The Strategy Review

The Intelligent Brand - Part Three

(The Intelligent Brand - Part Two is here.)

A revolution in intelligence

[…] an evolutionary turning point: one from a straight back-and-forth communications network to a new form of media … The Net began to resemble a complex and highly adaptive life form, with a personality composed of many different interests and motivations. With each new advance in technology and each new use that was found for the Net, the whole of the thing adapted and grew.

Andrew Zimmerman, Coopers and Lybrand Telecom and Media, 1997

A great leap forward

We’ve framed our changing environment in terms of three distinct but overlapping eras: Industrialism (up to say 1960), Late Industrialism (up to say 2000), and Informationalism (from say 2000 to today). We’re especially concerned with the period since data processing entered the picture, and after that, what changed since the emergence of the Web.

While we can usefully continue to use the term Informationalism to contrast with Industrialism, as our narrative evolves it becomes increasingly problematic to think in terms of today’s environment as The Information Age. Given that the new dynamics we need to grasp revolve far more around the dynamics of the Web, and given also that the central role of information in business predates the Web by, we could argue, well over a century, I believe it’s more accurate to think in terms of The Network Age.

An ideal commentator to help us here is the academic who has, over several decades, significantly advanced our understanding of how networks impact culture and commerce, Manuel Castells. He writes, with co-author Pekka Himanen in their 2014 book, Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age, of:

... a new form of socio-techno-economic organization that became fully constituted on a global scale in the early twenty-first century. Informationalism did not replace capitalism. In fact, it powered a new form of capitalism now prevalent everywhere […] What characterizes informationalism is the widespread use of microelectronics-based digital information and communication technologies that allow the diffusion of networking forms of organization in all domains of economic and social life. It also powers information processing and digital communication, enabling the expansion of the knowledge base of the economy and of the information society. […] Networking is an essential component of informationalism. This is why the dominant social structure of our time can be characterised as a global networking society.

The role and value of information have steadily changed over centuries, accelerating sharply since the 1960s, right up to the emergence of our current Web. But we haven’t - and this in many ways is the heart of this work - yet appreciated just how very profoundly this paradigm has disrupted the rules of value creation. 

There’s been, only over the past ten to fifteen years, a discontinuous great leap forward whose radical impacts and implications - again, perhaps because most of us have lived and worked in the midst of this revolution - remain under-articulated and misunderstood. It’s no longer more and better, of more or less the same thing. It’s a new thing altogether.

Evolving intelligence

Core to coming to understand this is the way information has been captured and applied to evolve and expand intelligence for business. We can usefully think in terms of five phases, all but the last of which are more or less familiar and self-explanatory.

1. Product intelligence: how to design and build a mousetrap, then a better one;
2. Business intelligence: the accounting and logistics required when the market, and firms within it, professionalise;
3. Market intelligence: competitive insights and statistics that inform innovation, marketing and sales;
4. Customer intelligence: which came into vogue towards the tail of Late Industrialism giving rise, among other changes, to direct or database marketing;
5. Network intelligence: rising floods of information entirely redefine the new marketplace, defying Late Industrial efforts to make sense out of them.

One startling realisation here is that information, in its commercial role of enabling increasing types and amounts of intelligence for the market and the firms within it, has quietly shifted from primarily being about the business processes that create the value (i.e. in the Late Industrial model) to become about the value itself. 

We could say, more pithily, that information has moved from being previously about resources to now becoming a resource in its own right. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the significant implications of this change.

Think about the type of data processing work done by the world’s largest corporations using IBM’s revolutionary System/360. Now think of the sprawling server farms of today’s tech giants. The paradigm shifts from information being about the workings of the business, to just being the business.

In the Web age, information also, for the first time, becomes an empowering and enabling resource for customers, the implications of which we’ll explore further below. Every one of today’s smartphones exceeds the power and range of the room-sized monoliths of 50 years ago.

We had expected to be able to carry over the same concepts that emerged in the customer intelligence period - when information remained scarce, and thus both easy to manage and make sense of for competitive advantage - across to The Network Era. We can now begin to replace these misconceptions, with a model of thinking that reflects the extreme discontinuity of the Web, while combining the appealing merits of simplicity and sophistication.

Network Intelligence

A simple definition

Intelligence has many definitions, perhaps too many. For our current purposes, we’re concerned with what we can call the ‘functional intelligence’ that gets results.

While a person we might refer to as intelligent could be a scatty academic, a ruthless fraudster, or a precocious child, the aspect of intelligence that arguably matters most - not just in business but in the today’s world - is quite simply an ability to make sense of things to generate intentional outcomes that are beneficial. In this sense, intelligence and power are not far from each other.

When we speak of actionable information, we’re referring to an increase in our available intelligence: in fact, the actionability more or less entirely determines the value of information. 

We’re thinking of intelligence, therefore, in terms of the ability to find, articulate, and also to act upon, meaning.

When thus equipped, we are able - as a single person or a large corporation - to assess, to decide and to do what’s best. To further our own interests, and in some instances, those of others.

A road to clarity

Tracing the history of intelligence in business, its journey from the happy simplicity of the quest for a better mousetrap, through to the unimaginable complexity and velocity of today’s Web, offers an urgently needed sense-making lens through which we can, perhaps for the first time, fully grasp the nature and scale of the enormous shift we are experiencing. 

We’ve been hung up on the data, and looked to the data scientists to make sense of it for us. Understandable, but impractical. Our current hopes and expectations of Artificial Intelligence are underpinned - for now at least - by the same magical thinking.

We’ve turned to network theory and network scientists to help us understand the dynamics of the Web. They can tell us how and why networks grow, and how they’re made up of nodes and links. But they remain - as do we - in the foothills of articulating what makes the Web work.

The insight that matters - the one that gives leadership the picture on the box of the puzzle we’ve all been puzzling over - is how business intelligence itself has been transformed by the collision of billions of human lives and minds with a global network that now carries some 95% of all the world’s information. And in turn, how this impacts the daily experience and expectations of our customers. 

From there, the implications for how we structure business and its brands - to meet the newly empowered customer where they now live - begin to emerge. This informs the philosophy for our own transformation. We can also begin to frame what shapes and determines customer value from here on. Which helps us make more sure-footed, faster decisions about innovation.

A power shift

As we’d expect, business intelligence, in four of the five phases outlined above, has been applied exclusively to optimise outcomes for the corporation. And this happens - naturally, if not ideally - at the expense of what may be best for customers. But the rise of networked intelligence has already significantly tipped the balance the other way. 

Customers are now - in ways we may already fail to appreciate due to their ubiquity - well-equipped to work out and find what’s best for them. The new network intelligence that so informs and empowers has introduced reach, range and transparency that now directly affect all corporate concerns - from pricing right up to purpose.

The turning point we have reached is one where business can no longer just apply intelligence to get what it wants at the expense of what others - “people and planet” - want.

This line of thought points us, usefully, towards what will, as we’ll see below, prove to be the most desirable and mutually beneficial value-creating market behaviour of The Network Age - active collaboration and co-creation. Surely the most valuable of all commercial intelligence enables a brand to optimally serve a customer at the time and place - in the context - of current need.

Now that we are beginning to understand what we had failed to previously grasp, we are infinitely better equipped to step across the aisle and look at modern value through the skeptical eye of the modern customer.

How can the firm and the customer best apply network intelligence to balance and achieve what’s best for them both? As we’ll now see, there are already widespread behaviours that clearly point the way forward.

The Intelligent Brand - Part Two

(The Intelligent Brand - Part One is here.)

Think different

System/360 represents a sharp departure from concepts of the past in designing and building computers. [...] This is the beginning of a new generation - not only of computers - but of their application in business, science and government.

Thomas J. Watson, IBM, April 7th 1964

McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new technologies of the electronic age, notably television, radio, the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. [...] They radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesn't matter what the content of a medium like TV is. 

Tom Wolfe, New York Herald Tribune, 1965

Signals from the 60s

In 1964, two very different events occurred that set the scene for the profound cultural and commercial changes with which we are still in the early stages of coming to terms. 

The rise of data

IBM - which had led business computing since the mid-50s - had made an enormous bet, an investment at the time of $5 billion, to develop the System/360, a revolutionary family of digital computing power, software and peripherals.

The 360 featured six mutually compatible computers and 40 peripherals that could work together. It also actively encouraged and rewarded external developers, anticipating how, in 1981, the company’s PC would kick start - while famously giving Microsoft the opportunity to supply and control DOS, the PC’s own operating system - the software industry that we now take for granted.

Rather than waiting weeks or months for information about the performance of the business, firms were, from here on, able to access increasingly sophisticated and actionable reports in closer and closer to real time, while the established silos between divisions and departments were simultaneously eroded.

The role and value of information about the business - and, over time, some information about the customer - were transformed by data processing and corporate networks during this period. So it was - and indeed still is - so easy to imagine as we plough through The Information Age, that if data is good, more data is even better, and that the global connection of the Internet would simply signal an acceleration into the same vision of the future.

The way information itself behaves and enables value for both business and customer has been fundamentally, yet very subtly, changed by the rapidly shifting context in which it lives and moves. As we’ll come to see, this subsequent networking of the world and all its data has come to demand of firms, not more of the same, but something completely different. 

Network effects

That same year, 1964, Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian former English professor, published Understanding Media, a far-reaching, often opaque, account of the impact of the new media technologies on human beings, their experience and behaviours in modernity. 

McLuhan was lionised by the corporate world, whose leadership, even over half a century ago, were already conscious that the world was running away with them. They were both excited and frightened by his lessons; just as much perhaps by his iconoclastic stance and calm refusal to be disturbed by their struggle to accept the implications of his manifesto.

While McLuhan’s thinking resonates through to today - not least his concept of the “global village” that the connected world creates - his central, most important and still bewildering contention was that “the medium is the message”. Though at the time his primary reference technologies were the television and telephone (with computing something of an aside) his meaning rewards close scrutiny today. 

To restate this argument for our current circumstances, it’s not the content of the Web that matters so much, as the impacts - some profound and obvious, others more subtle - of our very connectedness. This is an environment that carries not merely the comforting familiarity of scores of petabytes of data - it contains and reframes everything it touches. Most of all, it changes us in ways with which we have only just begun to come to terms.

In the light of our current obsession with information - the content of our networks that tends to preoccupy business - McLuhan refocuses us firmly back to the radically changing context for human life and business. We must beware of over-focusing on what flows across these new networks, and pay closer attention to what happens to our world, our lives, our work and our corporations, as a result of our being so completely networked.

To imagine that business can transformatively benefit from digitised information, while ignoring such profound shifts in the shape of our environment, is an entirely understandable yet serious error of thought, with significant inhibiting implications for leadership insight and decisioning.

We are led to re-examine the seismic disruptions that the emergence, in the 1990s, of the World Wide Web introduced. It’s crucial to our project that we pause to understand what was - and what was not - happening here, and when.

