texas.” And their target loved it. It has an implicit “F@*k You” to anyone who doesn’t “get” what Texas is all about. It appealed to their pride in order to compel them to make a humble behavior change. 

When GSD&M presented the campaign, their client, still not really understanding the strategy, directed them to add the word “Please” before “Don’t Mess with Texas” so that it wouldn’t be rude. Fortunately, the agency prevailed and such a tragic mistake never happened.

Result: within 4 years, the campaign reduced littering by a staggering 72%. 

2. Las Vegas: “More than Gambling” becomes “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.”

Las Vegas was one of the top vacation destinations in the U.S. but it wanted more. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority looked at how their city stacked up in the minds of vacation decision makers compared to cruise lines, Caribbean resorts, Hawaii and Cancun. Their research showed that the number one equity for Las Vegas was gambling and not everybody wanted to go somewhere just to gamble.

“We need a campaign that says there’s a lot more in Vegas than gambling,” they told their agency, R&R Partners. “Show people our modern airport, all the great entertainers we have in town, the superb hotels and fine dining, the spectacle of the beautiful desert and surrounding mountains. Find a catchy way to say, “Vegas is more than casinos,’ there’s your brief.”

But R&R Partners ignored the implicit direction to “clean up” Las Vegas and instead showed the client their research into what Vegas meant to people who went there: feeling more free to be someone they couldn’t be at home.

They came up with the idea of “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” They sidestepped the rational message of “more than gambling” and instead talked about Vegas like it was an anonymous club, some kind of “Eyes Wide Shut” experience. It neither talked about nor ignored gambling. Gambling became a subtext in a different kind of drama, one of escaping the normal boundaries of everyday life.

Result: the campaign grew holiday traffic to Las Vegas by 26%.

3. Miller Lite: from “beer with no carbohydrates” to “Tastes Great! Less Filling!”

There’s a reason it’s called a “beer belly.” For beer, such a marvelously comforting and sociable beverage, is loaded with carbohydrates. Drink 2 or 3 every day, and soon you’ll be sporting your own distended gut.

So the first drinkable beer with reduced carbohydrates should have made its owner a fortune, no?

No so fast, Gablinger’s Beer taught us. This was a good tasting beer that went out and told male beer drinkers, “Here’s a beer with essentially no carbohydrates.” And they pointed out, “It won’t fill you up.” But it bombed. And its flop convinced Anheuser Busch, the owners of the leading brand Budweiser to stay away from this category because its research showed that “real men don’t drink light beer.”

The category’s No. 2, Miller Brewing Company, saw AB’s reticence as an opening. They could do better than Gablinger’s and if they played their cards right, create a new sub-category and benefit from first mover advantage. They created a brand called Lite, which at first was kept separate from the Miller brand but, once successful would be integrated and known, as it is today, as Miller Lite.

Their agency, McCann at first, then Backer Spielvogel, came up with a way to position Lite beer as a brand “real men” could drink. They hired a whole bevy of famous athletes, ones known for their masculine charisma and jokey persona, and place them in old-fashioned pubs, taverns and corner bars. They would then engage in a favorite drinking pastime which is divide into teams and have a spirited argument. But this one wouldn’t be about which city has the best football team. It would be about what makes Lite beer so good. “Tastes great!” one team would shout while the other team would fire back, “Less filling!”

Now the “less filling” part of the proposition spoke to the primordial beer drinker. When you’re having a good time with your buddies, like the guys in the ads were clearly doing, why would you only drink one beer? With Miller Lite, you could keep on drinking and not feel heavy. It sounds stupid when it’s spelled out and you’re not even conscious of it when you watch the fun. But the message is planted. It’s not a “considerate” or “progressive” way of drinking beer. It’s a license to enjoy beer even more.

Result: Miller created the single biggest new category of beer in 50 years and established market dominance in this space. It would take the overall leader, Budweiser, more than ten painful years to catch up with Miller Lite and get its “fair share” for Bud Light.

4. Whole Foods Markets: from “health food store” to “Whole Paycheck.”

The story of Whole Foods Markets is not about an ad campaign but about a positioning created through the shopper experience.

In the 1970s, the first “health food stores” began to appear on college campuses and in neighborhoods with high concentrations of liberal-minded creative class. They were independent retailers who eschewed the colorful and manipulative-looking displays that mainstream grocers used. They would only sell foods that were rationally good for you, sold in sincere but unadorned packaging. Their shoppers were not there for hedonistic pleasure but to connect with their higher selves and affirm their belief in lives of health and sustainability.

In the 80s many progressive brands began to realize that there would be a fusion of the “fancy foods” and “health food” and began to make packaging with more of a sense of artisanal pleasure. And the first chains began to appear – including Whole Foods.

Whole Foods rode the trend and maneuvered into market dominance by making the shopping experience more beautiful and pleasurable than mainstream groceries. Having a Whole Foods store in your neighborhood became a badge of pride for the creative class everywhere. And Millennials began to jokingly refer to Whole Foods as “Whole Paycheck” for they knew that the experience of shopping there was so intoxicating you would not only buy much more than you had planned you would spend more just for the pleasure of bringing home absolutely perfect olives, cheeses and breads.

Result: the market leader in an entirely new space and one of the single most profitable grocery chains that has ever existed.

5. Durex: from “think about STDs and unwanted pregnancy” to “turn off to turn on”

The rational argument for wearing condoms is so powerful yet many men who should be wearing one aren’t. Having sex, for men, is a game of confidence. Anything that deflates the mood immediately drains away the spirit which propels lovemaking. Which is why the rational argument doesn’t work. It compels the executive brain to contemplate consequences at precisely the moment when the executive brain needs to be silent and let the reptilian brain take over.

So talking about a brand’s performance in comfortably preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancy is not going to create a strong consumer bond with the brand.

Which is why Reckitt Benckiser invests in campaigns which avoid the rational benefit of condoms and instead celebrate the joy of sexual intimacy. 

The enemy is their latest global drive is not disease and unwanted pregnancy, it’s our mobile phones. The insight is that the mood for sex takes time to develop and if we’re all wrapped up in our texts, emails and Instagram, we never get there. Hence the slogan “Turn Off to Turn On.” (And the theme of “PLAY” for their mobile activations at music festivals perfectly fits this.) It’s ingenious, really. Suddenly, we’re thinking tenderly about real intimacy, without getting too high-minded about it (this is a condom after all). And we’re not thinking at all about the supposed rational benefit of condoms.

Result: Durex has achieved number one market share globally.

Putting it work for your brand

So what do these case histories teach us about being “irrationally successful?”  Four rules of thumb stand out:

Check your brand purpose at the door. It’s great that you’ve got one. It gives your brand motive and soul. But be careful not to wear it on your sleeve and forget about the importance of being relevant and creative. Dove made that mistake with its “all shapes and sizes” packaging and it backfired. Pepsi did it with Kendall Jenner and the same happened. Having a brand purpose doesn’t give you an all access pass to your prospect’s interest and acceptance.

Understand why people use your category. What are the deep drivers? Have you studied these as deeply as the problem you’re trying to solve? How do these deep drivers relate to their own identity? Miller Lite knew that beer drinking was all about male bonding and their campaign celebrated that. Las Vegas figured out that a holiday is all about feeling free and found a way to embed its own unique proposition in that feeling.

Look at how your rational proposition connects with the deep drivers. Miller Lite let beer drinkers enjoy drinking even more. Texas made littering into a desecration of tribal pride. Vegas celebrated the escapism of gambling but made into something much more. How might you achieve a similar effect for your brand?

Embed your proposition in culture. Durex made the Internet the enemy, not STDs. “Turn Off to Turn On” has pop cultural resonance. Same with “Don’t Mess with Texas” and “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.” It’s not enough to be relevant. You can be relevant and still be boring. Creativity is the key here. And it takes creativity to see the connection between your proposition and something happening in local or global pop culture that your brand can capitalize on. Look for it and you’ll find it.

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Levi’s is restoring its iconic power by using storytelling to put it back in the heart of pop culture all over the world

A brand that begins with a legendary story

In the midst of the California gold rush Levi Strauss had the idea that the sure money was not in panning for gold but in selling stuff to the men combing the hills and rivers in search of fortune and fame, specifically with well-made trousers in heavy canvas. One thing about those gold seekers, they didn’t have time for anything that wasn’t hunting for gold. They slept just long enough to stay alert, ate hurriedly and sorely resented any interruption to their work schedule - including having to repair a rip in their trousers. So Strauss had a simple idea: put copper rivets in the corners of the pockets, making them virtually indestructible. Miners paid top dollar for these sturdy, riveted denim trousers and the Levi Strauss brand of blue jeans was born. They didn’t just corner the market. They created it - out of whole cloth. Their trousers, overalls and lined coats became a staple of outdoor and frontier life.

One thing leads to the next...

More than 150 years later, denim now accounted for about 7% of all apparel sales and Levi-Strauss was no longer the only brand on the market but had done well to evolve with times and was a $4 billion global business, headquartered still in San Francisco, where it had all started. Typically the company had been run by lifers, but sometimes the leadership slots would be given over to outside “garmentos,” people who specialized in fashion, mass apparel and retail. The business was stagnant but the company’s board knew they had a powerful brand on their hands. So they tapped into the talent pool of the world’s historically greatest consumer brand builder and hired P&G veteran Chip Bergh to run the company. Chip insisted that the company have a clear brand strategy and a sound business plan. With his new head of brands, Jean Sey, they hired hot agency Wieden+Kennedy (who had birthed Nike) and when the crash of 2008 hit, W+K gave them “Go Forth,” a campaign that seemed more like “Occupy Wall Street” than true Levi’s. It didn’t do much for the brand and it didn’t have global appeal. What to do?

...and then comes back to the power of stories

It wasn’t until Chip meet James Curleigh that he finally grasped what the brand was all about and saw how to apply a great insight to a growth momentum strategy. Jim had reengineered the Salomon brand of skis by making the company stop thinking “ski equipment” market share and focus instead on their “share of mountain.” Salomon set its sights on mountain sports all year long: not just the downhill skiing but the cross country, the hiking, the climbing, the trekking. Salomon became a vibrant mountain sport company for which Adidas eventually paid $1 billion. Similarly, Levi’s would start thinking not share of jeans, but share of closet, which is why today, Levis Strauss & Co includes the Dockers and Denizen brands. But what were the jeans about? For they were the icon, the glue that holds the company together. Jim persuaded Chip that it was all about stories…

The story of people finding their true selves

Chip created a job for Jim, Brand President. Jim had the company look at the social and cultural history that surrounded jeans. After the miners, blue jeans were adopted by cowboys, who, as Marlboro would celebrate 75 years later, were living symbols of rugged independence. Then the bikers. Then the “rebels without a cause.” Then hippies. Then hipsters. Then start-ups. What did all of these cultural iconic lifestyles have in common? A desire to be true to themselves and a readiness to seize the day, trust their instincts, take action…to really be alive. They were all people who wanted their life to be a story, not a routine, not a calculation. In order for the brand to be ready for the next great generation of story seekers, it would have to think of itself as 150-year-old start up. It would have to live its own brand. And, slowly but surely, they began to realize that their new global brand idea would be: Live In Levi’s. They fired W+K and brought back FCB who had given them a soulful campaign years earlier, “the 501 Blues.” What would they do now with “Live in Levis”? And what kind of results could it deliver?

