Celebrity + quirkiness passes for innovation at the Edge

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A microcosm of marketing and brand innovation, including the Good, the Bad, and the Silly was on display at the Ad Club of Boston’s recent Edge Conference.  My first post covered the Bad.   Working our way up, it’s time for the Silly.

The Silly

Johnny Cupcakes

Given the emphasis on innovation, I was startled to find Johnny Earle, founder of the cult t-shirt brand Johnny Cupcakes, as the opening keynote speaker.  He’s an appealing, quirky guy who’s built a brand and a fortune.  But innovation?

Quick background:  His company sells pricey t-shirts with cupcakes on them, often integrating them into familiar images (e.g. cupcake and crossbones for the pirate symbol).  His stores (Boston, LA, London) use a retro bakery motif, complete with wafting frosting aromas.  A lifelong entrepreneur, Earle scored a hit with his brand.  Earnest and hard-working, he’s built a following and enjoyed success on the speaker circuit.  Now he’s working on a business book.

Let’s see: strong branding, retro styling and premium prices.  Johnny Cupcakes is a fashion brand with a successful shtick.  But pioneering?  Earle is clearly an “it” entrepreneur today.  Fine.

But conflating celebrity with innovation—by branding folk who should know better?  Like an empire built on an overpriced cupcake/bakery gimmick, that’s just plain silly.

Next up: The Good

Marketing microcosm at the Edge: The good, the bad, and the silly

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Some things make me proud to be a marketer.  Some make me sigh.  Still others make me wince.  All were on full display last week at the 2011 Edge Conference, sponsored by the Ad Club of Boston.

This annual event is designed to showcase innovations in branding.  In a series of posts I’ll offer a highly subjective summary of highlights and lowlights, focused perhaps more on what they say about the current state of marketing—and humanity—than the actual items in question.  Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.

The Bad:

Obsession with coolness

Marketing at its worst is shallow coupled with stupid.  We parody ourselves when trendiness trumps common sense.

Questions to the panelists had to be tweeted. When raising a human hand is too passé, obsession with social media has gone way too far.  Exactly one tweeted question was used, that I could tell.  Would direct engagement with the audience have encouraged more dialogue and a warmer atmosphere?  Absolutely.  Give me warm over cool any day.

Venue posturing: A funky nightclub too dark for taking notes or reading the agenda—whose ideal setting was this for an all-day event?  When this also includes no place to sit to eat a bland boxed lunch, the Ad Club organizers did the impossible: created true longing for a Marriott conference room.

Measurable = Important

Is something important just because it can be done with a lot of data gathering and processing power?   Or because it quantifies something new?  Presentations by two tech startups gave me real pause, even as I salute their technical chops.

Blue Fin Labs

Analyzing TV content against conversations about it via social media feeds, this company probes huge data sets to reveal social structures, influence, response to stimuli, and more.  Masterful and complex.  And yet…

What about that data source?  How valuable or representative is the subset of people tweeting or posting in real time about TV shows?  Surely a very young crowd with time on their hands—a useful audience for some, but how many?  In olden days this would be roughly like knowing the daytime game show audience really, really well.  And so?

The underlying idea is intriguing, the technical prowess staggering.  But it all hinges on the data stream: what’s publicly shared.  Right now it’s drivel about drivel.

Call me a throwback, but I fear the day when we’re so externally focused and privacy-deaf that anything meaningful can be measured this whiz-bang way.

Smarterer

Rating people on specialized skills via crowdsourced tests, this company offers numerical scores and rankings for digital, social, and technical tools.  This allows you to wear your scores (708 on Photoshop!) as a badge on FB, LinkedIn and elsewhere.

“Scores can be shared for reputation, competition and fun.”  Were this just the stuff of Nerdier Than Thou posturing, I’d find it harmless.  But we all know that standardized scores can be far from harmless.

Low FICO scores, even those based on inaccurate data, can prevent you from getting a home—or a job. The No Child Left Behind standardized-test juggernaut has eviscerated good teaching.  Enlightened colleges are finally dropping SAT requirements, but it’s slow and sparse.

