Eagleton on Olins

Pat Kane points to Terry Eagleton's scathing review of Wally Olins' book " On Brand" Here's a snippet:

Olins’s whole case works on the assumption that branding works marvellously well, an assumption he also has to deny if he is to avoid looking like an advocate of exploitation. He is in the position of the pornography king who insists that nobody forces you to watch videos of women being sexually humiliated. ‘People’, he remarks, ‘know perfectly well what they are doing.’ But so do drug dealers. We don’t permit ads urging people to push heroin or kidnap toddlers on the grounds that they can always ignore them...

‘Brands’, argues Wally Olins in On Brand, ‘represent identity.’ It may be that he himself only knows who he is because of his brand of underpants, but the more discerning among us have not yet been reduced to this tragic condition.

It seems to me that the critics of branding like Eagleton write vastly more engagingly and entertainingly than the supposed professional communicators they criticise. Which tells us something in itself.

Co-creating value

Good to see my friend Alan Moore on his soapbox: Co-creating experiences, co-creating value

So what are you going to do as a business or a brand, run out your 30 second TV commercial and hope for the best? Or are you going to roll your sleeves and really think about how your are going to engage your customers and stakeholders, how you are going to co-create VALUE, facilitate greater more valuable experiences, become the conduit to communities who are passionate about whatever floats their boat.

Alan references Customer Made, a newsletter highlighting ways companies are recruiting stakeholders as co-creators.

A highly-caffeinated protest...

Chris Macrae points out this article from The Guardian: Campaign aims to hit Coke where it hurts

An anti-capitalist former stockbroker and the son of Sir James Goldsmith have launched an audacious attempt to halve the value of Coca-Cola's shares.

The radical activist Max Keiser has joined forces with the editor of the Ecologist magazine, Zak Goldsmith, to launch a hedge fund that will donate the profits from short-sales in Coke's stock to the "victims of Coke's business model in places like India and Colombia".

The idea is that as a boycott spreads the money in the fund will increase as shares in the company drop.

Wow, I don't quite know what to make of this. Is it a case of legitimately using a system against itself, or a case of indulging in the very sin that you're complaining about? Either way, take a look at the Karmabanque website for further evidence that we live in interesting times.

Ours or theirs?

Like Hugh, I like Tony Goodson's questions:

Cluetrain feels like ours. LoveMarks feels like theirs.

Why are the battle lines being drawn for Cluetrain v LoveMarks?
Isn't LoveMarks trying to say the same thing?
What is it about LoveMarks that's winding some of us up so much?
Is it Kevin's voice in the book and on the website?
Is it that there's an inconsistency and contradiction in parts of the book?
Why does our gut feel tell us that there's something missing or wrong?

Part of the answer is in the distinction between broadcast and conversation. Lovemarks tries to glimpse a world beyond brands but its modus operandi is still that of the classic brand: namely, it's a broadcast.It's the glamorous set-piece book with accompanying speeches by Kevin Roberts and plaudits by the fanbase. Sure, we can nominate a Lovemark to the website but we can't as far as I can see use the site to question the approach. It's interactive-lite, not the real thing.

Whereas Hugh, Tony, me and all the other blog participants in this argument have comment and trackback space: we may polemicise in our own way as shamelessly as Kevin Roberts, but our approach shows that we are more open to challenge.

So I'm still very much hoping that the Lovemarks team will accept my suggestion of a public debate so that maybe we get beyond the us-and-them approach...

Brand experts, your spaceship is now boarding...

I particulary enjoyed this chunk of James Surowiecki's Wired article on the decline of brands.

… [B]ecause consumers are more promiscuous and fickle than ever, established brands are vulnerable, and new ones have a real chance of succeeding - for at least a little while. The obsession with brands, paradoxically, demonstrates their weakness.

… Marketing types either don’t see this trend or choose not to talk about it. In the words of advertising legend Jim Mullen, “Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth.” Similarly, in the new book Brands and Branding, Rita Clifton, chair of Interbrand UK, puts it this way: “Well-managed brands have extraordinary economic value and are the most effective and efficient creators of sustainable wealth.” These assertions claim that while factories, source code, and patents are ephemeral, brands are real.

I don't much warm to Interbrand as an organisation. They make a lot of money by claiming to put a reliable value on brands, using some complicated and not-open-source model. At the same time, they come out with statements that mean I wouldn't rely on them to estimate the value of a dollar bill. I've quoted this before I know, but it still amazes me: in an Interbrand book, (I can't cite which book as it's at home 12000 miles away) edited by Rita Clifton herself, we find the following stated as fact

Today, Kellogg's is synonymous with health and vitality.

I don't know about you, but I've never been told by anyone that they're feeling really Kellogg's today; no doctor has ever reassured a hypochondriac "Don't worry, Mr Jones, you're totally Kellogg's"

I'm no expert on food and nutrition, but it strikes me that a lot of Kellogg's products contain quite a bit of sugar and other stuff which don't exactly qualify them as in perfect alignment with a healthy lifestyle.