The purpose comes from the personality

The way Levi’s has executed the next chapter in its story is grounded in its brand personality and values. The brand purpose, finding your truest self, is deeply implicit in them. The brand personality is effortless cool. The brand values are authentic self-expression. The emotional benefit is feeling fully alive. So the key for the brand has been to trigger the telling of stories. Its reach and resonance would come from amplifying those stories around the world in all kinds of different cultures.

To trigger stories, you have to know your own

Levi’s found an amazing way to tell the story of its own authenticity and legendary past. It wouldn’t be fussy or boring. And it would trigger sales. They created a new line of clothing called “Authorized Vintage.” Levis takes vintage stock and reclaims it as theirs: inspected, cleaned, certified: lovingly prepared for a second life. This taps into the Millennial’s love of vintage clothing while at the same time taking Levi’s historical creds and turning them into a saleable product. Everybody wins.

True influencers are born storytellers

Levi’s isn’t interested in glossy Instagram “influencers” who are living advertising campaigns pretending to be your celebrity friend while adding you to the eyeballs they sell to their advertisers. Instead Levi’s, in concert with AKQA sought out people like music producer Caroline de Maigret, who have cool stories to tell, involving Levi’s most iconic mark, the 501s and who would be interested in talking about them in a global campaign called “We are 501.” (Link)

In the UK, supporting music - where new stories are being born

In the UK, Levi’s got behind music as a way of telling stories, creating culture, giving people something so powerful to believe in, so they can change their lives. They partnered up with music hero Skepta and created a youth music facility in Skepta’s hometown, Tottenham North London.

In Pakistan, Levi’s boldly backs the return of live music

There is something special and life-changing about live music. You’re there, under the spell of the musician, your life energy focuses into a beam and suddenly your craziest dreams and ambitions turn into something you’re really going to do. In that spirit, in 2017, Levi’s became a major backer for the return of the live Indie music scene in Pakistan, rebounding from Islamist harassment.

In India, Levi’s gives voice to women who want to shape their world

With 7 out of 10 women in India feeling that they don’t “measure up” to expectations concerning their appearance, and in a culture that pressures them with messages about how an Indian woman is supposed to look, Levis used its brand to become a projection of her most confident self, of, indeed, how she “shapes her world.” With social influencers that included a transgender model, a cancer survivor and a rape victim, the brand sharply contrasted itself with Indian stereotypes and, with zero paid media, obtained 10 million unique views in 2017 and a 22% sales increase in the Levis 300 “Shaping Series.” (Link)

In China, 2.6 million self-created ads in 2 weeks

Today’s 20-something style seekers in China had mostly tuned out Levi’s even though it had painstakingly built excellent mass distribution. Why not let this new generation make their own statement with the brand? Levi’s put together a platform on WeChat where they could select from different Levi’s and insert themselves into a fashion statement complete with their selection from a music library on TenCent QQ put together by Levi’s with a nod to its own values as a brand. The click-through on this was 50% higher than anything they had ever done. It generated 2.6 million co-created ads in just two weeks. It increased e-commerce sales 45% and total sales 15%.

In Malaysia, Levi’s redefines Chinese New Year

The fact is, Chinese New Year can be oppressive. Everyone feels obligated to send out a cavalcade of messages, head back home for the family reunions, get inspected by Grandma, eat traditional dishes…what if you’re young and cool and living in KL?  Levi’s stepped forward with a cultural meme of #NewYearMyWay.

Bringing it all together, “Live in Circles” hits home

That moment when you’re in a club or at a really great party and you overcome your fear and you step into the middle of the floor and you get your groove on and everybody eggs you on and suddenly you feel free and loved…that’s what Levi’s celebrated in Live In Circles. Like Smirnoff, it connected with the Millennial’s love of living in a diverse and inclusive world where everyone comes together but remains exactly who they are. Inspiring and joyful, “Circles” hit YouTube’s top ten most watched commercials in 2017 with 22 million views and counting.

It’s working

Jim Curleigh joined Levi’s in 2014. “Live in Levis” kicked off in 2015. The campaign has gone glocal for two years now. More will be revealed later. But in 2017, Levi’s had its best year in over ten years. There’s something going on in this 150-year-old start-up that looks promising indeed. With the simplest of integration, an anthem – Live in Levi’s – and a clear grasp of the power of its brand personality and values, Levi’s is executing around the world with an astonishing mix of story-telling, product innovation, activation, co-creation and culture-specific messaging that shows just how much local can go into glocal.

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Adidas challenges Nike by revealing the true soul of athletic pursuit: creativity

We take for granted that athletic shoes and apparel are high-emotion categories that let people make powerful statements about themselves off and on field & track. Which is a testament to the power of branding. For it is branding and branding alone that made Nike, a former niche player, founded in 1964, into the leader of the pack. Once it launched “Just Do It” in 1988, it gradually shot past former market leader Adidas, founded in 1924 and the inventor of the spiked running shoe. (Link.) But now Nike is nervously looking behind its back. Because Adidas has mustered a newfound inspiration; it is gaining ground with a unique take on what athletic performance and fashion can mean for a new generation all over the world. And the recent leaps in Adidas sales performance show it’s working.

The insight: athletes are creators

Why do rappers call themselves “ballers?” Why do entrepreneurs like to surround themselves with athletes? Why do fashion creators care about which athlete wears their clothing? Under the leadership of CEO Kasper Rorsted, Adidas began to see the single answer to all these questions. You can find it in the stirring words of their new brand manifesto: “At the forefront of change are the people obsessed with progress: creators. Those who have a bias for action, who flip the script and break boundaries are the ones who influence how things are done on the field, track, court, stage or street.”

“Creating the New” becomes the new brand mantra

Nike became an icon brand by becoming a protagonist itself who provokes you to seek all that is great and uplifting in the experience of sports and fitness. Adidas now realized it could also become a protagonist who provokes you. Except what you’re being called to do is to become more creative. So while both brands inspire you, Adidas unleashes your inner creator by redefining athletic pursuit as creating with your body. Which is why it wouldn’t be “borrowed interest,” or just another celebrity endorsement, for the brand to proclaim Pharrell and Rita Ora as “Superstars.” And all of this would have sweeping implications for every aspect of how Adidas would build its brand and execute its strategy.

High-speed innovation: creativity in action

Speed is itself the raw material of all athletic performance. So, as part of its mission to “Create the New,” Adidas adopted speed of innovation as its own way of life. Rorsted slashed the layers of approval required to get product breakthrough ideas into the hands of consumers. He also demanded that the company become more “open source,” more excited about collaborating with external companies, creators and influencers to pioneer its breakthroughs. Like the Boost shoe, developed with BASF, with its substantial and superior energy return. Or the FutureCraft 4D, developed with Carbon, with midsoles crafted out of light and oxygen (link). Or the way its newest shoes use reclaimed Parley ocean plastic. The ideas just keep coming.

Setting the stage: #HereToCreate

In the brand’s new signature advertising, a staggering collection of athletic superstars all seek to provoke each other to greater and greater heights of creativity. True to the insight of Adidas, they’re not just athletes. They are joined by the likes of fashion creator Alexander Wang, entertainer Pharrell Williams and supermodel entrepreneur Karlie Kloss. But just before we viewers become too star-struck with this team of culture gods, they turn to us and say, “Join us. Let’s create.” Launched in December 2017, it has climbed to nearly 40 million views. (Link)

Six-city focus: cauldrons of creativity

Corporations that want to avoid becoming dead zones of the imagination can draw inspiration from the creativity of cities themselves: tumultuous, diverse, dynamic and free. In this spirit, Adidas made six cities the loci of its brand: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai. Not because the volume is there (though it is great) but because the culture is. Explains global sales boss Roland Auschel, “Global brands are created in global cities. Therefore, we are committed to winning hearts and minds in the great cultural capitals of the world.”

Influencers and co-creation

So how do you experience the creativity of the brand in action in these great cultural capitals? Through highly creative athletic influencers, first and foremost. But in Adidas’s case, these aren’t just good-looking people with large follower bases who sell their followers’ eyeballs. No, Adidas looks for people who understand the idea of being creative with their body and who want to collaborate with Adidas in finding fresh new ways to live that way.

Dark Social: A Powerful Way to Participate

The new holy grail of digital for brands is Dark Social: consumers accepting brand messages in private exchanges through unmeasured (hence dark) social media like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Line. And Adidas’s Tango Squad is one of the marketing successes most frequently cited as a Dark Social success story. Are you a football fan? Want to watch your favorite team practice, meet the players, get exclusive interviews with them, get the VIP treatment? Then apply to join Tango Squad. You fill out an application, get vetted and if you’re accepted, the content and invitations start coming to you as well as the option of sharing it with selected friends. It’s no surprise that Tango enjoys nearly 90% share levels of all its content. And Tango Squad members are shown Adidas’s new creations before they are released to the general public so it also functions as a powerful R&D and marketing insights sensor.

Original: Something that is Never Finished

Adidas’s more casual line of shoes and clothes, featuring the traditional trefoil logo are called Originals and comprise the most important part of the brand’s street wear. Johannes Leonardo has created culture-leading advertising under the theme “Original is Never Finished” with an impressive collection of culture-creating brand ambassadors conspiring to create a stirring tour de force – both its 2016 and 2017 executions have made it to the top ten most viewed TV commercials on YouTube.

Impressive Results

From 2011 to 2016, Adidas had already grown its revenues 25%. But in 2017 as its “Creativity” strategy enjoyed its first year of execution, sales jumped an impressive 20%. And the 2017 BrandZ Monitor had already flagged Adidas as owner of the single largest year-in/year-out surge in brand valuation, an increase of 58%.

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Top 10 best practices in modern brand building

Best practices…what are they good for?

They aren’t constitutional law. They’re flashes of lightning that suddenly reveal a bigger landscape of opportunity and make us ask, “Why didn’t we see that?” Commercially savvy companies use sophisticated tools to minimize risk of failure and wasted capital. But those same tools also make it hard to distinguish between niche and tomorrow’s next big thing. Insightfully reviewing what smart brands are up to can serve as a foil against the inherent conservatism that comes with risk control. But, in the spirit of risk control, this list also includes two worst branding practices.  I’ve drawn examples only from brands that have serious scale, ones you’re likely to find on the most current BrandZ Top 100. It’s far too easy to find cutting-edge brand building by tiny brands with no demonstration of scale.

1. Uber: the power of psychological benefits

Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland asks: what if the great innovations of the future are going to come not from technology but from psychology? (Link) What if, instead of making the product 10X faster, you made it 10X more enjoyable? Uber is the perfect case in point. The human brain hates uncertainty and the real-time map makes it 10X more satisfactory to wait for you car.

2. Adidas: “original” can be scary – and profitable

The BrandZ valuation of Adidas shot up 58% this year giving it a total brand valuation of $8 billion as the brand succeeded in making classic high-top sneakers a favorite of Millennials looking for a cool retro look. Its flagship video this year, “Original is Never Finished” (Link) garnered 25 million views. Its colorful cast of characters is a parade of people who most corporate management wouldn’t be comfortable being associated with. But they show us what individuality is all about in 2017.

