OK, so I’m trying to make some kind of order in my mind, the first little step in writing my Master’s thesis. I just feel the need to get everything one can do online to engage with a brand down on one place, in a neat table. Just a fraction of these interest me right now, but it’s still good to see it all together. What glaringly obvious actions have I forgotten? (I will fill in more examples where possible, when I get around to it.)
A little taxonomy of online brand value building and destroying by consumers (non-media brands) other than “just” consuming. V 1.0
(Yes, two examples from the world of Barbie. There could be more. I got a bit sucked in to the Barbie universe the other day, although it was all in the name of research so it wasn’t wasting time really, and discovered that both Barb and Ken are on Foursquare, too. He’s apparently rambling about all over America reminiscing (a little bit creepily) about when they were dating. Get over it, Ken.)
Oh! Apparently, it’s Christmas. I’ve been working so much I’m caught a bit off guard here (Christmas? Now? In mid-November?), but anyway, it’s that time of the year when you might feel the urge to read up on stuff. Not me, no. I’ve, frivolously, bought this pile of cheap French nonsense. Which I will happily peruse accompanied by a sickly sweet non-alcoholic eggnog like the ones my father used to make me (Brilliant stuff. Just like the early beginnings of a sponge cake, in a glass.) and some deeply unsophisticated music, to compensate mentally for a semester of late night afterwork master course reading.
But YOU, my darlings, I’ve got some grand plans for you. You’ll spend your holidays reading clever stuff on communication, digital culture and futurology, going back to work enlightened and inspired. Someone has to do it. Why not start here:
1. A classic article Grant McCracken: Culture and Consumption. A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods
Grant McCracken’s 1986 article on how cultural meaning moves in a consumer society. One of the best accounts I’ve ever read on how products, signs and style get their meaning, and why and how that meaning changes.
2. An interesting blog Top Trends
Slightly silly name for a good blog by futurist Richard Watson, a man who advises organisations such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and McDonald’s on the future. Which means that what he says is probably good enough for you, as well. Judging from his blog, mr W also seem to have the advantage of being a consultant on the future who’s actually reflective and, yes, rather nice. Instead of a raving mad technophile dressed like some horrible little man from your technical support department.
3. Heavy stuff in a small book Adam Arvidsson: Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture
I’m not a great fan of critical theory in general, but frankly often find its self-righteous accusations a bit of a detour. But if you as an advertising professional can stand a bit of Capitalist Conspiracy and a galloping sense of being Part of the Problem while reading, don’t miss out on Arvidsson’s clear and sharp history of adland trends and rhetoric, and his analysis of how brand value is created in the digital age. Very clever.
Instead of reading branding/advertising/marketing/etc literature, step out and observe Life. This is what all strategic folks tell you. And yes, it’s obviously good advice, at least to a point. (It’s also a little like the planner version of the female celeb’s classic ‘I mix designer clothing with vintage pieces and H&M’. A great phrase for showing your sophistication/cultural capital/general superiority. But anyway.)
Life is great, but sometimes you need a bit of help to analyse it. A good piece of cultural inspiration will give you just that: a new perspective, a bit of unveiling, a small shock. (Also, sometimes you’re at a cocktail party, a situation in which you need something to talk about that starts with ‘Have you seen …’.) Here are my top five(-ish).
One. Photographers of the absurdity (and poetry) of Culture
There’s nothing quite like a good photographer’s eye. A photograph exposes, deconstructs and de-familiarizes. It makes you look at the culture you live in like you’re a foreigner. Which gives you the best odds for seeing hidden connections and structures and patterns in what you otherwise take for granted. And for coming up with something entirely new.
Like when you step in to the, sometimes abandoned, consumer theatre of Brian Ulrich.
Brian Ulrich: Schaumburg, IL, 2004 (part of the Retail series)
Brian Ulrich: Dominick’s 2, 2008 (Part of the Dark Stores series)
Brian Ulrich: New York, NY 2004 (part of the Retail series). Isn’t this the most heart-achingly beautiful picture.
When I was a child, my mother owned an old, canary yellow DAF 66. Plagued by lack of comfort, decent heating and general trustworthiness, this Dutch little car wasn’t the most convenient of vehicles. And, as you can see, it wasn’t all that swanky, either.
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.
From Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang ‘New Faces and New Masks of Today’s Consumer’, Journal of Consumer Culture 2008; 8; 321
The consumer, then, is unmanageable, both as a concept, since no-one can pin it down to one specific conceptualization at the expense of all others, and as an entity, since attempts to control and manage the consumer result in a mutation from a stable consumer concept to an unstable one.
