Mark at fouroboros has posted a passionate response to my earlier post on modesty. I want to pick up on this robust observation:
Lying, fudging, or corporate cosmetic surgery in the form of PR can't change what we intimately know of the character of the organizations to which we loan our lives. But--and here's the real tragedy--they can vastly increase our levels of guilty knowledge and rob our willingness to help haul employers and their brands out of the fire. Obvious, to those with eyes to see, isn't it?Good stuff. Few things are more corrosive to morale than leaders touting versions of reality that do not correspond to people's experience. Vision and aspiration are fine, indeed necessary, but if they become a denial of reality they are demoralising.Those old and simple truths, as ideals, are self-sustaining and extremely socially relevant, if not always self-starting or self-clarifying, hence the need for leaders who simplify--and do it ethically. The absence of these relevant ideals means you resort to constant spot applications of the cattle prods of fear-mongering, jealousy, pride, greed etc. We destroy the village in our misguided efforts to prop it up. In this, business, branding, politics, etc are no different. Despite being counterproductive in the short term, and destructive in the longterm, coercion is far easier than cooption or understanding to the narrowminded, hurried, or inattentive. (Read: Decisionmakers.) But, sure as night follows day, the alternatives do break through like a daisy in the concrete, and the institutionalized venality and laziness are shown in high relief. In this way, those "voila!" moments describe the finding of something that was never really lost.
One of my favourite examples is from a book published by Interbrand, which blandly states, "Today, Kelloggs is synonymous with health and vitality." If this kind of casual lying goes unchallenged, I believe it corrodes the power of language in an organisation and thus diminishes the force and power of its conversations. The continous challenging of this kind of wishful thinking is - for me - be a mark of an organsation that has some vitality and purpose.
The language of death
So much of the language of branding (and business in general) is the language of death - it is abtracted, disembodied, dessicated. Typically, speakers present themselves not as responsible actors with their own beliefs and opinions, but as marionettes. When asked for an opinion, they tell you what the organisation thinks, or what their boss thinks, and not what they think. When you get to meet their boss, they need to brief you for 15 minutes on what you can and can't say to them. Mantras about accountability, core competences, ROI are trotted out with apparent vehemence - but if you ask them to give specific examples, they can't answer, because they don't actually know that these mantras actually mean to them.
At a profound level, people who are unable to articulate their experience are likely to lose touch with it. In doing so, the best motivation they will find is the motivation of the slave. Grandiose brand visions, if unchallenged, create a culture of denial and disengagement. We only need to observe the typical level of engagement of people working in our shops and banks to assess the desperate paucity of vision of the branding of these organisations.
Challenging conversations
One of the most effective ways I can help organisations change the way they speak is in the way I speak to them. I believe that's a choice that each of us has for any brand we are connected with. We can all make a choice to go along with its half-truths or we can choose to challenge them.People high up in organisations freqently see change as something that takes place outside the room. It happens to other people, rather than to themselves. Much of the talk about organiational change is just a set of shadow conversations - talk about problem people outside the room, instead of the doubts, fears, passions and beliefs of those who are inside the room.
The experience I have of Pret a Manger, Sainsbury's, NatWest bank, whoever, is not a given. It's something I collaborate in or collude with. I increasingly decline the choice of colluding with rubbish brands. That's a choice that any stakeholder in any brand can make. Brands are only the sum of our individual choices of how to engage with each other. We can choose to engage passively or we can be active. We can go along with bland half-truths or we can ask for more.
Bookmark: del.icio.us Digg it ma.gnolia Yahoo MyWeb Google StumbleUpon
Permalink
Facebook/Johnnie Moore
Linkedin/Johnnie Moore
Twitter/johnniemoore
Last.fm/johnniemoore
Del.icio.us/johnniemoore
Technorati/johnniemoore
MyBlogLog/JohnnieM
Blog/Johnnie Moore
Comments (1)
Is FCUK a lovemark or a sexmark?
Making love has its own terminology. Should it be used to name any brands?
Let's have a look at some examples in the history of branding. When Mitsubishi launched a new car with the name "Pajero" on the Spanish market, it became obvious very soon that the name chosen was not optimal because it immediately was the subject of jokes due to its homophony with a Spanish expression related to masturbation.
The same happened to Ford's model "Pinto"(Portuguese for male genital) in Brazil where it was quickly renamed into "Corcel"(horse).
There is quite a long list of product names that give food to the dirty mind be they chosen accidentally or deliberately. Obviously there seems to be a kind of tradition for this in the history of naming which originally started with place names.
Some of our ancestors obviously were too innocent to realize what burden they place on their offspring when naming places like Pratts Bottom (Kent), Brown Willy (Cornwall), Lickey End (near Birmingham), Booby Dingle (Powys), Great Cockup (Cumbria), Even places such as Thong (Kent) seem to have revealed far too much for not being the victim of lewd remarks.
The European continent, however, is also challenging the innocent mind of the English speaking traveller. In Southern Bavaria they will come across a village with the name of “Petting” and about eleven miles from there, in neighbouring Upper Austria, the shock might be inevitable when they enter the village of "Fucking". Inspite of the fact that the inhabitants of Fucking have had enough with English-speaking tourists swiping their sign, they refuse to change their name. It goes back to the ancient Bavarian settlement and although this area was christianized by Irish and Scottish monks in the 9th and 10th century, an amendment of the name has never been deemed necessary.
No wonder that in many countries there are restrictions regarding the choice of a place name as a trademark for goods and services. One way around these restrictions is to distort the name so that it becomes indisputable but on a subliminal level takes advantage of the fact that sex sells.
A recent example of successful distortion are the products of a British based fashion retailer called French Connection Group plc with the trademark FCUK.
Linguists tell us that the power of a word depends on its context, and clearly the English word "fcuk" falls into that category. To make it even more explicit, two new fragrances were launched named "FCUK Him" and "FCUK Her".
On its website FCUK demonstrates a clear picture of its marketing strategy. Whereas the linguistic allusions are close to Shakespeare's bawdiness, the images remain subdued and innocent, which on the one hand is rather cynical but on the other hand tries to bridge the generation gap because most parents finance the quite conventional fashion attire that their children obtain from FCUK. Thus FCUK's clients in each major market display a range of attitudes when confronted with the provocatively distorted four-letter mark.
The American Family Association (AFA) promotes initiatives against FCUK such as prefabricated emails protesting against the exploitation of youngsters in such a manner. Sex in marketing is bound to raise demand along with a few eyebrows which in addition either secure the necessary publicity or ban the product from the market. Branding an almost swear word in order to create a cash cow is, however, not restricted to fashion clothing and related products.
On a recent visit to New Orleans I was surprised by the abundance of labels for their traditional hot pepper sauces. Besides the well known Tabasco, there are more spicy brand names such as "Burning rectum" or "Hot shit". It shows that name design must be ready to apply wit to anything that makes the blood boil and the label sell.
Obviously this does not really work in all economic fields; certainly not in tourism because the places mentioned above are not among the hot spots that travel agents propagate in their catalogues.
August 17, 2004 15:28 Permalink for comment