3. Gucci: weirdness can have tremendous scale

Overly bright. Insanely layered. Complicated. Vintage. Street. Everything about the new Gucci (#80, BrandZ) is so wrong, it’s right. And it’s kicking butt. Sales are up in double digits. Watch for a higher position in 2018. Why does it work? As the Wall Street Journal’s Christina Binkley put it, “Everyone who ever felt like a weird kid, or too smart to be popular, or totally out of sync with the jocks can now wear Gucci and finally feel cool.” (Isn’t that about half the population?)

4. KFC: fast food is best purchased with a grin on your face

KFC (#81, BrandZ) doesn’t just want you to know it only uses real chicken - no fillers - and that it’s introducing new chicken and rice meals - it wants you to be grinning when you think of them. And it’s getting there with humor based on two of the biggest pop cultural reference points there are. Rap music. (Link) And Game of Thrones. (Link) It’s different from anything else out there and not everybody’s a fan. But it’s memorable, it gets a reaction, and it’s funny, young and cool. So it’s giving the brand a shot at water-cooler conversation. Even if it’s just in your own delighted mind.

5. Worst: Pepsi or why we we all need a certain level of cynicism

It all looked so perfect for Pepsi’s in-house creative team. With Millennials putting street protests back on the cultural map and Kendall Jenner’s willingness to step off her fashion pedestal and make a statement, Pepsi (BrandZ #84) could find a provocative way of enacting its brand’s promise of helping people bond. (Link.) But it got too lofty. And it forgot how to have common sense. Their CMO had made headlines decrying how out of touch big agencies have become. But, as Richard Huntington observed, can you imagine trying to run this kind of idea by a cynical CD in any self-respecting agency anywhere? You’d be handed a raft of excoriation. A good reminder that some hard-bitten cynicism has its place.

6. Worst: Dove or why, again, a little cynicism can go a long way

Unilever’s Dove has done an admirable job of bringing the ideal of “celebrating every women's unique beauty” to life and driving brand growth. But its introduction of limited edition body wash packaging celebrating a multitude of women’s shapes backfired. “Why do I need a pear-shaped bottle in my bathroom to empower me?” read one typical commentator. So what went wrong? The brand got heavy handed and self-regarding. “Great shelf blocking, folks, but my bathroom isn’t your shopper marketing program.”

7. Facebook: a series of tragic mistakes

You may have noticed that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t give a lot of interviews. The founder of Facebook (#5, BrandZ) might start doing so now that he’s rumored to be getting ready for a run on public office. But, for the time being, it’s hard to find something like his podcast interview on Massive Scale. (Link.) Check it out. It’s a good listen. What’s the big lesson? All his life he’s just tried stuff. His mantra: Release. Observe. React. Almost nothing he ever did was spot on right out of the shoot. But he listened. And learned.

8. Apple: for every iPhone, there must be a Newton

Apple, holding the #2 BrandZ spot, has so many things to teach us. Perhaps for us today, its most valuable lesson is from its distant past. Thirteen years before the iPhone, Apple thought it had cracked the code of mobile computing with its Newton. It was advanced stuff but it didn’t achieve the kind of adoption to make it massive. But they kept at it until they had the iPhone.

9. Tesla: never underestimate the power of reviews

You already know the Tesla 3 is a total game changer and that Tesla’s game is no longer to eclipse a narrowly-defined category set but to rival the BMW 3 series and the Mercedes S-Class, period. How’s that possible? They’re not even on the streets yet. Because, as Bob Lefsetz underscores, they got reviews like this one: (Link). It’s a slam dunk and reports are that Tesla is going to be hard-pressed to meet demand.

10. Nike: mixing channels to amplify brand meaning

Nike (BrandZ #26) has doubled its online sales in the last two years, bringing them up to over $2 billion – and later this year will be available for purchase on Amazon, something it has resisted for 15 years. But it’s not just about going B2C for them. They’re making sure that there’s the right mix of product for every channel partner. Basics for Amazon…high-end collectibles for smaller retailers…customized by you on NikeiD. However you buy, it’s Nike but the context amplifies the brand’s meaning.

So what have we learned?

The eternal verities change shape but they remain eternal. Think aggressively about how to build cultural meaning. (Adidas, Gucci, KFC). And how to make your channel add meaning (Nike). Look for ways to bring to life the psychological benefits of your brand (Uber). Build positive WOM about new products before they are even launched (Tesla). Throughout it all, keep experimenting; keep learning. Never let perfectionism crush your initiative (Apple, Facebook).

[rwise]

“This isn’t a utopian revolution. This is business.”

Ten Key Takeaways from SXSW 2017

With his against-the-grain quip, Cyberpunk novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling best captured the spirit of this year’s SXSW Interactive. There was no cut-through announcement of a startling new social media platform. President “gets-it” Obama was the keynote speaker last year, so last year, and the raucous Trump era has begun in earnest. “As you walk around here today, you’re just at another trade show, really. And if you look with the eyes of historical insight then you realize that there isn’t such a big difference between Amazon and Sears & Roebuck.” Sterling was speaking as a social visionary but for those in the brand-building business, it’s a good reminder to not be so star-struck with digital innovation that we forget: it either contributes to building the business or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then it’s a fascinating distraction at best.

“We are so clever, we have made ourselves obsolete.”

Bruce Sterling’s big point is that the future belongs to those who control the AI and the algorithms, making entire layers of the population increasingly unnecessary. In developed economies and the cultures that engendered them, there is a flagging of human purpose. It’s all been worked out for us and Guaranteed Basic Income might well be around the corner. Marriage rates and childbirth are in steep decline. Alcoholism, drug abuse and obesity are all on the rise - powerful indicators of a basic failure of existential conviction. Brands with a strong purpose can call us back to real human life with all its appetite and strife. Wasn’t that what made Apple’s “Think Different” so epochal? But even less grandiose brand ideals like Smirnoff’s purpose of making the world more inclusive can spur us to reconnect with our basic humanity as Diageo’s CMO Syl Saller pointed out.

Behind the brave and the bold is deep insecurity.

Brian Sullivan of Sabre Corporation (the travel booking distribution system) was talking about selling to the C-Suite. Many of us find this intimidating and by letting ourselves give in to fear, we forget how to be real and just make a good case for the high-stakes recommendation we are making. “Remember,” he said, “the bigger the ego, the bigger the insecurity.” In other words, they’re just as nervous as you are, even if they don’t look like it. Cory Booker, the insanely talented adventurer/photographer for National Geographic who climbed Mount Everest, live on SnapChat, without supplemental oxygen, said the same about himself: “What kept driving me was a deep personal insecurity.” Which is perhaps why a comedy series about a very cool black girl in LA is aptly entitled “Insecure.” Those of us on brands that appeal to the young and the cool need to remember this: even the bold among us are looking for confidence boosters as long as they’re not fake or stagey.

The never-ending power of stories.

Today’s neuroscience has taught us that story telling is inherently more attention getting than the presentation of facts and that it lights up more areas of the brain than almost any other form of engagement which means that it will not only get more attention, it will also be more memorable. As Nancy Harhut explained, “the story is the ultimate Trojan Horse for your marketing message.” Our activations that seek to place a product difference in the consumer’s mind will always benefit by putting them in a story form. Who came up with this? What were they seeking to do? What was the barrier to success? How did they overcome it? What’s the result? How do you know it has worked? What do other people experience? How do they describe it?  This is always more involving and memorable than the simple product function and benefit.

Everything old is new again.

Content and digital marketing managers, average age 28.5, all listened with bated breath to Nancy Harhut, a brilliant behavioral scientist/creative director who did for them what John Caples did for David Ogilvy three generations ago: learn tested techniques of attention, recall and persuasion. Nuggets like these:

-The brain zeros in on the new, unusual, out of place: put an emoji in the subject line of your email and you can get a 30% lift in your open rate. 

-Our emotions become 400% more vivid when triggered by a surprise. 

 -We are 68% more willing to complete a task if the reward is uncertain. 

 -Stories activate the Zeigarnik Effect – the nagging desire to know how it ends.

 -Once we write something down, we feel compelled to live up to it- otherwise we get cognitive dissonance – so get people to tell what they eat when they drink Rioja and the next time they eat that thing they will drink Rioja. 

 -Significant Objects: with a story, a piece of junk that cost 59 cents at a yard sale becomes worth $60 on Ebay. 

 -Framing: describing something as “a small $5 fee” improves response by 25% vs “a $5 fee.”

A treasure trove of such insights and facts can be found on slideshare/nancy harhut.

Unfinished is the new real.

We visited an expensive and exclusive SXSW event featuring Aaron Franklin, founder of arguably the most famous BBQ restaurant in the world where people wait for hours in line and pay a fortune to have his brisket: it was by normal luxury standards a disaster. Chaotic, smoky, snarky…and supremely real, totally worth bragging about, unbelievably delicious. Production values are a huge part of the Airbnb success but Alex Schleifer from Airbnb reported that, while professionally produced videos do well for them and their brand, the obviously homemade video “here’s something that’s going on today at Airbnb, we just thought we’d capture it,” can outperform their professionally made content by up to 300%.

The new look of high tech is denim and plywood.

The near future isn’t cold, plastic and impersonal. Perhaps the coolest new device introduced this year was wearable computing from venerable Levi’s in a JV with Google. The $350 Commuter jacket will come out this Fall that gives you haptic signals and features a cool-looking button allowing you to play music and the like. It will look good paired with playful SnapChat spectacles which are doing for wearables what Google Glass failed to do: be fun and look cool. Perhaps the coolest live activation at SXSW ’17 was JAPAN FACTORY from Sony. Showcasing one amazing gaming and media technology after another, they were displayed in an environment built of plywood and decorated with graffiti. Curvy, shiny plastic is so 1999. Be transparent: this is a pop-up; don’t try to pretend it’s a museum. Perhaps the most advanced stuff doesn’t try too hard to look like it is.

Influencers are the new mass media.

As Neiman Marcus’s CMO Carrie Fisher reports, 26% of sales to Neiman Marcus via Instagram are driven by influencer content. And 82% of consumers reported they were likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro influencer.

For brands it’s all about building relationships that are true, deep and long-term. You’ll get the kind of results enjoyed by the Dollar Shave Club if you carefully research your influencers to make sure their brand values overlap your own and give them free reign to keep their communication on their own brand as they see it. To build credibility, the endorsement, even if paid, has to be on-brand for the influencer. You can see this truth even affecting the style of the Priceline commercial starring Kelly Cuocco. Most people recognize her as one of the stars of the hit TV show Big Bang Theory. But look how she talks and makes everything involving with a personal touch – much like an influencer would talk to their fans.

Our new heroes are heroines.

As Leo Burnett’s Yousef Tuqan reports, in 2011 the Arab Youth Survey showed 11% agreement with the statement, “Traditional values are out of date.” But by 2014 that number had jumped to 47%. (And, remember, 68% of the population of MENA is under 35.) Which accounts for the 14 million views of the hilarious spoof of the Saudi ban on female driving, “No Woman, No Drive.” (here) We’re at a tipping point here and Nike’s “What will they say about you” is pitch perfect in this respect (here). In the West, Millennial women now outpace men in education and professional career development. They’re being cheered on not just by themselves but by men as well. For brands that stand for individualism or progress, the opportunities are rife – see for example, Acura’s new commercial, “Drive Like a Boss.” (here) And Reckitt’s resurrection of Woolite with “Dress for Success.” (here)

And we’re all Hollywood now

People love stories. People want to relate. And they love videos more than ever. As Seraj Bharwani of Visible Measures reports, mobile video viewership is skyrocketing. 500 million video ads have been since 2007. Viewership is up 61%. Movies, series, live videos, videos with captions, Vines, it really doesn’t matter what the format is or how long the length, we’re eating it up in record numbers. So if you’re in the marketing business, you’re a filmmaker.  Those videos you make to impress your board, where are the ones you made to move your fans? Maybe those should be the ones you show to your board. Make them real, not slick, make them tell human stories not corporate balderdash…but, above all, make them and make them discoverable.

