The color of money…

A guest post from (Roughly) Daily…

The increasingly rapacious and reactionary corporate attitude to intellectual property rights has been the subject of several posts over at Scenarios and Strategy (c.f., e.g., “Patently Absurd…,”Caution! Pile up ahead…,” or “I was aiming for my foot, but I seem to have shot myself in the thigh…“)

Now an update for readers who might feel the urge to deliver a present in just any light  blue box, or who might fancy a certain shade of orange…  Tiffany Blue and Home Depot Orange are trademark-protected– “colormarked”– hues.

Qualitex Press Pad

It all started in 1989.  Qualitex used the unique color blend illustrated above for their dry cleaning presses.  But then competitor Jacobson began using the same shade, allegedly to more easily confuse companies into buying their product instead. Qualitex sued, won– and colormarking was born.

Readers will find a list of 10 privately-owned colors at Mental Floss‘ “10 Trademarked Colors.”

As we discard a number of our crayons, just to be on the safe side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the extraordinary Canadian athlete Arnie Boldt jumped 6′ 8.25″ at the Tribune Games outside of Winnipeg, breaking his own record for long jump in disabled competition.  Boldt, who’d lost his right leg in a grain auger accident at the age of three, burst onto the parasports scene at the 1976 Paralympics, where he took gold and set records in both the long and the high jumps.  He raised his high jump record at the next Paralympics in 1980, then raised both records in 1981.

Arnie Boldt in the long jump (source: Canadian Sports Hall of Fame)

 

The Devil You Know…

Felix Salmon shares a BrandIndex report on the relative reputations of three beleaguered brands:

The graph above charts responses to the question “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?”.

To get a score of -40, the level to which Goldman Sachs has fallen, you’d need 70 people saying they were hearing negative things about the bank for every 30 saying they’d heard something positive… which, given the success-to-date of Goldman and the rest of Big Finance in squelching meaningful financial services regulatory reform, leads one to marvel at the the obvious power of money over public opinion.

Notable too that BP’s not (yet anyway) sunk that low… leading one to wonder who’s hearing positive things about them.

The romance of retailing…

A guest post from (Roughly Daily):

source

But then, Zippy can console himself that, as recent honoree H.L. Mencken observed, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

As we revisit our plans to open that book store, we might recall that this is the anniversary of the premiere (in 1954) of Walt Disney’s first prime-time television program (Disneyland, on ABC; later re-titled The Wonderful World of Disney), the second longest running television franchise in the country (as measured in seasons aired), and arguably the nation’s first major full-length infomercial (…though Bonomo, The Magic Clown, which ran on NBC from 1949 to 1954– and which was essentially an advertisement for Bonomo Turkish Taffy– has a defensible rival claim to that honor).

source

Your correspondent is headed for points antipodal, where, as it happens, the drains do not spiral in a different direction, but where connectivity promises to be uncertain…  consequently, for the next week or so, these missives are likely to be more roughly than daily.

Textbook stuff, revised edition…

source: Lee LeBlanc

The story recounted in “Textbook stuff…“– “United Breaks Guitars,” now sitting at over 2 million views, up from 250,000 two days ago– continues to unfold.  United has responded, offering belatedly to pay for the damages.  Dave Carroll, leader of Sons of Maxwell and composer of the song, has responded (see it here on Youtube), proposing that, after all this time, United should just give the money to charity.

United has also suggested (for instance, to the Chicago Tribune, in an interview featured in this coverage of the incident) that the carrier could use the video internally to help change its culture– a prospect that Carroll applauds: “It could be used to improve the way passengers are treated around the world.”

But for all the hits on Youtube, has there actually been a meaningful hit to United?

Kevin May, writing at Travolution, suggests not: “…the reality is that the ‘complaint’ has probably done more to boost the profile of Canadian rockers Sons of Maxwell than it has impacted on the ticket sales of United Airlines.”

In the short-run, I suspect that’s right: Carroll and crew have certainly gotten a lift, and United ticket sales are likely holding.  But then, ticket sales these days are largely made via constraints–  corporate travel deals that result in policies restricting employees to a single carrier; dominant/sole carriers offering the only option on many routes, etc.– or as a product of cut-to-the-bone promotional pricing.  And as bad as United’s service is, the universe of choice on most routes in the U.S. offers very few real service alternatives.  I typically fly 100,000-150,000 miles domestically per year and would suggest that, with the exception of a few relatively small carriers like Virgin America, the level of service is pretty uniformly terrible and continuing to deteriorate.  So, United breaks guitars…  but where are you going to go?  (I’ve written before about this “race to the bottom” and why, I believe, it is happening.)

