The medium is the message. One of the most famous quotes about communication ever, and almost up there with the fifteen minutes of fame in terms of ubiquity. And during the 2000s, the idea of the media channel has been expanded, to encompass pretty much everything. Adding to print, broadcast, web, mobile, outdoor billboards, etc, brands advertise themselves on any physical object they find suitable to associate with. This kind of advertising uses creative associations between the brand and the medium so that it’s actually the medium in itself that communicates the message. So, really a case in point for McLuhan. Easily translated into entertaining, instantly graspable jpgs, ad blogs love this kind of brand communication. But is it effective?

There’s not much written about advertising outside of ‘proper’ media. Swedish rock star professor Micael Dahlén (a generally very clever man, isn’t he) has written a few things on it though. He calls employing a novel medium that makes a statement in itself creative media choice. Which is fine but could mean a wide range of media decisions, so I guess I’d call it something like creative context connections*. (That’s a nice alliteration which I could use with a trademark symbol, too, should I need to make one of those fluffy agency models.)

In both of these studies (The Medium as Contextual Cue. Effects of Creative Media Choice, Journal of Advertising, 2005 and Dahlén, Friberg and Nilsson: Long Live Creative Media Choice. The Medium as a Persistent Brand Cue, Journal of Advertising, 2009) experiments were made where traditional media (ad posters, print ads) and creative contexts were compared. An egg with an insurance company’s logo and tagline or a fire extinguisher with a salsa sauce label on it were two novel media used. The results: creative contexts were more effective than traditional media use in creating the intended brand associations. (This presumes a good match, of course, between context and product.)

As an added bonus, the medium itself can continue to remind people of the brand, something that hardly happens with regular media that’s normally filled with brand messages. Actually, in one experiment, exposure to an altered creative context (when the brand logo etc had been removed) even transferred new associations to the brand. A phenomenon that could be good or bad, presumably. Maybe you should be a little careful with, as in the first example above, associating your food brand with public toilets, hot air connotation or not.

What I would like to do a study on is a possible conflict with brand personality and tone of voice. The simplicity of the message when it’s created by association overlap between brand and medium (Salsa sauce – Hot – Fire extinguisher) and the inherent witty cleverness in making such associations make every brand sound quite similar, and frankly, maybe a little too advertising-y to suit any brand. An obvious rival is of course what trendwatching.com calls Brand butlers. Brand butlers are all those apps, sites or services that also work by association (Energy drink – Sport – App that keeps track of your exercise) but allow an own voice and add value. Like IKEA France’s brilliant covoiturage service, where you can meet people to share your ride to the store – making both driver and passenger save money, perfectly in line with IKEA’s brand values.

* I really dislike the word guerrilla advertising. It’s an example of the old militaristic language of traditional marketing, with its targeting of consumers and offensive and defensive strategies. In his seminal books on guerrilla marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson actually calls different strategies ‘weapons’. Amazing. (Also, dear creative, you’re in advertising, not an invincible jungle warrior. Deal with it.) So I didn’t use it.

Or they’re just chosen a magnificently frightening dragon poster because they’re located close to the classic movie theatre Draken (The Dragon), and don’t see how this choice of imagery might contradict the first line below it: “We’re happy to welcome people with dental fear“.

I, however, loved this thing more or less like I loved my pet, Skrållan the cat. Completely uninterested in the more comfortable station wagons that my dad drove, my four-year-old heart belonged to the DAF, and I would object loudly to the idea of selling it. I even made a miniature of it using matchboxes, which, thanks to the no-nonsense design of this car, turned out very similar to the real thing.

Cars are among the objects people most often anthropomorphize, according to scientists. With their fronts easily interpreted as human faces, and the fact that they move, sound, smell and respond to your actions, it’s no wonder that they’re given nicknames and get called “unreliable” or “sexy”. In all likelihood, the friendly little face of the DAF was the main reason why I took a liking to it. Just look at its white cousin now as it stands in this promotional photo, a happy and gentle family member – don’t you want to, like the male model here, scratch it a little above its front door?

So, of course, anthropomorphizing cars is a common marketing strategy. Like Max the Beetle.

But does it affect you, treating your car like it’s your friend? Yes, according to Jesse Chandler and Norbert Schwartz, in their article Use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship: Thinking of objects as alive makes people less willing to replace them (in Journal of Consumer Psychology 20 (2010)). When induced to think about their car in anthropomorphic terms, consumers were less willing to replace it. Also, their decision whether to sell their car depended less on pragmatic considerations, like how well the vehicle actually worked. Instead, they chose to keep or replace depending on whether their car (here, specifically, its colour) was described as “warm” or “cold” – a feature that belongs more in the interpersonal domain.

Why? Well, thinking about their objects in anthropomorphic terms makes people start using knowledge about the social world instead of thinking like they normally do about dead objects. And you don’t discard someone close to you just because they, being old or sick, can’t serve a useful function anymore. You care for them.