In short, the statement is a load of old tosh. And it represents exactly the kind of fawning, lickspittle client-worship that makes me so suspicious of branding experts.

And I distrust the sleight-of-hand by which the successes of real companies and products are hypothesised as branding - exactly the process Surowiecki spotlights in his article. Most branding experts started life in advertising or packaging. They may occasionally sing songs about the customer as king but what they really love to do is to add a dash of icing and then claim the whole cake as their own.

Douglas Adams wrote a marvellous scene in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in which our heroes stumble on a spacecraft manned by what seems a rather incompetent crew. It transpires that a planet has rounded up a collection of its least productive and useful citizens and tricked them into leaving on a spaceship to escape the pretended imminent destruction of the home planet. The rest of us will follow behind, the travellers are assured. Of course, the rest of them have no such plan. Adams populated this craft with (as I recall) the likes of telephone sanitisers and PR execs. I'm sure if he were writing today, he'd find a few spare seats for Brand Consultants.

Whose brand?

James Cherkoff has an interesting article on the hijacking of the Burberry brand. Short version: Burberry has been adopted by "Chavs", a group of people who are somewhat downmarket from the traditional Burberry wearer. And what could Burberry do about it ?

Who knows what could happen next. Any nominations for brands that might deserve this kind of treatment in future?

Travel update

I'll be in Auckland on 30 Nov/1 Dec - up for coffee with any interested bloggers...

I don't get it

I was shopping with my friend in Wellington. There we found "Jamie Oliver" cookware. And "Nigella Lawson" cookware designed by one of the Conrans.

Why do people buy stuff this way?

I know part of the answer: pyschologists suggest that the human brain is poor at seeing context and as a result tends to overvalue identity-level decision-making. So we put our faith in celebs, instead of really looking at what's there.

And I also can't help feeling this is a mark of decadence.

Debating Lovemarks

Meeting Brian Sweeney, the Kiwi end of the Lovemarks team, was interesting. We had a good-spirited dialogue about Lovemarks. As in, we were both willing to hear each other's points of view. I found Brian more than willing to acknowledge criticism and essentially his position was that the book is a work in progress. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

I suggested that Kevin and Co try out blogging as a way to develop thinking. Jack Yan (who was at the lunch with me)and I both thought that a public debate with Kevin and Brian would be a welcome next step in the dialogue.

I don't think Lovemarks presents a vision of the future beyond brands. In some ways, it epitomises what I dislike about branding practice: too much promise, not enough coherence. I despair of many of the examples used; surely we as a species can do better things with our time than pretend that Cheerios are an efficient way to improve parenting?

That said, I am interested in a genuine dialogue about whether marketing can make itself truly relevant to helping humans get beyond our current unsustainable chaos. For me, that may involve moving beyond the Punch-and-Judy of polemics into a place where there's a greater willingness to admit uncertainty and possibility.

So, in the spirit of transparency and openness, I hope Kevin and Brian will treat this as an open invitation to more face-to-face conversations, with or without an audience...

By the way, Tony Goodson has been writing some provocative thoughts on Lovemarks lately.

Wellington

Quick update. I flew into Wellington yesterday. My friend Tom had come in from Nelson and met me at the airport and Jack Yan drove over and took us into town.

I really like Wellington. A city on a human scale, surrounded by water. Not overdeveloped and with kiwi friendliness.

I've just had lunch with Brian Sweeney who collaborates on the Lovemarks site. For now, I'll just say it was a very stimulating meeting... Brian was a good host and there was a frank exchange of views and ideas... and I'll blog more when I've reflected on it further. Call me a tease if you like.

What is brand? And is this getting boring?

So the whole is-branding-dead debate drones on. I feel torn between a part of me that has some strong opinions... and another part that has a a rather cruder response: one of boredom. And I wonder if some of my readers are getting bored too? (Does that sound too proprietary? Well, even Neasden FC has its Sid and Doris Bonkers.) Do let me know.

Anyway, the part of me that won't let go of the bone enjoyed Evelyn's latest, typically rich, postings. One key idea which I agree with is this:

I'm not developing a brand, I'm developing my Self. The clearer I am about who I am, the more that's reflected clearly. And that's where I focus. What you think you see as quote branding unquote is simply a side-effect.

And but of course. Yes, there's a parallel to companies.

I posted a comment suggesting that this idea of branding challenges a lot of the assumptions people make about "how to" brand. And if I think of the few brands that stand-out for me, they tend to be ones that have opinions of their own that are not a slavish response to consumer demand, nor created by expert consultants in an expensive navel-contemplation exercise. It's like they're not actually trying to be a brand at all.

I remember working with an agency trying to "rebrand" investment trusts. They created a pretty logo and announced that they would next "fill it with meaning" as if it were some empty vessel over which they had complete command. Of course by trying to do this work for the consumer they created almost the distilled essence of blandness and pretty much killed off conversation.

I might add that to create a conversation you might need an opinion and an argument as well as feeling. It isn't just emotion, as some might say. There is actually a potent role for reason too.

