Virality and Teasing the Fat Kids.

One of the biggest dreams of the average brand is still going viral. This isn’t new, but it is getting more irritating.

We could blame Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, and the man responsible for the word Meme entering public consciousness - this is the genesis of the concept of the ‘viral idea’, a self propagating memetic life form that everyone seems to think is the key to making any brand relevant.

There’s a key issue with this, and I think it’s best clarified by getting people to actually look at the most prevalent type of meme online - the ‘image macro’ format first popularized by lolcats. The example I’m going to use, though, was created by an acquaintance of mine; it’s called Watch The Cradle.

And seriously, you should check it out.

This is the holy grail of memes, as far as I’m concerned. A quick rundown of why this works:

1) It’s instantly recognizable. The image macro format is prevalent enough that nearly anyone who would find it amusing has encountered it online already.
2) Getting it comes with a certain amount of cachet. To understand Watch the Cradle, you need to be familiar with internet jokes, and familiar enough with a popular hip hop record to know the lyrics being referenced.
3) It’s cute. There are babies, which make everything more pleasant, and changes the context pretty effectively.
4) It’s accessibly participatory. You don’t need to be particularly creative to participate, you just need to be familiar with the format, the music, and google image search.
5) You can share it with everyone around you, pointing out how clever you are, whether for finding / getting it, or for contributing.

In my mind, these five points are the big ones to hit to cross over into virality, with the big missing one being the intangible (that is to say, being so undeniably awesome that people NEED to share or participate).

The problem I mentioned earlier? The problem is that we can use these same points to explain why the fat kids get teased in grade school.

Everyone gets the joke. You getting to laugh means your aren’t one of the people who is the butt of the joke. It’s funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing. Anyone can join in, and in fact, you gain respect and power by joining. It happens in public, not in isolation.

What I’m trying to say is, brands need to aim higher. None of the attributes I’ve mentioned build positive associations about the subject matter.

You don’t want to be viral. You want to be the thing that is so culturally relevant, it inspires this low impact participation. That doesn’t happen by trying to go viral.

Awesome though it is, you don’t want to be the image macro that made me laugh so hard I spit coffee on my keyboard. You want to be the amazing record by two titans of the form.

Your objective should be to inspire participatory culture, and to exist in a form that facilitates it. Brands that mean something don’t create movements. They inspire them.

Scribbles.

I love it when a campaign takes the shape of a documentary.  When I see a commercial or video that is expanding on, explaining, or celebrating an action, rather than just an idea or an association, it tells me something meaningful about what a brand stands for.

My mother always told me that change and growth are shown, not told.

This doesn’t just mean campaigns focused on social responsibility, or the narrative of a specific spokesperson.  Show me what you do, and make me care about that.  What you do, not who you are or how you want to be interpreted.

The easiest narrative to create is one that is focused on practices, on actions, rather than on associations.  And in the current, authenticity-obsessed environment, an action-focused narrative confers a sense of honesty and ‘realness’ that is hard to achieve with even the most well-produced montage of sports heroes being victorious, or attractive young people looking cool.

Building People, not Brands.

[I’m reading Adland by James P Othmer on my staycation this week, before starting my new gig.  A comment on the impending death of brands and branding by Rick Webb that is quoted in the book got me thinking.]

I’m a very strong believer in badge theory, the idea that people make purchases, intentionally or subconsciously, to help establish cues to their identity.  Where I step away from some interpretations is in my assumption that you are seeing indications of, and purchases for, the persona a consumer wants to project, rather than some deeper, truer internal self.

I suppose I didn’t consider, until I read this quote, that looking at building a brand as a set of signifiers that people will want to incorporate into a projected identity might be doing it backwards.

[I’ll be spending the rest of this piece trying to make that last sentence clearer.]

I’m considering that it may be time to stop worrying about building brands, and to start worrying about building people.

Conversations about target markets and what appeals to them are standard.  What worries me is the next step is to focus on the people-on-paper in terms of what they will react to, and not who they want to be perceived as being.  Focusing on what brand people will react to is to be forever tying your brand to the actual consumer identity, the persona of research and proof, rather than the projected self, the person each of us is building to face the world.

[Despite an ongoing love-affair with authenticity, I’d argue most people just react well to ‘being true to yourself’, which is code for internal consistency and a predictable range of what you will, and will not do.  Stepping outside of that range, even if it is ‘authentic’, will be met with hostility.]

Imagine designing your messaging with a different process - your product positioning based on the person your research says is currently making up your customer base, and the person you think they would be willing to pay good money to be perceived as.  This isn’t cynical, any more than it was when a friend made a comment to me today about ‘Dressing for the job you want, not the one you have’.  People are obsessed with presenting themselves as they want to be, not as they are.

The complex part is, for many brands, this is seemingly interchangeable from what they currently do.  A BMW says you are a BMW person, and is most likely purchased because it makes a clear statement about your success, interest in quality, and restrained-but-still-obvious flashiness.

But in the endless world of niches that seems to be making up the future of business, targeting yourself carefully at the type of person a segment of your customers want to become, makes sense.

The problem is, it’s easy to put the cart before the horse, and try to build a brand that people will react to; this is what the vast majority of ‘ethical’ brands to - focus on what they mean, rather than what people will use them to indicate.

You mean precisely what people want you to say about them.  You’re building people, not brands.  Plan like it.

You are Talking, first and foremost.

