i [love] marketing.

best find of the day.

This is incredibly true. What are the most popular marketing books?

(the quote found here).

Is there anything really new about brands and culture?

Everyone today seems to be talking about culture and brands, and about the importance for brands to understand, connect to, and use culture. But, haven't brands always by their very definition and role been the culture? Or, what is really new here?

A little journey through history. Million years ago, before mass media, branding had mostly a pure economic function of organization of products in the market. (When mass markets emerged, companies needed to somehow persuade people used only to local trade that their products are equal or better quality than the local ones). But then came mass media, and branding expanded to include concepts like brand image, brand personality, and brand associations. Those were then communicated through television, radio, print, etc. And they have transformed branding from a purely economic relationship between products into a social relationship between the brand and its customers.

With modern branding, the brand was made into a social symbol that communicates a set of values aimed at turning consumption into an activity with social meaning and consequences. In this context, as everyone knows today, branding communicates not the actual worth of products and services, but the social benefits that a consumer can expect to receive from economic exchange. By translating economic value into social benefits, the brand mediates between the social activities of consumption and the economic activities of production, distribution, and exchange.

Forever now, brands have been taking something happening into pop culture and aping it in advertising. Without being able to do so, brands would not exist. It seems to me that the question is not how the brand can be connected to culture, but how they are the culture. Again, nothing new.

(Before brands even existed Veblen and Simmel were talking about cultural significance of consumption. "Philosophy of Fashion" was written in the 19th century. So was "The Theory of the Leisure Class". For people who care about thinking about consumption as a cultural activity, they should check out anthropologist's Daniel Miller's books and also other stuff from the field of "material culture").

I found the photo here.

Good brands aren't filters, they are resources.

About a year ago Umair Haque said that brands today don't make any economic sense (he also said that NYT should acquire Twitter, um.) Years earlier, Wired said something similar. Their argument was that there's so much information around today that we don't need brands anymore. The logic behind it went something like this:

1. Brand is information from a company promising consumers a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of goods or service. 2. In the past, this information was treated as a scarce resource that was communicated via short television, print, and radio ads. 3. Today, there's no info scarcity and people can get first-hand information from others online, and 4. Since we don't need to compress the info about the expected value of goods and services into a logo or an ad, we don't need brands anymore. People stop trusting brand promise to help them in their purchasing decisions, and because they have info from others, their product choices are less risky. And when risk goes down, people's willingness to experiment goes up, and there's no loyalty as a result. Out goes the brand.

This would make a perfect sense if there wasn't a problem (a big one). If we base our argument around plain old availability of information, then as soon as we proclaim that there's no information scarcity we end up dealing with the problem of information abundance.

And that, turns out, is not what brand challenge is about at all.

Why? First, if we say that you don't need brands because there's info abundance, very shortly afterward we will claim that we actually do need brands to help us filter through all the available info, so that's a problem. But, the bigger problem is that the challenge of digital media is not that they offer a mere plurality of information sources (more info from more places), but that they increase complexity of communication as a resource (a person needs to navigate and interact and find and rate).

If we really want to talk about the role of brands online, then instead of focusing on information abundance (which is, when you think about it, just an extension of traditional communication position that a person is passive and easily bombarded with information), we need to focus on ways that information is categorized, organized, and presented so it helps people make product decisions and make their choices less risky.

Now, this is a brand challenge.

There are a lot of many great tools and resources on the Internet that help people decide among products regardless of the brand promise. So, the only think that may not make sense in digital is brand promise, not the brand itself. Why?

When brands are online, they too often think they need to communicate their promise in a way that "breaks through the clutter" because there's so much info around; and they think they need to filter this info abundance for consumers by telling them that their brand is the best. So they build a website or a minisite or an app. Turns out, that sort strategy online is plain stupid - because it treats digital just as TV on steroids.

Smart brands figured out they can be, instead, a resource in consumer decision-making: either by accompanying product with a service, or with a customer support, or with a superior e-commerce, or with a community, or with an advice. Then consumers go to them not because of their brand promise, but because of a tangible benefit.

Digital really doesn't kill brands, it just redefines what (and how) we call the brand.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science*

*Bill Bernbach (Somewhere in California, Google silently laughs). I have always been slightly surprised by the ease with which marketing professionals assert causality between brand symbols and product sales: "it's pure art, and we have no idea what's the mechanism, but it works!"