Take it personally

On the flight into Melbourne I read Anita Roddick's latest, Globalisation - Take it Personally. (It comes in two editions, I bought the more matter of fact version; there's also a more lavishly illustrated version).

It's a (slightly chaotic) assembly of short articles by different authors and pocket bios of many of the organisations challenging the status quo. I can easily forgive the slight messiness - in fact, faced with such problems it would be hard to have a simple, neat and ordered response. Much of it is distinctly thought-provoking, and certainly left me feeling better informed about the anti-globalisation movement. And it also made me feel less comfortable about the state of the world - as well as pointing to a few things any of us can do about it.

Roddick pulls no punches, as is apparent from her introduction where she details the birth of children living near tobacco fields in Mexico with no genitals.

Scientists had tracked down the cause to the pesticides but the American tobacco companies that bought the crops grown there wouldn't accept responsibility, because they said the fields didn't belong to them. And knowing that representatives of these companies would be in a Cancun conference I spoke at about it, I showed them the slides.

This kind of confrontation isn't always the best way of going about creating change. But there was absolutely no reaction from them at all: no embarassment, no outrage, just a bloodless sense of good manners.

I'm occasionally accused of seeing these issues too personally. As if being in business was necessarily a cold-hearted, objective, pseudo-scientific project to manipulate consumers. But I've also learnt over the years that it can't be that anymore.

It's a shocking story, and I admire Roddick for her passion and courage in confronting it. The book as a whole is robust challenge to the idea the current form of capitalism is the only and inevitable system for us to operate under. (And I say current model to deflect the tiresome punch-and-judy accusation of undermining capitalism, as if capitalism is a rigidly fixed system rather than one that can evolve.)

And my next read, Natural Capitalism, looks like an impressive - and optimistic - suggestion for an alternative model.

Idle thought about Starbucks

Talking with Tony yesterday about Starbucks. And now I see that Jennifer is having a pop at them too, prompted in part by my namesake .

Jen and John are fed up with premature Christmas music. And I'm asking myself a broader question: I was wondering if Starbucks has actually served its purpose. It has done an interesting job of introducing a different style of coffee shop on a grand scale. But now we all get the "third place" concept... do we really need Starbucks anymore?

I don't mind Starbucks, I think they are making an effort on social responsibility and yes there's something reliable about their offering. But I'm not sure that as a brand it's really that useful anymore.

And I guess I'm wondering whether we could all do with being rather less interested in brands being timeless. Wall St, of course, is addicted to cancerous profit growth... but for the rest of us, I'm not so sure.

And the truth about brands is, there are a an awful lot that we really wouldn't miss.

I could be wrong, but I thought I'd float the idea.

Flying Wellington-Melbourne

So a nice flight on Air New Zealand. Wellington airport made me laugh. They have a giant Gollum statue crawling over the international terminal to greet visitors. (Pic here) Mad, but brilliant. And why shouldn't they celebrate Peter Jackson and what his team have done for the country.

Perhaps we could add a giant Tony Blair figure to improve the appearance of Terminal 3 at Heathrow?

One slight grumble about Wellington. Having to pay a departure tax in the terminal. I didn't realise until quite late and almost missed the flight. Why can't they let airlines include it in the ticket, like almost everywhere else?

Arrived in Melbourne to drizzle, but this morning is bright and beautiful. And I like cities by oceans!

Staring, take 2

Ah, maybe the living statues from the Apprentice (see entry below)were trying to emulate bright, happy children. As per Anita Sharpe's interesting post on Worthwhile.

"After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy, (Harvard psychologist Burton) White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. But the children came from a wide variety of backgrounds -- rich and poor, small families and large, broken and stable homes, poorly and well-educated parents -- and from all parts of the U.S. Finally, through extensive questioning, he determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space." -- Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers (from Creativity in Business)

Somehow I think Donald's friends haven't quite got it right.

The Apprentice: Weird

It seems like The Apprentice is popular down under. I watched bits of it at a friend's in NZ and Tony prompted me to watch it again last night - so I did, for about 10 minutes.

This review is based on fairly limited watching, but boy this show is weird.

First off, what exactly is the role of the two creatures either side of Donald? You know, the glamourous woman in red and the severe looking older guy? Their job description seems to be: "Sit very still and stare ominously into the middle distance. Act like your face is paralysed with botox." They hardly speak at all, and when they do, it's a bit like one of those old-fashioned Talking Barbies, where you pull a string. Words come out, but they seem oddly devoid of the spark of life. Maybe they're androids left over from the last series of Star Trek?

On the other hand, the contestants have lots to say, which seems to consist largely of anxious shouting, a bit of slightly-implausible cameraderie and an awful lot of slagging each other off, usually dressed up in management-speak. They do seem to get very energised about important tasks like... er... introducing us to vanilla flavoured toothpaste. Just as well there are no more pressing needs in the world for them to deal with.

Still, Donald is a nice guy, after all he uses everyone's first name. Whilst he remains "Mr Trump". Hmm, they must really respect him.