All communication technology is augmented talking.  Written language is talking that can conquer time and distance, granting it range and longevity.  Printing press was the same, with the added benefit of speed.  Video, IM, Radio, all technologies that take talking, and give it the scale that one-to-one communication can never have.

But you knew that.

So why is the conversational aspect of social media such a big deal?  Because by the time communication strategy had wormed it’s way from an abstract concept into the DNA of the modern brand, there was so much technology in the way that the roots in talking were obscured.  The broadcast model - the basis of modern communication strategy since the industrial era - is hard to relate to talking, because in conquering the distance, speed and longevity limitations of talking, reactivity and intimacy were sacrificed.  No one looks at a TV and thinks immediately that ‘this is the spawn of conversation’.

It’s all augmented talking.  The difficult part is the urge to reinvent the wheel, when we all already know how to talk.  The magic comes when you realize that you don’t need to take modern corporate communications, and derive a way of talking from that.  The talking part has been figured out for centuries, and it’s faster to learn how to adapt the brand and comms strategy to that, than it is to develop a new way of talking that both fits into the existing biz structure, and doesn’t immediately alienate people.

It all started with talking.  So why should your communication strategy start any other way?

Quality is Insufficient.

Signal is noise, sad but true.  There is enough good content, enough good products, that merely being good, or merely being great, is insufficient to guarantee success.  Being excellent is a bare minimum, I would hope.

You also need to be visible, be interested, be remarkable (as in, worth remarking on) and be continually refreshing.

Don’t tell me that advertising, marketing, or PR are meaningless.  Because if that was the case, format wars would be won on quality, fashion would collapse on itself, and the modern concept of a luxury brand would be drastically different.

Meaning is a mixture of what is innate in a thing, and what is attributed to that thing, what qualities it is imbued with, whether due to the efforts of the brand, or the efforts of the public.

Pretending you don’t need to take an active role in building awareness, in making that meaning, indicates you’re still trapped in the ‘build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door’ mentality.

It doesn’t hold up so well when there is a nearly unlimited number of established pest control options out there, even if yours is vastly superior.

You aren’t Da Vinci.

everythingismedia:

attentionindustry:

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Very few people are Da Vinci, very few people have the ability to excel in many different areas.  But the assumption that you HAVE to be Da Vinci causes some serious problems.

If you’re crap with numbers, you wouldn’t do your own accounting.  It would be idiotic to do so.  Similarly, If you are a world class painter, you would probably want to hire someone of similar skill to frame your work.

This is my issue with people who insist that consultants are often useless, because they can’t ‘do it themselves’.  I’d rather work with someone who has an expertise in a specific element of my business that I don’t, than assume that because they can’t paint, I should ignore their framing expertise.

Just because you make the best furniture in the world, doesn’t mean you can sell it to people in an effective way.  If you have a great internal marketing team repping a strong product line, that doesn’t necessarily make them a team that specializes in influencer relations, or social media outreach, or a specific demographic or community.

If you use consultants as a security blanket, or to protect yourself from the realization that what you are doing or selling isn’t sufficient, that’s a problem.  But if you refuse to bring in an expert frame maker because they can’t paint, you’ve missed the point entirely.

I have no idea if your post is a result of my post on awesomeness. But for the sake of the discussion I will assume it was.

This argument doesn’t make sense to me. There is a difference between hiring someone to do your accounting and hiring someone to do your thinking. Talking about “awesomeness” like Umair does will not help your business in any way.  In order to truly understand something you need to do it — that is how you get insight. Not by observing the news and reading blog posts. You do it by talking to customers, by solving problems, trial and error. And you may not be become Da Vinci but chances are you will find problems that you can solve, and these problems get more complicated and rewarding as you go along.

I agree that hiring someone to do your thinking is a problem.  But hiring someone to share expertise and help strategize about a specific aspect of your business is entirely different.  I guess I have trouble conceiving of consultants as people who come in, talk about vague, undefinable concepts, and leave.  I generally call those people a waste of time.  Consultants, on the other hand, are usually asked to make recommendations.

My main point was that consultants don’t come in without insight in what they are consulting on.  My argument is that to help a painting look good in a frame, you need insight in framing, not necessarily insight in painting.  My point is that these people, if they are at all useful, have experience in doing - in executing and strategizing certain tasks or groups of tasks, rather than in the core business of the firm that is hiring them at the moment.

You aren’t Da Vinci.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Very few people are Da Vinci, very few people have the ability to excel in many different areas.  But the assumption that you HAVE to be Da Vinci causes some serious problems.

If you’re crap with numbers, you wouldn’t do your own accounting.  It would be idiotic to do so.  Similarly, If you are a world class painter, you would probably want to hire someone of similar skill to frame your work.

This is my issue with people who insist that consultants are often useless, because they can’t ‘do it themselves’.  I’d rather work with someone who has an expertise in a specific element of my business that I don’t, than assume that because they can’t paint, I should ignore their framing expertise.

Just because you make the best furniture in the world, doesn’t mean you can sell it to people in an effective way.  If you have a great internal marketing team repping a strong product line, that doesn’t necessarily make them a team that specializes in influencer relations, or social media outreach, or a specific demographic or community.

If you use consultants as a security blanket, or to protect yourself from the realization that what you are doing or selling isn’t sufficient, that’s a problem.  But if you refuse to bring in an expert frame maker because they can’t paint, you’ve missed the point entirely.