Steal This Brand

And so off to Sweden, flying BA to Stockholm for the annual forum of The Medinge Group, a group of activist brand authors, practitioners and academics.

Our aim is to discuss the dehumanisation of branding and I am to kick off proceedings with a sermon on the dawning implications of 'The relationship age'. Acknowledge consumers' reality and manage it with them.

"Get real. Be human" would sum up my theme pretty well.

In a fit of mid-flight conscience, I fill in the exhaustive and tedious customer questionnaire, noting in passing that it is designed purely to produce a better segmentation for BA's customer relationship management strategy, boxing me into a corner of their database where my financial value can be assessed, and service delivered accordingly. It's all about refining their transactional offer to reduce service-cost.

In another fit of conscience (this is becoming a disease), I fill in some additional notes on the back. I write in passing that BA has learned nothing interesting about me. It has showed no respect for the fact that I pay these people's wages. I drive its shareholder value. In return it presumably tries to be nice to me. We are in a mutually-dependent relationship.

But this questionnaire has learned Nothing about my values. Nothing about my opinion of the corporation which provides these services. Nothing that might help them to build a relationship with me.

The service has been great. Smooth and friendly and pretty much irrelevant. Easyjet would have been just as good. It's what I expected. Offer made; promise delivered. Yeh. So what.

For all they know, or care, I may loathe the organisation and be actively campaigning against it. They have dehumanised me and themselves in the process of pretending to learn about me.

I am aggravated, so I add a further comment on their CSR gloss. "BA's only contribution to society is in donating its customers' money to the world. BA does nothing itself. This is an abrogation of responsibility". Finally, I add this stealthisbrand web-site address out of irritation.

And then... something truly magical happens. The stewardess Claire (Wilkinson?) comes up to me and my MutualMarketing companion John Moore and fellow traveller Luke Nicholson of Ethical Media fame, and says (drum roll here):

"We've read your questionnaire.
Thankyou. Great feedback. Very interesting.
I wanted to talk to you about what we do in CSR.
BA has an active programme enabling staff to participate in ethical initiatives on an unpaid basis.
Here's what we've done in Africa...
I think I've heard of your web-site (NB. This is of course unlikely to be true! #;¬} )
I will go to your web-site. This has been a helpful discussion."

So Claire, if you're visiting and reading this, tell somebody who thinks they matter in BA that you just humanised the BA brand for me overnight.

This really matters. Their future rests upon it. So please make this happen again and again. You went beyond service, and showed me a glimpse of your personal brand intent. BA the monolith just peeked beyond branding. Beautiful.

So thankyou Claire and thankyou, BA.

What would it mean if...

CRM came to be illegal?

CRM merely seeks to identify valuable customers and nurture them so as to retain and grow their lifetime value. It seeks to dispose of low value parasites and retain high-spenders. Hence reward points, privilege queues at airports and preferential rates for 'existing borrowers'.

As government and corporations become increasingly the same and share responsibility for the maintenance of society, what if the governmental standards of non-discrimination, equal opportunity, and fair access came to apply to corporates too?

Values are changing all the time.
What if CRM is simply discrimination by another name.
What if it's undemocratic, unfair and simply unkind.

Now there's a thought to send a shiver down the spines of the folk at EDS...

Slow and faltering speech.
Pale complexion
Agitation and trembling
Short-temperedness and and excessive impatience with queuing or waiting.
Volatile energy highs and lows
Sudden bursts of enthusiasm and irrational despair

I have been exhibiting these symptoms for around two months now, and they
are getting worse.

However, I have finally got to the bottom of the problem.

I have blogitis.

However, I have also, finally found a foolproof cure. I now seek out daily therapy by finding others who share these same symptoms, and sharing my opinions with them.

If you too need help, I recommend the following. Travel to Central London, simply hold out an arm and an emergency therapist will arrive in a black car with a yellow light.

The support is available at any time of day or night and is very reasonably priced.

Last week, the UK's Daily Mail - that penultimate bastion of reactionary conservatism, organised a very concerted flash-mob attempt.

It used 'underground' techniques to persuade 120 people to arrive with umbrellas at the London Eye, peel a banana, and chant for a minute or so, and then disappear at an appointed time, a few minutes later.

This was, in some microscopic and atavistic way, a 'happening'.