I wonder what a visitor from Mars would say? "Forgive me earthlings, my command of your vocabulary is not yet complete. So this mixture of ominous staring and being nasty to other people, this is what you humans call 'work'? We used to do what you call this 'work' on Mars in ancient times. But when we were down to our last few hundred survivors, we thought it would be wiser instead to create useful things together and explore the mysteries of the cosmos."

Mind you, every contestant looks beautiful and they seem to have some very expensive clothes, so that's good isn't it?

I think I've learnt to see the beauty within people who may not look so great, but I guess I need to do some more therapy to get better at seeing the beauty within these beautiful-looking people.

Here's my puzzle: with all this largesse in terms of clothes and living quarters, and all this attention they get... how do these people manage to be so completely... joyless?

Or am I missing something? Regular addicts please let me know.

Next stop: Melbourne

So tomorrow (Thursday) I'm flying from Nelson to Melbourne for the weekend. I'm going to hook up with Tony Goodson. I'm sure we'll put the world to rights. Last time I saw Tony was at Starbucks in Islington, just before he emigrated. Since then he's become a father, twice. It will be great to see him again. Not been to Australia before so it'll be fun to have a quick taste of the Ozzie culture. Any Melbourne bloggers who fancy a coffee, let me know!

Then on Monday I'll be back in NZ,in Wellington. Where I've been invited for a beer by the Lovemarks production team. There are a few friends who'd like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation!

Marketing and the "language of business"

Nick Wreden in his FusionBrand blog reports on an ANA survey on perceptions of marketing. In some ways, it's a familar story

Despite its importance, marketing is not getting the respect that all those in marketing think they deserve. Few marketing executives ever make CEO. Vice presidents of marketing have a notoriously short shelf life. According to executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, the average CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) tenure lasts only 23 months. In the food industry, tenure is only 12 months, barely enough time for business cards to dry. Famed branding observer Don E. Schulz observes that "the marketing function is being pushed lower and lower in the corporate hierarchy."

I was interested in the bit that showed CEO's preoccupied with things like growth, agility and innovation... whilst the marketers were most interested in... branding guidelines!

There's a lot of material in the full post... and I just want to have a bit of a rant against the part I least agree with. I hope Nick will cut me a bit of slack if that seems rather ungracious.

Nick reports

To address this gap, marketing needs to talk the language of business. That means more than paying obligatory homage to ROI, then using surrogate metrics like "awareness," which has no quantifiable impact on the bottom line. It means using some of the advanced features of Excel. As the ANA study put it all too well: "Some marketing chiefs value unbridled creativity and innovation over multivariate regression models that isolate the incremental consumption delivered by a new ad execution."

Actually, in this set up of CEO-stereotype vs Marketing-stereotype, I feel like saying a plague on both your houses.

I'd like to see thinking that transcends both the wishful thinking of marketing and also the mechanistic metrics fetishism that - it is claimed - matters to CEOs.

Down with the "language of business"

If this stuff about "multivariate regression models that isolate the incremental consumption"" is what the report calls the "language of business" then marketing should be challenging, not feebly and half-heartedly imitating, it. I dislike the idea that business is somehow so separate from life that it qualifies for its own elite language. And this "marketing-must-speak-the-language-of-the-boardroom" idea needs a good seeing to.

Marketing goes down a blind alley if it buys into measurement gobbledegook. Of course there is a role for sophisticated measures but there's a an important difference between the sophisticated and the merely-complicated. The latter represents our fallible, unpredictable human interactions as a neat set of isolated-value-increments. I find that way of describing human interactions dehumanising and crass.

And while I'm on this soapbox, I just don't buy the myth of the CEO as blind to the fuzzy and intuitive and fixated only on the hard and concrete. I think this is largely a fantasy made up by people - perhaps especially marketing people - who just don't have the nerve to challenge their bosses or speak up robustly for things that are intangible but real.

I'm looking for a bit of muscular uncertainty, not more Gradgrindian "hard facts" that turn out to be specious.

(For more on Gradgrind, check out one of my favourite spots on the web: Mr. Gradgrind's
Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions...

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Though the poet neglects to enumerate them, providing instead a mere list, a simple inventory establishes that--if we omit the purely hypothetical posthumous final one--Elizabeth Barrett loved Robert Browning in precisely six ways.

How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?

Administered commodity prices resulting in an average profit per farmer of no more than $50,000 per annum should be adequate to discourage profligate trips to France.

are two good examples)

/rant, as Mark Brady would say.

Branding.. or corporate marketing?

Tim Kitchin at the Glasshouse blog picks up the branding debate. It's a lucid summary of several strands of the debate. Here's a snippet

The proliferation of factual information and rising standards of quality across the board make brands less and less important as guarantees of quality. Brand must therefore migrate to a different competitive arena...offering different benefits beyond the product per se: leveraging service benefits, knowledge, emotion, ethics and empowerment.

However these benefits do not and cannot reside within branded packages, stacked on shelves. They are the net effect of corporate AND product performance. Of behaviour, as well as value-delivery.

