HENRI WEIJO*
Just had to post this video from YouTube. It’s the intro from Lakai’s new movie “Fully Flared”.
It’s pretty darn awesome. And it’s spreading like crazy virally. It’s something even non-skateboarders will want to watch. And send on to their friends, some of whom likely are skateboarders. Or at least people willing to buy the video.
Red Bull just introduced (at least here) a new bigger can to complement its litter sister:
From a logistical/production perspective, I’m sure this move makes sense. A bigger can always gets you more scale benefits (well, not indefinitely, the cans need to stack as well) and offers the customers more variety, which can sometimes boost sales.
But still, I can’t help but think that this is a bad marketing move. Red Bull’s small size has a lot of meaning latched to it. I always thought the smaller can made people understand what it was but also what it definitely was not: soda. Because the can was smaller than a normal soda can, it meant that it’s more “potent”, in a way that you shouldn’t be drinking more than 0.25l at a time. Of course people WOULD drink more, but that was the whole idea. Also, the unique shape and size of the can made it stand out: it was a purple cow in the beverage shelf, especially compared to a lot of other energy drinks. Now they have a new bigger can on the shelf, which basically says that “sure, you can drink as much of this stuff as soda”. Also, the new can is big enough that it’s not remarkable anymore.
It’s similar to when Volkswagen tried to boost sagging Beetle sales by introducing the bigger Super Beetle (besides, I HAD to work some Cultural Branding linkage here!). The whole charm behind the Beetle was that it was small, and un-car-like. Making it bigger wasn’t the answer. I doubt the same is the answer for Red Bull.
I recently bought Robert Reich’s book “Supercapitalism”, which has been getting a lot of media coverage lately. Reich is a former minister from Clinton’s cabinet with some pretty interesting things to say. I haven’t read the book yet (have to get the thesis out of the way first), but this review by Lawrence Lessig made my buy the book from Amazon. From Lessig’s review:
As I said there, we need to understand the nature of the corporation — to make money — and come to love it, and yet, to keep it in its proper place, just as you can love a tiger, but know that it’s not the sort of thing that should play with your kid. [...] Corporations are not more efficient governments. They are instead increasingly efficient money making machines. And while there’s nothing at all wrong with money making machines — indeed, wealth and growth depends upon them — there is something fundamentally wrong with trusting these machines to restrain the drive for profits in the name of doing the right thing. The cushion that enabled that in the past (relatively limited competition) is gone. The job of GM is even more now to make money for GM.
I’ve been thinking about this lately. It is indeed true that a corporation’s sole purpose is to generate maximum profit, but is this really in contradiction with doing “the right thing”? As Holt argues in “How Brands Become Icons” (and his academic articles), brands that manage to make themselves into being “more than about making money”, i.e. being about some higher cause or mission, are the ones that become iconic. In other words, the most successful brands (and most likely most profitable) are the ones who … don’t aim to maximize profits – at least in the short term. Google is a good example; they’ve done a good job of managing their “do no evil” image (although the murmurs are getting louder every day) by investing billions in environmental initiatives and by creating an organizational culture that fosters innovation and playfulness by allowing initiatives that on the surface seem crazy and downright wasteful (Google Copernicus, anyone?) Apple has resisted short term profiteering by keeping their product line relatively narrow and I think that as a company they really are about something else than maximizing profits, call it “Think Different” if you will. Both Google and Apple enjoy extremely high stock prices at least partially because of their way of doing things.
This makes for an interesting situation. I think Reich is absolutely right in saying that we shouldn’t expect for brands to do the right thing, but in my opinion brands do better when they actively resist maximizing profits – especially in the long term. Of course, this only applies to identity and consumer brands, I don’t see how ExxonMobile would do any better than their current obscene profit margins by doing the right thing.
I don’t think it’s that big of a secret anymore that presidential candidates in the United States (and over here in Europe, too) are managed almost as closely as some major corporate brands, probably even more so. All the top candidates have numerous aides and political strategists who constantly monitor voter reactions and manage their candidates accordingly. Sometimes it works (like with Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Clinton before him), sometimes it backfires (Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004), but it’s something that all serious candidates have to partake in.