[rwise]

The Anthropology of Brands

I once got asked by the Wharton School of Management to predict the future of advertising.

“Advertising is dead,” would be the normal thing to say if you’ve been a consulting futurist at a place like Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve where I had previously worked.

But it’s not. And it will be around as long as humans are.

It will change as often as humans and the cultures we create change.

It will always be with us – just like its sister discipline, branding design, and all of the other arts of publicity and commercial trust building.

We humans need mental shortcuts to know where the good stuff is. We are thrilled by everything beautiful and clever. And we want the ordinariness of our daily lives to be cast on a bigger dimension.

We’ve been like that since early Homo Sapiens blew pigment towards the cave wall blocking its path with an outstretched hand. 

“Look. It’s my hand. I made this.”

“Look what else I can do. What do you think about that?”

And we are still doing the same thing with the largest advertising installation in the galaxy. 

“Look. It’s us. This is where we gather. See what we can do.”

OK, I know. Those aren’t really ads. One is art. And the other is a byproduct of electrical illumination in large population centers.

But is that all they really are? When we make art, isn’t it something that surges from the wellspring of our imaginations? Isn’t it meant to be shared? Isn’t that what great piece of design or advertising is? And when we light our cities isn’t that more than just allowing us to see things better? It is also a promotional message saying, “It’s safe here. We want you to accomplish something and we’re making it possible for you to do that.”

Something doesn’t have to interrupt your favorite TV show in order to be an ad. It can be anything that has an intent to occupy your imagination and change your behavior. Marshall McLuhan said that the great brands are like Jesus was for him – always in the back of my mind.”

To do this well, you have to think like an anthropologist.

The basic anthropological question is: what makes humans human?

How can you possibly create great design or do superior brand communication if you are not implicitly and constantly asking that question?

Try to do it without anthropological insight and your work will be…clueless. You might make something that works fairly credibly by imitating what everybody else is doing without really caring about what makes humans human. But you will be like the sociopath who learns to look compassionate in order to gain the trust of his prey. And you will never know the joy of transcending yourself and your own narrow-minded self-seeking.

Or you might make something extremely loud and crude that makes it impossible for people to miss your message. But then you will be like the guy who wins an argument by shouting more loudly than his opponent. There’s a word for that in American slang which translates as “shower” in French. It’s no fun being one even though you feel confident…in your cluelessness.

So unless you’re a corporate sociopath, or just an ordinary douche, and there are plenty of both, the question persists.

What makes humans human?

What does the way we make and consume outstanding design tell us about the adventure of being human?

I want to give you three views of that.

To begin, a little story.

I married a wonderful woman from China. She took me to her hometown of Jinan which is in the Shandong province, the birthplace of Confucius.

We visited the Temple of Confucius to commune with the spirit of wisdom that reigned there 2,500 years ago.

You pass through many gates and walls until you are finally standing on the ground where the apricot tree under which he taught flowered every year.

Seals which communicate the gravity of your person or your office can be obtained there as a memento of your pilgrimage. 

My father in law described what I do – Brand Anthropologist – and the seal maker broke it down into Chinese symbols which you see arrayed on my seal.

I am “pin pai ce hua da shi” which means “the master teacher of the drawn plan of the quality brand.”

Many Mandarin characters, particularly the oldest ones, have a visual storytelling dimension. This was dramatized by the marvelous Shaolan in her book Chineasy.

I was fascinated in particular by this symbol:

It comes from the character for “mouth.”

And when you have three of them, it means quality. Shaolan teaches us, “Imagine that each mouth is an opinion. The quality of something is judged by what people say about it. This character also means “item,” “product” or “grade.”

Quality itself, like the symbol for many mouths, is a mental shortcut that says, “good stuff here.” Quality doesn’t exist unless it is attested to by many mouths.

Later on that trip we visited the breathtaking Shandong Cultural Center.

There we were able to admire this Neolithic Dawenkou teapot from approximately 4000 BC. Its visual wit is a reminder that as soon as we have met our most basic needs, we immediately need to be delighted by the visually clever and want it in on our everyday life. 

Then we start to get a little more sophisticated and we get into more refined abstract shapes that are only vaguely zoomorphic like this piece from the same culture but a few centuries later.

We need visual wit and gracefulness to elevate our everyday life.

Like the social reality of quality, that sounds simple enough, right? Is it though?

Consider this. When you read, as I’m sure you have, the epic story of the world’s most valuable company, a pivotal moment in the events that led up to it is that its founder took a typography class in college and that turned him on to the power of design. I’m old enough to remember computers and mobile phones before Apple. And none of them were EVER made by someone who was sensitive to the power of typefaces. Nobody who Steve Jobs worked with understood what appeared to them to be a foolish obsession on his part. But he persisted against all odds. And literally changed the world.

Are you ready to change your world? All you have to do is cleave yourself to this anthropological insight and never let go.

The third truth.

Have you ever been to the ruins of Pompeii?

It’s fun to visit, thinking like an anthropologist.

Hey look.

It used to have B&B’s for people going to the seaside for a few days of respite... 

....from the crowded apartment buildings of Rome in the first century. 

Where they would use BBQ grills like this one.

And they would dress up the taste of their grilled meats with Scaurus brand garum sauce which you see advertised here. 

If they didn’t want the wait of grilling their own meat, they’d go to the street corner and pick it up at the nearest fast food joint. Or they could eat there. And as they munched away, they could cast a glace at the restaurant décor which included scenes from Roman mythologies.

Why the scenes of Roman mythologies? Because it elevated the mundanity of eating and cast it on a bigger scale.

You can see the same thing in the stained glass windows of Chartres. Did you know that some of them were sponsored by the guilds? 

That’s right if look carefully you can see that some of the windows are actually “sponsored content.” They are signed at the base by the guilds that paid for them. So that the things we buy and use every day, shoes, bread, clothing, they are all elevated by being made a blessed guild who formally recognizes its importance as only part of a larger grander meaning.

How is this any different than buying food at Whole Foods surrounded by signals that the food we are buying is local, sustainable and ethical? “What I am doing is not just eating, it’s living on a higher plane, one that is conscious of what is true and beautiful?”

Have you ever noticed how sometimes this seriousness about something that you’re just going to eat can become a bit much?

For God’s sake, why do you have to take yourself so seriously?

We need comic relief but maybe that’s what the second truth can help with. It’s time for a little visual wit.

Let’s go to the Abby Church of Saint Foy in Conques. It really is beautiful. 

And there over its front doors is the tympanum which presents the ultimate final meaning, the judgment of the living and the dead. “Pay attention sinners and reflect on the choices you are making today – are they…sustainable?”

And as we search the jumble of different lives and their outcomes and as we search our own consciences if we are believers or even just provoked by the art work, there in the folds of the frame surrounding the tympanum is just what we need, the intrusion of human cleverness, the self-aware medium, giving us the most trust-building of all signals, a smile.

So here’s how thinking like an anthropologist can help you build a better, more powerful brand.

The conceptual engines we use in modern marketing like briefs, strategy statements, consumer insights, brand purpose, brand architecture, they are all amazing and involving but they support an almost maniacal kind of thinking that lets them get out of touch with basic human truths. You have to get good at using these fancy tools. I think I am. But you have stay…simply human.

Remember that we want: shortcuts, wit and a bigger picture and you can’t go wrong.

Shortcuts. Behavioral economics is kind of like an enormous correction of classical economics which most B-school grads learned and which has a hard time accounting for the anthropological effects of advertising. But we used the distributed presence of advertising as a way of short-cutting supplier selection. If someone has gone to the trouble of spending all that money, chances are they’ve made sure there won’t be too many complaints about the product and if they do get them that they will be forced to respond.

Wit. We like to be entertained with a sparkling insight or a simple truth made humorous. It’s funny how Byron Sharp had to remind the entire marketing industry that what works is staying present in the consumer’s memory with something that reminds them of a category benefit.

Bigger picture. What about the category fits into the larger drama of our lives? What gives it human interest?

Just execute on those three principles and you have a shot at greatness.

Some examples.

Cat food. Whiskas. It will give your cat great energy. Aren’t cats awe-inspiring but safe examples of nature’s struggle for life? By the way, do you notice how much this could be the subject of a droll cave painting?

Shavers. Isn’t it nice how neat and clean they make you look? That’s why the board is so clean itself.

Jeep. Driving one is a real adventure. And while you’re at it, please take better care of the planet. With the implied message that builds trust in the brand: and we’ll do our best too.

Legos. They inspire the imagination. See, we just inspired yours. You should get some and keep this experience going. BTW, more cave art, more shadow play.

Glassex. Glass is kind of miraculous. It’s solid. But when it’s clean, you can’t even see it’s there. That’s why you need cleaner.

Texa. We give you allergy relief. Because it’s terrible to have to sneeze when you don’t want to. Here, we have the enduring comic relief archetype the cuckold. And now you’re the one who gave him horns. Ha, ha.

Short cuts. Wit. Bigger picture. Hang on to these and you will do the most important thing you can do in the business of building brands. Stay human.

[rwise]

Niche: The New Mainstream.

Key takeaways from SXSW Interactive 2016

“I’m off to Southby. I’ll be bringing back the future,” I announced a few days ago to one of my more punchy colleagues at the London HQ of my global activation agency. “The future of what?” he quipped. “Southby’s just a niche.”

He didn’t yet know that his would be the year in which 35,000 Southby Interactive participants would listen to a keynote on Day One by none other than President Barack Obama.

As cyber-punk novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling put it four days later, in his closing remarks, “Now, in its 30th year, Southby, matured, was visited by the very top of the food chain of the pundits. The only higher up would be the Pope.”

The Internet itself was once a niche pursuit by computer programmers. The Internet got Obama elected. And is not Obama himself a triple triumph of what was once niche (intellectual, black, arch-leftist), now become resolutely mainstream?

Obama relaxed in the company of mostly benevolent well-wishers as his new mainstream now finds itself threatened by even newer niche challengers. The Bush dynasty is dead. The Clinton dynasty severely harassed. The Democratic challenger is not a Democrat. And the Republican challenger is a reality-TV star who is not a Republican.

The American political mainstream has vanished in the space of a year. The establishment didn’t listen to its public and the public is voting with its attention span. The mainstream is an illusion, the illusion that things won’t change – or will agree to do so at a pace we find comfortable.

VR was a niche technology in the 90s but now, as the founding editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, observed, it’s going to become an irresistible force thanks to vastly cheaper processors, high-res screens and accelerometers that the smart phone explosion made possible. And…Boom. It’s now possible to build shopper experiences, activations, entertainment and social networking all on it. Consumers love it and want to see as much of it as they can.  Case histories abounded of how to use it for brands and among the many activations you could visit at this year’s Southby, the “it” item was a VR headset.

