Chris Busch wants me to wade into the “Is Branding Dead?” debate:
Link: Wired 12.11: The Decline of Brands.
Link: gapingvoid: why branding is dead.
Link: PSFK: Long Live Branding.
Here’s my take:
1. The data are irrefutable. The number of massive mega brands and their value (in terms of the premium consumers are willing to pay) is shrinking, and fast. You can’t get as much extra for a Sony DVD player or a Marlboro cigarette as you used to.
2. The number of new micro-brands is exploding. Hugh (see gaving void above) is a brand now. If we define brand as a shortcut for a set of commercial attributes, emotions, stories, whatever, then any blogger with a following has a brand.
3. There’s a difference between brands and branding. Brands exist whether you want them to or not. Brands aren’t going to go away any time soon. Brands are a useful shorthand for a complicated asset within an organization. Branding, on the other hand, is a thing you do. And as an activity, branding is problematic. Branding is ill-defined, usually vacuous, often expensive and totally unpredictable. I’m happy to say that you shouldn’t grow up to be someone who does branding.
Doc Searls and company would have us believe that markets are conversations. This is a great conversation-starter and a useful piece of agit-prop. But the reality is that many many brands are actually monologues, not dialogues. That doesn’t mean a conversation won’t create a better, more robust, more useful brand. But, alas, most organizations can’t handle that truth. So they do their best to do it the old way.
Big brands are dying.
Little brands are doing great.
Branding is a weird gig.
There. Hope that riff helps my brand a bit.
November 14, 2004
I need to fly to Colorado to go to a meeting in February. Do a Travelocity search on flights from EWR (Newark) to EGE (Eagle) and you’ll discover a bunch of tabs. The default tab is called “Travelocity” and my guess is that these are the flights they’re getting paid to promote. But it’s the default tab, so the results here are the only results you see.
A quick look at this tab shows that every single flight is a one-stop.
If you were clever enough to click on each and every tab, though, the fifth tab (American) would show you a non-stop.
I admit it. Travelocity fooled me. They fooled me because I used to trust them. I used to be able to assume that they’d just go ahead and show me the best flights. I was wrong.
Lincoln was right. You can’t fool all the people all the time. How much profit makes it worth Travelocity using up their single biggest asset–permission to talk to me about air flights?
Just because other people are trying to fool your customers doesn’t mean its okay.
November 8, 2004
And some people collect Seth Godin original Purple Cow Milk Cartons!
I’m moving my office, and the very last milk cartons on earth have been located. They’re available exclusively at 800 CEO READ. Link: 800CEOREAD.com – Purple Cow – Collectable Milk Carton.
Don’t tell me later you didn’t know.
November 5, 2004
sooner or later, it all adds up.
Google measures things in billions. Billions of pages searched. Hundreds of millions of pageviews.
Literary fiction measures things in thousands. An important title might sell 4,000 or 8,000 books.
For the non-math whizzes among you, four billion is about a million times greater than 4,000.
All to say that everything has a range. It’s a big deal if a movie sells 3,000,000 tickets in a weekend. That used to be nothing for a TV show, but now it’s pretty respectable for cable.
Some business books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Less than a dozen have sold a million since the beginning of time.
And ChangeThis is just about to cross a hundred thousand downloads directly from our site. Figure in passalong and other sites posting and printouts and it’s pretty easy to estimate 250,000 changethis manifestos downloaded since August.
It’s always been an experiment, so forgive me if it sounds as though I’m horn tooting. I think it’s interesting to track how these ideas are spreading and to consider how a medium like blogging or PDF manifestos can help you spread your idea…
November 3, 2004
It’s been twelve years since the videotaped beating of Rodney King started a riot in LA. Rodney King and the Los Angeles Riots.
In that time, the percentage of people with a video camera at home has increased dramatically. And the number of streetcorners and businesses that tape everything has gone way up as well. Steve Rosenbaum is trying to use that fact to change the way media is created: CAMERAPLANET
Odd segue: Today, in anticipation of a dinner party, I stopped at a lobster seller in Chelsea Market in NYC. I asked for a six pound lobster. The pricing at the store is $9.95 a pound for small lobsters and $8.95 a pound for lobsters six pounds and up.