Tim argues that the company reputation is going to increasingly impact the perception of the box on the shelf. And I like the passion behind this statement

Vapid story-telling has had its moment. Organisations must take their organisational principles to the front line - and into their products.

Tim also says

In all these areas, whether brands are trying to become 'lovemarks', 'dreamcasts', or 'anti-brands', what matters is consistency. It is critical that the organisational purpose is felt in every stakeholder's experience.

I see where Tim is coming from and I also feel wary of excessive consistency and a possible implied counsel of perfection (eg in every stakeholder experience). I don't need to experience Mars' deep purpose every single time I buy a chocolate bar, and I also think that it's the nature of human organisations to mutate to stay alive - so that too much consistency is a bit inhuman. One of the aspects of conventional branding that most troubles me is the tendency to set up idealised visions that aren't really compatible with our essential human fallibility.

That said, I think Tim's onto something and his full post is worth a read.

On Seniority

I notice the word "senior" used a lot in business speak. On The Apprentice the other week, Donald introduced two execs from P&G and emphasised that they were "senior", with no clue as to what that meant. These two seemed perfectly nice people but I don't think they had anything terribly insightful to say that some "junior" couldn't have said equally well.

And today I see that Tom Peters is offering a summit for a "small group of senior executives" (my italics)

This seems to go with a tendency that I've noticed especially in American business books, which seem to reverence status - sometimes the list of acknowledgements consists entirely of Dr this and Professor that.

Maybe I'm just a cynical limey, but I find this all a bit elitist. And as someone brought up on Monty Python I find it hard to take reverence for status too seriously. Reading Tom's exuberant iconoclasm, I really think he'd be just as thrilled to mix with some junior people who have things to say - so I'm guessing that this is an unconscious attempt to assure senior people that they're important really. Or perhaps it's code for "have a fair bit of money to spend on this sort of thing" ? Actually, I'd like to know what Tom really means by senior in this context.

Not knowing

Warning: this is a more than averagely rambling post.

I've thinking about uncertainty and not knowing. This morning I've been triggered into posting on this topic by Gary Lawrence Murphy: You know you don't know, or do you... The gist is that as our knowledge increases, so we come to realise how much we don't know - but those who know less are more confident.

One way to look at this is to see that society will be dominated by the confident-ignorant. Needless to say, that's a view that some disgruntled US Democrats are adopting post-election.

But wait, there may be a way out: which is to get more confident in our uncertainty. What the mystics call the wisdom of uncertainty. And to be more wary of putting our faith in those who claim to be knowledgeable. One of the best things to develop in recent years is the decline of deference and a growing willingness to challenge the experts.

I've talked about the iceberg metahphor before. I see a lot of thinkers, especially business thinkers, spending their time charting the visible tip in minute detail. They aim to be the masters of the known. They emphasise the metrics and the ROI, the bits that can be measured and seen.

They also tend to issue injunctions to us as if all we need to do to succeed is to mimic the visible bits of the successful organisations. As if it's that simple. And the effect (on me at least) is simply to cause anxiety - oh my god, here's another list of things I need to do to be succesful.

But here's the thing: the bits of organisations they see (whether those are hard things like Walmart's ratios or softer things like Southwest Airlines' spirit) are probably based on things that aren't visible.

Here's a crude example. Donald Trump is by most measures a hugely successful businessman. But look to The Apprentice for his philosophy of business and it's largely blustering homilies about control and power. I think Donald is successful for all sorts of reasons that even he is not aware of - and it would be a mistake to confuse his story about himself with what is really (if I can use that word) going on.

What if we are all icebergs, trying too hard to make sense of ourselves and others based on stories we tell each other about what is going on. Some of the most satisfying moments in my life recently have been silences in groups and times when I'm with people who are talking about their uncertainties, in an atmosphere where no-ones trying to offer solutions. I think these are the moments when I come close to appreciating the power of life beyond the purely rational and material.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with metrics and measurements and checklists. When I learnt to fly, I was very much in favour of instruments telling me my airspeed and altitude, and equally in favour of all the other pilots having the same data. And this created a sense of structure within which the adventure of my first solo flight could happen. Of course, that first experience of flying solo was something beyond the metrics; something for which no-one could ever fully prepare me. And it seems to me that life is largely about how we handle those unknown spaces that appear amid the known.

Where the debate can get tedious is if we set up the known and unknown as alternatives where we have to choose one or the other. As if we can only be supreme rationalists or fluff-bunny-touchy-feely spiritualists. Whilst there is a certain amount of fun to be had in polemicising and ridiculing such straw men (and I know which type I prefer to stigmatise), I think the truth (again, if I can use that word) is paradoxical.

In which case, perhaps we will do better to be more honest with each other about what we don't know - and indeed what we do. I think a lot of our problems come down to not being honest about either: we adopt rigid pseudo-certainty to cover our anxiety; or we cover our discomforts and passions with disengenous vagueness... For "we"here, perhaps I should say "I"...

