Confluence

For some brands, it's about trusting the tale, not the teller

If you’re interested in how certain brands take on personalities of their own beyond their framers’ intent--or in the self-conscious denial of any intent at all--a recently published book deserves your attention. Buying In: the Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker, examines how certain brands come to embody what we say to ourselves about ourselves, but with no apparent acknowledgement of a surrounding brand community of any sort. In other words, individuals embrace many of these brands with no conscious pretension to belonging, seemingly because the brand has individual meaning for them alone. Or so they think.

 All this may seem to run counter to the proposition that brand contagion is fueled by social networks. But the examples Walker cites don’t diverge all that much from this model. And while he’s a little snarky about notions like co-creation, that turns out to be pretty much the phenomenon he’s examining. Many of his keystone cases--Converse sneakers, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Timberland boots among hip-hop devotees—are brands that have prospered through diffusion force fields that are, at least initially, invisible to the “commercial persuaders” behind the brand.

And all of them, paradoxically, seem to emerge from a distinctive peer-to-peer energy that is militantly brand-averse, a kind of anti-matter in the branding universe detectable only through its effects. Clearly we’re not in the realm of mass market brands here. Still, Walker’s take on brand contagion--not to mention his vivid coverage of the individual entrepreneurs and early adopters behind the brands—make this a most valuable read for anyone, and especially for “commercial persuaders.”

Battle of the brands, cable news style

Watch a little election analysis and you’ve likely noticed how the vocabulary of branding has infiltrated the commentary of the talking head crowd. For the CNN and MSNBC commentariat in particular, the word “brand” has become a formula and a fashion. It’s the “Republican brand” this and the “Obama brand” that, et cetera and so on.

It’s not that they’re getting the underlying mechanism of brand equity wrong. Quite the contrary. The major parties and candidates do anchor distinctive constellations of values, perceived strengths, and associations that attract communities of loyalists and spread their influence by word of mouth.

But for those of us who deal in these social and business phenomena regularly, this is old news. Even so, I think there’s a lesson here. The vigor with which the on-camera experts (and party surrogates) have flocked to these terms of art as if they were remarkably fresh and insightful bears out how memes (even concepts that are pretty standard in other communities) can spread with eureka! enthusiasm among cohesive social networks.

 Make no mistake: for all its internal differences in political stance and affiliation, the fraternity-sorority of talking heads is a full-fledged social network. Not an entirely closed one of course, but one with enough commonality of focus, go-to sources of information, and ritualized habits of inter-communication to qualify as soc-nets as surely as the more self-consciously fervent communities of Harley owners, Sam Adams drinkers, and PETA members.

Vinjamuri's People

If, like me, you’re a fan of good business writing and you’re interested in entrepreneurial brands, I can recommend a book that you will almost certainly like.

In Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands, David Vinjamuri profiles eight entrepreneurs—some you may have heard of, others not. The business owners that Vinjamuri covers all share one dominant attribute: a passion for the quality and customer ‘fit’ of their products.

Most worked for years to refine their small business brands before they hit it big or, in the case of J. Peterman, hit it big, lost it big, and then slowly rebuilt it. It’s refreshing, by the way, to meet seasoned entrepreneurs in their seventies and eighties, like Peterman, Gert Boyle (Columbia Sportswear), and Roxanne Quimby (Burt’s Bees). No sleek airbrushed cover-girl CEOs a la Fast Company magazine here.

Happily for the book, Vinjamuri doesn’t just sit back and analyze the elements that make for business and branding success. He injects himself, and his voice, into the narratives, recounting his visits to the subjects and allowing them, at critical moments, to tell parts of their creation tales in their own voices. Throughout he exhibits the born writer’s eye for revealing detail. We experience not just how these not-so-ordinary entrepreneurs think, but how and where they live and work.

Ultimately, Accidental Branding is all about story elements, both in the brands themselves and in Vinjamuri’s approach to his topic. Every brand needs a story, and Vinjamuri gives us some superb examples to ponder and retell.