Hillary Clinton is probably the most “managed” candidate of the presidential hopefuls still in the running. She has had a mountain to climb in selling herself as a serious candidate with an agenda, and not just being “Bill’s wife”, and she has done so quite successfully. But the thing is, I think her brand management may be going a bit too far, in that it’s starting to put voters off because she is so obviously playing to the crowd. For instance, take this video from the Daily Show:
Douglas Holt has an absolutely brilliant article called “Why do brands cause trouble?”, which sheds some light on the current anti-brand movement (such as Adbusters and why Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” was such a huge hit). Holt argues that brands and marketers in general are in a sort of arms race with consumers. As time passes, consumers become more media-savvy when it comes to marketers’ marketing efforts. The natural consequence is of course that once people realize HOW the marketers are trying to convince them of their products’ superiority, they become more immune to the tactics and eventually start to resent these marketing tactics and companies that engage in them. Or put it this way: once one politician goes for the baby-kissing gag, it will lose its effect each time it’s done over and eventually be resented as an obvious ploy for votes. For example, saturation of old marketing tactics, such as TV and magazine advertising, has lead to the rise of guerrilla marketing and other unconventional media. These media face, of course, a similar fate as TV and magazines as they become more saturated with competition and people become more conscious and simply bored of these tactics. One of the key findings of Holt is that consumers have become very anti-corporate as a result, which I will come back to later.
I think a similar phenomenon is happening in presidential branding. As the Daily Show clip illustrates, people and members of the media are very much aware that Hillary was essentially told by her strategists that she needs to laugh more because she’s considered too serious. Hillary’s not the only one, of course, (I saw a similar clip of Rudy Guliani) but as she was the Democrat front runner up until last week she probably held under closer scrutiny. It goes without saying that all these exposés on presidential candidates’ branding tactics reflect negatively on the candidates, because it makes them seem calculative, inauthentic and power-hungry. Which brings me to my point as to why I think Barack Obama has played his cards right up to now and why his surge in the polls could be due to his campaigning that reads like a good example of Cultural Branding.
As points out in his Cultural Branding theory, iconic brands originate from “populist worlds”, worlds removed from the cultural, political and commercial elite, which gives them considerable credibility and authenticity. If people on the “outskirts of society” accept a brand as a part of their ethos, the brand will seem authentic for the normal consumer as well (think Hell’s Angels and their relationship with Harley Davidson or punk rockers and Converse shoes in the late 70s’). I think Barack Obama qualifies here. His rise to political superstardom started from his great speech in 2004 after John Kerry’s loss, he was sort of “swooped up” into the presidential race, sort of like how a brand can be “discovered” and championed by influential users. He’s also relatively unknown as a freshman politician, where as Hillary is a Capitol Hill fixture and in many ways synonymous with politics. Obama may not be ideal in his populist world credibility, but he’s certainly better than anybody out there thanks to his “untaintedness”.
Another key aspect of Cultural Branding is that a brand needs to convey a sense of “purpose” other than the obvious of making money to retain their iconic status. This relates heavily to the anti-corporate attitude I mentioned earlier. People love to attack big brands (sometimes unfairly) when they engage in activity that they deem not supporting the brand’s “ideal” or even profiteering. Similarly, I think that a presidential candidate needs to show that he/she is in the presidential race not only because of some selfish, power-hungry motif. Vanity Fair had a great piece on the media’s perception on Al Gore in the 2000 election, in which the writer, Evgenia Peretz, argues that Gore lost in part because he looked like…
“[a] wonk so desperate to become president he’ll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician [Bush] running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.”
Similar rethoric can be found in this election, regarding Hillary Clinton, from Obama himself:
Sensing what he calls the “fierce urgency of now†– a line borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr – Mr Obama contrasts his motivation to be president with that of his nameless rival. “I am not running for president because I believe it is somehow owed to me or because I think it’s my turn,†Mr Obama says. “[I am running because] I believe we are on the cusp of building a new majority in America.†The applause spills over into whoops of enthusiasm.
I think that most political strategists have failed to see that because of their overtly image-obsessive tactics have been exposed, much like advertising tactics of old, people are more likely to ignore them and react negatively to them. It’s a time for authenticity and “underdogs” who speak in a rebel’s voice, as Holt puts it. Barack Obama has managed to avoid the lens of pundits like Jon Stewart for now, but as he’s become the clear front runner, he’s bound to be scrutinized more and he’s also bound to lose some of his challenger appeal. But to me it feel that Obama’s team has been micromanaging him less, unlike Hillary’s team, which makes him more authentic, and as it seems, more iconic.
