Brand?

A month or so ago, Blaise Zerega, CEO of online topical video aggregator and conversation-connecter Foratv, posted comments from a recent Commonwealth Club forum made by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. The video shows Lakoff speaking at a recent Commonwealth Club forum about town halls and the health care debate as it relates to language and the human brain. For one, I want to give props to Zerega for using social media in a way that contributes to important and timely conversations (as opposed to simply shilling for his company). His post shows a good understanding of how he can highlight Foratv without resorting to all-too-common marketing desperation on the Internet. Bravo, Blaise.
Now, as I sat there listening to Lakoff and reflecting on the underlying marketing savvy of Zerega’s post, I started to think a little more seriously about the role of marketing in the process of democracy. This tendency towards marketing on the part of politicians and interest groups to persuade Americans about matters of policy is something that fails the sniff test for many thinkers and critics, Noam Chomsky one of the most prominent.
At the same time, strong marketing exhibits a keen understanding of how people think and how they absorb information, as well as how their material circumstances or cultural and personal preconceptions may affect their responses to information or calls to action. In a political context, this may not necessarily be a bad thing.
Consider the relatively recent flap kicked off by former president Jimmy Carter when he stated baldly on TV that so-called tea-baggers venting their collective spleens about health care reform at town hall meetings were consciously or unconsciously motivated by racism. Carter has never had a firm grasp on how to deliver messages in a way that they can be accepted and absorbed by the public (just read his “malaise” speech). He doesn’t get marketing. Being right doesn’t matter if no one can accept what you have to say. If he had a bit more insight in terms of marketing, the whole debate around his comments might have been quite different.

And that’s the double-edged sword of marketing when you think of it in relation to politics. It can be glib. It can reduce complex issues too much. But, at the same time, an understanding of cognitive psychology (which is implicit in marketing) can make it much easier to get people to consider your ideas – especially when they may challenge a person’s lifestyle or viewpoints.

I just sat down in this cozy little independent coffee shop in my current city of residence (San Francisco) to write a little bit about Starbucks…and maybe a little about local versus corporate economies as well. I’ve actually been meaning to turn my attention to these guys for a while, ever since I noticed their new “fair trade” iconography gracing the bus stops of my fair city some months ago. You may have seen this, it’s large-scale representations of a very organic, very hand-knit looking light brown sack, which is, of course, how all fair trade coffee gets transported to our caffeine-starved shores. Tongue out of cheek, though, seriously, I like the campaign and the way Starbucks seems to be constantly evolving their brand.

Then, I ask myself, how can this be? I mean I’m sitting here in an independently owned coffee shop to do my writing. Why? Well, yeah, I care about supporting my local economy, blah blah blah. But, if I’m being honest, it’s the vibe. Classic German prog-rock band Neu! is pulsing from strategically spaced speakers. The place is bathed in natural light. I’m sitting at a scarred square wooden table. Wireless is free and there are plenty of electrical outlets so I can keep my laptop charged. And the coffee’s decent, too. If I went to do this writing and Net surfing in any Starbucks, it would be a) not free b) noisy c) filled with only mild, corporately approved music d) hopelessly over-lit and e) suffused with that strange nowhere/everywhere antiseptic feeling that every chain seems to embody in spades.

Nevertheless, if I’m looking to grab the best tasting soy latte I can get, I’ll definitely be stepping into a Starbucks and snagging one of those ubiquitous cup-and-sleeves that poke from every celebrity’s hand in the pages of Us magazine (talk about the best product placement ever). Starbucks is a great grab-and-go, but I never have the desire to stick around (though, in my neighborhood, many folks do).

So, this discrepancy or contradiction or nuance or whatever you want to call it, hit me a little harder when I came across a recent article from the Guardian UK, by University of Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal. In it, she frames a critique of Starbucks latest recession-influenced strategy:

Starbucks’ new stealth strategy sees it “rebranding”, or de-branding, stores to give them different names and more local “community personality”. A victim of its own success—161 branches within a five-mile radius in Central London and the famous promise to open a new one every fortnight— Starbucks has been hit by the recession and, in different ways, both by the turn to less expensive caffeine hits and a reawakening of interest in local economies. Even before the downturn, its legendary CEO, Howard Schultz, fretted about what he called the ‘watering down of the Starbucks experience’ and the loss of ‘the soul of the past’ in ‘the warm feeling of the neighborhood store’.