Three ages of information

When we cannot imagine what the future may bring, we cannot create markets today for unspecified goods and services in the future. Sometimes investments are made for which there is no future demand and sometimes businesses fail to invest even when there is a demand for their output in future.

Mervyn King, LSE, The End of Alchemy, 2017

Two ages of industrialism

We tend to think and speak of The Information Age as having conclusively arrived with the ubiquity of the World Wide Web. But as it turns out, this future is nothing if not very unevenly distributed. It’s useful here to think in terms of three distinct but overlapping eras. 

The Industrial Age was more or less entirely mechanical, and the overall paradigm changed little when electricity became commonly used from the late 19th century. It’s worth noting that the relationship between corporate management and business information also dates right back to that time.

Powerful innovations in that field - most famously perhaps, the punched-card tabulating machine, invented by Herman Hollerith (later to be a co-founder of IBM in 1911) for the US census of 1890 - were consistently introduced up to the middle of the last century.

In the years following World War Two, electronic computing rapidly entered the market, pioneered in its earliest days by the established powerful US office appliance firms. IBM launched its first electronic computer, the 701, in 1953, and took over the commercial computing market only a year later with the 650. In 1957 the Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, was founded, and just two years later, IBM’s first transistorised computer, the 7000 series mainframe, was introduced.

The period from roughly 1960 to roughly 2000 spans what we can call the Late Industrial age. This was the era of data processing, where the industrial model of capitalism was extended and enhanced by computing, along with a degree of network penetration. The middle of this period was marked - and its progress dramatically accelerated - by the introduction, again by IBM, of the PC in 1981, and, in parallel, the emergence, further to the invention of ethernet, of the corporate network.

However, the core nature of value creation remained essentially the same. Systemic innovation took the form of incremental improvements. They were rarely, if ever, what we would today call truly “disruptive”.

Lagging the Web

It’s both startling to realise and hard to accept that we are today still in the surprisingly slow process of crossing the long bridge between this Late Industrial period and, heralded by the commercial arrival of the World Wide Web from 1995, the “real” Information Age.

With the arrival and ubiquity of global digital networks, the nature of life, work and trade are being reconfigured. Crucially, the nature, behaviour, role and value of information itself - not merely its massive and always-increasing volume and velocity - are profoundly altered in the Web environment. 

Most of the world’s largest corporations remain rooted, for the most part, at the tail end of the Late Industrial Age. Their digital transformation programmes have, certainly, added plenty of information- and network-enabled efficiencies to their still-industrially-based business models, but have not moved them to the other side of the bridge. 

How can we get our minds around what’s changed, and what matters about those changes?

The difference between these two worlds is hard to easily capture. However, at this early stage, we might ask ourselves why Amazon’s recommendations - with all the information the company holds on us, and despite its immense investments in data and data science - remain so stubbornly dumb, while Uber’s driver map - showing us the location and ETA of our ride - should feel so very smart? 

Is Amazon the mighty digital pioneer, in fact, an Industrial leviathan? And why are Uber’s apparently simple service add-ons still so riveting?

New context, new content

Not another channel

It may seem unnecessary to go back and reexamine the nature of the World Wide Web. In fact, we’re already so accustomed to living, working and trading online, that we miss what’s actually happening, like goldfish asked to explain the water and the bowl we live in.

The Web is a radically different kind of network. To think of it - as we started to in the late 90s - as ‘another channel’, created a mistaken mental model that still haunts us today.

Industrial era networks were linear and content-dependent. Simply put, when you launched a new product, you shipped it to retailers over road and rail channels, and you promoted it over media channels - primarily print and broadcast. 

These channels only went one way at a time: they were the opposite of interactive. They were also passive, we could say “intrinsically empty”, in the sense that, in the absence of trains, planes, automobiles, newspaper articles and advertisements, TV programmes and commercials … there was nothing happening.

However much traffic we sent hurtling down them, the overall dynamic was the same. They each carried a single type of traffic. And the content entirely defined them. Think of a road with no cars, a newspaper with no copy, a TV with nothing on.

To see today’s and tomorrow’s Web as merely a continuous increase - more channels for carrying more stuff - is a profound and critical category error.

Can we usefully think of, for example, YouTube - where so much of the world’s attention and media spend now reside - as just “a lot more channels and a lot more content”, much of which is user-generated? Of course we can’t. And that’s before we recall that it also happens to be the world’s second most-used search engine.

The Web is called “a web” for good reason. Online, when something happens anywhere, it happens everywhere. Just like a spider’s web, every single event creates a signal, a change, a shift. No matter how small or large, it’s this “active and alive” quality of the Web that differentiates it. 

And while the channels of the industrial era were populated and propelled almost entirely by commercial activity, the Web - whether we’re at any point in time providing goods and services and promoting them or not - contains the lives, behaviours and communications of billions of human beings. It’s busy out there! It never stops and it never stops growing. And this vibrant change is happening more, and faster, every day.

This is an entirely discontinuous shift into a radically new market model. We are tasked with understanding, creating and communicating correspondingly new forms of value, for customers whose shifting experiences and expectations are every bit as fluid and fast-moving as the Web itself. Without a shift in vision, we are trapped: transforming and innovating for a Late Industrial marketplace and customer, both of which are slipping rapidly into the past.

Not the new oil

McLuhan urged his bewildered audience of 1960s business leaders to appreciate that the impact of the changing content of media cannot be confused with the changing context. 

Now we understand just how very different this new context of the Web is from the industrial channels that preceded it, we can turn our attention to its content: the surging tide of infinite varieties of information that it carries.

Just as we had framed the impact of broadcast television as being based purely on its programming and the commercials that funded it, we have tended, as we balance uncomfortably between Late Industrialism and the true Information Age, to assume that for business, the Web is all about the data.

While the television programmes, advertisements, trucks and trailers of Industrialism certainly all carry their own intrinsic kinds of value, the popular metaphor of data as “the new oil” is a second category error, one that compromises our thinking and our priorities as we face up to the complexities of digital transformation and innovation.

In a sense, we know we’re in trouble as soon as we recall the Industrial origins of this idea. And yet, while oil - assuming of course that we wish, for now, to use hydrocarbons as a source for energy - arrives with intrinsic value built in, the same is categorically not true of data. 

When we compare data to oil, we’re tacitly promoting and reinforcing the idea that it behaves like the traditional natural and human resources that Industrial corporations captured and acted on to create products. We are also implicitly sustaining the notion that data must surely have some kind of intrinsic scarcity value: that we should therefore be mining it, hoarding it. And that it might somehow run out at some point.

The problematic conclusion, from there, is that the process of creating fresh customer value in this new Web environment derives primarily - as of course it does in Industrialism - from exclusive ownership and exploitation of this precious resource. 

We’ll come to understand that the resulting belief that, somehow, the process of innovative value creation starts with the information and proceeds from there outwards into the market - as it would if we were mining, refining and exploiting natural resources - no longer applies when we move into the Web model.

(The Intelligent Brand - Part Three is here.)

The Intelligent Brand - Part One

Why this? Why now?

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A disturbing fracture

More than a few leading marketers of my acquaintance, from both the client and agency sides, have, in very recent conversations, expressed their increasing hesitation to use the term “brand” in anything except the most private conversations. 

Marketing appears to be beginning to believe, or at least to worry, that brands and branding may no longer be important. On both sides, remarkably, one can sense an underlying but genuine fear that “it’s more than my job’s worth” to go there.

Most consumers however - if we framed the question appropriately, if they had the time to think about it, and if they frequented the same concepts and vocabularies as marketers, which they notoriously hardly ever do - would surely beg to differ. 

Were you and I to pull our marketing hats off, and step across the aisle and into the marketplace, we would immediately and without hesitation feel the same way. 

So, what’s happened. And what’s happening?

This paper concerns itself with beginning to resolve what is clearly the most urgent of marketing conundrums, more urgent even than the ubiquitous obsession with digital transformation. 

What do brands today mean to consumers? And what, therefore, should they mean to marketers?

“Meaning” is central here, because, as we’ll be exploring further below, a key job (my own belief is that it’s in fact THE key job) of brands has always been to create meaning. But the context for and the rules of this meaning creation have evidently changed. Changed profoundly, and in ways we don’t sufficiently understand. And it’s almost certainly here that the disconnect is rooted.

Defining the problem

A central tenet of this argument is a direct and deliberate challenge to the illusory and destructive idea that brands have somehow diminished in their relevance and their contribution to building customer value and to driving the growth of the businesses that invest in them.

To the contrary - and with a nod to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s deliciously terse quote above - brands are very much alive and well, albeit feeling understandably uncertain, unloved and undernourished. They sorely lack, we could say, the confidence, the clarity and the rigour of a contemporary branding philosophy and discipline that are fit for purpose.

Motivated by our own uncertainty and insecurity as twenty-first century marketers, we have attempted to fit a mean and pinched picture frame across the explosive, expansive and deeply complex contexts in which brands and customers continue to connect, to make meaning, and to co-create value.

This hidden picture is huge, it’s growing and it’s full of opportunity and, yes, uncertainty and risk. The problem does not lie with brands, their underperformance or ongoing relevance to business growth. We need - with both urgency and boldness - to discover and develop a radically new, far more sophisticated frame.

A little history

“I wonder whether all top managements are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully enough that is from the success of brands rather than as products that the profits will come? Do they fully understand the nature of brands? Do they set company objectives in terms of brand positioning or simply in financial terms?”

    Stephen King, What Is A Brand?

The lessons unlearned

It’s both astonishing and concerning that since Stephen King of JWT, an acknowledged godfather of brand planning, wrote the seminal paper quoted above half a century ago in 1971, hardly any useful or applicable guidelines have been published to help marketers build, manage and grow brands.

One honourable exception is perhaps How Brands Grow (Oxford 2010) by the perceptive and astringent New Zealand academic Byron Sharp. This work admirably, and without sentimentality, slashes many of the Gordian knots marketers face. It focuses however - as can also be said, and indeed immediately forgiven, given the era of its publication, for Stephen King’s argument - almost entirely on how marketers need to understand the role and value of advertising. 

One would have hoped, given that by the time of publication the Web and its digital implications for marketing and brands had already been a major preoccupation for well over a decade, to see addressed the critical underlying challenge of how to think about brands and branding. In fact, How Brands Grow - some of its broader insights notwithstanding - is written more or less exclusively from the perspective of the pre-digital FMCG marketer. For this reason, it ignores the important concerns of - and lessons from - central modern marketing issues such service and B2B marketing.

Consider, in sharp contrast, the critical (and criminally underread) work of US academics Robert Lusch and Stephen Vargo, Service Dominant Logic. While only indirectly addressing brands and branding, they nevertheless admirably challenge and reframe our understanding of the cultural and commercial contexts within which brands operate. 

This exemplifies an observation that we will return to, that the most urgently needed and persuasive insights on twenty-first century brand and branding rarely originate from within mainstream marketing’s commonly ponderous and repetitive deliberations about itself.