The mechanism of flash-mobs...i.e. using texting, on-line advertising and community-based networking to bring together groups of people for brief and pointless encounters - is tedious. It intrigues me far less than the motivation which lies behind it.

What flash-mobs hint at today seems to me to be a latent experimentalism and frustration within society - but also a leadership vacuum. They evince a desire to play with ideas, a need to be 'on the edge', and a clear dislike or avoidance of apparent authority.

On the surface, this is reminiscent of the ethos of the late 1960s. Mass affluence. Ethical confusion. Amoral war. Political dilution. Eroding trust.

Not so different now, you say.

But in the 1960s these Weatherman-style occurences would have arisen from discontent, from agressive apathy, or from socialist political motivations - or at the very least from some collective purpose and common will.

The Daily Mail's motivation, by contrast was...er...self-promotion and..er...newspaper sales.

Nonetheless, I wonder how many Daily Mail 'flashers' felt betrayed when they discovered who was behind the event. Probably very, very, few......

And thereby lies the conundrum of the new Millennium. Although many people reject corporate incursion into their lives, it has become pervasive to the extent of invisibility. We have embraced corporatism, whether we like it or not.

What we are witnessing here is a new unreality, in which corporate and personal promotional techniques and mind-sets have simply fused. The internet was a personal communications vehicle; became corporate, then commercial; and was then briefly reclaimed by the people when the VCs ran out of road. But now they're back.

In the last 2 years, the powers that 'be' (by which, of course, I merely mean 'act') have attempted to reclaim the medium by appropriating the very notion of community.

Today, even our tools of communications are shared with the corporates. Or put another way - more optimistically - corporate marketing tools are available to all. Hurrah. Now we all share the same brand imagination, we can dream the same brown fizzy, cokey dream. We are all marketers now. Heaven forfend.

This means so much more than people simply becoming a little more spin-savvy or marketing savvy. Now we are all exposed to the very minutiae of the mechanisms of marketing. We are not just savvy. We are positively experts. We are all gurus now. There is nothing more to learn.

In the UK, the excruciating Hutton enquiry is laying bare, second by second, the process by which government press releases and reports are prepared. Are we surprised? No. Do we care? Maybe. But does it make us more cynical? Absolutely, Yes.

Trust? ... Trussed!

This pervasive and uncontrollable government transparency invites a form of daily democracy in which judgement evaporates. Ideas and people and power and motivations can no longer be interpreted, let alone separated.

Without reliable brands, we are drowning. Without reliable government...

When government becomes this transparent, you'd better keep an eye on it. It may just disappear entirely....

"When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger."

Written on a wall of the Paris Conservatoire de Musique, May 1968...

Some 'Beyond Branding' friends and I... (stand up and be double-counted, John Moore)... are considering an action-oriented conference for February in conjunction with our friends at 'CSR DataNetworks'.

Our intention is to probe and progress the issue of 'media reponsibility'. What exactly is media's duty to society and are the living up to it?

My personal goal is to find some practical collaborative routes forward to achieve a more sustainable media.

I was going to kick off that debate with an extract from the meedja's own pet rag, 'press gazette', page 3, issue:08/08/03, which should have set the tone for a very serious debate..."Blair puts faith in Phillis inquiry to rebuild trust".

Seemed promising. However, after poring over the article for 10 minutes I couldn't find a two-sentence extract worth quoting. So I edit here, verbatim.

"Prime Minister - death.". This genuine summary seems to accidentally exemplify the current relationship between media and government....and by extension, all sources - companies, NGOs, pressure groups, pundits...

The power of selective editing, eh!?

Trust is disappearing and organisations are panicking. Like any rare commodity, just as we are scraping the bottom of the very last trust barrel, everyone has suddenly decided they want some – and if they can’t get any, they’ll fake it, or buy it or start trading in trust-derivatives, like CSR and social marketing.

Trust is eroding at an infrastructure level: railways, airlines, traffic, telecommunications…all in chaos
Trust is eroding at a policy level: financial regulation, asylum, hooliganism, mmr...all fiascos
Trust is eroding at a symbolic level: doctors, police, politicians now carry little or no authority. We know our rights.
Trust is eroding at an engagement level: media lies, PR spin, celebrities lie, sport drug-taking, failure of international governance…all ambivalent or ambiguous
Trust is eroding at an outcome level: divorce, pensions failure, judicial failure, bankruptcy...all rising

In response to this lack of trust, what happens? ‘They’ try to tackle the effects.

