If any ad has been dissected and talked about more the past year than this ad, I’d like to know what it is. Much has been written about Crispin landing the unenviable yet so intriguing task of rebranding Microsoft, and after the Microsoft Mojave campaign, what you see above is finally the first TV-spot.

The casting of Jerry Seinfeld seems very un-Crispin when you first think about it. Hiring a superstar, and a fading one at that (like Antti said in this Jaiku thread “Jerry belongs to the 90s”) seems like a go-to move from the mind-share branding playbook. But while Seinfed (both persona and TV-show character) is not as current or “hip”, he still packs a lot of cultural meaning. Also, how they’ve scripted the ad and treated Jerry as a character is what makes the choice intriguing.

Grant McCracken had a fairly comprehensive rundown of the ad and its meaning. Small excerpt:

The meaning mechanics of the ad are wonderful: Jerry’s shoes squeak like a cartoon character. A store called Shoe Circus. A family gathered outside the store window in solemn and learned reverence for shoes within. The meaningful glance between Jerry and Bill that makes no sense. Seinfeld’s lunatic advice that Bill try wearing his clothes in the shower. The starring role give churros. The idea that anyone would want to earn points in a store like this, especially when the card calls them a “shoe circus clown club member.” The idea that computers could ever be “moist,” “chewy,” and edible. The idea that Jerry suspected this “all along.”

As far as contemporary advertising goes, this ad is indeed rich with nuances and meanings (I’m especially intrigued by the meaningful glance and the knowing smile Jerry and Bill share) that speak to you more than a traditional ad would. I wrote in my master’s thesis that as people’s media-savviness grows, it opens new opportunities for storytelling because people understand the medium better and you don’t need to be so explicit in your selling. However, this media-savviness (combined with market saturation and clutter) also makes people more resentful of ads that they feel are too pushy, “selling” and simply insulting of their intelligence as consumers. And given that the brand in question is Microsoft, the pushiest and most profiteering brand in its industry, I can definitely see why Crispin went for a more “un-selling” approach.

I wrote in the comments of Grant’s post that I think they will be going back to the “run tight” phrase they threw around a few times in the ad. First when Jerry said it, and when the hispanics outside the shop said it. This might be just a clever and indirect way of introducing the new benefit or value proposition. It’ll be interesting to see if/how they revisit the phrase in future spots. I think these ad spots are not meant to be examined individually, they work as one long commercial, sort of how the Cloverfield ad campaign was all part of the experience, almost like a treasure hunt. I guess some parallels to “Lost” work here, too. Like somebody posted in the comments on Grant’s blog, it’s too early to tell if this is a good campaign or not.

But I’m definitely a fan, if not for the sheer volume of discussion the ad has generated.

UPDATE: Here is the second spot, the longer version.

Steve Jobs clearly is worthy of Apple. When he comes on stage at any of Apple’s major conferences and does that little dance of his, within minutes he has the brand fanatics eating out of his hand. He could (and often will) take the brand into many different directions, because of his credibility as the brand’s number 1 spokesman. Steve Jobs can present many changes to the brand and be sure that people will at least listen to what he has to say. Other brands aren’t so lucky.

The guys at Flickr, apparently, are not worthy of their brand. They decided to add video features to the famous photo sharing site, and the heavy users and the fanatics didn’t like it and are up in arms about it. I’m a bit torn on the development myself. I understand the rationale behind both the company and the people opposing the move, but that’s not what this post is about.

When people are really fanatical about a brand, they will seek to take ownership of it. They see themselves as the only “worthy” chroniclers of the brand and its meaning. That’s why it’s sometimes so hard for prominent and popular brands to be managed: the insiders and fanatics are resistant to change (as people usually are by nature), and in this new and connected consumer economy the fanatics can group up and voice their opinions given their lack of geographic restraints. This is why it’s so important to have your brand’s management “on brand” (I hate that expression but can’t think of a better one): to avoid the brand’s control slipping away from the brand’s management.

Changes to the brand are inevitable. The consumers’ acceptance of these changes, however, is not. Some people even feel that in this new economy brand managers can’t control their brands at all anymore and they should just embrace this and let the consumers sit in the brand’s driver’s seat. Echoing this notion, in the book “Authenticity” it was argued that the more consumer-driven a brand feels, the more authentic it is perceived to be. So simply handing the keys to the brand to the customers looks like a tempting idea, but I still think it’s not the best way to approach the problem.

A company controlling its brands’ destinies is still possible, but the rules for brand management have changed, and brand managers have much less room to maneuver now. Brand managers have to convey a profound understanding as to what the brand is about (more than its mission statement and brand guidelines etc.) and show a charismatic voice and a vision that people will at least be willing to hear out. Otherwise the consumers will assume control of the brand entirely and steer the brand towards a more rigid and eventually doomed path.

Because we all know how committees work as decision makers.

I’ve been reading Joseph Pine’s and James Gilmore’s “Authenticity”, which was published to much fanfare last year. I’m in the very beginning, and I doubt that I will read it cover to cover any time soon as I’m now basically picking stuff from it for my thesis. But so far it seems like a very good read and a worthy heir to their previous book, “The Experience Economy”.

One thing got me thinking, though. In the beginning of the book they outline that consumers have 4 “dominant sensibilities” when it comes to products:

1. Availability
2. Cost
3. Quality
4. Authenticity

Also, the authors state that we now live in a world of “abundance over scarcity”, meaning that we have more choice in product categories than ever before. Also, through services like Amazon, eBay and price comparing search engines availability has become democratized. Everything is available, anywhere in the world. This of course puts pressure on price, but I guess the main price driver has been copycat brands (and especially in groceries, retail brands and the like). Quality is also pretty much democratized, as lean and supplier-based organizations can deliver equal or comparable quality.

So it seems like items 1-3 have been sort of taken care of for the consumer. So what about number 4? Why are consumers craving for authenticity? The trend of chastising people who buy, for example, fake Louis Vuitton bags in places like Thailand is increasing. People want the real deal, even if it costs them more. Why?

Because if you could get a Mac for a lower price, with similar quality, and obtain it easily, where’s the identity value? Where’s the bragging rights? Consumers are creating scarcity by labeling products and brands in ways that other brands can’t simply can’t copy. They are creating stories around products that make them valuable to show off to their friends. In a way, consumers have rushed to defend the brands they use to express themselves with, which I think is fascinating and very counter-intuitive to the current anti-marketing atmosphere.

That’s why a Mac is still a Mac, and you wouldn’t even DREAM of showing a cheap knock-off.

PS. I don’t know if Pine & Gilmore touch on this idea of consumers creating scarcity to re-attain the identity value of their brands, but it was just the first idea that came to mind when I started reading the book.fucking tight pussy and tits
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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.