Smarterer will probably be very successful.  Employers will want easy ways to classify, justify and dismiss.  Meanwhile, wonderful people brimming with vital, unmeasurable skills will be blocked.  That person who lightens hearts when he walks in the room may never become your colleague.  That resourceful, humble person who’d sacrifice her weekend to save your project may never join your company or enter your life.

Access to easy metrics will help and harm, as blunt instruments always do.  As we embrace them in the rush to simplify our lives, let us not overlook what they miss—or the widening of the gap between what can be measured and what may matter most.

Next up: The Silly

Five brand tips from dead poets

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When you see a display of best-selling business books, what’s your immediate reaction?  Excited?  Eager to discover new insights that can help your brand, company or career?  Or do they make you feel a little squirmy?  After glancing at one, do you ever feel that you’ve read it already?

To me, most look bloated and formulaic, with 10 pages of insight air-puffed into book-length.  The rest?  Bullet points, charts, graphics (pyramids! interlocking puzzle pieces!) and repetitive examples.  All pulsing with ego and chest-thumping energy.

If your mind hungers for more than fast food, where else can you turn for help on brand and business decisions?

Presenting: Dead Poets Marketing

When today’s gurus-du-jour fail to nourish or inspire, look no further than great dead writers to perk up your brand!   This sampler goes way back, from Ancient Greece and Rome to 13th c. Persia and 14th c. Italy.  Yet the insights still register as fresh and timely.

It is tedious to tell again tales already plainly told.
(Homer, 8th c. BC)

Brand-take: Originality matters. Avoid me-too approaches and the temptation of easy formulas.  Ask yourself honestly: How many brands would you truly mourn if they disappeared tomorrow?  Also: How many ads, from the Super Bowl or even last night, do you still remember or find compelling?

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
(Plato,* 428-348 BC)

Brand-take: Back away from the data deck, the focus group transcript and the conference room.  Go out and watch people.  Steve Jobs spends untold hours observing customers in Apple stores.  And you?

If you want to be loved, be lovable.
(Ovid, 43 BC-17/18 AD)

Brand-take: To have passionate followers, have passion for those you serve and give them real reasons to care.  Friendly, heartfelt engagement with customers shouldn’t be considered wildly original, surely?  Yet Zappos is considered remarkable precisely for this reason.  By being lovable, the company has grown an army of evangelist customers (and its founder has…written a best-selling business book).

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
(Rumi, 1207-1273)

Brand-take: Forget about what you think you know.  Challenge your assumptions: turn them upside down, inside out and see what happens. Microsoft and Yahoo were clever.  Apple and Google offer us radical magic.

“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
“Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way
is 
taken by the sorry souls
of those who
 lived without disgrace and without praise.
(Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321)

Brand-take: There is no honor or safety in mediocrity. In Dante’s Inferno, the space just inside the Gate of Hell is reserved for the bland and innocuous.  Brands, companies, categories (and careers) in the murky middle have disappeared, and will continue to.

Beyond notable quotes

These quotes are just bullet points gone classical.  The larger point is to cast a wide and inventive net when seeking guidance on important issues like navigating your brand through stormy waters, making key decisions, or attempting something new.

Poetry, myths, art and music create emotionally rich, imaginative spaces where fresh truths can touch us deeply in ways no PowerPoint or business book can match.  Popular business gurus may well offer valid ideas, but they have no monopoly on wisdom.  And they rarely offer bold new glimpses into the human heart.

Artistic and symbolic thinking dwell in the right brain, home of the wondrous and the unconventional. Tasty servings of right-brain insight will provide healthy balance, for whole-brain goodness.

*You’re right: Plato wasn’t a poet.  But certainly a great dead thinker and influential writer!

Three ways to connect with content

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As people tune out the shoutfest in traditional media, how can a brand try to get some love in a media world that’s increasingly social?  Content marketing is the answer, but easier said than done.  In my last post, I discussed ego as the top problem in content marketing, because no one cares about you you you.  The solution is empathy—but how, exactly?   Here are three ways.

Let’s take a boring category as an example: toothpaste.  (No offense, Crest, Colgate, and others, but there’s not a lot of obvious zip.)  Empathy here means thinking about the world based on your audience’s concerns and interests—and these generally don’t include toothpaste.  So how to engage them when they don’t care about you?