[…] Even as they are constantly typecast and pigeon-holed, consumers are becoming more unmanageable, eccentric and paradoxical.
In the beginning of my career, I had this mad idea that good design work would come directly, in one step, perfect, shining, from my brain to the world. And it would be directly understood.
The client would know great work when s/he saw it.
If s/he wanted changes made, especially when it came down to details, it was basically for one of two reasons: s/he (inexplicably) wouldn’t let us do our job, and thus was a rather hopeless client.
Or I wasn’t any good after all, and even the most untrained eye was better than mine at judging how big a logotype should be.
One is deeply frustrating, one is horribly scary.
I wasn’t very relaxed in presentations.
But that’s not how it works.
To make good work, you need to gesso it first.
‘Have you gessoed it?’
Gesso is what you use as priming for paintings.
Gesso makes the surface stiffer.
It prevents paint from soaking into the canvas, paper or wood.
And it gives the surface more texture, so the paint sticks better.
Traditionally made of animal glue – skin, bone or cartilage – mixed with calcium sulphate (a form of gypsum) or calcium carbonate (chalk), it’s pretty, well, intimate stuff.
‘Stop! Have you really gessoed it?’
So, gesso.
The gesso is the client relationship.
It’s the trust you build.
The feeling the client gets that s/he’s in good, professional hands. That s/he can stop being scared – because s/he’s terrified – and with good reason. S/he’s bought something from you that’s so important to get right, something that will define how others see him/her, something that can make or break him/her, without seeing it beforehand. Terrified. That’s why s/he instinctively wants to regain a little bit of control, by telling you to centre the logotype because s/he’s asked around a little and a guy in Sales said he just doesn’t like it to the right. Or by treating your best, bravest ideas like they were a separatist group’s demands for independence: like something that should be negociated down until it’s completely toothless. Handling fears.
That’s why, if you haven’t been covering your canvas with client confidence building, calming gesso, your work will end up an ungessoed painting.
Difficult to get right, those expensive and carefully mixed oil colours sinking into the canvas, turning out dull and uneven.
And the surface cracking.
No matter how great this piece of art was in your mind.
So gesso. Understand, inspire, motivate, involve your client. It’s the groundwork to your masterpiece.
P.S. Obviously, not all client critique is down to bad gessoing. It’s often very insightful stuff. But with proper gesso, it will be easier for the client to find that relevant input. And for you to listen to it.
So, I was flicking through a magazine from the Swedish Transport Administration, as you do, and this little notice struck me. New traffic signs, and an image of 2010 all in one. Out of four signs: one brought on by environmental concerns, one telling you where you can shop stuff generally – and not less than two drawing on the craze for craft authenticity.
Interesting for future anthropologists as this collection of signs might prove to be for its subject matter, it’s also a piece of information design. And – a sign saying Farm shop showing a sign saying Farm shop? My first thought was obviously Is this the very best you can do, Swedish Transport Administration? But then I got a little more philosophical about it, and now I’m quite sure it’s not lazy, but a covert critique of modern society. At the Swedish Transport Administration, they’ve read their Bourdieu and their Baudrillard (frankly, with a degree in Cultural Studies, where do you expect to end up?), and they’ve been talking among themselves about how they think buying your food at farm shops is as much about cultural capital as better tasting, more sustainably produced cucumbers. “Really”, they said to each other, “it all evolves around the farm shop as a sign, a symbol, for the educated middle class – the actual act of shopping is subordinated. Let’s make a statement, or actually more like a piece of conceptual art, about this.” And that’s how the Sign of Signs was born.
Similarly, that’s why the craftsman doesn’t actually do any actual hands-on crafting, but is just meekly pointing to something which he has presumably done (or is it an anvil?). “With this gesture”, the STA people agreed, “the constructed nature of authenticity is exposed. This man’s saying to the spectator: ‘Here, look, I’m re-enacting your idea of how craft should be produced, I’m just your dream image of craft made into physical form, I’m the Schloss Neuschwanstein of Handicraft!’”
A quick detour from my little deconstructing-the-idea-of-brand-authenticity series, to a somewhat related subject. I read something rather fascinating the other day. It’s got nothing to do with how brand authenticity is constructed, but rather how intimately people associate the idea of something that’s fake with immoral behaviour. And how much our thoughts, feelings and actions are determined by our environment. (Which is in itself is supporting the case against the concept of simple, straightforward authentic identity, but anyway.)
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.