I’ve been sort of searching for what this blog is “about”, but lately I’ve started to realize which areas interest me the most and in which areas I feel I can contribute the most. I feel that a blog needs to be about something, not just random ramblings on any given subject. I’ve been searching my voice, but I think I’m moving in the right direction now.
As some of my readers (a total of three, no doubt) might know, I’m doing my master’s thesis in modern branding strategies. Of these, what speaks to me the most is Cultural Branding, which is championed by Douglas Holt. Cultural Branding is about creating iconic brands through myths that “solve” societal anxieties and speak to people’s most inner needs of belonging and self-identity. Cultural Branding is about managing brands as cultural objects that convey meaning in time. Brands are very much a part of our culture and vessels of our zeitgeist, very much like books and movies are. A coke bottle from the 1950s has a lot of cultural meaning attached to it, just like a VW Beetle from the 1960s, just to mention a few examples.
Cultural Branding calls for brand managers to become cultural anthropologists: looking for anxieties that stress people in their everyday lives and searching for tears in society that need repairing. To me, this means looking for the human elements that speak to people in new products, marketing campaigns and cultural phenomena. And this is what my blog is mostly going to be about. I’m trying to become more active in analyzing big cultural trends that surround us and advancement in new tech and social media, and look for that elusive “human factor” that makes or breaks the appeal.
I also fiddled with the layout a bit, which I freely admit sucked before. I’m still looking for that perfect banner image and making small corrections here and there. So it’s a work in progress…
BTW, I’m gutted that I forgot to include this link by ReadWriteWeb on hyperlocal information. It’s a good read, check it out.
I went to Open Coffee here in Helsinki today. It was nice to sit down with a bunch of people you don’t know and talk shop. One of the topics that was brought was this trend of presence sensitivity in mobile phones. The idea is that your phone offers you information based on where you are, either via GPS, cell tower triangulation or even Bluetooth. Wired had a so-so article about hyperlocality a while ago that offers a rundown on how the future might shape.
There are some pretty cool trends in this field, for example Wi-Fi coming to cameras and other gadgets via cheap memory cards and of course Nokia is making moves towards this field with their acquisition of Naviteq. Also, geotagging seems to be working on Nokia phones now (got the link from Ville), so look for more from Finland’s big blue in this field.
I have no doubt that hyperlocal information is very much in our immediate future, but what I’m not so sure about is we’re going to act in this future once we get there. The Wired article to me reads as a typical techie’s wet dream where the human factors of such technologies are completely ignored. Most scenarios about hyperlocal information describe people wandering around cities while constantly being delighted by a nonstop push of information on restaurants or shops through their mobile phones. While I think some people might even enjoy this in some instances, I think traveling is about discovery and searching for unique experiences.
Brandchannel had an excellent article on the upcoming trend of exclusivity in social networks, which is well worth a read. Those of us who’ve been on Facebook longer than three months probably agree with the notion that once the gold rush to the site started, the place just hasn’t been the same anymore. You get invites to the dumbest of causes or applications (trust me, I’m guilty of sending out a few!) from friends and now most of them get the “ignore” reaction immediately. Sami N described that “Facebook apps are in general the 21st century equivalent of direct mail”, which I think is very accurate. I read a study for my thesis called “Dynamics of Viral Marketing” (which I can’t link here, sorry) that shows how rapidly word-of-mouth loses its effectiviness once the network becomes too active in its recommendations and if the network is not “tight” enough, meaning the connections between its participants are not meaningful enough. It’s a scary thought, if word-of-mouth goes, what’s left for marketers? Walling your social networks and getting to pick your friends are gonna be key in the future, or at least getting to organize your friends into different clusters with different access.
So how does this relate to hyperlocality? Well, unless the suggestions you get from your mobile phone display some sort of exclusivity, I think they are going to be ignored. I mean who wants to “discover” a shop that has been discovered by pretty much everyone? People don’t come home from New York and rave about their visit to Macy’s, it’s about the small boutiques in Brooklyn and the like. Some people might make a point of it to check if a café or small shop is NOT geotagged before patronizing them. So unless companies like Nokia manage to build some sort of exclusivity to the hyperlocal recommendations you get, I think their potential will not be fulfilled.
As Ville so eloquently put it in tonight’s Open Coffee, in the future people are going to be willing to pay for NOT being connected. If hyperlocality and social networks in general are driven by technology instead of human behavior, I’m afraid that his need for disconnectedness will hit us faster than we might think.
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