Brands, we must remember, live in the increasingly turbulent overlap between culture and commerce. This is where, and how, they perform their role of connecting a business with its audience. 

So to understand what, and even more importantly how, we need to think about the future construction, management and growth of the modern brand, we need to turn outwards, to front up to and to understand the profoundly changed, and now ever-changing and accelerating, cultural and commercial dynamics that define the environment.

The disruptions of digital

From talking to doing

It’s been a quarter of a century since the World Wide Web turned everything upside down. Countless brands - large and small - have come and gone. Trends such as disruption, disintermediation - alongside another d-word that we just can’t seem to shake - digital - have become normality.

The digital revolution has certainly stamped its mark on business and marketing in a number of irresistible ways. Perhaps most radical is the still-ongoing shift from product value to service value. A great service beats a great product more or less every time. 

This links closely with a now well-established trend away from ownership and towards access. The “Spotify effect” is spilling out everywhere, into sectors as diverse as automobiles and nutrition.

We begin to see a corresponding and fundamental shift in the nature and role of brands, from being more or less passive signposts for value, to becoming active participants in the very creation and delivery of value itself.

We could think of this change as moving from simply “standing for” something to “standing up” for it. Or more prosaically, from just “saying something” to “doing something”. Either way, we need to move our thinking on from the simplistic paradigm of brand as messenger, to consider the impact and implications of “brand behaviour”.

Today’s brands have agency. Broadly, we respond today very positively to those that behave intelligently, and dismiss the ones we experience as unintelligent. The attributes and parameters of this brand intelligence are the endgame for this paper.

Ambassador and concierge

While the promises of precision and prediction offered by our increasing obsession with data and analytics are as enticing as ever, as we’ll see, these make up only one contributing piece of the complex puzzle of the intelligent brand.

Two very different examples point up an interesting paradox in brand intelligence. The “Pet Rock” - yes, a stone in a box - was a must-have accessory for millions of children (and I’m sure more than a few adults …) some fifty years ago. Much mockery and bewilderment all round, of course. And yet, actually … how unintelligent was this brand?

Microsoft - certainly during the reigns of both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, less so in recent years - was a goliath of the software business, packed with many of the most intelligent professionals in the world. But during these explosive years, how intelligent was this brand?

One principle that hasn’t changed - while it could certainly do with dusting down and reconsideration - is that brands exist to serve two primary masters. At the most simple level, they create value for the firms that invest in them, by creating value for customers. 

A useful metaphor defines and distinguishes these two distinct roles. The modern brand must be a world-class ambassador for the firm, consistently, credibly and confidently representing its interests in a marketplace where linear change has been supplanted by what we might call “chronic turbulence”. And it must recognise and respond to the ever-shifting circumstances and needs of the modern customer, with the same timely, almost magical understanding and service that we experience from a favourite concierge.

The value and the digital

The changed and changing nature of customer value itself now clearly demands our close attention. Obscured behind the woefully inadequate frame we have forced over brand marketing is the rich and complex context - at the overlap between culture and commerce - in which brands and customers perform their dizzying dance.

But before we can grasp the value, we must come to understand the digital. 

As it turns out, our interpretation of the profound shifts introduced only a couple of decades ago by the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the Web, conceals many of the misconceptions that have led to our faulty framing of modern brands and branding, along with the role and value of marketing itself.

(The Intelligent Brand - Part Two is here.)

Introducing "The Liquid Enterprise"

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my latest book, The Liquid Enterprise, How The Network is transforming value, what it means for business, and what leadership needs to do about it by Infinite Ideas, Oxford, on the 29th February.

Here is a synopsis and some kind endorsements, and you'll also find a taster for download.

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We know everything. And it tells us nothing.

As the world’s most venerable corporations scramble to keep up with an ever-faster, ever more chaotic market, a profound paradox is emerging at the heart of business strategy. Information – that touchstone of understanding, decision and action – has begun to attack confidence, competitive advantage and growth.

The speed, precision and potential for innovation that the digital revolution has conferred on business is undeniable. And yet we have never felt more distant from the consumer, never felt less sure of what to do next, never felt less confident about the dynamics of the context in which we live and work.

Beneath this brutal conundrum lie disturbing truths about culture, technology and value. Where leadership has relied upon tangible, manageable evidence to guide the enterprise through change to sustainable growth, the chronic turbulence that defines every major market sector demands that we now look to seize advantage from uncertainty itself.

The liquid enterprise throws down the gauntlet to the leaders of tomorrow. It provides a radical rethink of how the new Network Dynamics drive markets, the implications for enterprise and brand, and how we must overturn the principles of traditional business strategy in order to survive and thrive in the unforgiving, chaotic environment that is the market.

Endorsements

The Liquid Enterprise is the first work to take an unflinching look at the unenviable job of transformation leadership, through the eyes of the leader. Taking us far beyond the usual digital platitudes, Michael Bayler once again challenges his readers to discard everything they know, in exchange for an entirely fresh view of strategy that, finally, is fit for today’s and tomorrow’s purpose. - Richard Mosley, Global Vice President of Strategy, Universum, author of Employer Brand Management

Everyone’s talking about change and disruption, but no one seems to have the instructions. Until now. The Liquid Enterpriseexplains exactly what we’ve all been worrying about, why that is, and how to rethink business strategy for a future that demands we constantly transform – or die. - Brian Wong, Founder and CEO, Kiip

The Liquid Enterprise squares up to a Gordian Knot that is the single most important problem facing big businesses today – how to convert the chronic uncertainty that undermines our confidence in the future into our most powerful strategic weapon. Michael Bayler slices through that knot with simplicity, brevity and wit. - Tony Ageh, OBE, BBC Controller

We need a completely new set of rules to navigate such a turbulent world. This easily digested book shows the way. Read, ponder and decide for yourself just how much of our classical management theory is still relevant. - Dr William Webb, CEO Weightless SIG, President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014–2015

Download Liquid Enterprise taster

"No country for old men?"

There has been a rash of heated discussion in my Linked In feed this week debating whether 50+ thinkers and executives have the right or indeed the ability to write and speak about the current business and technology environment with authority.

Is an old thought leader still a thought leader, or should he or she stand back and let the younger folks hold the stage?

On the negative side - and this is where the weight of argument has seemed to lie, certainly in terms of strength of opinion and number of comments - the sentiment is that age does not in itself confer wisdom, and more specifically that the perspective of commentators who may not entirely grasp the nature and impact of, for example, disruptive technologies on the current and future landscape is suspect.

There isn't much to say on the positive side really, except to point out that many of our wisest, most sophisticated and, I should add, witty and humane thinkers are well into middle age.

There is a real issue here, and reasons for concern. But the problem is not per se one of age, and to frame it in the dangerous language of ageism does nothing but damage to the cause of quality thinking and its availability.

Looking beyond the well-understood challenges facing professional men and women as they slip past whatever we might think of as their "prime", and also sidestepping the historic struggle between age and youth for primacy, the problem that is being discussed is not in fact about age at all.

It's to some extent about structure, in that the way societies and organisations have been set up has tended, depending on the usual variables, to favour beauty over age, or energy over insight and experience. 

The stranglehold that the old farts have held over "the way things are" in institutional environments is a source of justified frustration to anyone with a mind and a conscience, of course.

Equally, the youthism that has come to dominate so many of the more image-based sectors - music, television and of course media and advertising are all too familiar examples - while depriving many excellent minds and souls of gainful employment, has also led to a loss of depth, rigour and other important qualities that come only with passing years.

But this conundrum is, above all, about attitude. For a person of a certain age and profile to continue to insist, for example, that nothing's really changed as a result of the digital revolution and that the same old rules apply is deeply irritating, not least to those who dedicate their lives to clarifying and communicating the nature and meaning of such changes. This, by anyone's standards, is good old bullshit and should loudly be hailed as such.

However, there is - and I number many of these types amongst my closest friends and most valued colleagues - nothing more refreshing and valuable to any cause than an experienced mind that is open, curious, and emotionally robust enough to live in a state of "constant hypothesis".

Ready, in other words, to consider, accommodate and advocate the best of the new, while retaining a critical, even skeptical lens that ensures that we are not simply intellectual mutton dressed as lamb.

Not to say that these precious individuals are easy to find. Nor to say that any old fool - and by the way there are many more young ones - who cares to claim the increasingly vague title of Thought Leader should have it for the taking.

The thing about the activity of thought leadership - and it should be considered a practice, rather than as some sort of badge of honour - is that it demands a lot of thinking, and a lot of leading.

Old or young makes no difference at all, in the end. Humility without hubris wins the day.

The 14 Golden Rules of B2B Content

Talk to the hand

If we fed our children the way we use content in B2B marketing, we'd all be getting a call from the school right about now.

Concerns about under-nourishment, attention span, disruption in and out of class, and a general listlessness would be discussed.

The single, simple role of content (we'll get rid of this awful word soon, I hope) in the marketing and sales of B2B services is to nourish our clients, to enable them to serve their own end customers better, and, from there, to nourish our own businesses.

But what we see - with a few noble exceptions - is flabby, repetitive, self-serving waffle, thrown over the fence to our marketplaces in the vague hope that something nice might happen.

I've been aware of the imperative of superlative client communications for some decades. My uncle, Harry Bayler, founded of one of the few successful and long-standing B2B PR agencies in the 1960's. What he told me when I was a boy has never left me.

"When the editor of even the tiniest trade paper starts his day, he's looking at a pile of press releases in envelopes piled on his desk. As he opens them one by one, his hand is heading for the bin. Your job is to make sure that the hand stops, comes back to his desk, and that he reads the first couple of lines of your release. This means a great, punchy headline, an introduction that tells him everything he needs to know about what you're talking about, and copy with no fat in it at all."

This is not easy to do.

But these are the founding principles that enable us - whatever content we may be creating, for whatever purpose - to stand a chance of making an impact. A lot's changed. But just as Bayler Press Services performed the unique and valuable function of making business and brands that were, intrinsically, inwardly-focused and rather dull, interesting and accessible, so today we have exactly the same challenges, except in a far more crowded, busy and often cynical context.

Here, then, are the 14 Golden Rules of B2B Content.

7 principles

It's not content ...

It's fresh thinking that has to change the way our clients think about their businesses, and of course, about ours. We're stuck with that damn c-word, but we can't let that fool us into just shipping it by the yard.

Impact, not activity

No one cares. We're not doing any senior client decision maker or influencer a favour by sending them more content. Unless, of course, what they receive is punchy, fresh and well-written and beautifully produced. Then, we're in with a shot.

We are actually quite boring

So simply sharing with clients "what's happening with our business" is no less than toxic. "What we did at school today" is uninteresting and embarrassing. Our job is to make ourselves interesting in the minds of our clients.

The trap of Relevance

The current obsession across a lot of marketing communications. But a fundamental error. If all we do is reflect back to clients their own worlds - just like an Amazon recommendation list (sometimes handy, more often useless) - we're missing the point. We must make the "apparently irrelevant" interesting and compelling.

