The only important question:

How does this fit into someone’s life?

Whether you’re creating a product, or a service, or a marketing message to encourage people to acquire a product or service, your only question is: how does this fit into someone’s life.

For the product, this is use case / product market fit / the core of the concept. And too often, the answer is ‘because it’s awesome’ or ‘because it’s sexy’ or ‘because it says something about your identity’. These are answers, but not good ones.

For marketing, I don’t see a future in telling people how the product will fit into their lives. It’s important to do so, but that’s not what is going to, at core, drive people to make a decision that they wouldn’t have already made. Good marketing is going to need to have it’s own answer to the question, and provide value (entertainment, informational, personal, or social) independent of the product itself.

Awareness is a side effect of generating real value. If marketing is aimed at aiding awareness and translating it into intent, marketing will need to create it’s own value, not just hype and weak association.

The worst answer to ‘how does this fit into someone’s life?’ is using marketing to try to create a use case. And for most of recent history, this is what marketing has done. Whether it’s associating a car with masculinity, or a Mac with creativity, these are weak ties at best. Your message should extend directly from what you do, and how you do it.

Your marketing should extend your philosophies into action, moving with the same purpose as the product, but with a focus on spreading those core principles, rather than giving them shape as a product or service.

The key point I’m trying to make is this: the idea that marketing is about manipulation is obsolete. Marketing is about extending and operationalizing your brand, where brand is defined as the identity created by the synthesis of your process, culture, product and ideals.

[This post owes a massive debt of inspiration to Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist Manifestio, which I finished reading this morning.  Possibly the most inspirational business book I’ve read since The Rebel Sell.] 

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.

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.

Brand Extensions.

It’s common practice to add ancillary products to a valued, established brand. Usually this is done to expand awareness, build further points of contact, and most often, to generate more income.

This often results in crap.

I understand the importance of rushing out brand extensions into other markets. Maintaining awareness often requires a steady stream of new. But it’s less common to see these extensions skew high end than it is low.

Imagine a band that toured, offering a capsule collection by an established designer at a medium price point, in the manner of H+M. Most tour clothing is low quality, with the only value being the band attached to it. This is in part because tour merch is first and foremost a money making operation.

If the only value comes out of the brand, you’re selling an artifact of decay; a product that turns brand value into money, but neither supports or reinforces the meaning it’s selling. Willful decay isn’t a strategy. It’s a surrender to short-term thinking.

Narratives and Communication.

I gave an impromptu talk last night, at Refresh Events in Toronto. I may have been enticed to the front of the room with the promise of free beer, but in all honesty just watching others speak about their passions, and the lessons and challenges they’ve faced, got me up and talking about the transition I made from studying English Literature, to studying (and now working in) Communications.

I’m not going to repeat that talk here.

But I’m going to mention something related; the importance that my understanding of narrative has on my understanding of communication, in terms of marketing/communications disciplines. We can talk about messaging, or branding, or badge theory. In the end, we’re all talking about narrative. Everything has a narrative, is composed of smaller things with narratives, and can combine to form a meta-narrative. You don’t sell products, you sell expansions to the personal narrative of customers. Very few people buy a Tom Ford suit because they like the Tom Ford story. They buy it because they want their story to include the signifiers and meaning of Tom Ford suits.

Don’t create meaning for the product, or even the brand. Create meaning for the final narrative, that of the consumer. Create something that can be remixed and integrated into established lives and identities.

Narrative, and the tools and tricks of narrative, are what I loved, and still love, about english literature. In terms of durable, repeatable and distributable content, the written word, the written story, is the most developed medium our society will encounter. Learning to dissect that system, learning what it’s like to develop meaning in a format that often references ideas and concepts from an earlier century, another continent, from our collective cultural memory, taught me more about how to develop meaning from a patchwork of different influences than I realized.

To properly analyze a novel, you need to be able to understand the major references, regardless of how subtle or obtuse. I can’t think of any better training for building compelling narratives in the current media landscape, or for picking apart messages created and distributed in any other medium, all of which have had less time to develop and establish technique and idiom.

Except for a long string of self-effacing jokes, I’m very proud of my past studying English Lit. I’m certain it makes me a better communicator and strategist than I would have been otherwise, just as I’m sure it’s the only reason I ended up focusing on communication strategy.

Voltron is the Answer.

The solution isn’t one big idea. It also isn’t a hundred small ideas.

The solution is Voltron.

A pile of small ideas that build to a single, cohesive whole. Sentences and paragraphs that combine to form a single narrative, despite having individual meaning.

Be Voltron. Combine your ideas to form something greater.

(This is an old, established, comfortable idea. But I felt it was important to relate it to a mid-80s cartoon.)

The Value of Decay: My Old Blog.

The Broken Gentleman, my old website, has been completely static for the last month, other than updating links, and a few visits to older content. Every month, I get my google analytics email, and recognize that, until recently, it was a living thing.

It’s gone from a place of thought and action to something of a mausoleum, keeping a safe home for the ideas that will never go anywhere, the ones that are in stasis, and the lucky few that became something. Watching traffic diminish is oddly inspiring, it’s a reminder that the life of the thing was entirely my effort and ideas.

Watching things decay isn’t normally considered a motivation, and I’m certain this is a mistake. Decay inspires fear. Fear inspires action. Put in a crassly commercial context, people buy clothing to look good, but they also buy clothing due to fear of looking bad.

Worth pondering: the motivational value of showing people decay.