But does this kind of “default impunity” mean that United and the other underdelivering members of their competitive class breeze through episodes like this with no damage at all?  I think not.  There seem to me at least three ways in which being called out in this way will take its toll:

• While much/most of United’s traffic is prescribed, a good bit of it’s most profitable traffic is on more competitive international routes.  “United Breaks Guitars” has suggested to millions that, given the choice, it’s better to fly Virgin or Singapore or BA or Lufthansa…  And when these travelers do take foreign flag carriers (if their experience is anything like mine over the last several years) they will realize that there are airlines with decent service… they’re just not the big U.S. carriers.  And so more and more of these travelers will make their future decisions for travel on those more lucrative routes accordingly.

• It’s no fun working for a company that is the butt of jokes (or worse, as in the case of Northwest in Detroit for example, the target of focused customer hostility).  Employees can feel defeated, can become cynical, or both… and when they do, service tends to deteriorate further.  But more immediately painful to United, it aggravates relations with their employees.  In my experience, United’s line employees are neither stupid nor evil; they are, in their own ways, prisoners of the same broken system that victimizes travelers.  Indeed, increasingly as I travel I’ve seen defensiveness about “the way things are” give way to defeated embarrassment…  and when one’s job is an embarrassment, one tends to take it out on the company.  In the past, that’s taken the form of asking for more money, “battle pay.”  In this economy, it appears to be accruing as a general “uncooperativeness.”  In either case, it severely impacts United’s ability– the ability of any company in this kind of situation– to act effectively.

• In the longer run, United (and all of the hub-and-spokes legacy carriers) are vulnerable to a different approach to delivering air travel (see here and here). That threat will become a reality when both the emergent alternatives and consumer demand for them reach critical mass.  Episodes like “United Breaks Guitars” move consumers toward that critical mass, toward affirmative willingness to make the switch.  (And, as the experience of ATT through “deregulation” and break-up suggests, it also contributes to a political climate in which incumbents are vulnerable…)  When a shift like this happens it can feel surprisingly fast and complete– and thus likely feel to the legacy carriers in the U.S like an implosion. But in fact, it’s been steadily building, via incidents like this.  In the end, it is the festering of disappointed demand, finally enabled by new solutions, that creates “catastrophe” for incumbents like United–c.f., e.g., the “inevitable surpirse” of newspapers in the U.S.

So in the short run, “United Breaks Guitars” may just be another flash across the web, with little or no immediate effect on United’s bottom line.  But more fundamentally it– and the systemic issues the episode illustrates– could prove deadly.

Textbook stuff…

…  in the next generation of marketing textbooks, anyway:

Sons of Maxwell on being “serviced” by United Airlines. (Read the details of the episode in the sidebar on the right, or here.)

Up for under two days as I write this, and  already seen by well over 250,000 (growing rapidly), with a solid five-star rating…

Which is more than we can say for United.

Just a(nother) a reminder to those marketers aggressively  promising service they’re not prepared to deliver that the implicit protections of the “old” broadcast communications world are gone; the web will out their failures, and fast.  So more money invested in empty messaging– however elegant, as in United’s animated spots– is worse than wasted:  it concretely confirms consumers’ suspicions of hypocrisy.

Increasingly, when it comes to advertising in all its forms, you can (still) run, but you cannot hide.

O. Henry’s version of The Law of the West…

From the ever-insightful xkcd, a cautionary tale, “Troll Slayer“:

Among those who might pause, internet marketers– who might note that the “law” in question turns out to look a lot like Gresham’s Law…

(Readers may remember  4chan.org from this post; but those unfamiliar with the trolls’ home board can read amusing things about it– e.g., how its members elevated 4chan’s founder to the top of Time‘s “Most Influential” list– here.)

A mouse that roars…

On the theme running in “I was aiming for my foot, but I seem to have shot myself in the thigh…” and “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” a guest post from Roughly Daily:

source

Long-time (pre-blog) readers will recall Brian Burton– aka Danger Mouse– and his Grey Album, a mash-up of the Beatles (White Album) and JayZ that landed Mr. Mouse in trouble with the Beatles’ distributor, EMI…  trouble that lingers.