Remember when SnapChat was a niche marketing tool? Remember when Kansas City used to have more Burger Kings than yoga studios? When the world had more toilets than mobile phones?

And then there’s “Friendertainment,” the trend in which we rely increasingly on our network of friends for our entertainment needs making each of us learn to cultivate a profile of being a bit unique and quirky…a niche of our own. Together we form the new mainstream, full of passionate niche energy.

Maybe what marketers call niche is no more than “the sum of our fears.” But as Under Armor’s Kevin Plank put it, “No one ever won a horse race by yelling Whoa.”

So what transforms something that starts small into a movement and what transforms the movement into something that becomes palpably mainstream?

Malcolm Gladwell notwithstanding, there’s no magic formula for this. But it is possible to spot three big themes behind the transformation: Purpose. Passion. Participation. People are up to something new and important that provides us with an alternative to the same old, same old; their passion is contagious and they give the rest of us a way to participate.

Take the food truck phenomenon. Their meteoric rise coincided with the social media explosion. Traditional sit-down restaurants were the same old. Someone used the low entry barriers of what used to be called roach coaches to offer us a taste of something unusual. It was so good we put up with the absence of air conditioning and bathrooms to have that experience. The people making it for us showed passion. They gave us a way to be participants. We liked their stuff. We followed them. We raved about them to our friends. Now you can find them at Disneyland. It doesn’t get any more mainstream than that.

Here’s the question for brand marketers: where are the sub-groups, the alternative forms, the band of outsiders your brand can help advance? Do their values amplify your brand’s values? Then get involved and ask how you can help. It’s not just about underwriting stuff, it’s about asking them: where do you want to go with this? How can we help? Let the passion they have infect your own brand’s culture. Get caught up in it. Care. Share. Not everything you invest in will turn to gold but some of it will and you will have been there at its inception – you won’t be ‘The Man’ trying to cash in. You will understand why Kevin Plank of Under Armor says, “culture always eats strategy for breakfast.”

This is what I learned listening to talks given by Chris Barth, editor of Contagious magazine and Philippe von Borries, founder of Refinery29.com, the latter now reaching over 120 million Millennial women all over the globe. And I saw it in action when Nick Fairbairn, VP of Brand Marketing at Dollar Shave Club showed how he has built a host of online influencers and given them the freedom to share about his brand in a way that’s relevant to their brand. I saw it in action again when I witnessed how AT&T had skillfully become a sponsor of “Shut up and Go,” a YouTube channel of adventure travel ideas from the rising YouTube star Brazilian immigrant Jo Franco. Lots of brands had approached her and they usually started the conversation with a list of things they wanted her to say about their brand. AT&T showed up and said, “What do you want to do next?” That blew her away. The connection with the brand was a no-brainer and plenty of opportunities rapidly appeared for organic, natural brand visibility (they’re traveling, pulling out their mobiles everywhere they go).

Cadillac was big, fat and well established back in the day. Then the German brands took it away from them. Now Cadillac is back with a hot product line up. Their Director of Brand Strategy, Melody Lee, held the dais with her design partner, John Bricker of Gensler and her neuroscience guru, Dr. James Thompson of Evoke Neuroscience. She told the story of how she is treating Cadillac as a niche brand that will give its new owners niche passion. The folks at the plant want her to tell everybody how good the product is but all of her learning is you’ve got to lead with emotion, first then follow with RTBs. Which is why the brand is hot again with its brand campaign on the theme of “Dare Greatly.” Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-r7gp51KQU

Purpose. Passion. Participation.

Each of us is a niche now. And we’re using our phones to discover, mark, savor, share. Brian Wong, Silicon Valley’s youngest recipient of VC capital at 18 years of age, is using his Kiip platform to give marketers a whole new way to add value to their prospects lives. Kiip lets you track their moments that matter and offer them a reward that’s relevant to the moment and relevant to their brand. Everything from a celebratory treat because you just ticked that box to a ride service because you’ve been partying. “Don’t have rewards define behavior, have behavior define rewards,” is his advice.

“Big data is the new oil,” was one of the popular mantras at this year’s Southby. But the point of having all this data is that brands can do a better job of making us a segment of one. Not bombarding us with the same message over and over as we still experience with badly used tracking but giving us precisely what we want when it’s relevant to receive it.  Gail Horwood, Vice President of WW Digital Strategy at J&J shared one of the most state-of-the-art data-driven marketing she could think of. She made a reservation at a restaurant and she got a text message 90 minutes before her reserved time offering her a complimentary cocktail if she cared to come visit the restaurant’s bar before her dinner reservation began. “It totally wowed me and it was such a simple idea. You don’t need AI to do something like that.”

Shenan Reed, President of Digital at MEC Global head of digital was asked how she chooses from among the dozens of digital messaging platforms.  “Always begin with the consumer point of view. Why are they here? What are they looking for? How can you enhance their experience?

The new metric is Return on Attention. If you don’t give the consumer this, you won’t advance any of your other metrics. Think of it as offering branded experiences not just content. We’re seeing it transform the entire spectrum of marketing, right down to retail. Rachel Shechtman, founder of NYC’s hottest retail space STORY, which has the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store, said the key to understanding the future of retail is the shift from a place where you buy things to an experience where you buy things. Sound like another niche concept that’s coming soon to a mainstream near you?

Bruce Sterling made the observation that the current conflict between Apple and the feds over privacy was the clash between Surveillance Marketing and Surveillance Government. But Kevin Kelly pointed out that, when given a sliding scale from anonymous to fully tracked, we are usually more likely to let ourselves be tracked. Why? We know we will gain a more tailored experience. In the end, as he put it, “Vanity trumps privacy.”

Each of is niche. “In the world of social, everybody can be a celebrity or a critic,” Scandal’s Kerry Washington observed. You could see this reflected in three of the more promising new apps being debuted. Anchor social networking lets you join audio conversations with the warmth and emotion of your friend’s voices and contribute that of your own voice. Shorts lets you share with those of your network who are physically nearby. And KnowMe, backed by JJ Abrams, lets you make videos by adding all the media on your phone and add your voice by touching and talking.

It’s all about us. Even Obama brought it back to himself and shared his frustrations and unfulfilled hopes for a more responsive government. “Why is it still easier to order a pizza than it is to register to vote?” he lamented.

Each of us is a niche seeking its mainstream. And brands have never had better opportunities to be relevant.

Philippe von Borries closed his presentation with the incredibly powerful film “What happens when girls are free to imagine they can be anything?” for the new Barbie – one brand, many niches – and then said to us all, “If Barbie can do it, why can’t your brand?” Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1vnsqbnAkk

[rwise]

The power of stories to triumph over brute force and cash

Money is like tanks. And distribution is like an army. They can force almost anybody’s hand.  

Winston Churchill was trying to get Josef Stalin to loosen his grip on Eastern Europe after World War II. “You have to consider what the Vatican is saying,” he said, referring to Pope Pius’s condemnation of the Soviet takeover.  

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Stalin retorted.  

The Pope had nothing Stalin wanted or feared so he dismissed him from his calculations. 

But Stalin’s successors would find themselves confounded by a Polish Pope who called Polish workers to stand up and resist Soviet tyranny. They did so without bombs, guns or tanks. They did so with a new story about who they were: Polish workers, not Soviet slaves. They stared down the powerful Soviet empire and they won their freedom back. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

So Stalin’s question got answered. How many divisions does the Pope have?  None. But he has a higher purpose than you and a better story than you. He will undo all your power.

Isn’t that what Apple did to Microsoft?

Microsoft made itself the must-have operating system of the business world because you couldn’t exchange documents or information unless you had Windows. They even made it impossible for several years for such documents to be viewed on an Apple computer. The story of Apple’s revenge is not how they invented Pages, Keynote and Numbers. It’s how they told a story about the power of creativity and made their brand synonymous with it.

“Advertising is a confidence game,” hotshot creative director John Mezzina once said to me.  

“You mean we’re all con artists?” I asked.

“If you don’t believe, it doesn’t happen. We sure as hell better know what we’re doing but we can’t prove it will all work in advance. We have to build an atmosphere of confidence,” he answered.

I remembered his words recently when I read New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova’s book about con artists, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Time.

She lets us see that when we are conned, the psychology of what happens is no different than when we buy into a true story.  Either way, the con artist or the teller of true stories has to do three important things:

-       Understand our hopes and aspirations,

-       Create a drama that we find absorbing,

-       Make us feel that we have the power to make the world a better place and propose a way to do it.

Honest, trusting people get conned.  So do suspicious people.  The player of the con – like the teller of stories – simply has to make sure they understand their “mark” and then perform their magic.

I was working on the publicity for a new feline leukemia vaccine for a small biotech start up. Their competitor’s vaccine already worked quite well and was sold by a trusted, powerful and wealthy animal health company backed a major player in Big Pharma. We were screwed from the onset. My client, however, was adept in guerilla marketing and said to me in front of his all staff, “If you really were the crack marketer you’re always making yourself out to be, you’d get the inventor of the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, to tell veterinarians that our vaccine is the right one.” What a jerk.  

Wait.

Maybe there’s something there.

The competitor used modified live viruses to produce immunity; my client’s vaccine used killed viruses. The contrast between the two vaccines was mirrored in the two types of polio prevention, the one invented by Dr. Jonas Salk and the one invented by Dr. William Sabin. In my research, I discovered that Salk felt Sabin’s vaccine was never as good or as safe as his. That’s because a modified live virus vaccine can still “revert to virulence.” In a very small number of cases (or it would never obtain FDA approval), it can cause the very disease it is intended to prevent. This was not an insignificant question when it came to cats, because, not only do we love them as pets, but also they are in contact with our children and having them harbor mutated retroviruses is not pleasant to think about.

So I called him up and asked if he would moderate a roundtable on this subject for DVM News. 

Dr. Salk was living a dream life, well beyond the harbor of any need, the figurehead of the beautiful Salk Institute overlooking the bluffs of La Jolla and enjoying married life with a famous artist, herself Picasso’s widow. Why would he get involved in such a thing? Because it would amplify his own story. He agreed to do it and so did the magazine. As a result I got to have dinner with him at his favorite restaurant and listen to the stories of his fabled life. I also got to learn the marvels of the immune system and the true nature of viruses.

From that point on, my client became an unstoppable force and overwhelmed its competitor who had more money, more clout and more built-in trust than my little biotech start up had. They had a story to tell. 

Did you know that you have a Destrudo?

Well, you almost had one.

You see, Freud and his followers invented it at the same time as the Libido and the Id. But it never caught on. Which is why you probably haven’t heard of it until just now.

Freud’s theories are often counted as part of the scientific revolution of the last century. But Freud was no scientist in the purest sense of the term.

He was a storyteller; in fact, the literary critic, Harold Bloom, called him the “greatest fabulist” of the 20th century. He invented psychotherapy, the interpretation of dreams, founded a school of thought and tightly controlled its orthodoxies – all because he told us stories about what motivated us and what caused our inner conflicts.

Nothing he taught us hadn’t already been described by Sophocles and Shakespeare. But he made it sound scientific.  Because that was the story our culture was telling itself. We had transcended myth and had entered the era of science. Freud served up science as myth. It’s not just a sweet irony. It’s more proof that we humans will always crave stories.

