Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I created a draft for this post over a week ago but I thought I’d wait a while to wait for enough second hand opinions to emerge on Martin Lindstrom’s new book Buyology (link to Neuromarketing.com’s take on the book) before I’d post my impression on it. I haven’t read the book (I might in the future) and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving my opinion on it just based on a few reviews and the book’s sleeve text. But it’s been featured in Neuromarketing enough times that I think I know what the book is about and what its main strengths and weaknesses are. Here’s a consolidated list of reviews on it

The book seems to be getting mixed reviews: academics dismiss it and criticize it (I’d guess a bit unfairly too, since Lindstrom himself is not an academic but a, gasp, popular writer), magazines and blogs handle it with more praise and they seem to be buying into the hype. It has always been my impression that Lindstrom is a very good salesman (hell, you have to be if you get to promote your book on the Today Show), in that he knows the topic du jour and is not ashamed to ride the wave: in early 2000 he was hyping sensorial branding (his book “Brand SENSE” is bible of sorts for many advocates of Emotional Branding) and now he has turned his attention to neuromarketing, which some see as the next Holy Grail of marketing. So in short, it seems like one of those books that create a lot of buzz but eventually fail to make a lasting impact or change the field of marketing. We’ll see how my prediction fares in the long run.

But back to why wanted to write about Buyology in the first place. When the book came out, this was the first paragraph from Lindstrom’s newsletter:

It is probably one of the most controversial scientific findings of 2008. In his $7 million neuroscience-based research study, Lindstrom has spent over four years peering into the minds of 2,000 consumers across five countries to discover if there’s a parallel between brands and religion. Without disclosing too much (the findings will be published on October 20th), we can reveal that brands indeed activate the same areas in the brain as religion. By analyzing brands like Harley Davidson, Apple, Guinness and hundreds of other commercial icons, Lindstrom discovered that we are hardwired to believe in some brands. Lindstrom went further, interviewing religious leaders from across faiths and cultures. He discovered that the ingredients that create powerful religions may also be invaluable for branding of the future.

I can’t see how this is news to anybody who has been studying marketing beyond reading a few books by Seth Godin. Branding has become more and more about managing meaning, and religion is to a lot of people the ultimate path of seeking meaning, so it’s not hard to see parallels between the two. Jesus Christ is as much a cultural icon as is a bottle of Coke or a Harley Davidson. Also, people have valued the same kind of behavior in brands and religion: purity of intentions and non-profiteering motifs.

I’ve posted this link before, but Douglas Holt’s “Why do brands cause trouble?” (PDF) is an absolute must read for any marketer. In it, Holt outlines the historical change that has undertaken the world of branding from “cultural engineering” (from a time when people actually trusted brands somewhat) to the post postmodern paradigm where the best brands get a strong following by appearing “disinterested” in making money, and are more mission and meaning driven. In later works Holt has detailed what kind of missions and meanings are appealing to people through brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple etc. (like Lindstrom did above), and I’ve blogged about the subject here many times, but let’s not get into that. As for religion, it’s fairly obvious that the same kind of criticism that brands receive about profiteering and purity of intentions would be devastating to any church. For example, the church of Scientology is vilified for being nothing more than a money-making scheme, and people oppose it with a passion. People have a need to believe in something, but people also absolutely love to expose somebody as a false prophet. Hey, doesn’t the word “sellout” actually originate from what Judas did to Jesus (anyone care to fact check)?

I think by claiming this revelation of brands being similar to religion to be so “shocking”, Lindstrom had failed to do what I wrote in my previous post that brand thinkers need to drill deeper to uncover the “why” of a phenomenon. If Lindstrom had drilled deeper, he would have realized that brands and religion both are about meaning, and the similarities in neurology they create shouldn’t have come as a shock (a cynic might argue that this “shock” is feigned to create interest in the book). Of course, I’m not arguing that brands can be as strong as religious movements (and I doubt that Lindstrom isn’t arguing either), but I do think that brands and religion fit on the same scale (along with other cultural products, such as books and films) where religion sits a the top and everything else comes after it.

I’ve been trying to come up with a metaphor or explanation as to why meaning management and cultural branding are relevant and (in my opinion) the only ways to approach branding and why I’m interested in the field. I think I finally got the right metaphor.

The car manufacturer Toyota has a somewhat famous problem solving process called the “Five whys” that is heavily tied to their design principles. Sakichi Toyoda came up with the concept, and Toyota uses the “Five Whys” in their training extensively. The basic idea is that you drill down the problem until you are at the heart of it. Ask “why” enough times and you will find the real problem or the real reason for a phenomenon:

My car will not start. (the problem)
1. Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
2. Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
3. Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
4. Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)
5. Why? – I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, root cause)

And here’s where we come to metaphor relating to branding. I’ll use Apple as an example.