Ton on Rheingold

Ton Zijlstra has a good post on his encounters with Howard Rheingold on Blogwalk - how collective action will change the world. These phenomena - collective action, open source marketing - get me stimulated and excited about possibilities, a world away from the top-down paradigm of conventional marketing. It seems to me that a great skill for the future is the hosting of conversations, not attempts to outshout them.

More on the death of branding

Seth Godin joins in the debate on branding's death.

1. The data is irrefutable. The number of massive mega brands and their value (in terms of the premium consumers are willing to pay) is shrinking, and fast. You can't get as much extra for a Sony DVD player or a Marlboro cigarette as you used to.

2. The number of new micro-brands is exploding. Hugh (see gaving void above) is a brand now. If we define brand as a shortcut for a set of commercial attributes, emotions, stories, whatever, then any blogger with a following has a brand.

3. There's a difference between brands and branding. Brands exist whether you want them to or not. Brands aren't going to go away any time soon. Brands are a useful shorthand for a complicated asset within an organization. Branding, on the other hand, is a thing you do. And as an activity, branding is problematic. Branding is ill-defined, usually vacuous, often expensive and totally unpredictable. I'm happy to say that you shouldn't grow up to be someone who does branding.

That's a pretty good summary.

Is Lovemarks brilliant?

Tom Peters thinks that Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks is brilliant.

Well, Roberts is a brilliant self-publicist. I hope that his genius for PR may one day find a cause that really merits the amount of airtime he seems able to command. But Lovemarks surely isn't that cause.

I'll give Roberts credit for stating so explicitly how he sees the world so that it can be tested and challenged. I think he does a good job - inadvertently - of showing us just how far admen are out of touch with the times.

Down here in New Zealand I came across an interview with Roberts in The Listener magazine. All credit to interviewer Greg Dixon for giving Kevin the rope to hang himself with.

Q: Is New Zealand a lovemark?

A: No. It was, but now probably isn't, because it has lost respect globally

I assume that Kevin is speaking ex cathedra here as there is no reference to his much-touted research to justify this assertion. But let's not interrupt his Holiness so impudently. He continues

We've lost a lot of respect... we've grown up and become a little like a teenager: "We're very rebellious, so we're not going to join you in this, we're going to do this and that."

Nice specific stuff there then.

Roberts identifies himself as a New Zealander. I can only say that I find this a patronising view of New Zealand that I suspect most of its citizens might resent.

The interviewer goes on

Dixon: What's your definition of love exactly?

Roberts: In a marketing sense, it's to create loyalty beyond reason

It's quite telling, that phrase "in a marketing sense". I think what it means is, well here's some shallow stuff which is all to do with selling you things.

In case we don't follow, our Kev obliges with a specific example of what "in a marketing sense" he thinks love is

I walked past an Adidas concept store. I love Adidas. I didn't need anything. $US860 later I walked out of that store.

Well, in a marketing sense I'd call that lust or greed. Or as the interviewer puts it, a little more politely

But isn't that consumerism beyond reason because your buying stuff you don't need?

Yep, that's about the size of it.

But wait, there's more!

Dixon: One definition of consumerism is that it amounts to people working in jobs they hate to buy stuff they don't need to impress people they don't like

Roberts: Every person in the world is a consumer, six billion people. Are you criticising six billion people here?

Er no Kevin, I think he's criticising you. And little wonder when we read the next exchange:

Dixon: Consumerism means that New Zealand household debt is at record levels, however.

Roberts: I lke that.

Dixon: But people are borrowing money they don't have, money they have to pay back

Roberts: The next generation will. Great. Terrific

This is what Kevin's love boils down to: let's consume our way out of problems, and let's let the next generation pay for it.

Some of us might question the sustainability of such a view, and all Roberts can muster by way of counterargument is more self-importance

I'm the professor of sustainable enterprise at Limerick and Waikato universities

which of course proves nothing, except the size of his ego.

Indeed, it seems that Roberts needs to regularly remind us of his own importance

I'm the head of a very powerful company, so I have the opportunity to sit down with CEOs

- but then you wonder, why does he have to tell us this?

And if you disagree with Kevin, well that's because you are just the wrong kind of person...

If you're going to rely on government in any one country to move the world forward...then you're a dreamer...

Cynics can knock...

The consumer is boss... if you think that's bad, go be a communist

Question the sustainability of his philosophy and instead of a reasoned economic argument we get I'm-a-professor-of-sustainability-at-Limerick-and-you're-a-dreamer/teenager/communist.

Kevin fleetingly presents himself as the voice of the consumer, warning those wicked branding people not to take us for granted. But this is just a cover; we can see from his examples that Roberts is stuck in a twentieth-century adman's world where emotions are just there to exploited to shift product.

But if you worry for the poor old consumer, what about Kev's clients?

Roberts gives the game away here too.

Clients cannot communicate ideas. That's why we exist - because we're creative, imaginative, intuitive and inspirational.

So here is the sting in the tail for Procter and Gamble, whose products Kevin pitches slavishly in his book, preposterously presenting Tide as a Lovemark and asserting his undying love for Head & Shoulders. Oh he may pimp your products P&G, but deep down he thinks you can't communicate and need to come to him for imagination, intuition and inspiration.