Now, I just noticed this occurrence while cycling around town. A coffee shop that looks home grown, but is really a Starbucks. I actually find the move kind of heartening. I lived in Seattle’s coffee shop mecca neighborhood, Capitol Hill, during the early 1990s (before Starbucks was anything more than a local brand) and remember the diversity of the city’s coffee culture. Every café had its own vibe, including Starbucks. I can’t even name the amount of excellent bands I discovered, just by hanging out in different shops and drinking in their stereo systems. In one sense, this new “local flavor” move by Starbucks doesn’t just reflect their market research savvy about the public’s growing interest in local economies OR the company’s need to reduce costs (by forgoing those incurred from creating signage and stores that fit the corporately approved design schematics). 

I believe it’s also a reflection of where our consumer culture is heading. Slow down and think about it for a second. The hallmark of everything that’s going on with social media – Twitter, blogs, online reviews,  real-time feedback and, overall, increasing independence of thought among customers – speaks to a growing inability of large companies to exert control over their brands. And where branding became the business religion of the 1990s, now in the late 2000s the command-and-control enforcement of a company’s brand identity is becoming both a liability and an impossibility.  In one sense, I see Starbucks as recognizing this environment and bravely letting go. Maybe next time I stop in for a grab-and-go latte, I’ll stick around, maybe even chat with staff that have not been hounded into being scary cheery Disneyesque baristas.

Professor Gopal, I suspect, doesn’t see it the same way. Here, she wonders:

The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic… What can be done, and is it an issue? If every human desire, including a commitment to the distinctively local can be repackaged with such global panache, perhaps this is further evidence of the futility of resisting the gigantic enclosure that is corporate globalisation.

I don’t see the same futility. For one, I think it’s important to remember that most folks ARE mainstream. Whatever at any given time is quirky and countercultural is usually enjoyed solely by the quirky and the countercultural, always a minority of folks in any country.  Not every business can make their cake off this audience alone. Mass appeal does count for something. Two, blunting the impact of corporate globalization may not necessarily be the binary action/reaction suggested by Gopal’s use of the word “resisting” above. What if blunting globalization’s negative impact is a matter of propagating an unruly coexistence, not unlike how Michael Pollan envisions our future food system as being one in which local organic farms enjoy an increasing share of the food market with large-scale agribusiness?

What I mean is, the public is not always as brainwashed as intellectuals may think. In a Web 2.0 world in which regular, mainstream consumers exhibit an astounding amount of agency, local businesses have enormous opportunities to tap into that agency by reaching out to customers and each other (through online social media, the formation of cooperatives, partnerships, collective promotions and homemade branding efforts). This means that local businesses can engage an audience and protect their business interests not simply because a mass of customers become inspired to RESIST corporate businesses (which involves straight-up repudiation and is very difficult), but because they’ve been inspired to JOIN great local businesses. In an environment with this kind of potential, Starbucks may simply become one successful business among many viable and frequented options for today’s caffeine seekers.

Since we’ve entered the brave new world of Web 2.0 and social media technology, companies have been falling all over themselves in a race to use these tools to further their interests. It’s only natural. Blogs and social networks happen to be where their potential customers are or, at the very least, where companies perceive those customers to be.

But What is Social Media All About?

Let’s keep in mind that the power of social media as applied to building brand loyalty and driving incremental sales still rests on some pillars that many companies find it difficult to embrace: those pillars being transparency, authenticity, and free-flowing dialogue.

When you take a trip through different sectors of the blogosphere, it doesn’t take too long to spot instances where companies are using bloggers and the social media space to continue age-old one-way marketing practices that push positivity, innocuousness and, above all, product. While companies may be pleased as punch at their ability to utilize new communications mediums to reach customers, it remains to be seen if these stealth top-down messaging strategies are really serving to deepen their relationships with consumers. Because, to deepen those relationships, a little depth tends to be a requirement.

One of my recent forays into the blogosphere proved educational. This blog had to do with bath product giveaways and an ostensible blogger review of Fraiche products.

If you take a look at the blog, there are several tip-offs that a company is behind the proceedings:

1. Lack of transparency: it’s hard to tell who is behind the blog. There’s no info, photo, or anything much about the blogger.

2. Lack of authenticity: Of course, the blog tells us that Fraiche products are just great and you should get them for yourself. That’s the message. Nothing about why they’re great, what they’re made of, why anyone should care, nothing. They’re just great. This is a tip-off. Why would anyone blog about something just to say wow, it’s great. Sure, there are polyannas out there, but more often than not it’s because they’ve been asked to do so, paid to do so, or they simply don’t exist and a company’s marketing communications department has set up the blog.

3. Lack of free-flowing dialogue: If you review the comments, they are all exceptionally short, positive, innocuous and, amazingly, push additional Fraiche products. Wow, what are the odds!? Everybody else thinks it’s just great, great, great. Gosh, I just love it when things are so great, don’t you? Sorry to be so flip, but this is another tip-off. These comments have been planted for the purpose of driving sales.