Why do I say this? I recently came across the list of top 10 slogans and the list of top 100 advertising campaigns of the century. Do they have anything in common? No. Do we know why they worked? No. Yet, there's a list.

This is the problem called Everything is Obvious in Retrospect.

And it would not be so interesting as a problem (people make cognitive mistakes all the time, after all)  if it weren't for its impact on the millions of dollars in brands' investment. Someone said "the great idea in advertising is in the realm of myth.” This means that people still think, in great numbers, that a good ad or a slogan is a question of art and inspiration and accident. An inescapable conclusion follows: brand symbols are critical for a brand's commercial success, but their influence is a matter of chance more than anything else.

That's like going to a horse race and betting on a unicorn. 

Yet, brands are still doing exactly that. Why? First, they don't know what else to do or how to do it. Second, and more importantly, they genuinely believe it works.

And why do they believe it? Because they can easily observe successful examples of what worked in the past, and conclude that they can do it as well. So, they say, "I want my brand to be a new Apple. Or, I want something like Foursquare. Or, I want Nike+"

Okay, now: why didn't you ask for a Foursquare before the Foursquare was invented?

In marketing, we know what is a success story only after it, well, succeeds. And if we can feel that we can explain why they worked, it is only because we look at them from a vantage point of the future. That is, we say that something was effective only after we have already seen its effects. 

Why is this a problem? Because this is how we start planning our campaigns: from their effects. Better yet, we start from their imagined effects. We imagine something groundbreaking, some ubiquitous future cultural artifact, or another iPhone.  In that, we are no different from our clients. Our ambitions are so immense, that we never stop for a second to think about a solution that can work, right now, and work really well. We are so obsessed with the future rewards, that we under-deliver.

And all of this would be okay if it was an individual cognitive mistake. When the whole industry is based on a faulty reasoning, this is a problem.

“Let us prove to the world,” said the aforementioned Bill Bernbach in the 1960s, “that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.”

Fifty years later, the proof is still missing. It might be time to try something else.

(photo courtesy of Vintage Ad Browser)

don't build an old brand with the new tools.

A couple of weeks ago, I skimmed through the book "Brand Digital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World" by Allen Adamson, who is the Managing Director of the New York office of Landor Associates.

Now, while it can be expected that someone working for Landor would say something like "everything we know about branding is just amplified in the digital world" (after all, they need to stay in business), it struck me how much of this (mostly inaccurate) assumption I have still encountered in the industry and in my own work. That is, marketing professionals maybe too often simply appropriate digital media to what they already know about branding ... instead of focusing on how digital media change it.

To make the shift between "let's apply branding to digital" towards "let's focus on digital and see what branding means there" we maybe first need to change our starting position. In particular, we need to move away from the question:

1. "How to use digital tools to build brands?" to asking "How digital tools challenge what we call the brand?"

2. "How technology applies to principles of branding?" to asking "How digital creates new ties between people and products?"

3. "How to use the Internet to build brand value? to asking "What is valuable on the Internet?"

4. "How brand promise should be brought to life online?" to asking "How immediate delivery in digital removes the need for brand promise in the first place?"

Just an idea. Maybe also good start in thinking about digital branding, too.

Thinking about adventures.

That's my brother on this photo (no, not the bird). He is a credit derivatives structurer-turned-adventurer. Right now, he is in La Paz and has also recently visited Patagonia and traveled around Bolivia as well. I have eerily little interest in his travels, and I this morning I started wondering why. 

Of course, I love my brother and am interested in his life. It's just that talking about long stretches of traveling into awkward territories bores me. I also display minimal enthusiasm to be part of them. This is nothing short of crazy, since everyone loves to travel and everyone loves experiences.

Turns out, not really. I prefer being cooped up at home, reading the Internet or other forms of written word. That sounds horrible and also slightly sad. But that is what I really enjoy; I love learning about new things, and more than that, I enjoy finding out about unexpected connections between stuff that I already. Making new knowledge discoveries - that's something I could do all day.

So I guess both me and my brother are exploring new territories. It's just that mine are invisible.

Not sure if that's supposed to make me feel better, but it did.