Oh, and I can't let this pass unremarked:

Ideas are like arseholes, everyone's got one. But what advertising agencies do is share those ideas.

I see, all these years Saatchi and Saatchi have been dressing mutton up as lamb, all they wanted to do was share their ideas. Sure.

And as for this:

We (admen) are the people who create jobs through building demand

Words fail me.

I see that some people seem inspired by Lovemarks. Well, there are many brands that people find attractive on the surface. But with Lovemarks, the surface may be all there is.

Foxy Marketing

Good article: Crazy like a Firefox on the rise of open source marketing. (via Doc Searls) (Also see James Cherkoff's' good primer on the phenomenon.)

Marlborough Sound

Apologies for the travelogue for those looking for meatier posts... yesterday's stop on the tour of NZ found me boating on the Marlborough Sound, on the north east end of the South Island. Another away-from-it-all location. Here's me (in dayglo orange) with my friend/host Tom.

Metrics, Schmetrics

Top blogging by Jackie Danicki. Here's what Andrew Sullivan would call the money quote:

If any of us wanted to play stupid games with execs who know little about what we do but whose egos we need to massage, we’d go back to working as desk monkeys in companies that are 5 billion light years from the nearest solar system to clued-up. If we can’t do business the right way, a way that is enjoyable and fruitful beyond anything possible in the world of meaningless metrics and lame business jargon, then we can shut up shop right now.

It is not possible to measure the ROI of any of the blogs I have been involved with, and all of the friendships and business associations and deals they have made possible. If you can think of one good reason to pretend otherwise, I will eat my hat.

Yeah.

Oh Dear

Tom Peters nominates Lovemarks as his "Bizbook of the Half Decade Award"

I've been trying so hard not to rant anymore about this. I've been thinking of Evelyn Rodriguez's excellent thinking on integration and trying hard to find some things to appreciate about Kevin Roberts.

I think I'd better go for a nice long walk. But if any of you out there want to egg me on, I think I might have a few more things to say on this topic.

Spam comments

For some reason, the tide of spam comments to this site is rising. I probably need to upgrade to Movable Type 3.x and use moderation to forestall it, but I don't fancy sorting that out till I'm back home. Meanwhile, I'll try to get online and clean up as often as I can!

Random observations about New Zealand

So I've been in NZ for a week or so, and here are a few observations about the place.

1. The first person I saw coming off the jetway in Christchurch was a security woman. And she was smiling a welcome. You wouldn't get that at Heathrow.

2. The customs officer called me by my first name. I think that kind of set the tone for the friendliness of the place.

3. Seems like a high trust society. No one seems to worry about leaving stuff visible in their cars; at the gym they drop their car keys in a tray and trust they'll still have the same car keys when they're finished!

4. Lots of space. The lack of insensity here is good for morale. Even in urban areas, the scenery is uplifting.

5. Driving skills are not a strong point of the culture!

6. Vastly less fashion and status conscious. Not much concern with fancy clothes and most cars are resasurringly second-hand. (In fact it seems NZ takes in thousands of used cars from Japan.)

7. Don't watch the TV.

8. No tipping. Good serviceand helpfulness seem to come as standard. Very nice.

Overall, I sense a quality of life here that will not be reflected in the standard economic measures. Some in NZ worry whether they're too out of step with the rest of the world. Personally, I think they're onto to something special here.

More on the death of branding

Hugh at gapingvoid is on top provocative form, returning to his theme that branding is dead with a few good reasons. I have to admit that this afternoon I especially like number 5 for its insight and number 6 for its directness:

5. "Branding" is all about articulating top-down, hierarchal control of the conversation. "This is what it means." It's EGOlogy, not ECOlogy.

6. I generally find people who like using the word "Brand" a lot are assholes.

Yes it's rude but I think it has a certain emotional truth.

Yeah, like Jennifer Rice I'd make a modest effort to hold on to the word brand for conversational convenience. But basically I'm with Hugh in his impatience with the twaddle that is so often spoken on either side of the word in sentences.

Flexi-ethics

The Christchurch Weekend Press has a good article by motorbiking fund manager Gareth Morgan. Here's an online copy from Gareth's own site: Corporates and their “Flexi-Ethics" It's heartening to find a fund manager who cares about these things. Here he takes aim at Air New Zealand's changes to its Frequent Flyer Programme.

Next week Air New Zealand’s loyalty programme moves from airpoints to air dollars. If you had accumulated 168,000 airpoints then that entitles you to a free business class companion return fare to London worth $7,100. Next week the lovely folks at Air New Zealand convert that points balance to 2,240 air-dollars. That will entitle you to 30% of a business class return fare to London. What do you get to reduce the pain of this 70% loss the company has unilaterally imposed? You don’t need a companion on the flight, and your chances of getting a seat are promised to be greater. These “sweeteners”, the company presumes, will diminish the pain to customers of the kick in the teeth.