Find a hook that matters

The dentist’s office has been recast as a “smile center” because people care about their smiles.  So it’s no surprise to find a toothpaste brand using smiles as a content marketing focus.  Colgate does this: people can upload photos of their Colgate Smiles, and there are photo e-cards, apps, and more.  This connection with smiles is nice—but it’s linear and obvious, and it’s been done.  How else can people be personally engaged?

1. Connect with emotionally-rich aspects of your customer’s lives.

Smiles are linked with photos, and kids’ photos play a special role in family’s lives.  Connecting with kids’ smiles via photography can provide content for parents to care about.  A few possibilities:

  • Tips from famous photographers on capturing great smiles in snapshots or composing casual portraits.
  • Real-life stories (good, bad, and outrageous) from school photographers.  Similarly, a place for parents to share their own stories shooting milestone family moments—potential fodder for a “Modern Family” episode?
  • Photo contests of kids’ toothless grins during the tooth-fairy years, of kids with pumpkins carved as self-portraits, etc.

2. Lead in an area of aspiration

Parents want their kids to have a great education, yet school budgets everywhere have been cut.  Where do smiles fit in?

  • Arts programs are usually the first to go when budgets are slashed. Use famous smiles from world art masterpieces as the basis for an arts education curriculum that can be delivered multiple ways.  Mona Lisa is only the beginning!  Content can be spun for adults as well.
  • Smiles could be the entry point for other educational initiatives: Glimpses of history  through news photos of smiling historical figures, for example.  Smiles are universal, and the possibilities are rich.
  • Quizzes, games and contests can make these approaches fun and interactive.

3.  Commission truly original creative content

Smiles may be the easiest route to engaging content in this category, but there are others.  When approached imaginatively, even toothpaste can play a role in compelling moments: a first sleep-away camp, a road warrior’s tool kit, even a one-night stand.

  • Challenge a group of writers to come up with series of micro-stories involving toothpaste, and you’ll have content aplenty to grab attention and differentiate your brand.
  • Tying in with top creative writing programs can offer emerging writers some visibility as well as an interesting challenge.
  • Providing a creative charitable contribution (plenty of opportunities to help children via oral care) will make it easier to attract established writers.

Bring in the Artists!

Clever readers will have noticed a theme here: Bring in the Artists.  Art gives brands opportunities to create fresh content while offering sneaky advantages, like:

  • Cutting through commercialism.  A celebrity pitchman is a shill.  A writer creating an original vignette in which toothpaste appears is still a writer.
  • Signaling leadership: Great world and business leaders as diverse as Napoleon, Andrew Carnegie and JFK have also been great patrons of the arts.  Brands can do this, too.

Content marketing: The No. 1 problem

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Move over, Facebook and Twitter.  Social media is  being displaced as the hot topic in marketing as a new truth dawns.  News flash: WHAT you have to say is at least as important as where you say it!

Content marketing is the new holy grail, and brands are challenged to create content worth paying attention to.  No easy task for most, for one big reason.  Ego.

Whether personal, professional, or corporate, ego is the biggest obstacle to creating something that matters to the people you want to reach.  In his brilliant cartoon and related blogpost, Tom Fishburne shares how brands still view content marketing as All About Me, slapping a new social media band on an old advertorial hat.

Ego is a failure of empathy

Your job, your brand, your company don’t matter.  Harsh, but true.  Most people are going through their lives splendidly without giving you a second thought.   If you shout at them, loudly and expensively enough, you might get their attention for a minute.  But only a minute—then you start to get really annoying.  The new media landscape may give you all kinds of new tools and toys to play with, but if you’re still just talking about me me me, why on earth would people stick around to listen?

You don’t matter…unless you do

There is a cure for the problem of ego.  It’s empathy: understanding the thoughts, feelings and perspective of others—and caring about them, dammit.  In my next post I’ll explore how to use empathy to create a basis for great content marketing.

Meanwhile, enjoy a quick trip back to English 101.  The Romantic poets may not have had Twitter accounts, but they knew a thing or two about timeless human truths and what happens to a message of ego—even when chiseled in stone…

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)