Narrative uber alles

We change the way people think through storytelling. Not the multi-channel nonsense that seems to obsess most of the world's agencies at the moment - please get over it - but to offer our clients "information" without narrative structure is to make them work hard for something they didn't much want in the first place. Understand this ... no one wants content. No one.

Clients don't know what they need

No more so than in the areas of martech and adtech, where transformation is happening faster than we can keep track of. A pitch for yet another out of context product or service merely further muddies a pond that already looks deeply unappealing. We must educate, inform and inspire. This alone is a valuable service that will make friends in high places.

It's a service that sells

We tend to think of producing our B2B content as a chore that someone has to sort out, if we really have to - a kind of punishment for both author and then reader. This mindset is fatal. Every piece of thinking that we create and distribute - through whatever channel - is an important marketing event. If it's not, don't even bother.

7 practices

Quality Uber Alles

It's got to be great. Not good enough, or just about OK. Great. This means superb copy, ruthless editing, highly functional design, easy, satisfying, illuminating and rewarding to consume.

Don't talk about yourself

As above, no one cares about you. Until they do. The conversation starts with an insight, a framework, an angle ... anything that captures the attention of the client. In rugby terms, this hard initial contextual work gives us the permission to go wide, to refer back to elements of what we do that solve the problem or open up the broader opportunity we're addressing.

Context is not targeting

It's all about the context. Everyone's saying this at the moment, but not many get what it really means. Every time we address our clients' markets in a manner that helps them understand them a little better, see things they hadn't been able to see before, we're scoring big points. I call this "framing and claiming". It's essential, and if your writers can't do this, find someone that can quickly.

Likes are not enough

We need to measure the impacts of our content work using business metrics, not media ones. Impressions etc are fine for an ad campaign, but we're addressing a small, hard to please and busy audience. While we're on it, ignore Likes on Facebook and Linked In, and cast the same beady eye on RT's. Success is when clients start using your language, use your content to help them brief you for an opportunity. Anything less is worthless.

Avoid derivative brown-nosing

There's way too much repetitive toadying here ... How many times did you see someone - weeks after the event - proudly announce on Linked In that Google has become Alphabet. Not only is this type of blurt publishing naive, but it commits the deadly sin of wasting a client's attention on something they already knew. Just Say No.

Get your formats right

White papers are all good in the right place. But they're a hard read, and need to be superbly put together in order to get read to the last page. We need to ensure that our strong, fresh core idea is expressed as widely as possible across all media types. This means, alongside the usual .com website and social stuff, intelligently adapting the work for events, sales decks, press releases (to a wide variety of outlets - this is your PR agency's job) and speeches.

Integrate everything always

This work - this cost to the business - only lands when it impacts our growth. So while a content calendar is all good, a much closer, more real time alignment with your commercial agenda is key. Sales people love this stuff, when it's done right and helps them refresh their contacts with thinking that educates and inspires.

Signing off

Let me leave you with one last thought.

Not many professionals - writers, editors and indeed public speakers - are that good at this stuff. The ones that are, are a huge asset to the firms they work with. 

It takes decades to get good - sure-footed, passionate, energetic and able to produce fresh, punchy, empowering narrative - at this. We need to make sure that we put enough value on this important work and its crucial commercial impacts and outcomes, to budget intelligently, in proportion to the value that can be unlocked, and to give the work the support and focus it needs.

In other words, make sure you feed your children right.

 

Will data kill the consumer brand?

Barbarians in the kitchen

It’s a surprise, and something of a concern, that consumer brands are not more publicly focused on the significant potential impacts of automated shopping and replenishment offerings such as Amazon’s Dash and Echo.

Such services surely signal a determined home invasion, only the first of no doubt many forays into the home territory of our most well-known heritage products.

Already under unrelenting pressure from powerful retailers and, more recently, empowered consumers, not to mention an economic austerity that will not lighten in the foreseeable future, how should a household staple respond to this latest wave of disruptive, data-enabled friendly fire?

The received wisdom is that the present and foreseeable health of consumer brand marketing will be defined and driven by the sophisticated use of data.

And yet, despite the sharply increasing range and depth of data available to practitioners, alongside a lively scrum of martech and adtech service providers, we are if anything more distant from a meaningful connection with consumers than ever.

Down to the crossroads

Should we sit tight and wait for the answer to emerge, or do we challenge the current assumptions and seek alternative approaches? Whatever our choice regarding the former, the velocity of change in market and the ongoing feeling of uncertainty surely demand a regular and rigorous health check.

Are the heavy expectations that lie on digital marketing, advertising and data justified? Or does the way we think about the future of the consumer brand need a radical rethink?

Here I’ll argue for the latter. Having worked in digital media, marketing and advertising for a quarter of a century, and advised leading players on both demand and supply sides, I’ve come to see that a reliance on the current and envisioned applications of digital and data could lead to a severe crisis, at least in their current manifestations, for many of the world’s most familiar and successful consumer packaged goods.

I’m relieved to report that this current challenge is not, necessarily, the end of the road for FMCG. It’s potentially the beginning of a new chapter, one that will demand, alongside a continuing focus on new technologies and ever-richer and more comprehensive forms of data, degrees of bold invention that have not been seen in brand advertising since the golden days of Madison Avenue.

A Game of Thrones

It’s easy to overlook why we have brands, and why they have been so important in both culture and commerce.

Branding was invented in the late 19^th century in the United States by manufacturers of consumer goods. They had become frustrated by the increasing dominance of the wholesalers that controlled, through an effective monopoly of railways and warehousing, the national and regional distribution channels.

The evolution of the retail chains from the middle of the last century, first in the US, then across much of the developed world, extended the field. The power that chains such as Wal-Mart, Target, Tesco and Carrefour have over everyday household brands continues, as is well-documented elsewhere, continues to both expand and to change.

Branding, therefore, has always been about power before value.

Advertising, the undisputed driver of the media landscape of the past 75 years, introduced a new combatant in this unfolding Game of Thrones. Ads are, we tend to forget, information provided to an audience to co-opt them to the cause of the brand. And in doing so, choice enters the picture. And with choice, come the first incremental, then rapid and explosive, empowerment of shopper and consumer.

The great copywriters of the mid-20^th century could never have anticipated the rise of this ruthless connected consumer.

And so we arrive, today, at a kind of pincer movement, with the retailer – on- and offline – and the shopper, equipped to push the beleaguered brand around, with powerful weapons of mass commoditization. At the heart of this brutal new system, of course, lies the data.

There’s no need to go into further detail. The state of play in our Game of Thrones finds consumer brands at a severe disadvantage. The mistake, however, is to assume without close examination that, if digital technologies plus data are the problem, then they must therefore be the entire solution.

Marketing vs. advertising

One little-discussed effect of the digital revolution has been to enmesh the previously separate disciplines of marketing and advertising. Understandable, especially when many of us have concluded, often tacitly, that if it’s all about the data, then we’re really just using different information at different points along the purchase funnel.

I think this has led to important misconceptions, and have found it useful to re-separate them using value as the distinction. We could say that marketing’s primarily about the articulation of value, and advertising’s about its communication.

The discrete roles of data come immediately into focus. Whether used for research, validation of ROI, integration into smarter product and services, prediction and so on, we can’t question that data has been and remains front and centre in intelligent modern marketing.

Furthermore, despite its frequent misfires and continuing disappointments, and while not being the driver of transformation that we once hoped, CRM’s ongoing journey remains at least valid. We should note in passing however that CRM is often partially siloed in customer service. Of which more later.

It’s data’s role in advertising that seems less sturdy.

The vocabulary of digital advertising merits inspection. In particular, the word “relevance” is a daily touchstone of value that should concern us. While a product or service must, from a marketing point of view, resonate with current or anticipated consumer need or desire, surely the task of advertising is not to simply reflect back to our audience all the data we currently hold on them (like an ecommerce recommendation: “If you bought this you might like that”).

To the contrary, advertising’s job is, by blending creative alchemy and astute planning and buying, to convert initial indifference to some level of consideration. We are, we could say, in the very business of irrelevance.

Stephen King, after close to 50 years, still says it best. “How to measure advertising and its effect is not terribly hard if you work out in advance what sort of response you are trying to get, because the basic question then is: Are we getting that response?”

If equity, at its most commercial, is a disposition to prefer our brand over others, and to pay a reasonable premium for it, we must surely concede that, with honourable exceptions, significant ground is being lost to the ubiquitous yellow discount label in the store, and in-basket substitutions and one-click price comparison services online.

While not doubting for a second that media planning and buying should and will continue to be ruthlessly informed and optimised – the programmatic explosion says it all – nevertheless, the magic data bullet that that will rescue the household brand from the Game of Thrones remains elusive.

Efficiency vs. growth

Leading marketers are waking up to a stark realisation. Having spent up to 5 years investing in large programmes of digital transformation that were envisioned as bold steps into the future, they have, instead, become mired in the past.

These initiatives are not, in the main, transformations or innovations. They are programmes of incremental improvement. Efficiency projects. We become, well, smarter, faster and cheaper at doing the things we needed to be better at doing five years ago.

Notoriously, efficiency projects in themselves deliver no business value beyond cost savings. Putting aside the common estimate that 70% of corporate change projects fail, in sharp contrast to even 5 years ago, the sheer accelerations that life and business on the network have conferred on the market mean that we no longer have the luxury of “semi-optional” change gambles.

Life does not go on outside. It rushes past us.

Here, perhaps, a throwaway (and typically cryptic) line from McLuhan’s 1964 masterpiece Understanding Media comes back to haunt us. “The paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change.”

Our transformation programmes must not be mistaken for a result. Being digital is simply to arrive, often a little late, at Basecamp One. The mountain of tough competition remains entirely unclimbed.

Having focused, arguably to our detriment, exclusively on the science, we now need to swing back rapidly to the art. It’s creative growth, departing from our platforms of digital efficiency, that demands urgent focus.

Product vs. service

A friend and colleague, one of the country’s foremost engineers, when we were discussing the impact of automated services on consumer products recently, made an observation that must be noted. “But won’t these brands soon enough be selling themselves not to consumers, but to the machines that serve them?”

Indeed. What happens to the intangible and perceived value created by huge investment, over multiple decades, in advertising – with or without the data – when the shopper is, in any sense that we’d recognise, no longer the shopper at all? This is far from a dystopian vision. One way or another, home automation is a reality.

And yes, the data we currently collect and look to for advantage will go on to play a central role in this new episode in our Game of Thrones.

But this will be about services. Amazon, in fact, is best viewed no longer as a retailer, but as an increasingly must-have service provider: this is the logic behind the – for now still reassuringly feature-light – Dash and Echo programmes. The former offers replenishment services for participating brands via either its recently launched one-tap stick-on sensors, or its rather magical Wand.

The latter doubles as a speaker for various audio channels and – far more compelling – a voice-activated home control tool. “Alexa? I’m nearly out of mayonnaise. Get me anything on special offer – over 50% discount – to arrive … oh … Thursday evening. The same size as before.”

