Okay, so no one can totally recession-proof anything, but I’ve been thinking about some simple things you can do with and for your brand during down markets, when the temptation is to cut costs, slash prices, eliminate staff, lower service levels, change who you are and very possibly alienate customers (so that when the economy turns around - which it will- they’ll have moved on). I’ve been thinking about five opportunities: (Read on …)
Who cannot place their hand on their heart and say that what consumers really want is authenticity? I can’t.
With sincerest apologies to the burgeoning authenticity industry, as documented in Gilmore and Pine’s What Consumers Really Want: Authenticity (and just about every bibliographic reference in it), what is mistaken as an appetite for authenticity is actually a desire for escape, denial, disguise, control and temporary or permanent identity shift. How can Gilmore, Pine and others claim that consumers want authenticity when even they agree that our world gets less real every day? Harley Davidson? Häagen-Dazs? Las Vegas? Plastic surgery? Reality television? Reality television about plastic surgery? Low calorie brownies? Designer knock-offs? Spas? Wrestling? PT Cruisers?
Maybe you can twist all this into some theory about real-fake, fake-fake and fake-real offerings (as Gilmore and Pike attempt), but the fact is, there is no mass market for the truly authentic in any category. Travel, food, clothing, health, entertainment, recreation, consumer goods, personal services, luxury and so on. There is craft, the quaint, home-made and farm stands, but not much else.
This is not to say that people want to be out-and-out lied to. The terms of the transaction have to be honest and the promises have to be kept, but the provider who can suspend my disbelief the longest, wins. We don’t want to be fooled, but we don’t mind fooling ourselves. Give me the perception of authenticity - no matter how un-real - and I’m yours.
And what is the quickest way to give the perception of authenticity? It is with story-telling, or as the ferociously authentic (skeptical empiricist) Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it: the narrative fallacy - creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause. His words are meant to apply to our inability to accept randomness of events, but they describe as well the roots of our collective desire for the inauthentic.
“We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.”
Okay he sounds bitter, but he is right. People want to be lulled to sleep with bedtime stories. We want to be one step removed from reality because reality is too much work, and too scary. This is why the average American watches 32 hours of television every week. Is there ANYTHING authentic about watching television?
Just because people buy products, services and experiences that are labelled genuine, real, original, authentic, the first, true, classic etc. does not mean they value those qualities; they just want the label and the back story to connect it to some cognitive trigger that will make them feel better about themselves.
If I sound angry, it’s because I am. The flagging demand for things and experiences that are actually authentic means you have to drive farther, go deeper and work a lot harder to find the simple, the original, the unpaved, the un-story-boarded, the real deal; and then once you find it, you’ve worked so hard for it that is doesn’t seem authentic any more. The commercial world is being turned into a story line and the non-commercial world is following close behind.
Maybe this is why I like to work in settings where fake doesn’t rule (yet), like professional services, education, health care, B2B, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, telecom etc.
The horribly cynical implication from Gilmore and Pine is this: to succeed, create the perception of authenticity. Are they right? Or is there hope for real?
When it comes to competitive brand strategy you can be right in a lot of ways, but you can be really, really wrong in just two: 1) believing that there is no one out there like you and so you own your category and have no direct competition or 2) that you operate in a commoditized category and you’ll never be able to truly differentiate, so why bother. I hear both all the time - and shockingly - sometimes from within the same organization.
Regarding the former, no matter how unique, one-of-a-kind, quirky or pioneering you are, there is always something else that your customers can do with their money, their time and their affection. There are pure plays that eat away at your offer, giants for whom what you do is a rounding error and lots of competitors who will say they do what you do, but don’t. Heads up. Someone is eating your lunch; I guarantee it.
Regarding the latter, I need only quote the father of differentiation, Ted Levitt: “There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services can be differentiated and usually are.” (I always thought this would have been far more interesting if he had said …can be differentiated but usually are not). I don’t care if you run a hospital, a law firm, a country, a postal authority or a foodbank, you either already are different and may have lost sight of it, or you need to be. In fact I believe the biggest, most break-out opportunities in brand strategy are in the most highly commoditized categories. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. And I’m not talking about spin here. I’m talking about real, sustainable, valuable difference. Too often I encounter organizations with the potential to redefine their categories, lulled into believing that they are just along for the ride.