So readers may be delighted-but-not-altogether-surprised at the release strategy for the new Danger Mouse album:  It’s  collaboration with David Lynch and Sparklehorse, featuring , among others, Julian Casablancas (The Strokes), Black Francis (The Pixies), Vic Chesnutt, The Flaming Lips, James Mercer (The Shins), Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Nina Person (The Cardigans), and Iggy Pop (Stooges, Bowie, et al.)…  pretty much a must-hear!

Rather than release this latest work in the traditional way, and face legal issues with EMI, Danger Mouse will be selling a blank CD-R along with lots of artwork.  Buyers will be responsible for finding the music themselves (indeed, it’s findable on the internet, e.g., here) and burning the CD.

One tips one’s ears to you, Mr. Mouse!

As we limber our surfing fingers and contemplate changes in retail-as-we-know-it, we might recall that it was on this date 161 years ago, in 1848, that the first real department store, Alexander Turney Stewart’s Marble Palace, at Broadway and Chambers Street in New York City, opened…

The Marble Palace
(later the home of the New York Sun; now a City office building)

You are what you tweet…

source: Videohive

Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.

- Tom Peters, Fast Company

Should we have personal brands?  Should we invest in help to build them?  Much as I hate quibbling with my old friend/partner Tom, I’m not so sure…

I’m back from a period off-line to an interesting email thread from monitortalent.com that began when Chris Meyer, the Head of the Network, asked if the folks on his list would like a “Personal Brand Assistant.”  Chris wrote:

… Clay Shirky tweeted that he’d been spammed by a company offering to respond to messages addressed to him on social networks “in your own voice,” in order to promote his profile. I spoke to Erin McDonough about this, and she pointed me to an Ad Age story about the launch of an ad agency for media companies which, among other things, will tweet in the persona of characters on its clients’ shows. The founder began tweeting as Mad Men character Peggy Olsen to promote the show.  (As soon as she did, she discovered others who had assumed the characters of other Mad Men characters–as fans, not agents–and a whole parallel Mad Men story evolving independent of the show.)

Clearly the authenticity of this medium is under attack, but its reach and importance are growing. So here is a question For The Talent Network:  if you had a Personal Brand Assistant, what would you ask him/her to do? If anything…

Lots of fascinating responses so far (see, e.g., this one).  I was intrigued that most of them are as ambivalent about, indeed ultimately negative on, the concept as I am.  There’s a part of me that always wants to be responsive to a friend’s provocative questions in a positive way…  and then there’s a part of me that finds the notion of a PBA anathema– at least insofar as my own life is concerned…

I think the primary issue for me turns on an (admittedly mildly Scholastic, but more-than-semantic) distinction between reputation (about which I care lots) and a personal brand (which I’m not sure that I even want).  Both reputations and brands live outside of us; they exist in the communities in which we live and work. But at the level of how they are created and what they are created to do, they are importantly different.

Reputations grow over time; they are the accumulated perceptions/understandings of what one does. And while we may plan our lives in order to become who we want to become, and  order our actions in an attempt to become that person, and thus to build our reputations, those reputations are necessarily earned.  A reputation’s “purpose” is to be understood (and ideally, respected).

Brands on the other hand are crafted prospectively; they are aspirational.  We do our best to grow into them, to deliver on them.   Fundamentally, brands exist to be desired; in a more or less targeted way, a brand is meant to be an attractor.

So, while reputations are vulnerable to misunderstanding, even slander, brands are much more rarified still; they are importantly co-owned with those whose attention the brand is trying to get.  Indeed,  brands are (as many of us have preached to clients) things that we may initiate, things for which we may be responsible/liable– but *not* things that we can own nor control.  We necessarily share them with the folks who engage in the brand with us…  Thus, in the end, a brand’s “co-owners,” its users/audience, should be– when a brand is successful, will be– critical in defining what the brand means, what it is.

There’s a powerful echo here of the distinction that Lionel Trilling drew between “sincerity” and “authenticity.”  In his 1970  Norton Lectures at Harvard, Trilling suggested that pre-Enlightenment moral thought valued “sincerity”– a commitment to living/acting in accordance with external, received ethical and religious principles– while more modern moral thought values “authenticity”– right action rooted in the essence of one’s own being and beliefs.

Brands fundamentally attain to “sincerity” in Trilling’s construction– the best of them work hard to live up to a set of principles that is at first invented, then increasingly received…  which makes perfect sense for a product or a service that ought to be all about satisfying its target market.  It may even make sense for some individuals, celebrities for instance, who are prepared to be what(ever) their audience wants.  But for “civilians”– for me, anyway– it’s a step (or several) too far.