Jesus told his followers stories. In them is all the anthropology of the New Testament. It reverses the logic of power and puts the weak and the defenseless at the center of a love revolution.

Oscar Wilde felt that Jesus was the greatest artist of all time because he painted on the canvas of everyday human suffering and made a statement with it we can never forget.

The crucifixion took the leading symbol of the times of brutal naked power and turned it into a symbol of the revolutionary power of love.

The religion he inspired became a saint factory – a way of producing little Jesus’s scattered through history far and wide. The porches of the great cathedrals once showed all these saints represented in storytelling statues. 

“Look there’s Saint Denis carrying his own head.  He was not afraid to die for the truth. And that’s Saint Joan of Arc in her armor. She gave France its courage back. And there’s Saint Francis preaching to the birds. He taught us how to be simple and poor again.”

We in the West once lived in a world in which everything we do was animated by a living spirit who had lived as we do and done something incredible in the midst of the same fragility and confusion we all feel: a saint. Every profession and calling in life had a patron saint.

Almost no one I know in the ad biz knows that there is an official patron saint of advertising and public relations.  I love his story and have composed a prayer to him which you can find here: 

http://rwise.tumblr.com/post/68991120512/lessons-in-guerrilla-marketing-from-the-patron

[rwise]

Distracted, Discerning & Demanding: the realities of brand building for today’s consumers

On Day Five of SXSW Interactive, I got into the elevator of Austin’s brand new JW Marriott and it greeted me with a woman’s voice quietly purring "Going Up."

I was thinking about something quite deeply and so I absent-mindedly responded, "Yes, Floor 16 please."

Nothing happened.  

Then I laughed, realizing the elevator wasn't equipped with voice activation.

But my next thought was, "What's taking them so long to install that?"

That’s the SXSW effect.  You feel like you're the promising new hire at Google and you're being love-bombed, tech dazzled and brainwashed into permanent future-tense thinking.

It works.  I got deep dives into digital consumer engagement from some of the smartest, most massive branding organizations in the world.  I got immersed in breakthroughs in social media, apps, tech, publishing, television and immersive entertainment. And at the end of the five days, I didn’t just start talking to my elevator.  I started seeing three key insights that can drive the future of brand activation strategy.

Insight #1: today’s consumer is Distracted, Discerning and Demanding.

Distracted.  Mashable’s Pete Cashmore was asked who his competition is.  If you were thinking he was going to say “Wired” or “BuzzFeed,” you got it wrong.  “Baby pictures,” was his answer.  Because we’ve got our screens with us everywhere we go now.  Which is why, as Christian Schroeder likes to point out, Wrigley discovered a few years back that their grocery channel sales were dipping.  They couldn’t figure it out at first.  But then they realized that a big shift had quietly taken place.  People were staring at their smartphones in the checkout line to pass the time.  Bottom line: yesterday was about POS; tomorrow is about permission-based content streams.

Discerning.  We’re getting really good at rapidly sensing the relevance to us of the content we see in our daily streams.  We’ve got to see the payoff right away.  We may not even click through as BuzzFeed is discovering.  It’s more important to them now to be well-distributed than it is to have clicks to their own site.  And whatever you do, it’s got to be well-designed.  John Maeda, Senior Partner of Design at Kleiner Perkins started the rage at VCs in Silicon Valley to have designers on their boards.  Airbnb.com stood out only five years ago by having a designer as a co-founder.  Now the majority of VC-funded start-ups have a designer as principal.  Bottom line: yesterday was about being visible, tomorrow is about being beautiful.

Demanding.  Today’s consumer demand for engaging content has no cap and will just grow and grow.  There is literally no limit on this.  If you’re making unoriginal, badly-designed stuff, you will find out fast enough: no one will interact with it.  But once you hit your gold vein, you just can’t make enough of it.  Video in particular.  For brands that know what they’re doing, exclusive content made by respected artists or featuring original interviews with tastemakers, visionaries, comedians, this is the gold.  Examples: Acura’s “comedians in cars getting coffee” with Jerry Seinfield.  Denny’s comedy shop.  Mondelez YouTube channel for Sour Patch Kids.  Pepsi stealing the show from Coca-Cola at the World Cup with a fully interactive video.    All of these are scoring views in the tens of millions.  Bottom line: yesterday was about fighting for space in a zero-sum game; tomorrow is about fighting for new ideas in unlimited space.

Insight #2: The Internet of Things is setting the stage for the Brand Code of Things

Imagine you like horror fiction (do you?).  You’re always looking for a new frisson.  Well, in the era of the Internet of Things, the possibilities for that frisson are rapidly expanding.  Because, now, the story unfolding on your iPad could make your phone send you texts.  It could wake up the digital portraits you have and make them dim, brighten or appear with images you’ve never seen before.  And the story can propel you out of your house and into the streets.  There, your iPhone can start directing you to nearby locations where special screens flash messages encoded to appeal only to you.

Does this sound like science fiction?  It has already happened and on a truly massive scale.  

Customization. Consider Arcade Fire’s on line video generator (make sure open this in Google Chrome).  That was already 5 years ago.  Before that was Burger King’s even more massive Subservient Chicken which attracted over 5 million visitors.

Co-creation.  The Johny Cash project made it possible for tens of thousands of participants to design individual frames of a brilliant and beautiful music video edited by interactive artist Chris Milk.

Deep Immersion.  The Ship of Theseus does in a book form what many of the new digital immersion artists are doing on line.  You get a beautiful 1950’s library book complete with check-out card.  It is strewn with post cards, letters and memorabilia and the pages are covered with hand-written notes.  You’re getting two books for the price of one, a mysterious puzzle that invites exploration and intrigues you as you dig in.

Locative.  Adidas shoes are ready to suggest a running path you didn’t know about.

So what’s it about?  It’s about choosing why and how you want your brand to become dazzling, interesting, a vital part of on-going cultural conversation.  Study what’s in the landscape.  Think of a breakthrough experience for your prime prospect.  Visualize it.  Plan it out, all the tech, the execution.  Do it brilliantly.  Get ready to be a legendary brand.

Insight #3: Scale is King – Rapid Iteration is how we get there.

Research and Marketing are conflating into one.  After 9/11, the “Halloween House” industry thought they were going to see their worst year ever.  They had their best year ever.  People voted with their feet and indicated what no standard marketing research would have been able to predict: Americans were now in the market for a genuinely scary experience because they needed a catharsis.  The most important metric BuzzFeed looks at is not clicks or time spent, it’s shares.  Shares indicate that the content made their readers feel something they want to share.  So after the Sandy Hook school slayings, BuzzFeed suddenly saw a surge of “12 things that make me believe in humanity again.”  By putting content and co-creation products into the hands of consumers and learning directly from them, we own our insights and can more quickly uncover the next layer of the game.

Google X’s Astro Teller tells the story of how his moonshots program consistently aims to fail big and fail fast.  By “fail” he of course means to encounter the real-world reality of how human beings are going to react to your huge ideas once they can get their hands on them.  Don’t work on them in isolation.  Don’t spend years in your development bunker.  Prototype them as fast as you can and see what happens when they encounter the real world where they meet both the laws of physics and the quirks of the human brain.

Google Glasses was handled poorly because they never made it clear it was just a “let’s-see-what-it’s-like” beta product and they set back Google’s reputation and the perception of the not yet developed category.  Nobody wants a t-shirt that can tell you if you’re about to have a heart attack.  You can’t have a self-driving car that requires an alert human co-pilot.  On and on, Google X has developed a living library of deep human insights.  

Round-up: so where does this take us?

Share your vision.  Added Value research shows that brands gain cultural traction when they have four key qualities: visionary, inspiring, bold and exciting.  What’s your brand’s vision of the future?  You probably have an internal view of it.  Ever think of sharing it with your consumers?  

Apple did just this with its Knowledge Navigator video in 1987.  It was a fascinating glimpse of what Siri wishes it was and still isn’t.  But it gained traction because it taught us to look at Apple as a thought leader.  Where does your brand have the possibility to do this?

Go for the exclusive video content. When is your consumers down time?  What are their feeds?  What can you do at the right time to give them a burst of inspiration, excitement or just a chuckle?  Plan ahead and make that piece of exclusive content.  Maybe it can resonate to the experiences they’ve had at your showcase activation events?

Launch and learn.  Move faster with prototypes and learn from consumer response to them.

Don’t worry if you’re late to the game.  Papa John’s founder hadn’t used a computer until 2010.  Today his $2 billion pizza chain receives more than 50% of its sales through mobile/digital.  It’s not that he wanted to suddenly “go digital.”  It’s that he understood if his people spent less time on “the damn phone,” they could spend more time focusing on making a great pizza.

[rwise]

Be persistent. And find out who the real you is.

In the Summer of 1979, Carillon Importers, the company behind Absolut vodka, had just launched what would become the most famous print campaign of advertising history…and nothing much happened.  Sales didn’t magically go up.  The ad trades wrote very little about it.  That remained true for the whole first year it ran.  Sales began to pick up the second year it ran but nobody was breaking any records... yet.

At this point, most brand stewards at self-respecting multi-brand multinationals would have thrown in the towel and started running a different campaign.  But Carillon, under the leadership of Al Singer and Michel Roux, didn’t flinch.  They kept on going. 

The key to their success was that they tricked themselves into being persistent.  They of course told themselves, “this is a great campaign idea but great ideas take time to build.”  That is not a particularly original insight.  Most of the multinationals pay lip service to it - just before they change their mind anyway. 

What Carillon did was concern themselves with getting a series of tangible short-term wins that created a sense of momentum for their company and their brand:

-       they got it to be the star of the show at high-profile parties in Boston, New York City and LA.

-       they made sure it was distributed and showcased at spiffy liquor stores in the toniest neighborhoods. 

-       they made lots of friends among the fashion and arts set. 

They kept getting a series of steady wins and most of the brand’s growth in years one and two was due to these wins not to the sudden impact of the brand campaign.  Because it wasn’t sudden.  It was slooooow.  But no worry: Carillon tricked themselves into being persistent. 

Drink too much Absolut and you might need to join the AA underground, one of the most successful ways ever invented to reverse alcoholism.  What’s the secret to their success?  Same as Absolut.

Tricking yourself. 

You never “swear it off” for good.  That’s just too much to handle mentally and emotionally.  Instead, you focus on the day at hand.  “Sure,” you say to yourself, “I suppose I could always drink again one day, whatever, but today, just for today, I’m not going to take that first drink.  I can do that.  I can make it to bedtime without having one.” 

It’s a trick because of course the goal is to make a lasting change in your behavior.  And as soon as you get one day sober, you’re thinking about another and another, then a month, then 90 days, then a year and so on.  But you never get there if you don’t do it one day at a time.

So trick yourself.  Be persistent one day at a time.  And set yourself some fun short-term goals to occupy the fuss and bother of your ever-active mind.

Just for today, I will be persistent.

While you’re at it, you’re going to taste failure.  And part of the magic of persistence is that you’ll figure out how to use failure to your advantage.

Ever hear of Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo?  They were two musicians in a three-man 90s band named Darlin’.  A 1993 review of their music in Melody Maker called their music “daft punky trash.”  It was not a good start.  