The lobster weighed (I’m not making this up), 5.97 pounds. For reference, that’s just less than a pound by the weight of a penny. Feed the lobster a plankton and it would be six pounds.
He started to ring me up at $9.95 a pound. I pointed out the price breakdown and the guy shrugged and said, “It doesn’t weight six pounds.”
Two co-workers came over and with precisely the same uncomprehending grin, repeated his point. I added a penny to the scale but they weren’t swayed.
So, the two questions are, “Do you think the owner wanted them to act this way?” and “Would they have acted differently if they were on camera?”
I believe that the best motivation is self-motivation. That teaching people the right thing to do is far more effective than intimidating them into acting out of fear.
But I also know that people act differently when they think no one is watching.
I’ve been counting more and more mail from enraged customers (thanks, but I have enough!). These are people who feel outrage when they are deliberately mistreated by someone who should know better.
As the number of “owners” goes down (because the big chain outlets, telecom oligopolies and centrally controlled media keep increasing in number), it’s harder to find people who act the way we might like.
I wonder what happens once it’s on tape?
All as a way of asking you to bring your videocamera with you when you go to vote on Tuesday (regardless of which side you’re on). The biggest impact of the Net on this election, it seems to me, is that so many things are “on tape.” So many people are now embedded in the process that the process has changed forever.
Maybe if we all show up with a videocamera, other people will be reminded to act like citizens. Worth a shot.
October 28, 2004
It’s apparently the newest thing. I just got off the phone with one CEO who’s itching to start, and read an email from another who just did.
Here’s the problem. Blogs work when they are based on:
Candor
Urgency
Timeliness
Pithiness and
Controversy
(maybe Utility if you want six).
Does this sound like a CEO to you?
Short and sweet, folks: If you can’t be at least four of the five things listed above, please don’t bother. People have a choice (4.5 million choices, in fact) and nobody is going to read your blog, link to your blog or quote your blog unless there’s something in it for them.
Save the fluff for the annual report.
October 26, 2004
“I’ve worked out a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the “yes.” I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.”
Richard Avedon
Do you have a no?
October 25, 2004
Publishers Lunch points us to:
Amazon.com: Books: Election 2004: How Bush/kerry Won…
Is it risky to sign up and announce a book about the election weeks before it actually takes place? Risky to do a book that assumes the underdog won?
Of course not. It’s risky NOT to.
What are you doing that’s risky?
[yikes, the link is down. I guess Amazon wasn’t ready to be that safe…]
October 22, 2004
So, I flew round trip to Toronto from New York yesterday.
In New York, they x rayed my shoes but ignored my digital clicker, cell phone, digital camera and assorted electronics. They also made me take off my suit jacket.
In Toronto, they ignored my shoes but took apart my clicker. They didn’t care about my jacket.
On the plane from New York, they said it was fine to use cell phones as soon as we landed.
On the plane from Toronto, they insisted we not use our cell phones, even though we were on the runway for twenty minutes.
So, which is it?
One of the illusions members of the reality-based community labor under is that there’s a right answer. That if you do X and Y, you’re most likely to get Z.
This sort of rational thought certainly makes it easier to plan.
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that in fact, many complex problems don’t have obviously correct answers.
My best takeaway from this insight is to pursue answers that are inexpensive and easy to test. That becoming hysterical when one particular superstition is hard to implement is ridiculous.
Most of all, being serious about a superstition is not the same as being serious about the problem at hand. We shouldn’t minimize our marketing (or security, for that matter) challenges, but we ought to lighten up a bunch about the untested beliefs we bring to the table.
Why weddings?
Why this sort of humor?
I have no idea. I wish I understood the mechanism better.
eBay item 5527273221 (Ends 23-Oct-04 12:12:44 BST) – 2 invitations to a wedding I don’t want to go to (via Lecky)
October 21, 2004