If you believe either of these things about your organization it is time to examine the consequences, and consider the alternatives. If you do, you may be able to define an totally new opportunity space and a renewed sense of purpose.
From Peter C. Newman going on about power games to Naomi Klein dissing brands altogether to Andrea Mandel-Campbell telling us why Mexicans don’t drink Molson beer, we just have not had a lot of optimistic discourse on Canadian brands in the last 40 years. Jeannette Hanna’s and Alan Middleton’s new book Ikonica has changed that. In short, Hanna/Middleton show that brands=values and that Canadian values=good brands and that Canadian companies can win globally on the basis of our own particular brand genius.
Full disclosure: Jeannette is a long-time collaborator of mine, and my sister-in-law, and I was very lucky to have been able to watch and cheer from the sidelines as the ideas in Ikonica took shape. The end product - which I hope is really just the beginning of a national discourse - is a treasure.
The book - structured as a field guide, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson and written to be read with pleasure - opens by putting Canadian brands into their historical and cultural context. The authors propose an 11-point model of what makes Canadian brands Canadian. I love this part. Communitarian, chameleon-like, sceptical, collaborative….for example. When I think of the great Canadian brands I’ve worked with, these attributes are not just accurate, they are at the heart of what has made them successful.
Then come the stories. 24 interview-based stories - some with the usual suspects (Timmies, WestJet, Roots) - but also some lovely surprises (Dynamic Funds, TIFFG, Environics, McCain Foods). All the stories come across as intimate reflections by these organizations’ leaders about what has motivated them and the values they have built and modelled in order to succeed. These stories are at times funny, moving and silly but always persuasive.
The book will not disappoint practitioners with its very tidy little model that uses Community, Culture and Commerce as filters for values-based brand strategy. It’s just such great and useful stuff.
Ikonica is not going to change what it means to be Canadian. So much of what is in this book feels like us and is reassuringly familiar. What it could change is how we see the potential of our values to change the way the world thinks about brands, about Canada and about our role in shaping modern commerce.
The world is looking for what comes next after the monolithic all-about-me phase of American-style branding. Look no further. The future of the truly global brand starts here.
I responded to Richard Florida’s request for a city story and the request came back to spread the word, so please contribute and….spread the word.
http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/06/whos-your-city.html
I need your help for the new Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? I’m working on for publication in early 2009. My team and I at the Prosperity Institute are working through the data and rankings, building all sorts of tables and maps for Canada and North America.
But what we really need are your stories.
Back in September of 2006, I asked for personal stories about your city, and recieved more than 200 responses many of which made it into the book. Most of which were about US cities.
Now, I’d like to ask for your stories about Canadian cities Tell me about the place you live. Why did you pick your city or region? How did you go about picking it - what was your strategy? What other kinds of places did you look at? How has that choice affected the rest of your life? Your job or career? Friends, family, or romantic interests? Fulfillment and fun? Real estate jackpots or money pits? Would you do it differently next time? What cities and regions are on your radar for the future and why? That’s it. 100 or 200 words, on any or all of those subjects. 300-500 words could be even better.
Send your stories to Patrick Adler at patrick.adler@rotman.utoronto.ca , or post them on the comment section of this entry, or do both. Together, we’ll build a reservoir of community knowledge that I hope can make the book as relevant as possible for Canadian readers.
I am fascinated by the presence of intense contradictions in organizations. It may be possible that the highest performing, most innovative organizations are the ones that can manage the greatest degree of internal paradox, and not spin out of control, or lose their centre. (Read on …)
I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to live. In other words, if you are a high Agreeable you will eventually feel out of place in a high Neuroticism place.