Six keys to value branding

Brand practice is an evolving discipline, and many of its dominant approaches today diverge significantly from those of traditional branding, which had more to do with features and metrics than the intrinsic value (and values) of a company or institution.

Here are six of the guiding principles behind the increasingly prevalent approach of value branding.

1. Compelling brands are anchored in living brand communities.

Call them stakeholders, brand evangelists, or whatever, but opt-in communities of real people inspire a value brand’s power and reach. These folks feel proud to incorporate the brand’s attitude into their own public identities. Consider Apple Computer (a no-brainer) but also NASCAR, which in itself has become a magnet for scores of consumer brands [Coke, KFC, Lowe’s, Sprint Nextel, Office Depot, Harlequin Publishing(!), Best Western, and Nationwide Insurance, among others], all determined to thrive in its social orbit.

2. Value brand communities co-create brand value (and the brand experience).

The ad hoc social networks formed by NASCAR enthusiasts are  powerful forces for brand contagion. Fueled by collective energies like these, successful value brands seem to take on lives of their own, beyond the control of their corporate birth parents. Disney--considered in the full range of its offerings, from theme parks to Hannah Montana--is a telling case in point. So are Girl Scout Cookies, a co-created brand phenomenon that we’ve discussed here before (“You can’t hide from this Cookie Monster”).

[For insights from the business theorist who defined the concept of value co-creation, check out C.K. Prahalad.]

3. Themes and narratives, not “messages”, spur the growth of value brand communities.

Political strategists may soil themselves when their candidates wander “off message”, but this manipulative approach has no place in value branding. By framing themes (often expansive big-idea extensions of the brand’s values), organizations invite their brand communities to move in imaginative and/or inspiring directions beyond the strictly practical scope of the brand’s offerings. Take Nike, with its seemingly ageless Just Do It theme. Johnson & Johnson’s Campaign for Nursing’s Future is another great example. A related technique incorporates concrete narrative energy through case studies and user-submitted stories.

4. The authenticity of the brand experience is a key driver, with reasoned, logical persuasion playing a supporting role.

Small- to mid-sized organizations often limit their reach by striding down the left-brain path, i.e., by framing rigid value propositions that embody only the practical advantages of their offerings. This tack may seem to them to work well enough, but it ignores the communal dimension, meaning their stakeholders’ collective inclination to respond to imaginative appeals and concrete cases of real people in action. Narrative engagement is one approach that can help here. See Hitachi’s brilliantly evocative video True Stories (now happily supported by a full-scale print media campaign), Cadillac’s celebrity recollections, and Canadian Club’s nostalgic and funny re-branding campaign.

5.  Value brands build communities through word-of-mouth (WOM) transmission.

Two words: Starbucks and Oprah. The Starbucks phenomenon has largely spread through WOM boosted by the ubiquity of Starbucks outlets. Oprah’s mindshare empire has sprung from the same communal co-creative impulse, though seeded arguably by her daytime TV exposure. Viral video, if originated within a brand community, can be another vector of brand contagion.

6. If a corporate brand is the yin, its corresponding Talent Brand is the yang.

I want to address this widely under-appreciated point in my next post, but for now let’s leave it at this: an enterprise today rises and falls on the strengths and enthusiasms of its workforce. Calling this approach “employer branding” misses the point by minimizing the marketplace value of an organization’s human capital resource, which should be a fully-engaged brand community in all the respects we’ve enumerated above.

WEB 2.0: a new paradigm for branding and engagement--but look before you take the plunge

If, like many regular readers of this web log, you’re a decision-maker in a services company, national association, or government agency, up to now you have probably relied on tried-and-true channels for engaging stakeholders and inspiring your internal teams. For the most part this means print, events, fundamental web approaches, and maybe a few video and Flash! experiments. But a handful of potentially game-changing tools are emerging from Web 2.0 practices. Think seriously about integrating them judiciously into your communication programs as these approaches mature.