The other member left the band.  Thomas and Guy-Manuel embarked on a new musical destination of synth and drums and bass.  Remembering the review in Melody Maker, they grinned rather than cringed and decided to name themselves Daft Punk – going on to become a legendary force in modern pop culture.  They did not run from their failure; they saw the humor in it and turned it into a brand asset.

Something happens when you fail and keep on going.  You get over your fear of embarrassment.  You find the real you, warts and all.  And you embrace…yourself.

Hire the person who’s failed at least once.  Not just because they’re know where the fault lines are.  But because they’ve got a certain depth and self-knowledge that comes from realizing that you when fail you don’t actually die.

My biggest experience of failure came from working on digital innovations inside Saatchi and Saatchi on behalf of Eastman Kodak Company in the early 90s.  Kodak was a hotbed of new ideas and had invented almost every single imaging technology that still dominates the field today.  But they were obsessed with not “throwing the baby out with bathwater.”  The management of the company forgot Alan Kay’s dictum that the only way to control the future is to invent it.  If you hold on to what you've got, you can never grasp what's next.  I watched one great idea after another get scuttled and one brilliant entrepreneur after another get back-staged or outright dismissed. 

But I kept at it, if only out of self-respect.  One of my clients was a brilliant African American woman, an MIT graduate, who was definitely suffering from the “pale, male and stale” culture of Kodak.  We worked on one of the still remaining successful digital imaging launches, known today in Hollywood as Cinesite.  I had worked all night to orchestrate a multitude of unplanned changes in the supporting communications and my client asked me, “Why do you care?  They’re all bozos.  Why are you knocking yourself out?”  I hadn’t thought about in those terms and surprised myself by answering, “Because passion is its own reward.”

What I found out was that the fine line between prudence and corporate daring is just that: a fine line.  And that my own personal passion is by itself a virtue whose qualities are essential to being on the side of the fine line that leads to success.  I am very sad that good 'ole Kodak lost the plot. But I have no regrets about how I played.  That was my win.

In 1980, Francois Mitterrand had already run twice for President of France and had failed both times.  He was a classic “loser” but he never acted like one.  In fact, he had been on the French political scene so long, he had acquired a certain elegant gravitas as a result of that. 

For his campaign poster, Mitterrand posed for a portrait outdoors in the French provinces with a village and its church in the background.  This contrasted sharply with traditional campaign posters featuring head shots against a seamless and a corporate-sounding slogan: “Forward with Candidate X.”  Mitterrand looked different.  And he said something different, too.   The enigmatic slogan on his poster was simply, “La Force Tranquille.” 

It was almost like he didn’t care whether you voted for him.  He was going to carry on being who he was, grounded in French history yet with calm eyes on the future.  The fact that he had been around for so long but never served as President was all part of his “tranquil force.”  His persistence was itself his asset.  And the French wanted that.  He was elected and went on to be a President who did exactly what you thought he would.  He knew who he was and that was what France wanted.

You see, when you persist at something, it’s not just that you get good at it.  It’s that you acquire a body of insights that transcend the immediate goal. 

Steve Jobs took typography in college and saw that most people ignore the emotional impact of design when they make products.  That was his starting point and his great insight that he never departed from.  But look at the widening gyre of the implications of this insight.  The font library with the Macintosh.  The design of the Next computer.  The iPod.  The iPhone.  The advertising for Apple.  No one else got it with the passion with which he did.  He didn’t even always get it himself. 

Look at some of the early ads for Apple.  They’re not that good.  But they got better and better and Apple itself became a brand without which no discussion of modern design is complete.

I showed up for singing lessons for the first time in my life at the age of 44.  My teacher, Beverly, was a soloist for the New York Philharmonic.  She sat at her baby grand and asked me, “What do you want to accomplish with me?”

“To sing in Carnegie Hall,” I announced.  “What the hell, I figure.  Might as well shoot for the moon.”

She said, “It’s pretty hard to do that at your age, starting from scratch.  “But I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about the tourist who asks a New Yorker, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  And the answer is, ‘Practice.””

“So let’s start.”   And we did.  Three hours into my first lessons, I was still having a hard time distinguishing, when she played two consecutive notes, if they were going up or down.  This was turning out to be a thousand times harder than I thought and for the first time in my life I began to wonder if I was not mentally handicapped somehow.

Two years later, I could kind of sight read and I changed my goal considerably.  Now I just wanted to get good enough to join the local volunteer choir.

My teacher said, “You want to me to tell you the best way to get good enough to sing on the choir?” 

I said, “That’s what I’m here for now.” 

She said, “Just join it.” 

I did.  I was barely good enough and just surviving there became the new adventure. 

Five years went by and you know what? I got pretty good at it. 

Then one day, a call for choristers went out.   The Musica Sacra ensemble was going to be performing Saint Mathew’s Passion in Carnegie Hall and they needed experienced choristers to join them in singing the twelve chorales of Bach’s masterpiece in the second tier of the balcony.  This would give the audience a delicious “surround sound” auditory experience.  I put my name in and was accepted on the strength of my five years of choral experience.  We rehearsed many weeks and finally I was able to invite my mom to come hear me in Carnegie Hall.

OK, I wasn’t a soloist on stage but, dammit, I made it.  I actually succeeded at my wildest dreams. Thank you Beverly!

And, by sticking with it, I acquired insights I couldn’t have found any other way.  I understood in my bones, not just my head, the truism that it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.  I became much more sensitive to tone and manner.  You can sing something with perfect technical skill but if you haven’t connected with how a song’s idea is related to the emotions you have felt in your life, people will not react strongly to your performance.  I also came to understand that to learn to sing well is also to learn to listen well.  I have had my heart variously pierced, exhilarated and overjoyed by every beautiful piece of music I have ever listened to over the years.

Almost all of the great brands that have spawned empires start with one person who had none of the support systems that the great fully developed brands have: R&D, insights department, business analysts, a fancy ad agency.  These things rarely create brands (despite what they’ll tell you).  Persistence does.  Yet these same support systems often encourage a lack of persistence disguised as testing, optimization and risk reduction. 

If you work for one of those multinationals, they need you to lead them to be persistent in spite of themselves. 

Be persistent with everything you care about in your life and you will be up to this.  It won’t even bother you very much if you don’t always succeed.  Because you will have learned to love who you are, not just what you’ve done.

[rwise]

How having lunch at a truck stop in Nebraska helped me get over myself and start really enjoying life

I take it as an article of faith that each of us is unique and has a very special thing to do during our passage on Earth.  All the great mystic visions of life affirm this.  But they also say that cultivating the feeling that you’re separate, different from everyone else, is NOT the way to live out your uniqueness. 

Because, at some point, you just have to get over yourself. 

You have to realize that most of your life you’re going through very similar experiences as other people and you share the same hopes, dreams and frustrations of everyone who’s ever been alive.

I know that sounds absurdly simple.  But here’s where it gets interesting.  It’s not simple.  Pride keeps creeping in, like a gentle fog, and pretty soon, you can’t see clearly. 

When I was 16, I was reading Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau.  I lived in daily horror at the spectacle of “lives of quiet desperation.”  I felt apart from all other human beings and singled out for a separate existence, possibly tragic, definitely noble.

I mostly kept all this to myself and carried on with my New England Prep School where I was getting good grades, hated sports - except competitive slalom skiing - and had my own clique of critics, dreamers and frustrated visionaries. 

My dad, who I did not include in the list of the “quietly desperate,” took me on a father/son ski vacation in the Rockies.  We drove there from New England.  It was a good trip to take together.  And it was the kind of thing he would do.  Just take off in a car, drive to the Rockies, ski a few days then drive back home with a good story to tell.

Not far from the Rockies, we stopped at a huge and cheap steakhouse in Western Nebraska.  It served as a diner and a truckstop but you could see that local families came here to eat.  It was packed.

I surveyed the room.  Mostly overweight people making themselves even more overweight.  Dull, munching faces that appeared to be untouched by the illuminating thoughts of Ayn Rand, Nietzsche or Thoreau.

I didn’t say anything but my dad, always empathetic and alert, picked up on my inner thoughts.

“Do you know who these people are?  Do you know who you’re looking at?” he asked. 

“They’re mostly the descendants of settlers, two or three generations removed.  All of those settlers were a distinctive type of human being.  People who wanted to give themselves and their families more freedom and opportunity than they had ever known.” 

“They picked up everything, and plunged into the unknown.  They faced the dangers of sickness, starvation, robbery and a lonely death.  And they figured it out.  They beat the tremendous odds against them.  They learned so much about themselves in the process.”

“All around us, these are their great grandchildren.  They may not look very impressive but the wild courage of the settlers still runs in their veins.  Sometimes, it just takes the form of facing a 30-year mortgage you’re not sure you can pay.  But sometimes, as happened in World War II, Korea, and the unsung, frustrated heroes of Vietnam, it shows up again and blazes in all its glory.  And that, my son, is who you are sitting with today.”

Then he let me be and absorb what he had said, not requiring a response – always a kind thing to do when you’ve just put someone in their place.

I could feel a couple of “clicks” taking place inside me.  The realization that we are all living out dramas that are bigger than the ones we see day to day in the space of our lives.  The realization that each of us has a potential we have inherited that can suddenly take a surprising form.  And the realization that if I don’t search for this and listen for it, I consign myself to a lonely existence, judging the people around me by their surfaces and always missing the deeper, more inspiring reality.

Years later, working in advertising, I read an observation by legendary adman David Ogilvy.  He said that sometimes his copywriters began to write over the heads of their audience.  “Fact is, a lot of them were educated at Ivy League schools and lead a pretty smart life in Manhattan.  The best cure for that is to buy them a bus ticket to the Midwest and ask them to spend a day or two hanging out in the coffee shop listening to what people are chatting about,” he said.  And, remembering my conversation with Dad at a Nebraska truck stop, I realized that Ogilvy was talking about something bigger than the technique of writing approachable copy.  He was also talking about what it takes to be a happy human being.  That you have to get over yourself.

Here’s an experience most people who’ve ever worked in advertising have had.  They’re showing an ad to people who might buy the product being advertised and they’re asking them, “Does this persuade you to buy the product?”

Someone will usually say, “Well, you know, I don’t really buy products because of their ads.  I like to make up my own mind.”

So now a rift gets created.

On the one hand, the “consumer” is saying, deep down, “I’m not sure I want to play this game.  Advertising is ultimately just a bunch of nonsense.  In fact, I could live without it altogether.”

On the other hand, the advertising and marketing people are thinking, “Yeah, right, advertising doesn’t influence your decision.  Well, if that was really true, we’d all have been out of work a long time ago.  We know something you don’t know.  It does work.  And the reason we’re doing this research is because we already know what buttons to push and we intend to get better and better at it.  So why don’t you shut up and just answer the questions we’ve prepared for you?”

The way out of this impasse, for those who are making the ads, is to say, “Wait, I’m just like him.  He is simply asserting the dignity of his person.  I, too, don’t like the idea that I can be swayed in my opinions by something as insubstantial as advertising. What does that teach me about myself and the culture that has shaped me?”

Now it starts to get interesting. It’s time to check in with a very wise Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville.  He toured America to study its penal system in 1831 in order to recommend reforms to the French government.  But he ended up writing about something much bigger and published a classic, “Democracy in America.”  Our French thinker made a surprising number of predictions about the unfolding of the future in America:

-       There would be a civil war over the issue of slavery.