This way of thinking is not necessarily good news for either consumers or marketers, say the authors. Hanging on to your hopeless car just because it’s an old friend will mean unnecessary repair costs. And well, brands do want you to change cars on a regular basis. Instead of talking about products as living breathing things, anthropomorphize brands themselves, Chandler and Schwartz suggest.

A smart way to use this phenomenon, however, is used by (the generally smart) Zipcar. When the company named all of its rental cars, they found that it led customers to be more careful with them, putting more effort into cleaning and maintaining them. Not bad.

P.S. I fully support the intention of Dutch art hipsters to bring back the DAF.

From Hartmut Esslinger, A Fine Line (2010), p. XII

And, when we design a new and better object or a more inspiring human experience, the design itself becomes a branding symbol. People recognize visual symbols as cultural expression, and we embrace those symbols that reflect our deeper values, such as a delight in simple, elegant usability. In essence, design humanizes technology and helps businesses appeal to the human spirit. And it is the cultural context of design that roots business in history and connects it to a more profound future.

Here it is. Enjoy your read.

In “The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It”, (Psychological Science 21(5) 712–720), Gino et al. tell us this: if you give someone a pair of sunglasses and tell them they’re fake Chloe, they will both cheat more in tests, and start judging other people’s behaviour as more deceptive, than if you tell them they’re wearing authentic brand ones. (Of course, they’re all the same, real Chloe glasses.) This is true even if you just randomly assign glasses to people, so it’s got nothing to do with the possibly shady personality of the counterfeit enthusiast.

The determining factor in this, they say, is that people’s own sense of authenticity in the sense of opposed-to-self-alienation is diminished by the (supposed) wearing of fake items. The “Fake Chloe” crowd agree more with statements such as “Right now, I don’t know how I really feel inside”, “Right now, I feel out of touch with the ‘real me’” and “Right now, I feel alienated from myself” than the “Real Chloe”-wearers. (Thankfully, I have no idea how it feels like to be “alienated from myself”. Is this because I’m so wonderfully authentic – well I don’t wear any counterfeit accessories, so I’m making it rather easy for myself – , or because I’ve always lived so completely detached from the Real Me that I wouldn’t know when it was missing? Like a dog with docked tail, happily wagging and wiggling away.)

This idea not something totally new, it rhymes very well with for example this: even the non-religious become more helpful after reading a story from the Bible. But it would be interesting to see if the same phenomenon occurred with brands people think are morally authentic vs inauthentic – would you cheat less after drinking Innocent juice? Or even just craft authentic – surrounded by the furniture made by small Danish ateliers now run by a third generation member of a family of skilled craftsmen etc etc you so desire from the pages of Monocle magazine, would you be a better person than in your current Ikea Hell (for it is Hell, let’s be honest)? Should you splash out, for the sake of Humanity in general?

And in that case, would this truthfulness/anti-self alienation effect actually be a reason for making brands that people deem to be authentic? Utopian in a quite roundabout way, but still. Anyway: don’t you just love people. Such weird creatures.

Put aside the sexual connotations of these ads. Even though you don’t have to be that much of a semiotician to find “The young woman and the tiny folds”, illustrated with a girl working on a red handbag – a handbag! A vaginal symbol if there has even been one, according to Freud – with, well, tiny folds, rather obvious. Anyway.

The brand strategy here is quite transparent. Jumping on the luxury-should-be-about-craftsmanship bandwagon, Louis Vuitton tries to associate its brand with old-fashioned, artisan production. The result is, however, a bit like an upscale version of the claim of “using recipes we create at the kitchen table” on the frozen microwave lunch I had today. Why? Is it because, as Business Week points out, most Louis Vuitton products aren’t handmade? Not necessarily. Not that many people have the privilege of visiting a Louis Vuitton factory, and anyway, authenticity isn’t the same as truth.

In “The organizational construction of authenticity: An examination of contemporary food and dining in the U.S.” (don’t you just love academic titles?), authors Glenn Carroll and Dennis Ray Wheaton divide authenticity into four types; moral authenticity (Whole Foods), idiosyncratic authenticity (Dogfish Head brewery), type authenticity (that Italian restaurant where the owner’s mother sits at a table, and is overweight) and craft authenticity. Rather self-explanatory, craft authenticity is authenticity based on the artistry and mastery of the people making the product, and a refusal of industrial mass production. In everything from food to furniture to luxury bags, craft authenticity has been an extremely influential concept over the last years. In fact nowadays I feel rather embarrassed serving guests any food stuff about which I cannot tell a story involving several generations of artisan producers, techniques abandoned by the rest of the food industry before the 1950s, a mythic element of the secret-sauce kind, and a ridiculously long production time.

Projecting any kind of authenticity requires three things, according to Carroll and Wheaton: a visibly projected identity claim, credibility of the claim, and an identity that’s perceived as reflecting the meaning of authenticity in question. It’s obviously the second ingredient that’s the weak link here. The marketing claim is hard to verify, and it’s not particularly consistent with the brand’s general image.