1. Social Media. Our current take on these tools may sound dated and ill-informed to many of today’s confirmed blog-trekkies. But the fact is, few mid-market enterprises—not to mention institutional players—have put web logs, social networking sites, and Wikis to widespread strategic use for branding and engagement. Eloquent champions of social media like Geoff Livingston are certainly rallying the troops, but so far MySpace and FaceBook, the dominant “mass-market” social network sites, have yet to frame a persuasive business case as outreach and marketing channels. While user privacy concerns are presently checkmating these big sites’ exploration on this score, smaller niche soc-net destinations like Ski Space and Infield Parking (NASCAR) are refining promising new approaches to brand building (both for themselves and for paying advertisers/sponsors).

2. Virtual Worlds. Immersive 3D environments, while not yet a breakout phenomenon in the online mainstream, offer significant ROI potential for brand strategists. Second Life is the best known of these “metaverse” environments, but others, like Disney’s pay-to-belong kid site Club Penguin--which, by the way, attracts seven times the traffic of Second Life--and pre-teen mecca There.com are courting affinity participants. Here’s There.com’s three-minute promotional animation; watch it here for five seconds and you’ll have no doubt about the site’s demographic-of-choice.

[In a future post, I’ll discuss several of the corporate and government(!!) education-and-inspiration venues that are cropping up on Second Life and other virtual worlds. Practitioners of value branding, like our Brand Vistas team, find this trend particularly exciting.]

3. Narrative branding. Many organizations today are linking their value propositions to stories that their team members recount about their work…as well as to recollections submitted voluntarily by customers and stakeholders (“Tell us your story.”) The flexibility of the Web makes this eminently possible for textual contributions (for starters), and now TV campaigns are adopting this approach as well. Check out Giant Food and Home Depot for examples.

4. “Amateur” video. This trend has sprung from the success of YouTube, and fueled many a recent consumer campaign, including efforts from Dove, Crowne Plaza hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Dunkin’ Donuts. Look for this phenomenon to grow impressively in volume (if not in quality of submissions) in the months to come. Here's the winner in KFC's recent "Show Us Your Hot Wings" contest.

TWO INNOVATIONS AROUND THE NEXT BEND : market engagement through mobile phones…and “circular entertainment”, i.e., the serial enhancement/modification (“mash-ups”) of rich media and digital video as it passes from user to user.

A chicken dance in the end zone? Not likely, but we’re still hoping.

KFC has a product launch/Super Bowl tie-in that at first blush seems like the obnoxious antithesis of the Value Platform approach we promote at Brand Vistas. KFC has challenged any Giant or Patriot who scores a touchdown to perform a three-second “chicken dance” in the end zone. The incentive: a $260,000 payout to the charity of the dancer’s choice.

 

[Go here to see the Colonel himself bust a move as he demonstrates the dance’s proper execution, complete with campy polka-esque musical accompaniment.]

 

This is textbook guerrilla marketing, and you can be sure that the NFL--widely reported to be less than pleased with KFC’s challenge (not to mention the trend it portends)—is twisting arms behind the scenes and threatening BIG financial penalties if any player yields to temptation.

 

But KFC’s gambit has people talking. More importantly, it’s set the Web—not to mention the TV and sports-talk radio airwaves--humming. After all, the payoff does go to charity…so what’s the harm?, sez your average fan. There may be some in-stadium grumbling when somebody scores and doesn’t dance, which is the likely outcome, and indeed one that serves KFC’s engagement objective just as well. And if any daring player does look like he’s about to break out in poultry-inspired celebration, will Fox cut away, as I’m certain the NFL is demanding?

 

So, are we scandalized? No way, because dignity and decorum often have nothing to do with value branding. The NFL’s brand communities, and the social networks that fuel them, are loving this. NFL scoring celebrations occupy a realm where all dignity has long ago fallen away, and the disruptive thrust of KFC’s promotion will add a positive charge to the brands of both KFC and the NFL, whatever happens this Sunday.

 

Disruptive advertising can mean quick, if expensive, consumer mindshare

Some brands aim to build communities through aggressive non-sequiturs--by working off an image, association, or icon that carries no value content other than the intent to disrupt our conventional expectations. This can be spectacularly effective, fixing the brand in memory with compelling vitality and a dose of wry, self-aware humor.