We get the picture. The unmediated interaction that consumers and product brands have maintained for so long, is interrupted by a layer that anonymises both sides of the transaction and the relationship.

The fundamental logic here is that quality of service, in the end, always trumps quality of product. We’ve seen this repeatedly in marketing, and of course the digital revolution has accelerated the timelines between comfortable, bankable brand equity and also-ran commodity.

The stark realisation that follows, if we accept this logic and the trajectory we’re seeing so far, is that no matter how we may juggle and refine our marketing communications on behalf of the product brand, we can’t defend against the service players.

A way forward

We are close to marketing heresy here, of course. But looking around at the wholesale disruption we face across all sectors that are exposed to the destructive power of unfettered information, it’s hard, when we’re honest, to imagine that our product brands are somehow immune. To imagine that a data-led communications strategy will provide a sustainable defensive halo, is to ignore what’s right in front of us.

Will data kill the consumer brand? Well, not exactly, despite the clear and present dangers outlined here. It’s branded products that are under immediate threat.

Branded services – initially built around existing products, naturally, but rapidly evolving to create radical, ownable new forms of consumer value – are where logic demands we seek opportunity.

The question that remains is whether brand owners are realistically equipped to take this on at all, in terms of the longer game. Point services, based around a single product or category, will soon enough be subsumed, for the same reason that most branded smartphone apps fail.

Nevertheless, with improved focus and urgency in our various Connected Home programmes, we will uncover innovative, perhaps transformative service models of our own. Multi-category FMCG brand owners hold a particular advantage here, as to stand a chance of remaining, well, relevant in this bleak future context will require offerings that are integrated right across the home, indeed reaching beyond it.

This is not simply a challenge of technology, not indeed of marketing or advertising. I believe it represents, the single most urgent form of transformation that consumer brands should undertake, in order to sustain a useful and valued role in both culture and commerce.

What does Amazon's home invasion mean for brands?

I'm surprised that, apart from the usual sporadic social fizz, Amazon's Dash (+ Wand) and more recent Echo services are not causing household brand directors to roll around on the floor foaming at the mouth. And not in a good way.

Do you see what I see?

The old Game of Thrones between brand, retailer and more recently consumer has played out over more or less a century. And as connectedness and data have arrived front and centre of this benign, bloody war.

Household brands are caught in a nasty pincer movement.

Ruthless retailer on one side, squeezing ever-harder on name brand equity with unavoidable in-store promotion, own-brand competition and - let's face it - a control of key shopper data that is more or less comprehensive.

And connected consumer, only ever a swipe away from the best price. Not to mention the new basket aggregators like MySupermarket.com, stripping away value from everyone, except of course, the shopper.

It's well-established that the traditional split between shopper - going to the shops, in one way or another, and consumer - connecting with the brand in the context of use, typically the home - is disappearing. Douglas Rushkoff has written most coherently about the underlying drivers of this shift in his recent book Present Shock.

As we know, name brands have been trying to push back into the retail space to regain a sliver of power behind the battle lines.

And till recently, the home has been a sort of sanctuary for the beleaguered household brand. Until, at least, the time comes for replenishment. And isn't it replenishment that FMCG marketing is all about? Who'd build a brand that was bought once on a promotion, then only bought again when the dreaded yellow label - the new uber-brand that all value-conscious shoppers - catches the eye to offer 50% off, 2 for 1, or whatever.

Well, that's pretty much where we find ourselves today. And while Amazon's home invasion, with opening salvos like Dash and Echo, may not seem like game over, there's a lot more where that came from.

My friend and colleague Professor William Webb, of Weightless SIG and the IET, made a startling observation recently that stays with me. William is a leading engineer, and as far from being a marketer as you could possibly get.

But when he and I were earlier this year discussing the potential impact of the IoT (Weightless is a leading open standard for object communication, by the way) on the home and in particular on the household brand, he innocently dropped something of a brand grenade on me.

And it merits serious reflection.

"I don't know much about marketing as you know, but surely we're looking at a time not too far away, when most of these brands will be trying to sell themselves directly to intelligent home devices?"

Only an engineer would dare to think, let alone say, such a thing. When irresistible and affordable consumer services become the buyers of commodity household goods - buying them surely on the basis os anything BUT brand - we envision an extraordinary return to a world where brand, advertising, and anything more than the most functional and rudimentary marketing, had no role to play.

A time, in fact, before the Game of Thrones that is household brand marketing and retailing had even begun.

Those of us who care about and value brands need to pay much closer attention. Most consumers are not as sentimental as we may be ... and the machines are getting smarter - and talking among themselves more - every day.

I'm afraid that, while advertising still has a key role to play here, so-called "digital transformation" will not answer this challenge. Retailer and consumers have already reached an unassailable point of power in terms of taking and holding advantage from data. And digital marketing, while the science continues to evolve apace, still lacks the sheer creativity - the art - to win a war where persuasion is no longer in play.

Until we can find alternative angles, it seems to me that these vulnerable brand giants urgently need to accelerate their service innovation programmes. The current Connected Homes projects are generally insufficient in both speed and scope to either outthink or outrun broader, deeper, smarter and above all, more integrated home automation technologies.

Service beats product, more or less every time.

Without an abrupt change in gear, we may soon enough see a dramatic drop, outside emerging markets, at least temporarily, in the potency and presence of many of the world's largest brands.

Food, we could say, for thought.

The Inconvenient Truth ... Who, really, needs it?

One of my favourite moments in the excellent Ray Donovan, the Showtime series about a family of Boston gangsters making a life in Hollywood, forced to move there following a disastrous one-two of criminal acts by their father - Jon Voight - and childhood abuse by a priest, is when Ray - our anti-hero, played by the outstanding actor Liev Schreiber - is confronted at a Malibu beach house by his latest client, a rich, psychotic life guru who advocates "Radical Truth" in his followers.

Steve pushes Ray to tell the truth, to say exactly what's in his head, right now.

To our delight, after pausing and fixing him with the still, considered stare that is his trademark, Ray finally says: "I think you're an asshole. And I'm only using you for your money".

What's happening here? The truth makes us laugh, as is the case with every good joke you've ever heard. But is anyone better off?

An important legacy of the utter transformation of our lives - both culturally and commercially - of our lives by digital connection on the network is an unfolding explosion of transparency.

Salman Rushdie, a few years ago, dismissed the rush to the new social confessional as "blurt culture". And we can see, from the perspective of one who makes a living purely out of le bon mot, what he means.

Whether the tide of universal truth - be it trivial or tremendously important - is a good or bad thing is discussed in infinite depth and detail elsewhere. But putting the social and cultural effects aside for now, where are brands and the businesses that own them left by the new transparency?

Are we seeing more or less truth in commerce?

Before diving into this, a important side note. We often speak of the truth as if it were, intrinsically and indisputably, the right thing to say. Jumping back, for a minute, to the uses and abuses of religion, I will always remember in my youth being lectured by an imposing, austere priest who taught at my secondary school.

"Just because it's true, Michael, doesn't mean you have to say it."

Think of the centuries of power, control and, yes, wisdom that lie behind that statement. We realise that the world we live in and the truth are entirely different things. When we sit down, finally, for a heart to heart with a friend, a colleague or a loved one, we're invoking more than "just the facts". We're calling into play a powerful, irrevocable and, let's say it, often dangerous tool.

We speak of the truth as if it mirrors, tracks if you like, our day to day lives. But the fact is that we very rarely apply it. Indeed, too much of it, whatever your moral preferences may be, is rarely, except in court, and perhaps, if you must, in therapy, welcomed.

Much of the time, we'd rather not hear about it. And much of the time, we're probably right. Humans are not, in the end, set up for too much reality. That's why we have that often-derided mental and emotional cushion, denial.

The truth, of course, has a sporadic affair with brands and advertising. Recall the late and great Dudley Moore, during his unlikely stint as a movie star, in Arthur, pitching a new strapline for Volvo: "They're boxy, but they're good".

Sidestepping "The Mind Manipulators" - in itself an inconvenient truth about the realpolitik of brand advertising that, most of the time, we'd rather not pay attention to - how do consumer brands relate to the truth?

Paul Polman of Unilever famously launched their laudable Sustainable Living Programme several years ago. He committed, not just to consumer and market, but to the financial markets, that the world's second-largest advertiser would double its turnover and halve its relative environmental footprint by 2020.

Whether this was career and commercial suicide or a smart political play - or indeed both - remains to be seen. But while the company has launched some remarkable and very worthy initiatives - Lifebuoy's hand washing promotions in the developing world are an example of serious intent and genuine impact - it's hard to imagine that Mr Polman's aggressive commercial targets will be reached.

Looking closer, though, we see the raw truth behind the USLP. Without many interventions like the Lifebuoy project, millions of the world's future consumers of goods, in the very - in fact, arguably the only - growth territories that Unilever and every other FMCG marketer has marked for investment, will die.

Pragmatic - and there's nothing wrong with that - is the word. We must, whatever happens, applaud the company's vision and courage.

Turning our attention to branding and brand advertising, we find a dismaying plethora of ersatz truth everywhere we look.

The awful word "authentic". Surely, at least in terms of the way the term is used, we mean some sort of appealing, getting-away-with-it echo of integrity. Miles Davis, for example, an epitome of authenticity and "cool" (let's not even get into cool ...) was a notoriously prickly, against-the-grain genius whose own encounters with the truth were often mediated through drug addiction. Believe me, that's not what we mean when we ask for brand authenticity ...

"Edgy" ... "Real" ... the list goes on. But we never, ever seek the Edge, or Reality or whatever, when we imbue our brands with these qualities. What we're looking for, most of the time, is a back story for the brand that has a bit of drama, a bit of jeopardy, a bit of Ray Donovan about it. We want to point to the edge, like a tourist in Rio, but we don't really want to go there.

When all else fails, we're entirely correct in demanding the truth. But we need to both grow up and use the concept with far greater care and pragmatism.

The facts are, whether blunt instrument or stiletto, weapons that rarely merit public consumption. And before we demand them of any person, institution or corporation, we must ask ourselves how badly we actually want the truth.

The machine of capitalist society (no judgment intended, by the way) is no more oiled by the facts than our daily lives are enabled by persistent, profound examination of our private motives.

The truth is important. But, all too often, it is and will continue to be more inconvenient than we ourselves, let alone the market, will bear.

A look back at a book that still has a little bite to it ...

 

With thanks to the good folks at Salt Digital, here's the first of 3 short videos looking back at my work in digital strategy ... this one focuses on Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands, written in 2001 with dear friend and co-conspirator David Stoughton.

5 Unasked Questions About Digital Brand Marketing

Courtesy of my good friends at Digital Doughnut, a 30 minute talk from a recent Digital Leaders event challenging what I see as our most troublesome assumptions that currently inhibit intelligent progress for brand marketers.