People like Apple’s products

1. Why? – Because Apple’s products are cool.
2. Why are the products cool? – Because cool people use them, and I want to be associated with them.
3. Why are these people cool? – Because these people work in the creative industries, or at least portray that sort of ethos or behavior. Apple is the brand of choice for creative industries.
4. Why is working in the creative industries cool? – Because being creative in one’s job is something that people aspire to.
5. Why do people want to be creative at their jobs? – Because changes in the workplace through the layoff-laden 90s, cost-cutting, and the ensuing slacker-age left a lot of people (especially young people) disillusioned with the corporate world and this created a huge cultural demand for achievement in the workplace that was not tied to working in large corporations or “moving up the ranks”. This is where the creative industries with their low hierarchies, limited structuring and discipline but still high sense of achievement became in vogue, call it the “bohemian bourgeois” dream.

Bad marketers know that Apple is “cool” and will just try to leech off its cultural value without knowing any of the meanings or understanding populist worlds that Apple occupies. Somewhat capable marketers will at least understand the socio-demographic field that Apple occupies (they might even know the word “hipster”) and not totally embarrass themselves when trying to leverage Apple’s cultural value. But they are far from “culturally aware” brand thinkers. I’d say that a large number of advertising professionals in most agencies fall into this category (“why number 3″, or number 4, if they’re lucky), meaning that they understand how to handle a brand and position it within a target audience, but they don’t understand the cultural value of a brand and can forecast its relevance or track its historical arc, nor can they make a distinction between a target audience and a populist world. This is why so many once-successful campaigns suddenly lose their steam. It’s not because the campaign or the idea is bad or badly executed, it has become culturally irrelevant, even culturally harmful.

I’m not saying that I’m a “why #5″ type of brander (yet, at least) myself, I’m just saying that this is brand thinkers should be aiming for. The two only “why #5″ branders I can think of are Grant McCracken and Douglas Holt. I’m sure there are others, especially ones that unknowingly or intuitively manage to always navigate brands to the right cultural field. For example, read McCracken’s take on the “I’m a PC” campaign, it seems that Mr. Bogusky and his gang are that kind of agency that have a feel for culture. I’ve blogged about Crispin’s Microsoft work before.

I was going to blog about this sooner, but I sort of gave up on the idea because A) the idea wasn’t mine, and I wanted to be original, and B) the hype behind Wall-E had sort of died down. But today I got an excuse to revisit the topic via Apple’s launch of two new laptop computers.

Teemu pointed out to me what he had noticed, that Apple had a considerable presence in Wall-E, Pixar’s latest masterpiece. Wall-E even boots up with the similar sound that a Mac does, which was very tongue in cheek. This is of course partially due to the fact that Steve Jobs used to work at Pixar, and the two companies enjoy a very close relationship even today. But what Teemu had noticed, that Apple’s presence in Wall-E had elements of meaning management in it. He suggested that I blog about it, because this subject is kinda up my alley. Needless to say, I was gutted that I hadn’t noticed it myself. But Teemu’s right, there’s a lot of meaning Apple is trying to mine in Wall-E.

I won’t go into detail about the movie’s plot, but let’s just say it’s heavily centered on green values, in a rather pessimistic way. Of course, Apple or Macintosh is never mentioned directly in the movie, but Apple’s presence is more about the small things: Apple’s familiar design language in Eve, the other robot, using the Apple chime when Wall-E boots up. But what I thought was the most obvious, and most meaningful thing about Apple, was this:

In the photo you will see that green leaf in Eve’s, uh, body. That leaf was blinking as Eve had gone in to sleep mode of sorts. The blinking was identical to how a Mac’s LED flashes in sleep mode, so it couldn’t have been a coincidence. But what I think is even less of a coincidence, is the green leaf in it. Apple has caught a lot of flack for the environmental unfriendliness of their products. Greenpeace had their prominent Green my Apple campaign. Apple has also scored low marks in Greenpeace’s guide to green electronics (guess which company ranks #1?), so they have had their work cut out for them.

I thought the subtly done meaning management in Wall-E could have been seen as a sign that Apple is aiming for a new, greener strategy. A cynic might say that everybody is these days, but the the launch of the new Macbook today showed that the company is taking green very seriously. Watch the presentation video, and you’ll see how much effort and emphasis they’ve put on the green aspects of the computer. It’s quite a huge step.

But all in all, was the meaning management effective? Or was it even intentional, or at least planned on a high level? Or was it just a gag that the guys at Pixar had done, to show their affection to Apple? We won’t know unless somebody comes forth and says it. But for now it’s a very clever way of doing brand placement in a movie. Using only the design elements of Apple products and not the company logo would make Martin Lindstrom proud.

UPDATE: Treehugger says that the new Mac is indeed very, very green (via PSFK). Great news. I think Apple really understands the concerns of their core demographic: they tend to be left leaning, young and urban, and not being a green company is against what Apple stands for, in terms of lifestyle.

But in other news, Wired reports that analysts say that the new Macbooks are too pricy to compete. The analysts cite the downturn in the economy is the main driver. I sort of disagree. Are they going to feel a pinch in sales? Sure. But I doubt that slashing prices was going to help their bottom line anyway, especially for an iconic brand like Apple.