The Geico gecko, of course, is today’s leading exemplar of a disruptive icon that has already entered the pop-cultural mainstream. AFLAC’s duck is another surrealist party-crasher with no apparent connection to the sponsor’s offering. Rewind into mid-century brand mascot practice and you’ll find this disruptive approach’s more literal ancestors—among them Smokey the Bear, the Jolly Green Giant, and Charley the Tuna, all of which, however, bore some declared connection, if only in "toon" logic, to the sponsor’s selling proposition. Gecko and duck are postmodern, tongue-in-cheek expressions of this inherently silly lineage.

And similar disruptive impulses are showing up in other guises that don’t follow the goofy brand mascot archetype. Take the incessant barrage from the folks that bring us the Head-On family of topical analgesics. The spots, which have been running for a year or more, have apparently boosted sales by triggering product familiarity through annoyance.

Is the path these companies take any way to build a resonant and trusted brand? They overturn our late 20^th century certainty that a commercial should entertain…or at least engage us in a palatable and informative way. Like Letterman and Colbert, they’re ironic in intent and effect, and they never let the mask slip.

In yet another manifestation of this disruptive, convention-exploding approach, Old Mutual, an old line British financial services company, has been tweaking us with otherwise true-to-life TV vignettes where characters invoke the name of the company as an all-purpose descriptor for widely varying motivations, states-of-mind, and reactions to events. For the petulant ‘tweens, street musicians, upscale shoppers, commuters, and museum goers depicted in the spots, “Old Mutual” is the catch-all adjective that describes it all. You can watch the spots here.

All these examples aim to build brand recognition and word-of-mouth contagion. And of course they connect only remotely to the underlying value that their respective brands represent. Even so, their strong dose of disruptive “attitude” is proving to be a quick, if media-expensive, shortcut to consumer familiarity and share-of-mind.

Three steps that will make your Value Brand come alive

If there’s a fundamental principle governing how our consulting team works with client-partners, it’s this: all organizations that operate in the public eye have brands, whether they have intentionally shaped them or not.

More than just a logo and slogan, your brand has taken shape organically from your product and/or service track record, from your activities and business practices, and from the impressions your stakeholders take away from their interactions with you and your team. Physical “artifacts” that represent your value (like your Web presence and print publications) are important contributors, but not the sole source of your perceived value.

Stated simply, your brand is embodied in the respect and admiration you inspire in the communities you serve. That’s a bit more than saying it’s governed by the quality of your products and/or services, and intentionally so. To assume that your present "image" stems only from intellectual constructs and practical product value is to miss the big picture. Because your brand is rooted in your organization’s real-world relationships of value, there are impressions, intuitions, and felt associations caught up there as well. To neglect these right-brain factors—or to dismiss their high value in refining a resonant and authentic brand—is to take your intellectual value proposition only part of the way to its real potential.

We’ve come up with three guiding principles for brand outreach that can help any organization leverage the Value Platform behind its current brand,and engage/deepen its brand communities effectively.

1. Broaden the frame. Portray your offering as an ideal that’s much bigger than its purely practical, utilitarian value to customers. Nike provides a great example of this bigger idea approach; you can view the company’s most recent TV spot here [Download itsnotabouttheshoes.mov ]. Note the uncredited MJ voice-over.

2. Appeal to the imagination. When you highlight your value, appeal to right-brain triggers in the brand communities you address—not just their practical and logical left-brain mental faculties. This doesn’t mean you should go after tear-jerk or flag-waving responses, but you will want to inspire the imaginations of your stakeholders. Examples: TV spots from two familiar insurance companies. I’m embedding one (Liberty Mutual) and linking the other set (Nationwide) at the end of this post.

3. Anchor a community. Position your organization as the center of a vibrant community of stakeholders that interact with you to co-create the value and values that empower your brand. We’ll be discussing this element in the weeks and months to come. For a good example of how a company personifies this attribute, consider Justin Long’s MAC-guy in Apple’s “MAC vs PC” campaign. Starbucks, especially in its untroubled heyday, is a pure example of a co-created brand community.