‘They’, increase regulation… ‘We’ practise avoidance
‘They’ increase measurement … ‘We’ engage in deception
‘They’ try to regain control… ‘We’ demand freedom
‘They’ make bolder and grander promises… ‘We’ berate them for inevitable failure
‘They’ become more transparent… ‘We’ become confused, and cynical

And all the while, this game of social chess continues, the gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’ continues to widen. But actually, we realise ‘they’ are ‘us’. Our sense of self is increasingly splintered, our dignity is tainted. We are victims but we are also complicit.

With no trust to fall back on, our sense of community has become a mere vapour, inhaled when Oxfam is at the door and exhaled with a spattering of phlegm when something real, like a train-seat is at stake.

So, in response to this lack of community, what happens? Again, ‘they’ try to tackle the effect.

‘They’ humanise authority figures…’We’ laugh at their frailties
‘They’ focus on delivery… ‘We’ lambast them for incompetence
‘They’ campaign their values… ‘We’ distrust them more
‘They’ want to be understood… ‘We’ don’t see the point

And what has been created through these cycles of mislearning? Trust-free communities. Communities of self-interest.

At no point in this litany of disaster has anything been done to tackle the causes.
So here’s a radical and uplifting thought. Maybe trust is an inevitable casualty of an information democracy. A natural sympotom of mass-affluence.

Here's an even more radical thought. Maybe we should just learn to live without unquestioning trust…and find something more meaningful instead...'self-respect'.

Marketers tell us that all brands must have a 'big idea'.

Why? Well just because....because...big is better, right? That's why growth is good, and greed is great, and grass is always greener and...and...and...GRRRR.

But what if having a big idea is the worst mistake you can make?

Why? Well just because.

Beacuse the bigger they are, the harder they fall
Because times change
Because relationships evolve
Because knowledge evolves
Because needs change
Beacuse big ideas get shot at
Because expectations advance at thought-speed
Because big ideas are dehumanising
Because learning is more important than telling
Because patronising simplicity has had its day
Because no idea, no matter how gargatuan, can rival the wonderful smallness of just being alive.

Enough pub-speak.

The big trouble with big branding is that to survive, it needs to implant that idea into peoples' heads. It seeks to persuade, rather than educate. It shouts when it should whisper. It is content-focused, when it should be context-focused. Fundamentally, it's boring. "We hear your big idea, and we just don't care."

Beyond branding, I want to shine a tiny light on the cult of the small idea, which, being so small, will not even need advertising to explain it. You just watch. All around the world, people will begin do tiny things to improve one another's lives as a backlash against 'big culture'.

Reality is personal, subtle, changeable...small. Once we have our dignity, we will have no place for 'big' brands.

I've argued here, there and everywhere, that brands are just ideas with names on.

It's the economical packaging of these great ideas that enables them to propagate so well.

'God'. 'Nike'. 'Outsourcing'. 'Coke'. 'Communism'. 'America'.
These were great first generation brands.

But that same elegant slipperiness from one brain to the next is also what makes these ideas so vulnerable in this new democratised generation. Because you can't really get hold of them, you can't change them or mould them. They are closed to their stakeholders. No bars holed. We just can't make them relevant.

They are, by definition unsustainable brands. They cannot learn.

So what does 'Beyond Branding' imply for brands? That they invert!

Instead of being ideas with names on...you guessed it...they must become names with ideas on.

Spiky, engaging, uncomfortable, confrontational. BB superbrands will wear their knickers on the outside.

We are seeking nominations for some potential BB superbrands - brands with high learning opportunities?

IBM
Conservatism - no, seriously!
The Internet
Freedom
China
Adidas
Starbucks
The Co-op...

All that remains is for these brands to turn potential into reality...

Here's a funny thing.

Corporate researchers (as embodied by the Market Research Society) are seeking new ways to tap into the subconscious of customers so as to sell more powerful and eloborate brand dreams. According to the blurb for their annual conference, they want to promote and accelerate 'The dream economy'. No, seriously.