I’m plenty concerned about my reputation:  anxious to act in ways that might enhance it, and careful (I hope) to protect against moves that might damage it. .. But in any/every case, I’m trying to act in ways that are “authentic”– that are true to who I am/mean to be– in the hope that these are what will contribute to the reputation that I hope to have– the reputation for being who I am.  Which is to say that, fundamentally, my understanding of “reputation” is intensely personal, both in the sense that it is rooted in who I actually am, and in the sense that it’s something that, through my actions (for better and for worse; with no co-pilots, no co-owners), I drive.

(Promotion– exposing one’s reputation to a wider audience– certainly has a role in communicating reputation.  But without belaboring the distinction here, I’d suggest that this kind of promotion is distinct from brand messaging/advertising in a way analogous to the distinction between reputation and brand.)

The irony is that brands are stronger when they are not just sincere, but also authentic.  The great branding practitioners that I know understand that brands are more powerful to the extent that the aspirational brand and the actual reputation are aligned… but then my friends have steady work because brands (and the companies that steward them) almost always stray.   In some cases this is because a sense of opportunity or of need leads the company, “the branded,” to act in ways that are untrue to the brand; in others, because the “co-owners” pull a brand in a way that the company can’t (or won’t) move.  The most benign form of drift occurs when they push their brands in aspirational ways, and then have to live up to them; the least, when companies undermine the very characteristics for which their customers– their co-owners– have come to know the brand….

Fighting that drift is among the most (if not indeed the most) important things a branded business can do.  But it’s not, it seems to me, a battle that an individual need (nor indeed, with few exceptions, should) even try to fight.

It may be (Heaven forfend) that I’m just old-fashioned; but better, at least for me, to worry about who I want to be and what I need to do to achieve that… then, in the words of a brilliant branding company, Just Do It!

The Future of Advertising (or the Lack Thereof)?…

source

As we ponder the future of journalism, and viable business models for the press in a digital age  (e.g., here), or more generally the future of the media landscape (as here), we inevitably wonder about the role that advertising can and will play.

An old friend and collaborator, Wharton professor Eric Clemons, has guest posted on TechCrunch “Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet.”  Eric’s piece is (characteristically of his work) thoroughly grounded and tightly argued, at the same time that it is powerfully provocative.  He excepts paid “key word” search (of the sort that has fueled Google) to concentrate on advertising as it might– or, as he suggests, might not– work for content sites…

The problem is not the medium, the problem is the [advertising] message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.

…

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.  We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.

Agree or disagree, it’s an important argument to understand and to engage… which one can– and, your correspondent would respectfully suggest, should– do here.

Conspicuous presumption…

A guest post from (Roughly) Daily…

What happens when the D-I-Y movement collides with a brand marketer’s determination to bedeck its products with its logo?  The niftiest of inversions:

The “Prada Ironic Advertisement Wallet” above was made (and sold on Etsy) by 17 year old “Lia.”  As she explained:

This wallet is ironic. Why, you ask? Well, the Prada image is an advertisement plucked from the very pages of VOGUE magazine — yes, literally. Typically, an item with a brand as prestigious as Prada would be extremely expensive. Advertising feeds into this prestige and brand-name popularity. By taking the advertisement and — rather than buying a Prada product — turning it instead into a product in and of itself with that brand-name on it, we have successfully usurped the entire silly Brand system. We have taken their advertising and turned it into a handcrafted, DIY duct-tape and paper wallet.

The irony is that the product is a wallet.

The owner of this wallet will hold his/her money in this fabulous, handmade wallet with the Prada brand name on it — but although he/she touts this brand proudly, no money actually went to it.Instead it goes directly to the lovely maker of the wallet, me.

Stylin’!

(via Influx Insights)

As we empathize with marketers’ headaches, we might console them that it was on this date in 1899 that German drug company Friedrich Bayer & Co. patented their formulation of acetylsalicylic acid and registered the name under which they would go one to sell it: “aspirin.”

Aspirin’s active ingredient, salicin (in it’s native form, found in willow bark and the spirea plant), had been used since the time of Hippocrates to relive fever and pain.  But Bayer’s formulation– more stable and easier on the stomach and the taste buds– quickly became the best-selling drug in the world.

(Surviving official records suggest that the formulation was the work of Bayer chemist Felix Hoffman.  But other evidence shows that Hoffman’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were covered up during the Nazi era. )

source