Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

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.

Somebody at Stealthunit posted a thing called the Garfield Randomizer. Here’s a short explanation as to what it is:

..so this guy noticed that Garfield comics make just as much sense if you throw random panels together, and sometimes are actually pretty funny. He got a cease and desist letter. So he made the code available for people who wanted to try it for themselves. Here we go!

It’s addictive and a lot of fun. For example, here’s one that I cooked up in just a few minutes:

Not that good, but it shows the potential of this thing. Garfield comics ARE surprisingly modular, and it doesn’t take long to cook up a funny and sensible strip.

So what has this got to do with crowdsourcing? For one, the Garfield Randomizer is a great and fun tool for people to play with and express themselves. It’s incredibly viral. Hell, I’ve sent the link to a number of friends already and together we made a bunch of pretty darn funny comics (some of which were raunchy, I’ll freely admit). If I were Garfield’s publisher, instead of sending a cease and desist letter I would take the Garfield Randomizer right away and put it up somewhere and have people create their own comics – and share them! Imagine, a voting and commenting system for the best strips which could eventually be gathered into a book which people could buy. And the thing is, if the publisher were in control of this randomizer, they could offer links to the original strips from which the individual tiles were taken, and from there offer people the opportunity to order the original comic book on Amazon, for example. And let’s be honest, if they take this one down it’ll pop up again somewhere anyway, so might as well join the fun and get some additional benefits from it.

I thought I’d add my thoughts on this. The debate around the study of NBA referees and racial bias still hasn’t died down. The NBA has been in full propaganda mode since the study was reported in the New York Times a week or so ago.

In short, two grad students compiled box score data from 1991 all the way till 2004 and crunched the numbers. They found that white referees called fouls on black players at a higher rate, and vice versa (although the disparity was smaller with black referees). Naturally, it caused a major ruckus and cries of racism.

The NBA promptly slammed the study claiming it was “junk science” (conveniently forgetting that the study had gone through proper academic scrutiny and was peer approved). NBA personnel and even some players attacked that study with Bulls forwards P.J. Brown saying it’s just a case of “somebody having too much time on their hands”. The NBA then released their own “study” that used a smaller sample size and when reviewed by experts was found “incomprehensible”. Just yesterday, by sheer coincidence, ANOTHER study was released that praised the NBA for incorporating minorities in VP positions, showing that the NBA PR department has been working overtime these past few days.

The Times has been on the defensive as of late, but has stood by the grad students and the integrity of the study. The guys at Freakonomics agreed that the study is properly done and the science is sound. Other experts have lined up to defend the study as well, a major inconvenience for the NBA.

As you might expect, everybody has an opinion on this, but relatively few have actually taken a look at the results of the study to see if the findings warrant any reaction or not. ESPN’s John Hollinger was one of the only experts to actually take a look at the study (Insider subscription required, sorry) and evaluate it. He had this to say:

But the bigger point that everyone is missing is that, in fact, this study showed remarkably little bias as well. Maybe I’m a cynic here, but I had expected there would be some level of bias by both black and white officials — refs are human too, after all, and when they step on the court they unwittingly bring their life experiences and values with them.

Yet the affect is almost totally insignificant. The study reports that a black player will rack up an added 0.16 fouls per 48 minutes with an all-white officiating crew, as compared to an all-black one.

0.16 fouls more per 48 minutes.

That’s one extra foul every six games, not an awful lot. The odds of that “racist” foul occurring in a critical junction of the game is basically irrelevant, I’d say an individual player’s reputation has 99% more relevance on whether a foul is called or not. As Hollinger puts it, I think the referees do almost exceptionally well when you put things in perspective.

If you’ve read “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell you’d find that the referees are almost borderline phenomenal in hiding their racial bias. Basketball is a fast paced game, probably the hardest game to officiate because the rules are so strict compared to the speed of the game. For the referees, this means a lot of “snap judgments”, as Gladwell calls them. And with snap judgments, your subconsciousness takes over. Even if you are by nature “not racist”, your subconscious mind will start tapping into racial stereotypes and experiences. For a white NBA referee it means that in a split second your sub-conscious mind asks your brain “QUICK! WHOM DO YOU RESEMBLE MORE: PAT BURKE OR RASHEED WALLACE?” Don’t believe me (or Gladwell, for that matter)? Take the IAT test and see how well you’ll be able to cheat your subconsciousness.

I’m really surprised that Blink hasn’t been brought up more when this topic has been discussed. I think the study validates much of Blink’s findings and actually puts the referees in a good light compared to the rest of us. I guess it goes to show you how sensitive a topic racism is in America.

It’s kinda sad that the aftermath of the study revealed more about race relations in America than the study itself.