Meanwhile, corporations' ability to fufil even our basic requests seems to become more and more fragile each day. Can these all-powerless corporates really expect to implant dreams in our heads - without creating a social nightmare? The whole thing is a daydream. A Mitty-esque delusion.

A core tenet of the 'Beyond Branding' movement is that power is being rapidly decentralised from corporations to the communities they serve - and brands must therefore be nurtured to respond to the transactional and relationship needs of those communities.

But what does this mean for market research?

Well, consider what happens if we really acknowledge the inverted power-balance here. As human beings, we all know that real markets are not communities of prospective buyers, we are just visitors. Real, live markets are full of stalls, piled with mechandise and charming one-eyed cockneys. Markets are where consumers go to buy things, aren't they?

So 'market researchers' should actually be researching market stalls, checking out the corporates, not the other way around. Consumers should be forming collectives to investigate and tap the dreams and aspirations of corporates. Then, we'd really know how to exploit them, get our CRM (corporate relationship management) programme aligned with our values, and really begin to exercise some true democratic power (see my blog on mutual marketing below).

So-called market researchers could do worse than listen to what the genuine consumer advocates are finding. They could start by listening to the consumers' association. Listening to epinions. Listen to corporate watch. Watch 'Rogue Traders' and watchdog even, and listen, rather than merely medi-training their paranoid spokespeople. Start by talking, without an 'agenda'. All this, of course, but so much more....

The MRS should actually be promoting genuine 'market research', by consumers, for consumers.

It's no use the market research industry closing its eyes and chasing the money. Only by 'going with' this ebbing power-flow will the market research industry stand a chance of adding sustainable value - by building mutual comprehension between corporates and their customers. In short, the role of market research is in building a platform for trusting relationships - not by creating better segmentation! Say it with me. I am not an orange!!

(NB. Brands, by contrast, may well be oranges...see Brain Patten's poem 'When I went out, I stole an orange', below).

For the avoidance of doubt, this rant isn't about introducing more mystery shopping or mass observation though. that's just not good enough. It's about acknowledging that marketing flows both ways. Acknowledging and embracing symmetry. Market researchers are not fact-finders, and certianly not power-brokers. But they could be; should be, trust-brokers. Market research as active engagement. Market research as transformation. That's where we're heading.

The future of market research is about embracing buyer-centricity, and customer-managed relationships and customer collaboration and all those other good progressive things which challenge organisations to learn emotionally, as well as functionally.

The future of market research is the brave new world of mutual marketing.

Consicknia, the BA tailfin tailspin, ITV Digitalis, Monday Mayhem...

How many renamings or relogoings are perpetrated in the name of corporate strategy but totally fail in the marketplace? How many more make perfect sense on paper but just don't make sense to customers?

Most bad branding seems to originate from a black box of marketing trickery, driven by a corporate 'must-do' mind-set.

"Here's what we, as managers, would like to do. Our brand doesn't seem to have the right aura for our new cunning plan. Too dowdy. Too slow moving. Too historically grounded. Let's change it. If we sit here for a couple of hours, we'll invent a new positioning that's so clever, we'll take over the world. When we've invented it and pre-ordered 1,000,000 new business cards, we can tell our customers what it is. They'll be so excited for us!"

Remember, a brand is not about messaging. It's about a set of gaps. A belief gap, trust gap, commitment gap. If the renaming or relogo-ing is simply going to increase those gaps, it might be wise to try some 'beyond branding' first - actually listen, actually engage, actually change.

Once your relationship has evolved, you may both both get a sense that the old brand-title doesn't quite fit. Then and only then should you change.

In the cases that work (BP for example), the old logo bas become a drag on the new relationship ethos. The new logo is not just a symbol of a corporate aspiration, but of a leadership vision, lived and breathed over the long haul, meeting needs that customers actually acknowledge on an individual basis, not just in carefully manipulated focus groups. The brand accurately reflects a new context.

Renaming is a lot like dieting. Crash course diets seldom work. For starters your partner may not want a slimmed down you. Second your body will be thrown out of balance, and finally, the new dress/suit that you long to try, probably won't suit your new grey colouring anyway. After a while then your skin will start to hang loose and you'll have to consider plastic surgery to bulk out again...

Instead, try a new lifestyle regime. Exercise. Careful eating. Mental discipline.
Might be hard work. Might be sustainable....