Some blogs don’t even try that much to hide their marketing intentions. This blog about financial products just pastes in marketing copy from online bank EverBank (I know it when I see it, I wrote copy for them some years ago).

Okay, okay. Of course, any company has the right to play around this way in the blogosphere. But, if Web 2.0 has taught us anything these past few years, it’s that people are sick of being passive consumers. They like products and gadgets and widgets, sure, but if they’re going to engage on these topics, they are looking for some depth, some dialogue, and some helpful perspectives. The rub about this for companies is that engaging customers in dialogue, as opposed to just trying to sell them something, takes a lot more time and necessitates giving up control of the “message”.

Some advice from the peanut gallery out here to companies.

If you want to be a part of the Web 2.0 world, start by listening. Find out what people are thinking about and talking about. Then look for ways to engage with them. Why not try asking questions instead of delivering messages? Why not be a part of the dialogue instead of the one who controls the dialogue? Hey, your legal department may hate it and your sales force may hate it, but if you want to build brand loyalty, you’ve got to put in a little work out here in the messy reality of a world where consumers have an increasing amount of agency and information.

As a final salvo, take a look at this blog about streaming video versus pirate downloads. If a company were listening to what this man is talking about, they could not only be a part of this dialogue, but also discover better ways to market their products to those pesky teenagers who are used to getting what they want for free. (or so we’ve been told).

Do you have examples of blogs or social media applications that help build brand loyalty through dialogue, transparency, and authentic voices? Please share!

So, picking up on my last post about Liberty Mutual and what I’ve been thinking of as their “Good Samaritan” campaign: It’s a pretty brand-invigorating set of communications, but the perennial skeptic in me has been wondering (pretty much since the branding boom of the 90s), what really is the purpose of a brand’s image, it’s promise, if the brand experience totally contradicts that promise?

Is it:

A. Simple bad faith – do many businesses believe that as long as a brand’s appeal gets customers in the door, their experience afterwards is irrelevant, that the customer is now a captive audience?
B. Laziness – is the business simply not interested in making sure the customer’s experience is a fulfillment of what the brand implicitly promises? Does it just take too much damn energy?
C. Structural issues – is the business simply not set up to integrate its brand work with its marketing with its products with its customer service?

I would love for those of you who have experience with some of these issues to weigh in here. What have you see that leads you to certain conclusions about why a company’s brand image may be wildly different from the actual experience of using its products or services?

For my own part, I tend to lean towards the captive audience theory. I think businesses have become accustomed over the last few decades to thinking that the customer is essentially passive and powerless. But anyone who’s been looking at what’s going on over the last few years is aware that consumers ain’t that passive anymore.

Now many marketing/advertising professionals and media folks might point to social media and the vast amounts of personal reviews that are available on the Internet (not to mention the straight-up data) as reasons for customers’ increasing boisterousness. But, honestly, I think there’s more to it than that. I mean, we’ve now had at least 60 years as an unapologetically consumer society. And while that might lead you to reflect on how passive we’ve become in the U.S. – less prone to vote, exercise, etc. – it also helps to think about how, after 60 years being constructed as consumers, many people may have actually gotten pretty good at it.

It seems to me that the Internet and social media are simply providing quick and easy ways for customers to mouth off and exchange information that they didn’t previously have at their disposal. If the Internet had appeared in the late 70s, I wonder if we wouldn’t have seen the same kind of two-way conversation phenomena develop – because people were already becoming savvy about the difference between a brand’s promise and its delivery on that promise. (we could easily expand our discussion to politics here, re: Watergate)

Jackie Ferrier, a filmmaker who blogs about marketing strategy, approached this line of thinking to a degree a few months ago:

“Brands have to work harder and more creatively to make sure their message gets heard in the cluttered market place.

As a result, we have become increasingly immune to and suspicious of brand messages. The
way we learn about products is becoming more and more dependent on word of mouth. We are
more likely to take the word of a complete stranger, simply because their views appear to be
more authentic.”

I would step back a bit from her opening statement here to a broader view. It’s not the
proliferation of brand messages that make us skeptical, as she implies – it’s the length of our
experience as consumers that has built up our ability to mistrust and deconstruct the messages
directed at us. We consumers have, in effect, consumed branding and advertising. We know
more instinctively to dig a bit deeper when it comes to making buying decisions (and the
recession makes these decisions even more consequential).

At the end of the famous John Ford western film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, a
reporter says something to the effect of “when it comes to a choice between printing the legend or the truth, you print the legend.” But in the old West, the reader of that legend didn’t have a million ways to debunk what they just read.