The Man Machine - M2M drives the future of brand building and loyalty

Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, sees as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020. Only 10 billion or so are likely to be cell phones and tablet computers. The rest will be machines, talking not to us, but to each other. The combined level of robotic chatter on the world's wireless networks... is likely soon to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations. "Talk to me, one machine said to the other", The New York Times, 29 July 2012

Computer World

Techno-rock legend has it that its iconic fathers, Kraftwerk, had but one telephone in their Dusseldorf base, the gloriously-named Kling Klang studio. The phone’s ringer had been disabled. But the band would pick up the handset once a day, promptly, at 11.00 every morning. And whoever was ringing in would get to speak to them. If not, well, too bad … Maybe catch you tomorrow.

Perhaps the greatest pop concert I’ve seen to date – at the Hammersmith Palais, 1981 – was Kraftwerk when they were on tour supporting their (at the time very quirky) Computer World album. Maybe I’m rose-tinted in my memories from all that time ago, but I’m sure that one by one, as the group left the stage, they left a dummy of each member poised behind the bank of computers that made up their instrumental line-up. And it seemed like the dummies were continuing to operate the computers right, through the encores.

The Kraftwerk message seems to have been: “You find machines fascinating, because you are yourselves machines. But there’s more: the role of machines in creating meaning in human life will keep on increasing, and the traditional divide between you and the machines will continue to become smaller. Just wait.”

And we did wait. And sure enough, the rewiring of the world that we’ve seen over the past 30 years has given birth to an always-on experience of human life that brings together flesh, blood and data in ways that only the cyberpunk authors could have anticipated when the process began.

Just Did It

How brands are built in digital, and indeed the cultural and commercial roles of brands in post-digital culture, versus their traditional roles, are fundamental questions that underpin the slightly more superficial weekly debates we hear in media and marketing.

What do we do with all this data? Do search, social and mobile move advertising forward or fatally hamstring it? Who really owns the brand, when so much equity apparently lives in areas that advertising can’t consistently touch?

And of course, Engagement … what is it? Why does it matter? How, why, when and where should we invest in it? What is it, by the way?

But like great art and porn (great or not so great has never been established I gather …), we sure know Engagement when we see it. And one inspirational heritage brand that has nailed it is Nike, in particular with its Nike+ program of runner engagement and activation. Nike+ has built powerful, shareable automated consumer value with an application whose entire impact depends upon shoe - or more recently, smartphone or watch - talking to network on the runner's behalf. All the user does is configure the service - the application does the rest.

This is M2M – machine to machine – technology applied to consumer branding, the Internet Of Things, brought to life. But what, exactly is going on here. And why is it so important?

At the consumer level, Nike+ takes a notoriously isolated stakeholder, the more or less serious runner, and gives them a platform. This platform takes raw data captured from a chip in the shoe, a wristband, or more recently a smartphone, and turns it into visual, shareable narratives of personal transformation.

Nike+, in fact, enables the kind of empowered self-expression that Marshall McLuhan I believe had in mind when he presciently defined media as “extensions of man”. But looking closer, we see the key lesson to be learned here. While Nike+ continues to build powerful equity and loyalty – indeed Engagement, that word again – among arguably the brand’s most critical stakeholders, the runners on which the brand was built, it does so without a sentimental need for consumer love or validation.

All the user does is configure the service and then … let it roll. The brand adds potent value, does all the heavy data lifting, and pops up at the end of each run with a beautiful story of the new, improved us … which if we want we can share, crow about, or just (as I like to think most runners do) quietly chalk up a little more personal progress with a tip of the hat to Nike.

This Engagement, in other words is built not on love from the consumer. It’s built on a crucial paradox, one that we must get to grips with if we are to continue to build brand equity “Behind The Line” in the VIP area of the connected consumer’s tribal life. This Engagement depends on enabling the consumer to Disengage – from both tiresome task and indeed, at least so it seems, the brand itself. (Note, by the way, that the model has this year been pushed out to other sports where Nike seeks traction, for example golf and basketball. This one's going to run and run.)

Loyalty without awareness

Almost 10 years ago to the day, my friend David Stoughton and I published a book – Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands – that took as its departure point the hypothesis that information, in and of itself, does not create value, and in many instances will attack it, both for consumers and brands.

To the contrary, the only information that adds value is that which removes both work and risk - perceived or otherwise - for the consumer.

We began the book with a robust attack on CRM – not the technology itself, but the underlying assumption by marketers that, per se, owning information about a consumer adds value to that relationship.

This, remember, was at a time when loyalty models such as Tesco's Clubcard were starting to make a significant impact, and the apparently promising links between digital consumer data, connected markets, and the World Wide Web were the subject of enormous focus: a hypnotic and apparently self-evident data-driven model was bought into by most of the marketing community.

But we said no. You're wrong.

Much of the second half of Promiscuous Customers was devoted to the future impact of what we called "automated value". Our argument was, and indeed remains so 10 years on, that the sentimental assumption by marketers that empowered, connected consumers generally care enough about their brands to engage in repeated displays of active loyalty over long periods of time is entirely wrong.

Brand loyalty is rarely, if ever, about love - one well-known drinks firm even aspires to "brand adoration" - but about utility. The ascendance of the app has cemented the role of Automated Value at the heart of brand-building: "What can you do for me, that I can't (be bothered to) do for myself?" says the smartphone user.

Getting consumers to disengage

The arrival point for contemporary consumer engagement and loyalty is not, I'm relieved to report, that most trite of consumer gestures, the "Like", nor even the marginally more credible Retweet.

It's the point at which the consumer consigns the immensely hard and complicated work of creating information-based value to a brand application.

We may not get the brand love we crave for this typically offhand commitment... but what we get is worth far, far more.

While paradoxically, the consumer actively engages much less with our brand when they begin to rely upon an application for a particular service (let's stick with Nike+ as an example for now) we need to learn to see this as a marketing positive. They may clock off from the often tiresome active engagements via our website, but don't mistake this cold shift in engagement for a drop in loyalty.

This, in any sector where information plays a significant role, is the lion's share of the future of marketing and brand building.

Returning to Kraftwerk at Kling Klang for a moment, we should I believe accept that the connected consumer’s project of self-creation and –distribution is far too important, too central to meaning, for brands to expect to be able to just “pick up the phone” and get through whenever we feel like it. A further paradox of post-digital brand building is an end to promises of more product or service value, replaced by the need to deliver up-front, consistent “life-value” for the consumer. If it looks like creating more work without major payoff for the new king, we can be sure it’ll just bounce off.

We need to put down our need for love, and get with the unconscious loyalty program. It’s the future. (In fact, it’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed!)

Can digital build brands? An essay on the coming shift to Engagement-based marketing

A troubled history

Stephen King's brief, urgent paper, "What Is A Brand?" was produced 40 years ago at the dawn of the seventies.

Even then, branding was struggling for its seat at the high table of commerce:

I wonder whether all top management are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully enough that it is from the success of brands rather than as products that the profits will come? Do they fully understand the nature of brands? Do they set company objectives in terms of brand positioning or simply in financial terms?  

The answer – then, and perhaps all the more so now – is an emphatic “No”.

Now the unforgiving context within which marketing and advertising must operate, along with a number of questionable assumptions that have come to prevail, have forced branding’s role and value even further into the background.

One of the least satisfying developments since digital advertising has so radically disrupted the industry, is the current demand for ROI at every turn. This has pushed brand managers into a position so defensive that they can often only point to e-commerce conversions to justify investment in anything digital, other than perhaps the most meat-and-potatoes search program.

The assumption seems to be that the lion’s share of brand building is still best achieved by blanket messaging via above the line advertising, and that digital investment sits – as it perhaps always has since its inception – further down the pipe, alongside direct marketing and retail.

Such developments, given particularly that the balance sheets of many of the world's biggest businesses continue to list brand equity as a dominant line, are surely an immense concern.

At a time when swathes of quality consumer attention are lavished on social and smartphone, can we seriously continue to imagine that brand equity – like royalty at a rugby international – watches from comfort and safety in a warm hospitality box, while every other significant aspect of the connected consumer’s life, including our own products and services, is kicked vigorously around the chilly playing field of digital?

No. Brands, for better or worse, are being actively, constantly and irresistibly constructed and deconstructed in digital. We are fascinated and bewildered by capricious shifts in the tribal sentiments of connected consumers: utter indifference to our most exquisite, flattering siren calls one moment, and the next, their inexplicable rush to engage en masse, triggered by an apparently tiny flutter of influence in a corner we never knew existed.

We have to date gained no convincing idea of how to play under the ever-shifting goal posts of 21^st century marketing. Certainly the performance of advertising in digital – while spend increases every year, the bulk of the investment is still in the “defensive”, hygiene-factor area of search – continues to vex all but the most dedicated of advocates.

Here we revisit and review this important element of Stephen King's substantial legacy, the argument for advertising’s key role as architect and builder of the brand equity that translates as preference and premium prices, through the unsentimental lens of post-digital culture and commerce. 

An evolving role

… whatever people might wish to call the process of creating a property that combines tangible and intangible attributes, can be symbolized in a trademark that creates influence and value if properly managed … Well, that is branding by any other name.

                                                                                                     Rita Clifton, Chairman and CEO, Interbrand

Adaptation is, as it happens, part and parcel of branding's story. Stephen King wrote in terms of its “waves”, or evolutions, within the broader history of marketing.

He wrote about branding very much as a defensive imperative, first used by consumer product manufacturers to push back against the wholesalers that dominated consumer product marketing from the late Victorian era, and second – starting in the 1950's – against the retail chains whose dominance of brands' channels to market, alongside their aggressive own-brand programs, created a game of cat and mouse that continues today. 

The latter in particular challenged manufacturers to investigate sources of value, beyond the product itself, to sustain both preference and margin.

So Mr King completed his paper by pointing to the need for advertising to build and sustain new forms of ownable added value around the consumer brand.

First, we can recognise that in the 1970s it may well have a different role from the past. Added values and their effects on profits will become more important … Secondly, we can improve our methods of setting advertising’s objectives, by thinking of them in terms of the advertising’s contribution to the added values of the brand … And thirdly, we can recognize that advertising itself is a totality … If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand … (which) will never come to life.

As we read his words, we have feelings of both familiarity and regret. His argument could live very comfortably in any seminar in 2012, but what have – indeed since long before they were written – always been common sense marketing rules to live by, remain curiously, stubbornly peripheral to current marketing practice.

Nevertheless, we also realise that a large element of the historic role performed by branding, before we arrive at the generally accepted creation and attribution of added value, has in sharp contrast been defense against an ever-threatening – and ever mutating – diminishment of perceived value.

If wholesale and retail have been the source of such threats to date, has digital introduced a new player?

Shifts in power

Branding has always been just as much about power as about value. This is even more evident, at a time when connected consumers are still in the early stages of flexing newfound powers of “mass self-expression”[1], co-created meaning, identity and belonging, and their own tribally-based, direct influence over which ideas attain currency, and which fade away to nothing.