If there is one luxury brand that has totally done away with every connection to Old World quality, instead choosing an aggressive brand exposure strategy that has got it associated with your little sister’s most annoying friends, well, it’s Louis Vuitton. In fact, a typical Louis Vuitton quote goes like this: “Showing off her Louis Vuitton collection (she had the sunglasses, belt, wallet, and garment bag!), Heidi Montag looked cute in a sleeveless beige top and light khaki trousers …” (from celebrity-gossip.net). The demureness of the 17th century-esque seamstress does not rhyme with the brashness of the stereotypical consumer.

The point of Carroll and Wheaton’s article is that authenticity is projected more credibly when it is organisationally constructed. A feature of the organisation – highly visible, costly to change and implicitly permanent, should radiate the symbolic meaning of authenticity that the company wants to project. But modern production is a pre-requisite for keeping Louis Vuitton’s operating margins well above the industry average. Would making a more reality-based campaign on the small part of the company’s production that’s actually made in an artisan way (custom-made products made in an atelier in Paris) do? Perhaps. Or maybe Louis Vuitton should simply rethink their strategy.

Why service design? Basically, service design is all about creating great user experiences. This is quite different than the creation of a product, which is something that still needs the magic of human interaction to be meaningful (a great user experience can very well include the interaction with a product, but that’s another matter). The experience is what moves people, what they seek and what they remember. And the experience is a powerful thing: a strong, positive experience can create a lasting bond to the entity that provided it. Contrary to much market communication, it has value in itself to the user, it does not need to be associated with a marketable product/service in an artificial way. Instead, the service experience is the embodiment of the brand. Additionally, with its insistence on building value for the user, service design seems like the more modern way of building brands in a world where the mass marketing concepts of target groups of consumers being served story telling and randomly attached values seem increasingly out of touch with reality.

But is it that simple, really? No. Focusing on the design of services can mean a too narrow conceptualisation of how people see value and how they make sense of the world. In its most basic form, service design can seem almost obsessed by just simplifying daily life with a nifty service. But if too single-mindedly concerned with the sheer practicalities of a good service, there is a danger of forgetting the emotional aspect of human life. There’s a danger of falling into a service variety of the frankly quite naïve “cut the marketing bullshit, make a good product” rhetoric I ranted about a while ago (here).

This is the power of traditional branding: with its symbolism and metaphors, it talks to the powerful emotional, expressive part of the human brain. The part that dreams, imagines, plays. The part that makes the experience of getting a coffee in a small coffee shop in a tiny Italian village a memorable experience of excellence, even though the same coffee served in a high street chain would taste unremarkable. It seems to me that the real power of service design as a way to build brands lies where its user value focus is combined with a creative way of thinking about what a good user experience is. A way that accounts for both our longing for being told the myth of the Hero’s journey, and for being able to buy our train tickets with the help of an iPhone app.

Authenticity, of course, is considered a general holy grail for 21st century brands. No wonder, as we live in a culture that’s more or less obsessed with authenticity; almost anything under constant threat of being labelled fake. (Authenticity is a concept with a polemic sort of built into it; it’s never as visible as when it’s questioned).

It’s also, a term that is often either taken very literally as a “real” business (un)strategy in a genuine backlash against, well, inauthenticity, or discussed in an almost outraged fashion as a cunning way to trick people into paying a premium. Either making a fan portrait of Innocent Drinks, or “calling their bluff” by pointing to them being partly owned by The Coca Cola Company. For someone involved in branding, though, I’d say it’s important to have a more thorough understanding of authenticity. Seeing how this concept so heavily influences the way people make sense of their world, knowing how it’s created and how it’s maintained (hint: it’s rarely a one-person-holding-strings kind of job) is crucial.

In short, social scientists tell us these about authenticity as it pertains to brands:

Authenticity has many meanings. For example, authentic can be interpreted as being moral (“being true to your values”), or historically accurate, or true to a type (like a music genre).

Authenticity is socially constructed. It does not tell you anything about metaphysical realness, but about how it’s perceived. A brand, a product, a place is interpreted as authentic and treated as such: that’s when the value is created. (That does not mean that it’s arbitrary, though!)

Authenticity is not stable, but always changing – what was perceived as terribly inauthentic can become authentic with time. And what was once authentic can suddenly have to meet other demands on authenticity, the bar has been raised, by other brands or by other factors.

Authenticity is not universal, but individual – what is authentic for someone is not to another. Judging authenticity is very connected with being a member of some kind of social context; being working class, or being a goth for that matter. More specifically, the concept of authenticity changes with the amount of cultural capital a person has.

There is some great literature on authenticity, of course. For example, Michael Beverland has written about authenticity in premium wines, and Glenn Carroll and Dennis Wheaton about restaurants – I’ll get around to both of them in later posts, which will explore different kinds of authenticity, and how it’s is crafted and cared for.

Screenshots from this video.

What I would like from objects around me, instead of them telling me absolutely everything about themselves at any instant, is for them to be a bit more exciting, interesting, fun even, on a more emotional level. Why not make me feel good about myself, or make me dream little. Well, that’s what good brands do.

Also, right now, I’d like my head to stop hurting. And in fact …

*Or Love.