-       Women would demand the right to vote and equality in the workplace.

-       America would be isolationist in its foreign policy but if it did enter any wars, once mobilized, it would do so with astonishing resolve and staggering impact.

-       Two countries would loom large in the world’s future: America with its mass individualism and Russia with its mass collectivism; these two countries would become struggling juggernauts whose clash would dominate world history.

All this he saw in 1831.

He described a society in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives but are also subject to market forces and the “tyranny of the mass.”  A society in which everyone wants to be one of a kind – just like everybody else.  He picked up on an anxiety this would produce in us.  We would dread the feeling that we are being massaged by the media (as Marshall McLuhan would describe it more than 130 years later).  We would dread the power of the mass media and the mass products they sell and we would struggle against them to assert our own individuality, wondering if our most cherished ideal was itself a product we were being induced to buy.

This would explain why consumers believe that there is such a thing as “subliminal advertising.”  Subliminal advertising, I can tell you, is definitely an urban legend.  If you try to run an ad in movie theatres where, for a microsecond, you flash the words “You’re thirsty.  Buy Coke,” it won’t work.  It creates a distraction and does not plant the hidden message in your subconscious. Yet most people believe it’s going on most of the time. 

An author named Vance Packard exploited this anxiety in 1957 when he published the now forgotten best-seller, “The Hidden Persuaders.”  He painted a picture of a society ruled by political spin doctors and Madison Avenue types who pull the strings of our subconscious with their scientifically developed techniques of mass manipulation.  Most of the things we were supposed to be afraid of – the supposed use of subliminal advertising – the hiring of psychologists, the use of archetypes…most of it might seem ho-hum today but the point is…the anxiety of living in a mass society. 

In fact, it turns out that a story Packard told about movie theatres flashing “Drink Coke” for milliseconds during coming attractions was entirely made up, a hoax that a marketing consultant perpetrated to build his business.  You can find the full story in “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology” by the admirable Scott Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn.

The meme continues fifty years later with The Baffler magazine and authors like Thomas Frank who published his scathing portrayal of the consumerism behind Gen X and hipster culture, “Commodify Your Dissent.”  You think you’re empowered in your individuality with your Apple AirBook and your Nikes?  No you’re not, you’re just a tool of The Man, the corporations that exploit your thirst for individuality by selling you mass products that proclaim…your individuality.  It makes for good reading.  I like this guy.  But I think it’s all part of the bigger picture that de Tocqueville so accurately described in 1831: the anxiety of being an individual in a mass society.  Today, this same dynamic is repeating itself in every culture that gets swept up in mass market dynamics and globalization.  It’s no longer a uniquely American syndrome.

To understand this is not to laugh at it cynically, but to accept it, maybe even have some genuine compassion about it.  Who knows?  It might lead you to create better advertising that adds a little sparkle to every day life.  It might have more heart, more insight, more humor, more fun.

Maybe instead of hiding behind the one-way mirror in focus groups, you should get out and meet your prospects.  There’s nothing wrong with doing focus groups per se but maybe your moderator could at the end introduce the whole team behind the ads and you could hang out for a few minutes, thank everybody give them a gift from the brand, answer any questions they might have.  You could even tell them what you learned by listening to them and why you like working on this brand.

Why not let that carry over into how you do business in general?  People like brands because they can embody a little bit of pop culture and the way the products get made is kind of fascinating.  Open up.  Invite people in.  Be transparent.  It’s no accident that this is a major trend in how brands get built.  We don’t want to feel the anxiety of being cogs in a mass machine.  So do your best not to feed that anxiety!

Hopefully, if you work at Facebook, this will help you understand why it would be a very stupid idea to play around with altering people’s news feeds in order to measure the effect it has on people’s emotions.  How does that help you be a better brand?  Really?  And, above all, once words gets out that you’re doing this, don’t you think it will play into the anxiety of living in a mass society?

Working in advertising can indeed help you get over yourself.  But the point is to still be able to embrace your uniqueness, that one thing you were born to do.  How do you find it while working in advertising, this “appeal to the masses” trade?

Just try to do really good work today and, my experience is, you will find out. 

Try to listen deeply to what you hear people saying to you.  Ask smart questions.  Listen again.  Don’t be afraid to probe, challenge, or look at it from a novel point of view.  And keep up your pursuit of really good work.  Right now, only you can do this work.  Only you.  And that “you,” that person who is earnestly striving to do really good work…that’s where you find what makes you unique.  It’s thrilling.  And it’s humbling. 

While you’re doing your work, you might in fact just be some data point in a larger equation that will only be understood by a French philosopher one hundred years from now.

But, you know what?  Life is short. 

And you’re not going to enjoy it if you don’t get over yourself.

[rwise]

How to Tell if Someone Is Lying

Pay attention to four nonverbal cues, all in conjunction.

[rwise]

How volunteering in a homeless shelter taught me the secret of lasting creativity

I've been working as a "brand anthropologist" for about twenty years - mostly taking me into adventures inside ad agencies.

Funny thing about the ad business.  You’ve got to be fanatically confident in order to sell a good idea.  There are a lot of amazingly cocky people in this business.  They have to be in order to survive.  So much so, that it’s easy to overlook the most important quality of every genuinely creative person who’s ever existed.  Humility.

It takes humility to stand in front of the unvarnished truth.  And this truth is often that your idea jut isn’t very good.  It needs more work.  Or maybe you need a whole new idea. 

If you’re trying to be funny and no one laughs, it’s not because they suck.  It’s because your joke does. 

And, if you’re pitching something and nobody buys it, it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because your idea doesn’t sell.  All really creative people admit to this truth and the successful ones keep on working until they have it right.

Jim Collins book “Good to Great” tells the story of how companies that combine soaring ambition AND fearless debate are the ones that win.  They start where the audience is, not where they think they are. 

You can see this wisdom reflected in one of ad legend Linda Kaplan’s favorite stories of how her new agency put itself on the map in creating a new campaign for the American Family Life Assurance Company (Aflac). 

Aflac had spent millions of dollars trying to build its brand name recognition with safe and bland advertising.  It wasn’t going anywhere until a copywriter at the Kaplan Thaler Group connected with the elementary truth that the name of this unknown company sounds like a duck quacking.  He wasn’t the first person to realize it.  But he was the first person to make a creative idea based on this elementary insight. 

The Aflac duck idea was “terrible” because it insulted the pride of the client.  They needed the brand name recognition to grease the skids for their sales force.  They were calling on HR managers to try to sell them on supplemental insurance for their employees.  No one even remembered the company’s name. 

But imagine trying to tell the sales force that everything’s going to be fine now because they’re going to have a duck quacking their name on TV.

Linda Kaplan paid for the ad test herself on the condition that she’d get the business – and her money back – if it scored higher than the other options.  It did.  When the sales force called on prospects after the campaign aired, their prospects would say “Aflac?!” and laugh, as soon as their caller identified themselves.  The sales force learned that this very laugh opened the door and their closing rates went through the roof. 

It took humility for all involved to do this.  Just as it took pride for them to run the crappy ads that made them feel good about themselves but couldn’t even be remembered by their prospects.

“Got Milk?” is another great example of marketer humility. 

The National Dairy Board was viewing declining milk consumption at a time when America was becoming far more health conscious.  They were proud of their product, rich in protein and Vitamin D, and they created a campaign based on that pride.  They showed people running in the park and, then, at the end of their run, enjoying a carton of milk.  Up came the slogan: “Milk! America’s Health Kick!” 

If anybody tried to dissent by pointing out obvious disconnects with consumer reality they were told to shut up.  Have you ever seen ANYBODY drink milk after they run?  Shut up.  Can milk every really be seen as a health product?  Shut up.  Isn’t the term “health kick” kind of patronizing?  Shut up.

Enter the California Fluid Milk Processor’s Board. 

Under the kind of management leadership that Linda Kaplan had at her client Afflac, they admitted defeat.  “Nothing we’ve done so far has worked.  We give up.  What do you propose?” they asked their new agency, Goodby Silverstein. 

The agency proposed the ingenious idea of doing “deprivation research.”  Participants agreed to voluntarily forgo buying milk for a week and then reported what their lives had been like.  “TERRIBLE!” they said with one voice.  Everyone had key moments when a glass of milk was absolutely indispensable.  Breakfast cereal.  Cookies.   P&B sandwich.  The Goodby team asked creative director Rich Silverstein what they should put on the cover of their research report.  He said, “Got Milk?” 

That’s how one of the most famous advertising campaigns started: with the humility to meet the consumer where they were.

The campaign started as a simple shopper marketing idea.  A shopping cart visual with a bite taken out of a cookie and the words “Got Milk?” put in the negative space of the bite.  Milk sales increased because it dramatized its humble little point: it sucks when you run out.

The Economist’s Andreas Kluth has written about the “catastrophe of success.”  Great success imprisons its owner.  Its makes them proud and resistant to change. 

At one point in my career and personal life, I experienced this, big time.   My brash and exciting agency Mezzina/Brown parlayed its success into a series of hot account wins and I got puffed up.  Little by little but then faster and faster I slid into being abusive, arrogant – and in fact quite the lush. 

Thanks to an intervention by my work colleagues, and to the great relief of my family, I stopped drinking, did a lot of self-examination, repaired broken relationships, and started to take the idea of volunteering seriously.

I got excited by the idea of volunteering at a men’s homeless shelter - which turned out to be hard work.  I slept on a folding cot in a large hall with all the other men to assure public order and in the process got a taste of how miserable and disorienting it is to no longer have my own comfortable bedroom with all my stuff just so.  We’d spend time in the evenings over a communal meal before lights out chatting about whatever caught a spark. One night, there was a lively clever-looking young man named Jamal at the table. 

He said, “You don’t look like the other volunteers.  You look like you should be out at some fabulous party.  What’s your line of business?”

“Ad man,” I said, “how about you?” 

 "Stand up comedian,” he surprised me by saying. 

“What happened?” I asked.

“I stopped writing new material.  And you know what?  Audiences can tell, even if it’s the first time they’re seeing you.  They start booing.  And rather than be humble and recognize why, I decided they were assholes.  I was out of work in a hurry.  I started feeling sorry for myself all the time.  Next thing I knew I was homeless.  So now I’m getting my shit back together again and I’m going to take another crack at it.”

I sat there with him, wearing my comfortable black cashmere sweater and knowing that I would return to my Union Square loft in a few hours, but all I could say was, “Dude, you’re telling my story.”

In the years that followed I have experienced great success advising brands you wouldn’t ordinarily mention in the same story as volunteering at homeless shelters.  Dunhill.  Johnnie Walker.  Ritz Carlton.  Lincoln Motor Company.  But I like to remember at such times that the most important thing I learned about good ideas, I got from a stand-up comic in a homeless shelter. 

Stay humble.

And here I am, bragging about it.

Uh oh.

[rwise]

I stumbled upon this fashion brand in Jinan, China.  “The description of the garment of fashion is therefore a social fact, so that even if the garment remained purely imaginary, it would constitute an incontestable element of mass culture . . . the analysis of written clothing can also effectively pave the way for the invention of real clothing.” - Roland Barthes, The Fashion System

[rwise]

Toyota's new concept car has a digital skin which transforms it to a "status update" on four wheels.