These are the kinds of cultural tasks of search and selection that brands have performed for us until recently. Do they still deserve their rather exalted position? Because viewed through a lens of global connectedness, brands are (until we intervene … whether and if so, how we do so is the subject of our enquiry) merely “yet more ideas” floating among a cast of literally billions.

As Umair Haque, the economist and media theorist, has correctly pointed out[2] from 10 years ago, where media, pre-digital, were scarce and thus highly valued, and consumer attention was plentiful, now media are overwhelmingly everywhere and consumer attention is the new gold.

We see a dramatic shift in power here, one that overturns the brand communications apple cart once and for all.

It's the power of the connected consumer that sets the scene for branding's next, “third wave” challenge. Along Stephen King’s branding timeline, first wholesalers and then retailers have historically set the challenges that great advertising has met, time and again, shoring up meaning and value not only around products and services, but crucially, within consumers’ own daily lives.

We now have a third protagonist, globally connected consumers themselves.

And while the battle for control of meaning and value remains the focus, we are today severely handicapped not only by earthquakes on our playing field and goal posts that never stop moving: we now learn that our star player is injured and may never return to top form.

The moving goal posts

Advertising, brand-building’s primary weapon of mass communication, is today in trouble. At its root, uncertainties about its role and value boil down not to its effects – arguably more measurable than ever before – but to a growing doubt about what it’s actually for. The strident insistence on ROI at every turn, points in the end not to questions about what is achieved in any given campaign or tactic therein, but about what it’s worth. Not so much what are we doing or how, more why.

We’re reminded of the familiar description of an accountant as one who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Measurability per se is, at least in digital channels, not a challenge. To the contrary, it’s the struggle for advertisers to reach some post-digital equivalent of the impression, of familiar, trusted reach and frequency, that underpins this crisis.

While ad spend remains stable for now, there's an emerging sense among brand owners that, even when bullseyes are consistently hit, they're shooting at the wrong targets. That somehow, the game has moved on.

I think this is close to the truth. Consumer presence and consumer attention have – a key and rarely-acknowledged legacy of the digital revolution – become uncoupled. The implicit value exchange that has underpinned advertising's very successful partnership with media is fractured, when formerly precious content is commoditized by sheer volume and choice.

Why else would we be hearing incessantly about the challenge of "engagement"? Behind all the talk about this still-elusive concept, is the sense that while the consumer eyeball may still drift over the messaging, the mind is elsewhere, “otherwise engaged”.

The fragmentation that so concerns advertising and the media that serve it, is happening just as much within a single consumer’s field of attention, as it is amongst a brand's target audience. And attention is a zero sum game.

So what has happened to cause this? And if branding is, as we noted above, concerned with building associations around products and arrives, then how, in this age of consumer empowerment and tribalism, are these often far richer and more plentiful associations being built. And perhaps more vexing, by whom?

Macromedia and Micromedia

Think of today's powerhouse brands. Coke, Mercedes, and the remaining handful of other great legacy brands were built, and continue to thrive, on the back of enormous advertising budgets. They are, in fact, entirely constructs of media. Ever since its rightly-famous “1984” campaign, Apple has marched in that number too. Steve Jobs was in many ways an advertising man more than a technologist. But do we feel that the Apple brand resides in advertising? Or is its victorious brand nourished by some other, deeper source?

Think now of the 21st century barbarians at the gate. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter are representative. For their billions of daily users, life without these brands is unthinkable. And yet, Facebook only began to advertise in September 2012, and Google only some 2 years previous to that, launching its now-won Chrome browser war against Explorer and Firefox.

Without contradicting Stephen King’s core premises, the new powerhouse brands of the digital age are clearly being built without any direct dependence on the media and advertising system.

This, perhaps, is not big news for most of us. But where does this leave the FMCG brands whose products and services are not, as the technology giants are, hardwired into daily consumer culture? How are they to argue their way over the threshold into the party?

It helps if here we divide media into two constructs. Visualize them as two separate circles, like you’d see in a Venn diagram. Consumers and brands map across both, but as we’ll see, the power of advertising – digital or otherwise – to create and distribute brand meaning and value in both is highly restricted.

Let's call these circles “Macromedia” and “Micromedia”. Big TV, Big Web, and Big Advertising are all largely moored in Macromedia. It's corporate, it's about big stakes, big budgets and big risk. But these days, it also has a fair amount of nose pressed up against the window of Micromedia.

Micromedia is that personal, “me and mine”, tribal zone of intimacy that is the most fascinating and troublesome consequence of the connecting of consumers.

If Macromedia is about the heft and swagger of Big Media, Micromedia's ruler is the powerful, often ruthless consumer (increasingly a troubling word, in terms of its assumptions). If Macromedia is about consumption of media by consumers, Micromedia is about self-expression by consumers to each other and, in some instances, back to our brands.

We have to now largely acted as if Micromedia were a new, younger, subordinate territory within Macromedia. We have thus assumed that plain vanilla digital advertising would, as traditional advertising has done so well in the past in Macromedia, build brands and drive purchasing in Micromedia. But this is where the “digital is just another channel” school of thought has failed so crucially.

In Macromedia, digital is indeed “just another channel”. But in Micromedia, the very fabric of the environment is digital, and furthermore the primary dynamic, the prevalent flow, is not from industry to consumer, but quite the reverse: outbound consumer self-expression and co-creation. These are the “extensions of man” that McLuhan wrote about so cryptically back in 1964, finally come to life in social and mobile, with transformational results.

This is I believe why the consumption-based advertising that has always ridden, with enormous success of course, on the tails of content, has struggled so frustratingly in Micromedia. Advertising in Facebook and mobile remain at the time of writing profoundly unconvincing in terms of both consumer acceptance and brand acceptance.

We have long talked about above, below and through The Line. I call this new challenge “Behind The Line”, the line of course being the far-from-permeable membrane that separates Macro- and Micromedia.

The technology giants that have ridden the web to commercial dominance have without exception done so by establishing a strong base in Micromedia, by empowering our already power-hungry self-expressing, co-creating connected consumer. While they do advertise, they sustain their brand equity above all by further empowering their customer Behind The Line.

Note, by the way, what happens when any – and it doesn’t matter how dominant they may have been – of the new powerhouses steps out of line (another Line to worry about here, perhaps!). Netflix (pricing), Facebook (trust and data), Apple (maps) and plenty more have felt the freezing breath of the hostile consumer tribe when their exhilarating new power is diminished or threatened even slightly.

A brand built in Micromedia is thus a still a house built on sand, that shifts along with the restless, capricious moods and desires of the globally connected consumer. Even a luxurious palace like Apple’s is intensely, incessantly vulnerable. So perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

Experience and Expectation

While we may now understand a little more about the constructs and dynamics that make up Digital The Culture, as opposed to Digital The Channel, the question remains, if we are to build brands in digital, what must change?

I’m still myself in the early stages of developing planning frameworks that bring Macromedia and Micromedia together to enable true “Behind The Line” brand communications.

It’s my belief, however, that branding in the post-digital era demands we move far beyond messaging, to take on the active management and optimization of consumer experience across all key touchpoints, right along the entire product lifecycle.

I also belief as a consequence that brand equity can be viewed and ultimately valued as a sort of snapshot in time of the sum of goodwill and otherwise that such experiences engender in what is, remember, a globally connected, highly tribal consumer.

Brand building, which has till recently lived almost exclusively in advertising, has been primarily a brand-controlled system of linear, almost entirely one-way “Promise and Delivery”. In the digital age, a new and, for now, chaotic dynamic has come into play, disrupting a lot of what we knew before, challenging all the rules and roles of marketing.

In contrast to the regimented lines of Promise and Delivery, we have in Micromedia a corresponding but very hard to reach cycle of consumer Experience and Expectation. Our brand Experiences – good, bad, indifferent – drive our brand Expectations (and also, note, our own brand Expressions via social to our hundreds, thousands or millions of networked cohorts). And round again of course.

But what matters most here is that the cycle is driven not by brands, but by consumers in tribes. Advertising (digital or otherwise makes no real difference) holds little sway here. To revisit McLuhan, the medium is in this case not just the message, it’s also the product or service itself. There is no time, in digital, between the Promise and the Delivery. Indeed, there is no longer effective difference between them: what we say and what we then do are held up for public scrutiny

So the dynamic between Experience and Expectation, how that plays out across the network, and how in turn we choose to invest in engaging the attention of the consumer, will I suggest be the future of brand building in digital. Advertising’s more precise role has yet to unfold, but clearly whether it’s digital or not, branding’s traditional vehicle has, in Micromedia, a secondary role.

If digital is indeed to build brands, and one way or another we must find out how, my last point is that less focus on Return On Investment, and more focus on improving the powerful consumer’s Return On Attention, would be an excellent departure point.

With this imperative in mind, I’ll leave you with a final, wise thought from The King.

How to measure advertising and its effect is not terribly hard if you work out in advance what sort of response you are trying to get, because the basic question then is: Are we getting that response?

 

---

[1] Manuel Castells, Communications Power

[2] Umair Haque blog, Bubble Generation

 

Introducing Miss Amelia Bayler - Cultural Commentator and Blogger (and daughter)

Fast Food: Design Classic

 I don’t only drink Coca-Cola because of how it tastes, I drink it because of the way it looks and what it says about me.  It says, ‘I am a consumer of a timeless and classic brand.’ In his article ‘Living in The Material World: Marketing And Meaning’ (Market Leader Magazine June 2012) Grant McCracken pointed out that even sub-cultures or anti-pop cultures are defined by big brands.  Instagram (as hip as lomography but for lazys) is full of filtered photos of Black Milk, San Pellegrino and Nike Blazer’s.  Do brands define us?

First, the paparazzi take unflattering photos of celebrities and then the writers come up with the shocking stories.  What we don’t seem to focus on is the FACT in the photo itself.  An unedited photo is fact.  The photos of celebrities in trashy weeklies are more real than the fictional airbrushed photos in high fashion magazines.  Airbrushing should be accepted as an art form.  We should appreciate the effort that has been put into making Kate Moss look twenty.  If celebrities are our religion, Kate Moss is our God.  We want our God to look good.

Type ‘Lindsay Lohan Coke’ into Google Images and there are several photos of her with white powder around her nose / looking worse for wear.  These are labelled with ‘Lindsay Lohan Breakdown’ and writers create whole articles of bullshit to sell copies.  We will never know what statements are true unless we are acquainted with the stars involved. 

If you search for ‘Lindsay Lohan Coca-Cola’ there are also several search results.

If we look at the photo as it stands we see Lindsay Lohan holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.  That is fact.  But what does this say about her? Perhaps she drinks it because she sees some comfort in a brand that generations of ‘somebodys’ and ‘nobodys’ have consumed before her.  The classic logo is a reflection on her; an accessory to complete an outfit.

Lindsay Lohan has been charged with driving under the influence  (her mugshot was all over the press) but where are the photos of her with drugs? Although there have been years of speculation concerning her personal life, when we look at the sheer amount of images of Lindssay with Coca-Cola we know that one thing is true about her and that is her Coke ‘addiction.’  She enjoys consuming the Coca-Cola brand.