I think the tough challenge for businesses is to cultivate loyalty beyond these various forms of bribery. Gareth points out that Air NZ does command that kind of emotional loyalty from many customers but may be squandering it by these actions. He highlights another version of the Tragedy of the Commons in which companies are lured into micropricing that ultimately unravels some significant community bonds. There are no magic answers here: but some really good questions...

On muddling through

More wisdom courtesy of Chris Corrigan.

I actually think that muddling through is not a correction to the conventional wisdom that stretegy and planning is the way to go. Muddling through has always been the way. The evidence is actually overwhelming. Show me something in the world, a finished process, project, thing or event, that was not the result of muddling through.

Strategy is figuring out which way to muddle. Good strategists are great muddlers. They seem to muddle in the direction of the resources or of the political will or of the greatest benefit to others.

Planning is fun, and very useful for the short term, like on the last half day of an Open Space. But planning that goes beyond "when will we talk again" or a simple to-do list needs to be aware that the muddle factor increases as the time frame increases. More importantly, and more seriously, planning that doesn't take into account a muddle factor and that creates a complex, long term and fixed to-do list is both disempowering for people and largely ineffective. It ties people to the plan (rather than the other way around) and limits exposure to true sources of inspiration and innovation.

For a comprehensive set of data on the effectiveness of muddling, check out the Nobel Prize winners speeches. When you come to a Nobel Laureate that says that their accomplishment was the result of a great strategic plan, let me know.

I share this view. I think planning is given rather high status, whereas "muddling through" is seen as inferior. Planning and muddling through are not opposites; not a dilemma to be resolved - they are interdependent.

Akaroa

Am currently in Akaroa, in a house overlooking the bay and it's quite beautiful, a world away from England. Continued amazing sunshine dictates heavy sunblock and very light blogging.

Engagement and formulae

Before leaving London, I was talking to some brand consultants about engagement. Their puzzle was: how do we get employees to engage with a brand. How would you approach this, they asked.

I guess I start from a position of feeling hugely sceptical about starting with a brand position and then attempting to engage employees. And this is where most branding types go wrong - they generate a frightfully clever idea of their own, sell it to management and then attempt to sell it to employees. As the Irishman is reputed to have said, "If I wanted to go to Dublin, I wouldn't start from here."

We talked about some specific brands, including a big financial institution which has done a very pricey rebrand and where, it appears, the staff don't get it. Despite millions spent on advertising. I didn't say this in the meeting - wish now that I had - but basically, I think the staff have every reason not to engage with the advertising. And I am more and more impatient with the notion that staff should change to fit some ideal of the brand that they've probably had little to do with inventing.

I've also found myself becoming obstinate, resisting conversations about changing other people. In this meeting, I kept trying to move the subject from the culture "out there" to look at the little culture we were creating in this meeting. And these guys kept politely declining; I think they thought I was being evasive. That would be one thing we had in common.

I also felt they were looking for some convincing story of my miracle cure for these problems out there. And although I do have some ideas - about using Open Space Technology for one thing - I just don't want to slide back into this problem-solution conversation.

So this meeting didn't go very well, and I'm feeling frustrated. You know, I think it's quite hard to articulate and stand up for a less formulaic, more emergent way of approaching brands. Because there is this constant pressure to come up with easy answers, and to avoid paradox and at all costs keep out of the discomfort of not knowing.

A little epiphany

The weird thing about flying down here was that the shades were down on the windows for almost all of both legs. So I was flying over some interesting places... Afgahnistan, India, Australia... but just took the onscreen map's word for it. Only as we approached NZ did the shades go up, and boy, what a view. It really did feel like the end of a journey to the other side of the world: my first sight of New Zealand were the spectacular snow-capped mountains of the South Island.

And I peeked them whilst listening to one of my favourite pieces of music. Bryn Terfel and Andrea Bocelli singing the duet from The Pearl Fishers. There is something simply electric about this performance, where as it builds to a climax I feel like something mysterious and powerful happens, something that is not Terfel and not Bocelli, but something in the space between that is more than either or both. And to hear that and see those mountains at the end of a long, long flight was... awesome. Which, it appears, is the favourite word at the moment of my friend Bec's two year old son who was here (with his mum) to greet me.

On the flight I read Joe Jaworski's Synchronicity - The Inner Path of Leadership. I can't remember who recommended it to me a few months back, but I'm glad they did. I'll probably blog some snippets later.

Down under

I've just arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand. The long, long journey (24 hours in 2 legs) was actually quite ok, even though I am completely jetlagged.

I flew with Singapore Airlines and I was pretty impressed. The crew seemed more serene than I'm used to on British and American airlines, and I didn't experience the kind of stinginess I've been getting used to when flying. They offered a pleasant service without either surliness or servility. As if they enjoyed their work and felt comfortable doing it.

In fact while waiting in the departure lounge at Heathrow, I saw the crew in a crocodile line passing through the terminal and they did exude a kind of contentment that made them stand out.

And the seatback entertainment package is pretty cool too!

(I won't mention the branding guru featured in the inflight magazine. Regular readers will quickly guess who...)