One of the most satisfying applications of corporate brand strategy is in helping hospitals define their proposition and orient themselves to a promise that sets them apart from others in their networks. This is far more than renaming, re-skinning or capital campaign sloganeering. In
When I got tired of asking my clients “who are you?” I started asking them “why are you?”. What’s the reason you are the way you are and do what you do? Then things started to get interesting. I’ve found that one of the best ways to answer that question is to go back to the earliest beginnings of the organization - the moment of conception if you will – to understand the formative values and beliefs. More often than not, those values are still operating in some measure, deep in the reflexive culture, and may be the most authentic thing to build the brand on. The creation story, linked to the present, can be a powerful credibility builder, especially inside the organization where employees are the first to apply the “stink test” to things like a new brand promise. (Read on …)
In my last post I argued that real brand strategy is too big, too important and too much work to be expressed only through a creative brief that goes to communication specialists, design firms, public relations types and advertising agencies. In Part One I proposed the Organizational Brief, in which the implications of the brand are fully explored across everything you do, not just marketing. In Part Two I propose the Experience Brief in which the real work of the brand – the experiences that it creates – are explicitly identified and managed throughout the organization.
The creative brief. What a curious way to cap off a brand strategy initiative. You mean you’ve spent months asking yourselves and others who you are, how you are different and what your unique opportunity is in the market, and the ribbon you tie around it is a creative brief to inform the design of the visual identity? What about the 900 other ways in which your brand will be experienced, expressed and supported? What about the Organizational Brief™? (Read on …)
While corporate brands rely on current equity, the best brand strategy will be built on the equity you can create in the future. This idea usually makes organizations nervous as they quite rightly measure the risk of going live with a promise they cannot fulfill. In my view, it’s best to explore the far corners of where your brand can take you and to work towards that vision with the help of your customers.
Corporate values are sets of beliefs that shape behaviour in organizations, and they strongly determine internal and external perceptions. In several projects linking corporate values to brand and organizational change, I’ve been working with a three-tiered model of values, which is helping to make the job of managing values a bit easier. (Read on …)
“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear.” Socrates’ insight is as true for organizations and their brands as it was for the virtuous individual he sought to instruct more than 2000 years ago. This simple idea, also summed up in the iconic: decide who you are and be that thing, is a powerful reminder of how to order your priorities. The common trap, of course, is not getting beyond appearances. So often, too much focus is put on building media attention, advertising impressions and unaided awareness; and on proclaiming through logos, taglines and marketing messaging, that you are who you say you are.
The Marketing function has pretty much had a lockdown on developing and managing corporate brand strategy in recent memory, but there are reasons to believe that this might be changing. Human Resources is emerging as the group to watch when it comes to implementing the most meaningful aspects of the brand. (Read on …)
If you’re part of even the most average organization, you probably know a fair amount about your customers. You probably know a lot about what matters to them, what they think about you, and how much they are willing to pay to buy to what you sell. But how much do you know about what your employees think, what matters to them and how far they are willing to go to defend your brand? Chances are you’ve got an employee satisfaction survey that HR does every year or so, and you’ve got a few programs in place to communicate more openly; but do you really know the effect that implicit corporate values are having on your ability to deliver on your brand promise, or for that matter on your basic corporate responsibilities? (Read on …)
There is a shift underway in how people are talking about corporate brands; a shift that is going to result in the next generation of branding. After years of brand being the big idea, leaders want more. They’ve got their new identities, taglines, brand evangelists and guidelines, and they’ve even done some training on “what does the brand mean for me.” But there is something missing… (Read on …)
Why is it that the big brand idea so often fails to reach the salesforce? It’s puzzling and it’s something that I’m paying extra attention to in my work these days. If the proposition doesn’t help them sell, there must be something wrong with it. If it could help them sell and they’re not using it, then it either hasn’t been brought to life for them or they’re being rewarded for doing something else. Either way, it’s not a good situation, especially in business-to-business, where the salesforce is so important. Try an experiment. Ask someone in sales to describe you organization’s unique, persuasive difference. If it takes more than ten words, I’d be concerned. (Read on …)