It is known to be used as an appetite suppressant.  A meal in a can - a Guinness a day but a little more sinister.  Lindsay Lohan is under pressure to look good; as consumers we like things that look good (Junk food for example.)

Celebrities and food and drink brands are in a co-dependent relationship.  There are countless photos of celebrities munching on McDonalds.  Britney Spears at the Drive Thru is a good example of a celebrity ‘keeping it real.’ There are old videos on Youtube (amongst Man Vs. Food and Epic Meal Time) of celebrities plugging fast food companies, for example Lindsay Lohan and Jell-O.  Remember Britney’s deal with Pepsi vs Xtina’s with Coca-Cola in the 90s? (So trendy right now.)

Since then Fast Food has gone in and out of fashion (with the help of Supersize Me) in the same way as the Curvy vs Skinny debate.  The internet generation’s consumption of the struggle between Paparazzi/Celebrities reached its peak around the Size Zero Era (when Britney shaved her head.)  Images of celebrities eating Fast Food were trash gold - and still are.  They have connotations with depression and emotional breakdowns.  We have a similar love/hate relationship with Fast Food that we have with these celebrities

The main link between celebrities and fast food is that both are sold as a flawless package while the reality is that they are not so beautiful after all.  A good example is the reality of a Big Mac.  In photos it looks big and juicy but when the goofy guy at the counter hands it over it is small and pathetic.  It is the same for images of Kate Moss.  In the Rimmel London adverts she looks flawless but in photos of her smoking Malboro Lights or taking coke she looks like a normal thirty year old.  She’s not ugly but she’s not perfect.  Burgers still look good in the flesh but it is their imperfections which make them attractive - especially the fake cheese melting all over the place.

Recently a video was released by McDonald’s Canada showing the process that McDonald’s products have to go through before they are photographed.  Should we care? We eat fast food because it looks good, tastes good and makes us feel good (even though it’s not as big or juicy as in the photo.) Burgers are movie stars - ‘Le Big Mac.’

Fast food is a design classic.  Now Supersize Me is a distant memory, ‘Cool’ brands such as Lazy Oaf and Eastpak sell products heavily inspired by Fast Food.  Lazy Oaf stock a t-shirt for a UK based burger blog called ‘Burgerac,’ burger socks, burger wallets, a french fries tote and a pizza jumper.  It’s attractive, it’s appealing and its smell is the Chanel No.5 of the masses.

They tell you to be conscious of each mouthful you eat because it’s good for your health.  Recently I went to a burger joint in Brighton called ‘Grubbs’ and was conscious of how attractive the branding and packaging was..

It was the best meal I ever ate.

----------------------------------

(Amelia tweets at @ameliabayler.)

 

"Polisse" - if you love film, you have to see it ...

Bowling and Pinball ... the ball rolls on!

Very pleased and flattered to see the good old Bowling and Pinball meme that I pushed out in 2007 taken forward into fertile territory by my close friend Peter Sieyes and colleague Rob Malcolm in this very useful piece for Wharton: Knowledge In Action.

It astounds me - in a good way :-) - that the thinking should have such legs ... Though somewhat alarming to imagine my headstone in (I hope) the very distant future: "You know ... the bowling and pinball bloke"!

Here, by the way, are the videos I first used when explaining the model to the great and the good of media and marketing.

The bowling ... and the pinball.

More on the "behavioural backlash"

Clearly the subject du jour, consumers' increasing discontent with the new targeting, and the implications for advertisers, are examined again by the excellent Liz Jaques in today's Mediatel Newline.

With astringent thoughts from your humble author for extra zing ...

The new window-smashing French intellectuals ...

For some months now I've been admiring the writing of Frederic Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassee, the French co-authors of The Monday Note.

Today's TMN edition has prompted a rare post in this blog ... Filloux writes a searing yet icily-argued attack on assumptions re Google and Facebook's respective futures in ad revenue terms, using the Do Not Track controversy, and Microsoft's apple-cart-upsetting declarations, as his departure point.

Connected to this, but standalone in terms of its vigour and urgency, is Gassee's equally thoughtful yet brutal body check to what he calls "The $20B Opportunty Mirage" of mobile advertising. I've leave you to read it, but it's bracing stuff.

Overall, their positions (a) that ownership and manipulation of data confer no intrinsic value or entitlement, and (b) that simply pointing to how enormous mobile advertising could/should be consitutes proof of commercial potential, are very much in line with my own views.

They also bring a wealth of evidence to their arguments that make this work credible as well as invigorating reading.

An essential book for students of what's happening

James Gleick's masterful work "The Information" is taking my breath away.

The quality of scholarship combined with the accessibility and the sheer excitement of information's journey from pre-history to present, post-social, day is superb.

Make a point of reading this remarkable book.

"Otherwise Engaged - Branding In A Connected World"

The digital edition of my recent mini-book on engagement is now available to download free of charge here.

Download Otherwise Engaged by Michael Bayler

(If you still feel compelled to own the remarkably expensive printed version, it's available from Amazon here.)

A video presentation on branding for startups

I just rediscovered this, a talk I gave for Sun Microsystems a couple of years ago. The video and slides are very well put together, unfortunately the host - who shall remain nameless - inserted himself rather shamelessly into the proceedings ... however, if you jump to 02.18 minutes in, there's some rather good stuff there.

 

Kevin Slavin on how algorithms shape our world

A kind note from a good (and clever) friend ...

A lovely review of The Artist and what it means in a world of 'infinite connectedness' by @michaelbayler bit.ly/ygrGEV

— tom gueterbock (@tomgoot) January 25, 2012

"The Artist" - Fresh air ... or musty nostalgia? A bit of cultural context

 

Having grown up glued to black and white Hollywood masterpieces from the Golden Age every Sunday afternoon - at the time, it was that, football in the street, or homework - The Artist draws on references that are almost every one entirely familiar. And of course, like almost everyone, I love it.

It's funny - in a sneaky, better-than sort of way - to hear about the poor punters who demanded money back when they found the movie is - well, 99% of it - really silent. And all black and white.

Take a little Singin' In the Rain - well, OK, rather a lot of it - throw in the better Astaire and Rogers masterpieces and a generous sprinkle of the Pickfair silent dramas of pre-1929, when as we know The Jazz Singer blew silence away forever, and, aside from the genuinely glorious acting that features in every minute of The Artist (and how good to see the great Malcolm McDowell, in a tasty cameo role that surely he'll treasure more than much of his later work) you've got a good summary of the tone and structure of the movie.

There's been - if only prompted by the Academy Award nominations that the movie has earned - a certain amount of soul-searching Way Out West about THE MEANING of The Artist. At a time when the major studios are scrambling to differentiate their still-potent output from the millions of frat-party fart-lighting and cute kitten clips on offer to the less discerning audience via the usual sources, any film this quiet, this unswashbuckling, this unstarridden, and, well, this small, is going to get folks a-talkin'. And a-worryin'.

It strikes me - not that I know much - that THE POINT of this lovely film is to remind us that magic - and Hollywood was always about magic - only works hand-in-hand with severe restriction. An empowered, choice-spoilt audience with all the magic they'll ever need in the palm of their hand, will paradoxically find magic almost nowhere. (Magic is also about the things that you could never imagine yoursself doing. Not just special effects. It's more about writing, in the end, than CGI.)

But put them (well, me, and many thousands of others, anyway) in front of a black and white, silent film for 100 minutes on a cold, wet afternoon, and The Artist returns magic, along with romance, compassion, tragedy, comedy, pathos, cuteness, in spades.

I keep telling anyone who'll listen - for reasons I'll explain below - that in 1929, 95,000,000 Americans went to the movies every week. Of course, like my Sunday afternoons with Busby Berkeley and friends, they had nothing better to do. As the every-tiggerish Umair Haque pointed out some years ago, before moving on to larger econonomic matters, there was a time when attention was infinitely plentiful, and media - stuff to watch - was rare, to the point of being god-given.

And this - actually rather brief, in the grander scheme - Golden Age of the screen was very much built on the profoundly humble, often mundane, rarely privileged, and perhaps above all, physically grounded lives of its audience.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

Any nostalgia that I felt on seeing The Artist was, in the end, little to do with a hankering for the age of the silent movie - those Sunday afternoons weren't THAT much fun, believe me - and all to do with a pang of the loss of a simpler age in the much more recent past ...

One where our infinite connectedness, power to choose, limitless access to channels for self-expression, and our regal bestowing of attention on media objects on the merest whim (with disenfranchised consumer brands creeping around the edges of Facebook, Twitter and the rest, beckoning and gurning like the dancing dads at your 18th) had not yet made us like cranky, jaded children after far too many sweets, allowed to stay up far too late for our own good.

Is The Artist, therefore, one last longing look back, or a sneak peek forward, with perhaps a promise of happier times for moviemakers, beyond today's gruelling battle for the attention of these spoiled, rather unattractive children?

I'll say it's neither, not for me anyway. It's a glorious example - reminder in fact - of what occasionally happens when storytelling and acting talent is left alone to do what it does well, which is not merely to give us yet another expensive, instantly-forgettable chunk of content (I love blockbusters as well as the next bloke, by the way) but to touch our hearts deeply, with a far smaller, more daring, more caring slice of real magic.

Dedicated to the late Jonathan Cecil, who cared enough to dig out and bring me hard-to-find, connoisseur's books about the great silent movie stars when I was a silly South London boy, and who would have adored - and written far more insightfully and lovingly about - this film. R.I.P.

 

Bob Lefsetz on Kodak

The great Bob Lefsetz weighs in on #kodak ... always worth a read. lefsetz.com/wordpress/inde…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 9, 2012

Jerry Lieber R.I.P.

In a rare moment of star time - at least one that I don't feel silly bragging about - I had lunch with Jerry and his delightful wife. Corky Hale (a jazz harpist ... figure that out) at their house overlooking Hollywood, maybe in 1986.

It's one of the few recollections I have of the music business that gives me unqualified joy, and a sense of real privilege. It's not just about the songs, it's about the spirit of the man, which came through loud and clear while he and his wife entertained a goofy and ill-informed young English guy. Who won't ever forget it.

R.I.P. Dennis Hopper ... a great talent, a great survivor!

"Doghouse" ads for JC Penney 2008

From a couple of years ago ... perhaps the funniest long-form ad ever?

Also check out Return to the Doghouse ... absolute genius.

Unreleased Exile on Main St track with video

Remember when the music business was truly exciting? Exile reissue 17th May 2010 has obliged me to cough up £100 for the whole shebang ... vinyl, book, postcards, CD's and DVD ... and you know what? Feels like a bargain.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/mpd/permalink/m3LHHSYQZG7ZJ6

Martin Mills on surviving the Web ... and thriving

Always interesting to hear what Beggars are up to and - via Bob Lefsetz - I got to hear about this interview.

Let the man speak for himself ...