For today’s businesses, printing the legend of their brand can be downright perilous without a
corresponding focus on the truth of the customer’s experience.

I really like this series of Liberty Mutual Insurance TV commercials that’s been on the tube for a few years now. Have you seen any of these?

This is the thing that gets me about brand image. Even though it’s gotten much easier to skip TV ads, to relegate them to a smaller portion of your unconscious, there’s still some that slip through and make their mark on you.

Now here’s a little bit on the social context in which these ads are operating: Despite the rise of the Internet and the advent of social media, Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another. There’s a great quote from an Ani Difranco performance piece back in the 90’s goes something like,

“Why don’t we build a wall between the houses and the highway, and you can go your way and I can go my way.”

However you feel about the sarcasm in this piece (Ani’s East Coast, after all), to me it pretty much describes a common characteristic of what passes for community life in a significant portion of the country.

That’s what makes the Liberty Mutual campaign (created by Hill Holiday, I believe) so heart string-pullingly attractive. It tells me that by being a Liberty Mutual customer, I will be tapping in to my best self and my best community, the one where everyone’s looking out for one other, wanting the best for each other, united in a sort of day-to-day practical love. Ahhhh, so nice. If you’ve ever lived in irascible, don’t-look-at-me old Boston, which is actually where Hill Holiday hails from, then you may understand the depth of yearning for this kind of a daily way to be.

Now to look at the Liberty Mutual campaign in the context of prevalent branding in the insurance industry, think State Farm for a minute. It’s pretty brilliant, the longstanding advertising appeal made by the insurance stalwart. It’s all there in their tagline: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” So State Farm creates a simile where they’re appealing to that America where everyone knows their neighbors and is looking out for one another. That’s our company. We’re like that one neighbor that was always checking up to make sure you were alright. Not like those other neighbors that didn’t give a crap if a bunch of strange guys were loading furniture OUT of your house.

But in the Liberty Mutual campaign, society itself has been transformed. It’s a way more ambitious approach. There’s no need for an overt appeal to a bygone American era of community. Instead, that vision of community is made real once again in the images of the ad. We see this community in motion, acting out its sense of comity and fairness – and Liberty Mutual is set up as a reflection of that loving community, the embodiment of it. What’s that old activist slogan? “Be the change you want to see in the world?” What is the Liberty Mutual campaign but that transformation of being? Sit back and think on it a minute. It’s pretty powerful stuff. I mean, they must be one heck of an insurance company, right?

And that’s the thing about really well executed brand image work. It’s powerful, evocative, and gets you where you live.

LOOK UNDER THE HOOD: BRAND IMAGE VERSUS BRAND EXPERIENCE

Here’s the rub of this little advertising utopia of heartfelt messaging. No amount of beautifully constructed brand images can ultimately determine a customer’s loyalty without a brand experience that matches what the image evokes. And woe to those who emphasize image at the expense of experience…or, for that matter, experience at the expense of image.
So I decided to fight back the warm and fuzzies and take advantage of a tool that most consumers out there have access to. Yeah, you know, like I’m talking about the Internet. I hit up a site that’s been around for a while and is generally respected, FreeAdvice.com – complete with surveys, comments, etc.

Here’s a little of what I found on Liberty Mutual’s actual brand experience, or at least a small swath of that experience. For the point I’m trying to make, it’s telling:

http://insurance.freeadvice.com/reviews/6/survey/Liberty+Mutual+Insurance/

Take some time to read some of the comments, which are instructive. The positive ones were few and far between. This one is pretty representative:

“Liberty Mutual finally gave me what was agreed upon in my policy only after a protracted series of phone calls and letters. Their handling of my claim demonstrated their interest in only their bottom line. One employee actually said something like, “I’m sorry we did so poorly in handling this claim. We can’t do anything to make up for the situation. We hope you will continue to insure with us.” He really said that.” (from August 07)

You can also tell a lot just by looking at the survey results. Seems that, according to this survey, the longer a customer was with Liberty Mutual, the less likely they were to be satisfied. When you consider that once you become the customer of a particular insurance company, it probably takes a few years until you actually file a claim, well then those rose-tinted extra special one-of-a-kind 3-D glasses start to slip down the bridge of your nose — exposing something a little more callous than that glorious community from the compelling LM TV campaign.

If you did a little research after every great ad campaign you saw, what would you discover? And would your discovery change your idea of what it might like to be a customer of the company doing the advertising?

Among other things, this blog will be about looking at and questioning brand images, the meanings and resonances they produce, and the realities they may mask. It’s called skepticism (what ought to be the default setting of anyone reaching into their pocket and plunking down dollars on En-eeee-thing).

So stay tuned, dear readers and feel free to highlight brands you’d like to lionize or rant about.