LIBERTY MUTUAL: “Responsibility” [below]. Note also how this spot broadens the frame with a bigger idea emphasis.

   ...and here's the link to Nationwide's "Life comes at you fast" series. (The earlier Kevin Federline spot is here.))

PF’s community of the cookie

Even packaged goods companies are looking to leverage the rudiments of social networking to create brand communities. Pepperidge Farm sponsors a micro-site entitled The Art of the Cookie that attempts to coalesce a community of “girlfriends” around the concept of friendships and –presumably--the central role of the gourmet cookie in that social universe. This is largely a push community of anonymous participants (though you can opt in to an email list); so it’s more affinity marketing than true social networking, and only a distant and feeble cousin of the ubiquitous Girl Scout Cookies network I’ve showcased before.

A stretch or not, Pepperidge Farm’s attempt to claim the suburban high ground is textbook bigger-idea branding, at least in intent. At the same time, the site delves into personality branding (another frequent topic on this blog) by associating itself with Sally Horchow, “lifestyle expert”, TV personality, and co-author of The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections.

In support of its “girlfriends” site, Pepperidge Farm dispatched Ms. Horchow on a nationwide journey “to explore the meaning of connections”. The site includes a smattering of stills, short video interviews, and Ms. Horchow’s journal reflections on “the wonderful women” she encountered. From the standpoint of engaging content, unfortunately, the site is half-baked. Too bad, because there’s lots of untapped value-brand horsepower here. (This may be Oprah and Rachael Ray turf, but it’s a big tent.) Was Pepperidge Farm hesitant to launch an integrated multi-channel campaign, or to enlist a viral component to support the social urges of its core customers?

Another Pepperidge Farm brand, Goldfish snack crackers, hosts an activities site for kids that’s a bit more interesting, ambitious, and well executed. For obvious reasons, there’s no unsupervised interaction among visitors here, but the site does boast some energetic animation touches and games. It also offers a big-idea companion site (“Fishful Thinking”) designed to “inspire optimism and positive thinking in your child" under the marquee of a prominent academic psychologist (and other authorities). In terms of broad concept and good intentions, at least, it’s reminiscent of Dove’s self-esteem initiative for girls, which you’re heard us discuss frequently in this space.

A skin flick from Vaseline

I still see Dow Chemical’s inspiring The Human Element spot from time to time on commercial TV. You may recall that we discussed this piece several months ago (“Branding the human factor,” June 7, 2007), pointing to this gorgeously produced commercial as an example of branding a bigger idea. As we’ve said before, this big picture approach means elevating the value proposition well above the utilitarian benefits offered by a company’s offerings (and even, as in the Dow case, applying a little misdirection with regard to corporate shortcomings).

Now Vaseline has jumped into this value branding game with an evocative and beautifully produced spot called A Sea of Skin. It’s an encomium to the familiar human organ that has been the company’s specialty since its origins in the 19^th century. Watch it here.

Sea of Skin’s stylistic parallels to the Dow piece (still available on You Tube) are legion, from its art for art’s sake flavor to its final-frame reveal of the sponsoring brand. What’s more, if you adjust for documentary ambitions and longer format requirements, both of these big picture videos are not unlike Hitachi’s customer showcase pieces (“Big-idea brands bank on the right brain's response,” Confluence, September 14, 2007).

For some of you all this may seem like little more than a new wrinkle on what we used to call “image advertising”. But that doesn’t do these brand innovations justice. As before, they certainly do intend to enrich the viewer’s respect and admiration for the brand, but the emergence of digital video and Internet communication have changed the game significantly. On the other hand, let’s not just say they’re “viral”, and then close the case.

They’re fundamentally different from user-originated virals like the Diet Coke-Mentos and Tay Sonday’s stuff. Even so, engaging You Tube pieces like these have surely opened the way for professionally-produced virals by altering customary TV-viewer mindsets and expectations in online communities.

But I think we’re seeing a new engagement medium develop here. It may not go far, but it’s vastly different in spirit, tone, and production values from user-produced virals, and it’s fascinating to track as it evolves. Most importantly, there are lessons to be learned here for any organization interested in exploring value branding.